You probably know by now that I’m all about helping people relieve chronic pain and live longer and healthier lives. Just the other day, a gentleman visited me at the clinic to request medical marijuana. He said his feet had rotated 180 degrees from normal when he was born. He was literally born with his feet on backwards.
A Back-Foot from the Nurenburg Chronicle, 1493. This ancient tribe of people with backward feet and 8 toes each foot.
He was a young black man who looked much younger than the 47 he told me was his age. He said orthopedic surgeons had started working on him before he could remember. He’d had a total of 34 operations, with the most recent at age 18.
To me, his gait looked amazingly normal. “I bet you want to see my feet,” he said as he ripped off his shoes and socks. He had one eight inch well-heeled vertical scar on the posterior aspect of each of his very thin ankles, and a transverse scar of about the same length on the outside of each foot. The left one was a bit more deformed than
Read more on The Man Who Was Born With His Feet On Backwards…
Filed under military by on Dec 7th, 2012. Comment. 
Chew on this — the sensationalist New York Post recently broke the story of an allegedly cannibalistic NYPD officer who went for women. He should end up in prison, but I’m not so sure they want to give the guy a job working in the kitchen.
I remember only a couple of times in my young life that my parents went into Boston to get a copy of the New York Post. This was before you could find the National Enquirer at every supermarket checkout stand. “Tabloid” meant a newspaper with half-size pages that you could read like a book. It was meant for less educated people than us, I was dutifully informed, and reading it was the intellectual equivalent of “slumming.” I remember wondering then if stupid people were really that stupid or if they just read newspapers that were easy to hold open. Read more on Cannibalism of Females…
Filed under News by on Dec 6th, 2012. Comment.
When I lived in Boston, I remember walking by the reflecting pools of the Christian Science Monitor building. My parents said it was a wonderful newspaper but it was somehow “heavy” or scholarly, so they did not want to dig into it every Sunday. Although, they seemed happy to skim the issues I would bring home after my journeys to downtown Boston.
Recently, they ran a piece about how New York is going underwater. Not that New York City is alone; there are plenty of cities that are slowly drowning. There seems to be no sense of urgency whatsoever. On the travel website above, for example, there is only a go-visit-it-before-it-is underwater kind of feeling. I suppose it would be really nice to get some views under your eyelids before they disappear. If nothing else, this situation ought to serve to confirm that global warming is real science and not a political construct. The polar icecaps are melting and sea level communities are sinking. It might sound slow, but it is really quite fast, and things need to be done.
First, we need to applaud Mayor Bloomberg of New York City. Last I heard, he was a Republican, and most Republicans believe that global warming is more Democratic propaganda than science. All these storms upon the earth are sinking us pretty fast. Bloomberg has appointed a commission to look at what this will do to New Yorkers. I don’t necessarily believe that commissions actually work, but he is at least trying to do something. That gets him points in my book. Read more on They Should Only Sink…
Filed under Government, News, Science by on Dec 5th, 2012. Comment.
The medicating of Americans for mental illness has continued to grow over the last decade. And while that’s not exactly a news flash, I have seen no approach as fresh as the one taken by the folks at “CrazyMeds”.
They are not doctors. They are presumably patients or potential patients, then, just as some doctors are or should be. Their approach is so fresh that I am amazed to notice the grain of truth in it. This is the same way I felt when I visited the “Psychiatry Kills” Museum in Los Angeles, operated by the Scientology folks. They had a distorted view, but I saw where they were coming from. Read more on Psychotropic Drugs, According to their Users…
Filed under Diagnosis, Doctors, medicine, Mental Illness, News, prescription drugs, Psychiatrists by on Dec 1st, 2012. Comment.
Drug company lobbyists still rule this country, even under a president who promised us something different. I am sorry it took me so long to find out about the threats and deals made by the White House to get drug companies on board with Obama’s healthcare overhaul. Apparently, it was released by Republicans at the end of May. Read more on Even Obama is Ruled by Drug Companies…
Filed under medicine, politics, prescription drugs by on Nov 30th, 2012. Comment.
I recently got hold of a copy of Dr. Atkins’ Vita-Nutrient Solution; a book by the same Robert C. Atkins, M.D. who invented the “Atkins Diet” –mainly known as the low-carb diet. I was impressed by his general erudition and review of the literature. He had even visited with various luminaries of alternative medicine. Here was a guy who was capable of writing a pretty complete vitamin and mineral prescription for almost any chronic illness that was part of an internal medicine practice.
