There is paranoia about the coronavirus. Patients come into my office for other reasons and we have often ended up talking about it.
There are a variety of classifications of paranoid thoughts in the latest (fifth) edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of psychiatry. Even though I have to hang a moniker from it on my work in order to get paid by any insurance for my services, there have been plenty of research articles published by responsible people tho show that it is pretty much useless. Read more on The State Of The Coronavirus…
Filed under depression, Diagnosis, Doctors, Family, life, medicine, News by on May 1st, 2020. Comment. 
To really know yourself, you have to know where you came from. Medically and psychiatrically, you can find answers to some of those things that have been puzzling you. Drinking, relationships, a whole lot of things. Be sure to sign on to Facebook and read what I’ve written about how your family history shapes your life. https://www.facebook.com/estelle.goldstein
Filed under Family by on Apr 4th, 2020. Comment.
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…
Filed under depression, Diagnosis, Disease, Doctors, Family, life, Psychiatrists by on Mar 15th, 2020. Comment.
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.
Filed under Doctors, eating disorders, Family, life, medicine, News, Nutrition, weight by on Jan 13th, 2020. Comment.
It had been a routine email, the kind I ask my husband (total personal assistant) to arrange on my letterhead.
Although this young woman had been a psychiatric hospital inpatient for suicidality a few years ago, she was doing fairly well. We spent most of the time talking about her future education, and choice of profession. Read more on She Could Handle Money…
Filed under depression, Family, life, News by on Oct 27th, 2019. Comment.
His mother had been seeing me and they had signed mutual releases. Mother wanted me to see him as soon as possible, because he was “nervous and unable to sit still at all.”
When he came, he denied a “nervousness” which his mother thought looked like “attention deficit disorder.”
I can’t treat what people don’t think they have.
He described problems with his girlfriend and his mother, since his mother had told him he could not go to a party in the home of his girlfriend’s family on the bad side of town, “where they would just as soon shoot you in the street as say ‘hello.'”
He sounded like he had pretty routine mother-and-girlfriend problems.
She contacted me on the weekend, worrying about him frequenting strip clubs, something I had not asked about and he had not told me about. Sometimes, she said he became so angry she physically feared him.
Their two narratives were simply inconsistent. I drew the line at her feeling scared of him physically.
I told her about “tough love,” and I told her if that happened again, to call the cops.
My husband reminded me of the ultimate authority in my profession — Hugh Laurie as “Dr. House” — who repeatedly said on television in public for all the world to hear, “Patients lie.”
Which one of them? Maybe both of them. I told her what I had told them; and would indeed, tell anybody who gave me the opportunity. I can try a session with the two of them together and help to resolve things, but I could not promise that it would resolve things. I would try. I always try as hard as I can to do the best that I can.
She said she knew this to be true.
I had told him and also told his mother on the phone, that the hardest thing a young man (or a young woman) ever had to do in his (her) life was establishing themselves as an individual distinct from parents. This usually meant a period of confusion before resolution. There may be (and there was) some confusion about vocational direction, too.
One can only press forward. The ability to communicate openly is precious, and irreplaceable.
- BE SURE TO CHECK MY FACEBOOK PERSONAL PAGE:
- https://www.facebook.com/estelle.goldstein
Filed under Alternative Medicine, depression, Diagnosis, Disease, Family, life, medicine, Mental Illness, Personality Disorders, Psychology, relationships by on Oct 11th, 2019. Comment.
We went for the entertainment, but had dinner during the show at an upscale establishment in Huntington Beach called “La Cave.”
The name was no accident — it was, basically, a cave.
Oh yes, it was decidedly upscale, since they don’t give you a physical menu (it is printed on their web page — tres modern) but once you are seated, they have to show the cuts of everything on a glass-covered cart.
Nothing wrong with the food. There aren’t many choices, but my husband raved that his basic steak was extremely well prepared.
But the show was the reason for going, and it was very good — although the poor singers and musicians were cramped in a small area.
The singers and their little band (drums and bass and keyboard) were decidedly retro, which may be part of the reason they were decidedly upscale. I guess you have to be old to find the music truly familiar, but pieces they played later in the evening were more newer stuff I think they were trying to make sound old.
My wonderful husband thinks it is good for me to go to upscale places, because I work hard a lot.
Our swing-dancing friends were elated by my revelation of untranslated extra verses in the old Yiddish (Judaeo-German) song, Bei mir bist do schön, which had been a major force in my young childhood.
Of course it was popularized in the Big Bad Era by The Andrews Sisters — and it was the version our evening’s entertainment provided.
The swing dancers — the supremely talented Alec Marken and Sarah Aisha — stole the show with a spotlight dance and afterward introduced me to a young oriental man who was trying to figure out what to do in life.
What is amazing is that I seem to have fallen into the “elder stateswoman” sort of role.
From a hospital file clerk to studying teaching English to foreigners. I did that as a substitute teacher.
I hope I have not done too much already, for I know I want to do, must do, new things. And new things are on the horizon — much more interesting than cave exploration.
Of course, you will read about them here — so stay tuned!
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.
Filed under Education, Family, News, politics, Religion, Religion and Politics by on May 13th, 2019. Comment.
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 Apr 12th, 2019. Comment.
My Daddy’s first set of toy soldiers was a plastic set of toy soldiers made by Britains LTD to be found under the Christmas tree by young British boys. It had somehow made it to an early Sears and Roebuck brick-and-mortar store in Saugus, Mass.
Route 1 to the north of Boston made the region north of Boston more accessible. I remember going there at first to visit the Saugus Ironworks Restoration — monument to the heroic and (historically, at least) physically demanding work of manufacturing. Read more on Daddy’s Toy Soldiers…
Filed under Family, Memory, News by on Feb 22nd, 2019. Comment.