Archive for the ‘ Medical ’ Category

George Washington was Killed by his Doctors

I just listened to his death in the biography Washington: a Life. The date was 1799, and he was 67 at time – older that usual, but still a strong man. At the time doctors were killing more patients than they cured – and this record was not improved on until much later. They still believed in bleeding – and believed in it completely. They bleed George five times, until half the blood in his body was gone.

Three doctors were in attendance. The youngest wanted to perform a tracheotomy, a new operation at the time, which would have allowed him to breath, and saved his life. The older doctors overruled him – decision they later regretted, but by that time George was long gone.

This story has a moral – people want to believe in authority, whether it is valid or not.

And those now in authority are not.

2012
08/15
CATEGORY
History
Medical
Psychology
Sociology
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Being Nothing

This is America’s proudest achievement, and in a way it should be – since this way of being (or way of not being, actually) has never existed before, and producing it was a tremendous effort.

It was the crowning achievement of my parents generation – roughly the WWII generation. Americans at the present are merely carrying on the tradition, and adding their own embellishments – mainly by making sure the young are complete nothings.

Before this, people were expected to amount to something – to be something, to be a success. My parents, for example, were obsessed with being respectable – and expected their children to go to college and have a successful (and of course a respectable) career.

But in my generation the ground was shifting beneath our feet, and we were hit with conflicting requirements. Those adept at abandoning the past, and identifying entirely with the new values (values that did not exist, bye the way) – did well – by those standards.

There was only one problem – the human body did not like this way of not living. It had to be doing something – and doing it right. I repeat – our minds, which can get used to anything, liked this new invention it came up with – but our bodies did not. The result was a huge increase of strange mental and physical illnesses – since the mind and the body are part of the same thing.

But people were not noticing anything – although the biggest change in history was going on right under their noses – or more exactly, behind their noses – in their minds.

Our decision not to be made this impossible – no being, no awareness. Which we thought was a tremendous advantage – because we could feel no pain – something we never had liked. What we did not realize, was this made it impossible to feel anything at all.

In our ignorance, which was complete, we felt we had conquered everything.

And here we are – the Great Nothings.

2012
07/06
CATEGORY
Medical
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
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Developing Symptoms

Foreign Affairs - Noncommunicable Diseases Go Global

When most people in developed countries think of the biggest health challenges confronting the developing world, they envision a small boy in a rural, dusty village beset by an exotic parasite or bacterial blight. But increasingly, that image is wrong. Instead, it is the working-age woman living in an urban slum, suffering from diabetes, cervical cancer, or stroke — noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) that once confronted wealthy nations alone.

NCDs in developing countries are occurring more rapidly, arising in younger people, and leading to far worse health outcomes than ever seen in developed countries. This epidemic results from persistent poverty, unprecedented urbanization, and freer trade in emerging-market nations, which have not yet established the health and regulatory systems needed to treat and prevent NCDs. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2010 Global Risks report, these diseases pose a greater threat to global economic development than fiscal crises, natural disasters, corruption, or infectious disease.

Obesity is certainly a major problem in Costa Rica, where I live.

It is a major problem for me, personally. It should be considered a mental health disease, with the stress of contemporary living as one of its primary causes. The National Institutes of Health estimates that 75-90% of all visits to primary care physicians are stress related.

To cope with this stress, we would have to be much more aware of our world and its stressors. Something we prefer to overlook.

2012
06/02
CATEGORY
Medical
Psychology
Sociology
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Hate All, Kill All

For me, the pieces of the puzzle are falling into place; the puzzle being an understanding of how the world works. The picture they are forming may not make much sense to anyone else; and may even seem insane.

One major piece of the puzzle is Hatred, which is sometimes so strong in my life I can hardly stand it. It seems to be a message screaming at me, but the message never made much sense. What meaning could hatred have?

I has finally dawned on me that its meaning is crucial (note the similarity between crucial and the cross). Basic Christian theology is profound here, if perverse. The Romans hated the Jews, and destroyed the Jewish state. But Christianity ended up being a Roman religion – after a very complicated transition that most Christians don’t want to think about.

Another major piece of the puzzle is negative being, or the reversal of values. For people in this state, bad is good, stupid is wise, and hate is love. And there is no way they can detect this simple switch has happened.

The result is a state analogous to the Christian ascension into heaven where believers are born anew, and are forgiven of their sins. In its Protestant form, the results are more complicated, and produced our affluent world, where we live in a heaven on earth – and a hell on earth at the same time.

These people (and myself, when I am feeling like them) hate everything. And this feeling is an integral part of who they are, it is not optional, something that happens only part of the time, depending on the circumstances; it is a fundamental, constant attitude.