In a section titled “My Own Transformation,” he tells how, when he was devoted to mainstream medicine, he found a diet that worked for him and for most folks. He had found it in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which is perhaps the most mainstream medical journal that exists. He wrote his first book about that diet. He was shocked when a consensus panel from the American Medical Association was critical. After all, he had been relying on medical literature which had been reviewed by peers and validated in every way that academics respect and deserve when they have done work. He started questioning these professional “edicts” and found himself squarely in the world of nutrition-based therapeutics. I have believed for a long time that most psychiatric disorders, maybe all, are the result of a genetically transmitted limitation of the ability to metabolize nutrients. There is plenty of evidence for this. Read more on Yes, Virginia — Cannabis IS Medicine…
Filed under Alternative Medicine, Doctors, medicine, News by on Nov 29th, 2012. 1 Comment.
It is very hard for straightforward and presumably honest medical researchers to give us much of anything objective about something that has been labeled “alternative medicine”. Maybe there should only be two kinds of medicine. Good and not good; helpful and not helpful. I was minding my own business – well, as much as ever — when I found an article about chelation as a preventative for heart disease. It basically says that chelation seems to “work”. But it also seems that some people are ashamed to find this out and don’t want too many people to take advantage of this as a treatment option. This makes about as much sense as most of what I have read recently about medical research, but I do have one way to put it in context. I have spoken at some alternative medicine meetings where I have proselytized about the effectiveness of high dose vitamins — chelated, to pass the blood-brain barrier. I have been told that I would be skewered by colleagues. Colleagues never seem to have much worried about what I have to say. As a matter of fact, the world seems to have a pretty bad track record as far as listening to what I say. Read more on Chelation As Preventive Therapy for Heart Disease…
Filed under Disease, medicine, Research by on Nov 26th, 2012. Comment.
“How in the world do you know how to say that in French?” I asked my hostess, in French. The reason for that was simple — we were in France and she was French. In fact, she was my closest friend at that time and in that place. As I look back, she was one of the best friends I have ever had, in a basically friendless world where I have received few favors. She told me — as we stood in front of a cranberry display on the Market of the Rue Mouffetard, in Paris — that she had learned the word when she had been on the team that discovered that DNA (and not protein) was the hereditary material. Afterward she had a year of sabbatical in Cleveland, Ohio at the Case Western University, and they grew cranberries somewhere around there. Her friends had known that this strange little fruit did not exist in France, so they showed it to her, and somehow they had tested and exchanged vocabulary, just as I had with her.
Although I had been born in suburban Boston, I had not seen cranberries growing in a bog until a high school road trip. My class had traveled to see Plymouth Rock, and the reproduction of the Mayflower (so tiny — they must have been really cramped) and other such things I had been told existed no other place on God’s green Earth except for Cape Cod. I was glad I had my French friend to help me break such myths of chauvinistic rubbish. How strong the myth had felt, how deeply I had believed it, and for so long. Read more on Canneberges?…
Filed under Family, Holidays, News by on Nov 22nd, 2012. Comment.
By now, I think most folks who care about snack foods have heard that Hostess Brands is folding. This the “twinkie,” as we know it will go the way of all flesh, which is also the way of all cake, which is to say, gone. I will admit that I have bought some Hostess Cakes for private consumption of late, mostly because the clinic I worked at in Redding was only a couple of doors from the Hostess Pastry Outlet. I got some orange cupcakes, mostly because my parents did not feel any cupcakes were worth the trouble if they were not chocolate. Whenever there are “rules,” real or postulated, people enjoy trying to break them. There is something basal that has drawn people to Twinkies. Since I was a tot in school, but I never gravitated toward them myself. The flavor seemed too Aryan, somehow. And there was something dairy in that cream-filled middle, which made them incompatible with the Jewish dietary laws that ruled my life back then. Read more on Twinkies Away!…
Filed under News by on Nov 20th, 2012. Comment.
Army veteran Galmiche, who served his country for 20 years, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in 2002. He says he worked with a counselor and took medication for years, but did not find relief from his symptoms until he was matched with a PTSD service dog.
The first time I met a patient with a service dog was when I was doing social security examinations, as a psychiatrist. The woman was about 60 years old, motherly and white-haired, and she told me that she was nervous about the interview and was being treated for an anxiety disorder. She did not think she could “make it” unless I saw her with her “service dog.” Many years before, when my allergy to dog-hair was in flower, I would have declined. I had since treated it effectively with alternative methods, so I told her we could try it. It was a tiny dog, the kind my husband would call a “barfy” dog. The dog had the cutest little blue coat with very official looking embroidery — including the wheelchair picture that is usually used to mark places that are reserved for such vehicles. The little dog wouldn’t stop staring at me. I did a customary and very basic psychiatric interview. I started with questions that involved little or no stress, like name and diagnosis. Eventually, I ramped up to questions about the topics that generated anxiety, such as past traumas. The pooch stood on its hind legs while she rubbed it vigorously, staring at me. I stared back. Read more on Service Dogs for PTSD Veterans…
Filed under Mental Illness, military, News, PTSD, Service animals by on Nov 15th, 2012. Comment.