Down with oversimplification. I have no interest in seeing life resolved to “yes” or “no” questions. This is what “mass media” seems to be doing. I hate, for example, people who agonize trying to decide if I am “conservative” or “liberal.” If a patient tries to focus on this sort of thing (and it is amazing how often they do) it is not too tough to find out what they want me to be and to convince them that I’m exactly what they want me to be. (It usually involves either telling them I am a veteran of the U.S.Army or telling them I went to undergraduate university in Boston.) Read more on It Is Not A “Yes” Or “No” Question…
I’m on my way to shoot a video with my dear friend Christelle Tachon that will end up on my new podcast site. This is actually the second time I will have filmed with Christelle, and the first episode with her is nearly completed in the editing process.
Filed under Doctors, Education, Family, life, medicine, News, Psychiatrists, Psychology, Psychotherapy by on Oct 15th, 2017. Comment. 
I recently read a heart-wrenching series of reports on doctors not believing women. I thought this sort of value judgment was outmoded, finding it hard to believe in this century and in this country. I have had at least a few experiences within the last year of patients who I sent back to the primary care physicians who referred them to me. I simply felt that although the primary physicians had in every case told the patient it was “all in your head” and sent them to me for care, I had found signs indicative of physical illness and wanted them to have a further workup.
Filed under Doctors, News by on Oct 13th, 2017. Comment.
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…
Filed under Education, Family, News by on Sep 27th, 2017. Comment.
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…
Filed under Alternative Medicine, depression, News, Stress by on Sep 20th, 2017. Comment.
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…
Filed under Diagnosis, Disease, News, prescription drugs by on Sep 19th, 2017. Comment.
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?”…
Filed under Alternative Medicine, Diagnosis, Disease, Dissociative Disorder, Doctors, Education, Family, medicine, Mental Illness, News, Research by on Sep 18th, 2017. Comment.
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.
Filed under Family, News by on Sep 11th, 2017. Comment.
I remember my respected psychopharmacology preceptor always had a pile of a bit out of date copies of the Wall Street Journal sitting around the house. I asked him why — about the third time I saw them sitting around his living room. He explained to me then it was the thing you really had to read to know what was going on in the pharmaceutical industry.
I remember I rolled my eyes heaven ward. I was too busy memorizing molecular structures and trying to understand potential mechanisms of drug-drug interactions. I still do a bunch of that sort of thing. I do it more quickly than I did at that time, but I still do it. Oh, I will find on line pretty much anything I can in “Newsfeeds” and such, but it is more to condemn than to follow these days, from what I know and can see. Basically, my problem is that they seem to keep making better sounding drugs. But from what I read, I don’t usually see them as a clear CLINICAL improvement over what I have seen in the past. In other words, I don’t think they are making people “more better” in terms of having more efficacy or less side effects or such. I just can’t find it in statistics in general, and sometimes even wonder if statistics are not a tad “Gerrymandered.”
Filed under FDA, News, prescription drugs by on Aug 25th, 2017. Comment.
As you may have heard me say before, not all doctors are saints. Patients often tend to revere doctors — of which I heartily approve! But as with any group there are always bad apples. And if not all of the apples are bad, there are also incompetent ones. Sometimes they are well-meaning. Sometimes they are just hoping nobody catches on so they don’t lose their livelihood. But I am definitely NOT anti doctor, anti medicine, anti prescriptions or anti anything else. I know there is good and bad everywhere. Unfortunately, in medicine, the bad or the incompetent can mean the death or suffering of innocent people.
Filed under Doctors, medicine, News by on Aug 17th, 2017. Comment.