Another piece of the puzzle is unawareness, the opposite of awareness. These people are not aware of anything – but think they are aware of everything.

Beginning to get the picture? Like it?

For awhile I wondered how hatred could kill, but then I wondered how I could have wondered about anything so obvious. Hatred says “Drop dead!” And people who are hated do just that, when the message is universal (from everyone).

“How do they die?” you might ask. There is no simple answer to this question, it depends on the circumstances. But in many cases they simply fade into the woodwork, as defined here. This may seem like an innocuous form of being, but it is really becoming negative, a state where people can commit the worst atrocities – and think nothing of it.

However, other things can also happen. In response to hatred, some groups of people can use this to define themselves. I am sure, for example the Taliban feels this way. Our hatred of them is what defines them, and is the strongest weapon they have. In American history, our hatred of the British (which was a long time forming, and was never complete) defined what being an American was.

Another response to hatred is mental illness. If the person doing the hating is an authority figure (a parent, for example) this puts the child in a difficult situation. The result can be psychosomatic illness of many kinds, which are very common – but which are usually unacknowledged.

They are unaware – and are strongly opposed to being aware.

2012
05/30
CATEGORY
Medical
Negative being
Psychology
Sociology
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Categories of Mental Illness

I said some good things about Snakes in Suits, but I now want to say some bad things about it.

The main writer, Paul Babiak, does a poor job of covering the subject – which is probably covered better in the book Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us by the second writer, Robert Hare. Babiak is just jumping on what he perceives as as bandwagon and profiting from it, without adding anything much of his own. He is unscrupulous himself.

Almost anyone could give better examples of craziness in the workplace from their own experience. And his attempts to explain the categories of mental illness only shows how inadequate they are.

He does have some pithy sayings, such as these on page 38 and 39:

In the great card game of life, psychopaths know what cards you hold, and they cheat.

The difference between psychopathic approach and the nonpsychopathic approach lies in the motivation to take unfair and callous advantage of people. Psychopaths simply do not care if what they say and do hurts people as long as they get what they want, and they are very good at hiding this fact. Given his or her manipulation skills, it is no wonder why seeing a “psychopathic” personality beneath someone’s charming, engaging surface is so difficult.

Amen, brother! But you could add that we now seem to want to be lied to.

When he comes to distinguishing between Psychopathy, Sociopathy, and Antisocial Personality Disorder (on page 18-19) he is not helpful, and refers to the DSM-IV instead!

When he talks of Psychopathy and Narcissism on pages 40 and 41, one is left with the feeling that psychiatry needs some help itself. From my own experience, I can name a few psychotherapists that are only interested in serving themselves – but are very good at hiding this.

When he quotes another book on pages 42 and 43 (something he does often) what the other book says about ruthlessness is excellent.

The arts have been dealing with the subject of bad people forever, and have done a much better job of it than the psychiatrists have.

2012
05/27
CATEGORY
Medical
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Something is Missing in Our Lives

American Institute for Cancer Research

This my second posting today about obesity. As usual, I have my own ideas on the subject.

I am convinced that people feel there is something important missing in their lives – but they have no idea what it is. Therefore, they eat – like everyone else.

They have two problems: (1) they have been told the affluent life is the perfect life, therefore they should have no problems – and (2) they have no skills at solving unconscious problems. They don’t even believe the unconscious exists.

To repeat: they shouldn’t have any problems in the first place, and they have no problem-solving skills because they don’t need any.

To begin with the first: they do not believe they should have any problems. This is such a wacky idea it is hardly worth commenting on, BUT we must, because the idea does exist and because people believe it so firmly.

People like myself, any competent mental health professional, or even any novelist – who see problems as a normal part of living, have difficulty explaining something so obvious. Everyone thinks they are an exception, and they should not have to have any problems. Like a fetus in utero, they should have all their needs met automatically.

To continue my theorizing: ordinarily a new-born has no great difficulty adapting to its new life outside its mother’s body. It is still pampered and cared for. It eats when it wants to eat and poops when it wants to poop. A good life.

But this does not always happen, life can be unpleasant for any number of reasons – more than we can stand, in fact. At the same time, however, we get the message – I have no idea how – that we should be grateful to our parents and parent-figures, and be good little children.

Faced with these two conflicting needs, we do the usual – we shove them down into our unconscious so we don’t have to deal with them (we think). But we end up with the nagging feeling that something is wrong – and we suffer anyway – sometimes severely.

I doubt if I have said anything original here, and I certainly am not the first person to note that life has become unsatisfying. But perhaps connecting this to obesity is original.

We cannot solve the obesity epidemic unless we make life more rewarding. What we are missing is ourselves, and if we do not we have that, we have nothing.

