placebo effect

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I find a lot of things I like in the New York Times. This article resonated with me as few others. First, there is the purpose of the human profiled.  Changing medicine into data science?  God save us all.

Sometimes I feel the best thing I do for a patient is to be human.  Just to have the pretension (a pretension which I do not take lightly) of being one human being in a room with another human being, trying to make them feel better.  This does more, I think, to make most of my patients “better” than all of the pills I have spent years studying about. All those years studying normative use of medications on large populations of humans.  And they work enough to please the powers that be.

Read more on Human Beings Are Not Computers…

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I have been friendly with and received referrals from homeopaths. and taken care of patients who have sung the praises of that art.  Since I am known to most folks as an “alternative physician,” this is understandable.  All homeopaths have been gentle folks, and I supposed that they were doing people good, in some way, be it placebo or something else.  I had no reason to fight them. I cannot remember ever actually referring someone to a homeopath.  Some people have told me it did not work for them.  And even though I use alternative methods,  I do things that are scientifically proven to my satisfaction.

I have never told anyone to stop seeing a homeopath who was helpful to them.  I decide on the basis of safety and efficacy for every treatment, as best I can.  Even if I sometimes have wondered about efficacy, I will admit. But for safety, homeopathy is off the charts.  I know of no down-side. I remember looking at the “dilution” level of the remedies.  In general, they are so dilute that they could not possibly have any of the “substance” that was used to make them, not even a molecule.

Read more on The Current State of Homeopathy…

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The first time I heard of the fruit mangosteen, I thought it was just a Jewish mango. Turns out it’s Southeast Asian and in no way Jewish.  Makes sense; I mean, how do you circumcise a fruit?  Let alone teach it to read the holy books.

The second time I heard of it, I was trying to help a manic-depressive who went manic on it.  A degree professional had suddenly thrown angry tantrums, put his hand and other weapons through nearby walls, and tried to burn down the apartment building where his woman-friend lived.  He succeeded in burning down part of it. It all happened within a few hours of him ingesting mangosteen.  I told him to stop the damned mangosteen.  I remember seeing him through bars, and I doubted he could get any mangosteen in there, anyway.  But he would not hear ill of his dear mangosteen.  It was a multi-level-marketing product and he seemed to believe in it for that reason, despite some factors I was trying to introduce.  Things like biochemical truth, behavioral pharmacology, and my decades of medical practice experience — as opposed to his multi-level marketing experience.  His family stopped paying me as an expert.  I think they all sold mangosteen. Read more on Utah, Mangosteen, and Bad Stuff…

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At a study done in Austria they looked at a University hospital, a general hospital, and a psychiatric clinic. They found a BIG problem – and not just in Austria: People are taking too many psychotropic drugs, even though there are no systematized justifications for prescribing patterns.  This seems to happen the most in folks who have a diagnosis or either depression or schizophrenia.

Pills on a conveyor beltAlthough some people take only one psychotropic drug, most are on many.  A study by our own government agency (a noble attempt to trace psychotropic prescriptions in a general hospital in the United States) decided this was a general pattern. All right, this is what happens. Read more on So Many Pills And So Little Progress…

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