Education

0

If you follow me on Facebook you may have read that I’m moving away from direct patient care and devoting myself to helping other people become doctors.

I’ve spent my career healing individuals, and now I’m shifting into a new mode.

Helping young people discover the magic of medicine and instilling the love of learning to help them find a successful career.

Cultivating the thirst for knowledge in the healers of tomorrow. Making doctors out of medical students.

More information will be coming soon, including a new web page and more social media.

But if you want to go to medical school and aren’t able to make it through the testing and the interviews, or …

If you have a child who wants to go to medical school and is needing some extra help…

I’ll be ready!

Filed under Education by on . Comment#

0

In 1987 I started my psychiatry residency. Since then, they have changed the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual three times and it still does not seem to be keeping up with how fast the world is changing around me.

I one saw lots of “lethargic” depressions. Slow and sleepy “ain’t got no energy” depressions. “I feel like a human blob” kind of depressions.

Now most of them turn out to be Type II (“adult onset”) sugar diabetes or the thyroid just stopped working for some creative reason. Read more on Then and Now…

0

Sometimes a good psychosis or delusion, is less harmful than medication — especially in a person who has previously been compromised by illness.

The first I saw was a veteran many years ago. Curiously enough, he was the kind of “old salt” you see plenty in San Diego street clinics but I saw him back at the Wichita V.A.

Then as now I enjoy the older veterans, The kind of folks who, although they were members of a nameless hoard of uniformed youth, have assimilated the serviceman’s identity into their own. Read more on When A Doctor Decides Not To Treat The Hallucinations…

0

It is cold and rainy outside. Neither of those factored into our choice of Southern California as home. I figured out early on, sometime in prep school, that every science had it own jargon and seemed full of contradictions. By the 8th grade I had pretty much decided that science was the “rowing toward God” that the great (Boston) poetess Anne Sexton was talking about.

It is a way to find the truth, and science is very hard work, indeed. I had figured out that I would never get a handle on more than a tiny corner of it. 
Life science (and later, medicine) seemed an accessible corner of the infinite entity, so I grudgingly accepted a sort of amateur status in the remainder of science. It seemed that even if I spent every waking hour reading, I could never learn enough science. I actually envied Leonardo da Vinci, because in his day, it had been possible for one man to know pretty much everything of the science that was known in all the world. This is why, by the 8th grade, I spent every free moment curled up in one of the window seats of the library at prep school reading the “Scientific American”. Sometimes I would visit scientists at local universities, calling them after I read their work. My parents encouraged me to do this. They seemed like decent, hardworking guys (no women then) amused by having as a fan a girl such as I. One day I went near-hysterical on the streets of Harvard Square when I recognized James Watson (of Watson-Crick double helix fame) wearing a bright blue suit which I gushingly told him was my favorite color.

So I still often go to “Scientific American” to resolve science that is not medicine. The link above will link to a plethora of sources that will help any rational people understand how it being dreadfully cold out, even in California, does not contradict, but actually supports global warming.

Of course I am temporarily freezing in my humble abode and can only turn up my fossil-fuel generated heat, thereby making things worse in the long term, although comfortable in the short term. This has nothing I can see to do with either religion or politics. Religion reveals to us only truths we are capable of understanding. God is Not Dumb. If he had put something about this in the Ten Commandments, nobody could have done much about it anyway. Now, divine means are more subtle, I think. This woman deserves sainthood or the equivalent. Just follow science to find truth. Other roads may simply be too confusing emotional and therefore, misleading.

0

I know it was my third summer, for that was the time I went “public,” and many people have cited the event to me in succeeding years.

Even though they had called me “little genius,” and knocked into my
head the need for serving God and Civilization as described to me in
the English language pages at either the beginning or the end of the
prayer book, I was basically a nicely-kept secret.

I know it was in the summer because I was hot. I simply did not want
to sit in the living room, for with all the summer heat, the customary
breezes off the sea had not been able to make it inland to us.

My brother sat down with one of the old “Golden Books.” Me, I wanted
something interesting.

There was a New York Times on the sofa. Usually Daddy got it first,
then Mommie and I competed for sloppy seconds of everything he had not
crumpled up yet. No parents were in sight. I quietly took the New York Times out and sat at the top step, by the front door.

I wish I could say I remember exciting news from the mid-July day in
1956 when the neighbors stopped by and decided and told me that I was
“cute,” which is a certain stimulus for me to do something especially
endearing. Daddy was always saying the Herlihy sisters kept to
themselves because they were “old maid schoolteachers” so they were
“straight-laced” which I guess meant something like “serious” or
“terminally dull.

They wasted no time in commenting on how cute I was, pretending to
read the New York Times.