2012
05/16
CATEGORY
Medical
Psychology
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Loss of Virtue

The loss of virtue is the worst loss we can suffer. I believe it is one of the causes of obesity. Scientists will scoff at this connection, but this is one area where science is severely deficient – it will not make values important, when they clearly are.

We are plagued with many mysterious illnesses (mental and physical). Many of which we do not understand at all, and most of which we understand only imperfectly. One thing we can be certain of though: emotional stress is one of these causes – and probably a major cause.

But labeling it emotional stress is not much help – there are all kinds of emotional stress. But at least this label shows us the right direction in which to look. And the loss of value, including the loss of virtue, is very stressful – despite our attempts to overlook this loss in favor of individual economic benefits – usually referred to as the market economy - where values mean nothing.

If we are to recover our wholeness, we will have to recover our values.

2012
05/09
CATEGORY
Economy
Medical
Morality
Philosophy
Science
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The Problem of Being

The biggest challenge any person has is to be - to be themselves.

I first noticed this when my ex was going crazy – a very difficult time for both of us. She was eventually diagnosed with Schizophrenia, a diagnosis that did not impress me, since that only meant she was crazy – which anyone could see easily enough. She was also beautiful and intelligent, and I didn’t want her life wasted.

My diagnosis was simpler, and based on what I observed – she had tried to be a number of things, but failed each time. She seemed to be afraid of being. And I have noticed the same thing in other people – including myself. Somewhere along the line we got the instructions do not be!

Inquiring into her parents lives, it seemed to me they had the same problem – and never solved it, even though they lived the American Success Story. Beth eventually killed herself, and her two brothers are permanently institutionalized. The family influence was clear enough to me, but not to any mental health professional.

The problem here seems to be conceptual – they have no idea what being is, what kind of situations make it easy or difficult – or even that such a thing exists, and should be encouraged!

I speak as the client of many therapists, who more and more were unacquainted with the problem. Because, I am convinced, society does not want the problem recognized. People have been eliminated, and they don’t want them back.

And therapists are not making the slightest difference, because they too refuse to recognize the problem – indeed they are often suffering from it themselves.

The problem is social, and has become part of our working lives. We all work in business organizations, and these organizations are focused on eliminating persons. Only business must exist – and nothing else.

2012
05/07
CATEGORY
Medical
Psychology
Sociology
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Pain

It is possible, I believe, to be in deep pain and not feel it. I also believe this a common condition, which has a profound impact on our emotional and physical health.

We have discovered numerous ways to anesthetize ourselves individually and socially, since the elimination of pain has been one of our top priorities. We have not been so interested in what is causing this pain.

The chemical means of doing this (including over-eating) are well-known, but there must be many more, including our constant necessity to be entertained, to be diverted from noticing what we are feeling.

Our ability to do this is a matter of great pride among us, and we disparage those who cannot do it – who can feel their pain, and notice what is causing it.

We suffer from an epidemic of mental illnesses, but also from many mysterious illnesses, such as ALS and Multiple Sclerosis and also more common diseases such as Diabetes, which are becoming more common. This increasing illness must be due to something else that is increasing, and this something else probably includes the painfulness of our lives.

To put this another way: we are a sick society, and sick in so many ways we cannot begin to understand them. As a result, we have turned ourselves, especially our pain detectors, off. But our minds and bodies are affected anyway.

Medicine has been successful because, as a science, because it has concentrated on the physical – but at the same time it has been unsuccessful with the mental and emotional. And in the last analysis the two cannot be separated.

We have ignored our emotional lives, and tried to be more like machines, with disastrous consequences.

2012
05/01
CATEGORY
Medical
Philosophy
Psychology
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Modernism in Vienna

Gustav Klimt was part of Modernist Art movement in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. I cannot pose as a art expert here, I got this from the book The  Age of Influence.

During this period, artists mingled freely with the staff from the medical schools, and frequently witnessed autopsies – thus the skull in the background.

Jewish hostesses such as Berta Zucherkandl, who was married to the brilliant anatomist Emil Zucherkandl, the chair of anatomy at the Vienna School of Medicine,  held salons in their homes, where people like Klimt, Rodin, Mahler, and Freud often met and exchanged ideas.

This, of course, ended with the Nazis, and the author, Eric R. Kandel, a Nobel Prize winner, had to leave as a small boy. But as he says, his heart still beats in 3/4 time.

Needless to say, this is not respectable art, such as the representational art now on display in Costa Rica.

Freud was not respectable either, but thrived in this atmosphere, where outrageous behavior was expected and normal.

This has now been lost to us forever.

2012
04/02
CATEGORY
Art
History
Medical
Philosophy
Sex
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