September 2017 Archives

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I felt nostalgia for my native Boston area when my husband and I took a Sunday walk through Heritage Park in Cerritos California. I chose the park, which is always potentially dangerous.  That means it is likely to have ducks, architectural curiosities and (disaster of disasters) other people — including children. It had all of the above.  In particular the architectural curiosities included a miniature version of revolutionary Boston.  It was maybe 2/3 or 3/4 size.  It was easy to tell for some one who had grown up in close proximity to plenty of (downtown Boston) statuary that this was no life-size equestrian statue.

Read more on Heritage Park Is A Time Machine…

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Many illnesses have support groups and even official organizations that help sufferers and families understand and cope with that illness.  You know, like The Arthritis Foundation and the Diabetic Association. Read more on “Accomodating” or “Taking Advantage Of?”…

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He was in his mid-fifties, quiet and fairly good-looking.  I did suspect he was balding or maybe just plain bald as few men would wear a turn-of-the-last-century newsboy-type cap indoors these days. He sat on my couch and told me he thought he had ADD (attention deficit disorder). I interrupted him right there, as I do everyone who comes into my office thinking they have this disorder. Most people professing this diagnosis who are adults and walk in alone to a psychiatrist’s office are looking for stimulants — the amphetamines and the Ritalins of life. I don’t prescribe these.  I used to — at least as long as it took to get people weaned off them.  But nobody wants to get off them, not ever.  I have seen people who have been on them from earliest childhood through middle age, for no clinical reason I can discern.  Usually they were just being kids and bugging the adults, so they were put on drugs to control them. Read more on The Regular Looking Guy…

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Teency children, starting at about four months, laugh about 400 times a day. Adults seem to laugh only about five times a day. This has got to have at least something to do with why growing up often stinks. The authors of this article start by reporting about a case of a woman with a mood disorder that was difficult to control. But she was more easily controlled with medication once she started doing “laughter yoga.”

Now “laughter yoga” sounds like my idea of a crashing bore.  I think that this discipline — invented by an Indian Doctor in the 1990’s — is intended to make people laugh without using words.  From what little I can find it seems to depend more on the “contagious” nature of laughter than on any humorous content. I suppose laughter can exist, as a neurophysiological entity, apart from content. A bunch of neurophysiological imaging studies, which I have actually attempted to read, implicate practically every part of the brain I can think of. Tickling initiates laughter in a baby (and on several occasions, in my husband as well). Read more on The Good Stuff…

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I’m excited to announce that a project that I’ve had in development for so long is ready to be unveiled. Read more on New Podcast From The Renegade Doctor…

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