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…
Filed under depression, Diagnosis, Disease, Doctors, Education, life, medicine, Mental Illness, News, Psychiatrists, Psychology by on Jun 11th, 2020. Comment. 
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.
Governments and public health authorities respond to situations such as the Coronavirus pandemic. Our government and public health authorities seem to have fumbled a window of opportunity and Coronavirus cases are multiplying so that the United States leads the world.
Axios seems to be a pretty good and fairly impartial reporter of news and has slowly, over time, won my endorsement. Read more on Sunday — Personal Mobility…
Filed under Government, life, News, politics, Public Health System, Society by on Apr 5th, 2020. Comment.
There was once a self-satisfied young male patient who told me that he took vitamin D and that was because he had a low serum level. He told me that D was the only vitamin ever proven to make you sick if you don’t get enough, therefore the only one worth taking.
I asked him where he had obtained this marvelous information. Read more on Everybody Is A Vitamin Expert!…
Filed under Alternative Medicine, Doctors, News by on Apr 4th, 2020. Comment.
I tend to obsess about my patients.
Especially the ones who have chosen prescription psychiatric drugs over natural alternative substances. I always give a choice when it is possible. it often is.
Of course, I must often rely on research that has been done in other countries. I have gotten used to doing this. I can’t say it bothers me terribly much. Read more on Death By Psych Meds…
Filed under medicine, News, prescription drugs, Science by on Mar 16th, 2020. Comment.
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…
Filed under Doctors, medicine, News, Psychiatrists, Psychology by on Feb 24th, 2020. Comment.
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…
Filed under Alternative Medicine, Diagnosis, Doctors, medicine, Mental Illness, News, Psychiatrists, Psychotherapy by on Feb 14th, 2020. Comment.
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…
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…
Filed under life, News, relationships, Science by on Feb 11th, 2020. Comment.
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…
Filed under life, News by on Feb 3rd, 2020. Comment.