I told them I wasn’t pretending, and I passed the paper down so that
one of them (I forgot whether it was Sarah or Jane) asked me to read
silly (and dull, of course) article from the Business section. I read
it aloud for what seemed like an interminable amount of time when I
asked her permission to stop reading, for I wondered if that had been
enough to convince her I was not faking and she said “just fine.”

By now neighbors were gathering from both sides of the street, and
even behind on Prescott Avenue, since it was so hot everybody wanted
to be outside, anyway.

Everybody was asking me to read one article or section or the other,
and really, I don’t remember finding any words that were hard to sound
out or to understand. One Herlihy sister dragged the other back to her
house. I asked if everything was okay and they told me I was just
fine. That seemed weird, mostly because they were a lot older than me
and more likely to be sick.

Apparently Mommie was disturbed by the noise because she was really
quite upset for no reason I could understand.

She told me to come back in the house instantly. Already socialized
somewhat, I told her I would come back in the house, after I said
goodbye to the nice people.

She was still angry. I tried to send the people away but was not very
successful. I mean our neighbor to the right, who I had never seen
standing so long in one place, was starting to talk about bringing
nice cold drinks for people.

By this time, the Herlihy sisters were walking back up from their
house on Webster Avenue (just around the corner to the right)
accompanied by their father.

I knew he was the Chelsea Superintendent of Schools, and was a very
important man in Chelsea.

He was spherically shaped and sweating profusely. My father came out
of the house (the only time I had ever seen him walk out on and
descend the front cement stairs ) and shook hands with Dr. Herlihy.

He had hired my Father to do a few days of substitute teaching shortly
after his degree from Harvard in the early 1940s. This magically had
permitted him, under Massachusetts law, to be “grandfathered” into a
teaching certificate in the Commonwealth without benefit of taking
formal education in how to teach.

My father was clearly no grandfather since I not only was not old
enough — but already was reasonably certain I did not want — to have
children, and my brother did not seem too excited about it either.

Anyway, Dr. Herlihy told my father he didn’t want me in Chelsea Public
Schools, and he raised his voice like I thought old, bald, and
probably smart men absolutely were not supposed to.

He must have been large enough for Mommie to hear in the House, so she
came out to help Daddy argue.

She did the one thing I couldn’t — she got the crowd to go away.

She started yelling about how it can’t be right to not let a little
girl to school.

He said he would falsify the records and say I was there and they
could even keep me home but he did not want me in his school, because
I would be a “disturbance.”

As the crowd left, I joined my parents.

“I’m a nice girl. I wouldn’t make a disturbance.”

He did not answer me, which was obviously impolite.

This started an orgy of being excluded/rejected/just plain kicked out
of schools that marked my childhood.

Filed under Education, Family, Government, life, News by on . Comment#

0

Mature female patient: “So you’re Dr. Goldstein! Wow , you’re dressed so elegant! I mean I feel really self-conscious! I just threw on a t-shirt and shorts…”

Dr. G: “Don’t worry, darling. You got it right — I’m the one who’s supposed to get dressed up. Now, you’re not going to think much of me.” Read more on Dr. Estelle gets a new patient…smiling, laughing…

0

Insight is the awareness of one’s own illness and/or situation.

This summary is as good as any textbook definition of this relatively amorphous concept that has completely infiltrated the fabric of psychiatric practice. Read more on Estelle The Translator…

Filed under Asperger's, Education, Family, life, News by on . Comment#

0

Often they are working women.

But people with no employment and no financial responsibility are not immune.

It is surely the illness of our time for everyone complains of it sometimes as if it has a specific treatment and they think I can change the deficient choices they made several years ago in their lives to make things fine and dandy with an instant prescription.  W.H. Auden wrote the (long) poem ” Age of Anxiety” in 1947 or so describing man’s attempt to find meaning and substance in an industrialized world. Read more on All The Stressed Out People…

0

I was 20 and I had just settled into the apartment above her cafe “Les Arcades” at 19, rue Leon Blum, right next to the marketplace of Amiens, France.

It was not exactly a tourist region. It produced neither wine nor cheese. But its medical school was one of two which Napoleon had said was okay to provide surgeons for his army. More important, with 650 students in the first year class and 110 in the second, it had the BEST such ratio in all of France for an aspiring doctor. Read more on My French Mama — Mme. Mareschal…

Filed under Education, Family, life, News by on . Comment#

0

I am eating a low-carbohydrate, “ketogenic” diet. I have lost a considerable amount of weight, increased my energy, and have done a pretty good (almost-perfect) job of reversing diabetes along with the gazillion supplements I take.

There are an awfully lot of folks publishing research on an awful lot of things, with the overwhelming amount of those publishing in “traditional” medical journals (like Lancet) being professional “academics,” or university professors. Read more on You Gotta Handle It When The Truth Changes…