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A fair amount of psychiatric illnesses have a genetic component.

Being formally “diagnosed” by a doctor does not make them official.

It is hard to tell when a woman says “my mother was probably depressed and anxious” what was going on. There may be a genetic component. Read more on Family Histories…

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I have vivid memories of the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard, where they let me hang around when I was still in high school but trying to learn some very fascinating things about medicine and science.

There was a hall lined on both sides with pictures of famous doctors who had made great contributions,

One of my favorites was Sir William Osler, a pioneer in Medical Education who spoke several wonderful aphorisms that were supposed to condense medical knowledge into some sort of easy to swallow bits. Read more on How To Increase STEM…

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My preceptor in Kansas taught me — while I was finishing my training and in my psychopharmacology fellowship — how to do “ECT”, which stands for “Electroconvulsive therapy.”

AKA: Electroshock therapy Read more on Yes They Can Still Force Electroshock Therapy…

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There are a certain number of patients who come to me suffering from autoimmune disease. Yes, more than one.

Sometimes Lupus or Celiac disease or rheumatoid arthritis or such.

Often they get through life dragging along with them unidentified articular pains, which are themselves probably an unidentified autoimmune illness. Read more on Depression As Auto-immune Disease…

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There is one thing I heard in medical school in France that, if anyone ever heard in America, well, they have long since forgotten it.

He was a little country doctor who came in from the country. He was one of the kind, he told us, that was the “backbone” of French medicine.

He taught us to keep the financial records of our (general) practices in a bound school-notebook. To enter each receipt for service on a separate line, and to cross out entries with a single line made horizontally with a ruler, leaving the original (erroneous) entry legible, so that we remained always above reproach. Read more on Science And Reality…

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It is probably Oscar Wilde who said it.  “Youth is wasted on the young.”

He was clever and witty and literate and gay in the days when being gay could land you in prison. (In his case, it did.)

Youth comes along with a feeling of being invulnerable. This is a false feeling, for the average human life expectancy gives a person plenty enough years to feel in her or his body the consequences of the decisions made when he or she was young. Read more on You Don’t Want To See Your Brain On Drugs…

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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…

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Classic Fashionista With A Touch Of Ole;!

The Fashionista is captured in the muted watercolors of the great masters. For another view and different style, make sure you go to her Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/estelle.goldstein

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I do not know this person, Nina Teicholz.

I do know that she is a very-well informed journalist and does her scientific research. She has done something very wonderful. She is spreading the correct information about the ketogenic diet.

So have I, actually. I promote it in my private practice and I practice what I preach.

I have been on some variant of the low carbohydrate/ketogenic diet for several years.

I was not terribly obsessive about collecting my own clinical data while on the diet. I have lost about 200 lbs. and basically reversed my own Type II Diabetes since I have been on this diet.

I say “basically” and not “totally” because I have not “cured” it.

Just gotten myself down to normal blood sugar range. If I ate a bread-and-pasta type meal, it might result in anything from a mildly raised glucometer reading to diabetic coma.

I absolutely do not want to find out.

I think I picked up some of the common complications of diabetes during the dozen or so years since my hospitalization (and initial diagnosis) of type II diabetes (with blood sugars around 600) which caused the docs to tell my husband I could snuff it during my intensive care hospital stay (at age 46).

I am still here.

I walk with a cane mostly, because of nerve damage in my feet. With meganutrition and exercise it has improved somewhat.

This despite the women in my family who did not have diabetes and yet managed to walk poorly (with canes) with weak and tingly feet. It may be a familial peripheral neuropathy.

At least it does not keep me from (my own brand of) dancing.

My visual acuity is down a bit because of retinal damage. All I can do now is watch my diet and monitor my blood sugar.

I did not decide how to manage my life and infirmity by anything other than … reading science. I have been doing that for a very long time. For all of my ups and downs, I have used applying science to resolve all the seemingly impossible problems of my life.

Loneliness. (See my book on “How to locate and marry your lifetime love.”)

Obesity/Type II Diabetes. (See “This is Not a Diet Book.”)

The real problem, is the finding of scientific truth.

Although academics, professors at universities and such, are pressured individuals in a painful distillate of scientific achievement, I trust the process of academic achievement more than the processes of government or insurance.

The processes of the latter seem to be more profit-motivated than anything else.

Read more on Keto Saves The Day — And My Life…

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Just when I was reminiscing about the ideal of everything that was SUPPOSED to be included in a psychiatric assessment in the 1950’s (biological, psychological, and social issues) I have tripped over a new psychiatric disorder.

Somehow it does not much bother me that most constructions made for the various diagnostic and statistical manuals may or may not correspond to actual (psychiatric!) illnesses.

What does bother me is that people may have found new ways to suffer. Even if we cannot quite describe them yet we got suffering people crying and wailing in our offices.

I can’t possibly be the only one, (Although some of my patients say that I am the only one who takes the time to listen…) Read more on Video Game Addiction…

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