Beyond Rivalry - health_and_medicine

Poirot for Illness

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 07:59:00 -0500

"It occurs to me now, for the first time, that film critics are the only people in the world who go to the cinema when they're not feeling well. Normal people slump in front of the telly and watch wall-to-wall Poirots until their eyes start to bleed. But the deadline of deadlines was looming. Captain Hastings was beginning to get on my nerves and the first blockbuster of the summer was in town. There was nothing else for it."

-- Marcus Berkmann, film critic, in The Oldie, July 2008.

Delusions, Illusions

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:12:00 -0500

Reading lots, between my inter-library loaned crime novels -- finished Tana French's The Likeness last week, am reading PD James' new Dalgleish novel, The Private Patient, now, and have Reginald Hill's The Price of Butcher's Meat to read afterwards -- and the arrival of the Wall Street Journal through the door slot almost every day, a little 6-month perk for having completed about 200 online surveys in the last few years ... I love the WSJ, its editorial board notwithstanding.

Here are a couple of recent gems from its pages:

***

Destructive Delusions: How therapists and 'victims' seized on the idea of repressed memory, leveling false charges and ruining lives, by Theodore Dalrymple, a book review of Dr. Paul McHugh's Try to Remember: Psychiatry's Clash Over Meaning, Memory, and Mind. Best lines:

"One of the most extraordinary outbreaks of popular delusion in recent years was that which attached to the possibility of 'recovered memory' of sexual and satanic childhood abuse, and to an illness it supposedly caused, Multiple Personality Disorder. No medieval peasant praying to a household god for the recovery of his pig could have been more credulous than scores of psychiatrists, hosts of therapists and thousands of willing victims."…

You Can't Be Judgmental (And Yet)

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 11:40:00 -0500

I've watched most of season 5 via Hulu on my laptop. "Lucky Thirteen" (5x05) -- genius show. "Joy" -- again the realisation that House says what most people are really thinking but automatically censor because it's cruel and would cause conflict to say aloud (particularly, in this episode, about Cuddy becoming a mom; what he says is truly cringe-worthy -- and yet it's part of what was in my thoughts, too).

A few bits:

Wilson to House: "I'm leaving."
House: "What? Are you going to take another two months. Boy, you're really milking this bereavement thing, aren't you? [Pause] I mean good for you. Take all the time you need."

(Dying Changes Everything, 5x01)

House to Cuddy: "You have to stop Wilson from committing career malpractice."
Cuddy: "Talk to him."
House: "I already talked to him. Twice."
Cuddy: "Mocking him and insulting him --- let's see --- yes, technically those are categories of conversation.... Talk to him. Deal with his grief. Talk to him about what he's going through."
House: "That's a brilliant idea. I'll take him out for a beer. That'll make up for the fact that Amber's in a pine box and that there's randomness and chaos in the…

Hospice at the Carlyle!

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:32:23 -0400

THIS IS WHAT I WANT. OMG. Imagine.

"Even as she was dying, she would take walks in Central Park in the daytime, and in the evening sit in a back booth in Bemelmans Bar, looking at the whimsical illustrations of New York City on the wall by the artist Ludwig Bemelmans, best known for the Madeline children's books, and listening to Mr. Harris play. She loved Cole Porter, and she would pass requests to the waiter."

What's A Stroke Feel Like?

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 13:38:00 -0400

On Oprah today, regular guest and cardiologist Dr. Mehmet Oz and neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor will be talking about what a stroke feels like and what's happening in your brain when you have a stroke. Taylor's book about her stroke is My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (2008). You can watch her TED talk about her stroke online.

Dr. Taylor offers a few exercises to help us make the choice to be peaceful and joyful. Here are two:

>> Pay attention to the energy that other people bring to you. Realize that you can observe other people and interact with them without engaging with their energy. Write about a time when someone else's energy affected you in a negative way. Consider how different the situation might have turned out if you had chosen to observe rather than be engaged and swept away by their energy. How might you approach the exact same situation in the future?

>> Brain circuits are very predictable and consistent entities. The more time you spend thinking a thought, then the stronger that circuit becomes and the less outside energy it takes for that circuit to run. As a result, for many of…

Leroy Died (1955-2008)

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:20:00 -0400

As I've mentioned, I've read the NPR blog of journalist and Nightline producer Leroy Sievers' battle with cancer for a couple of years now. (I wouldn't call it a battle but he did.) I was away all week and when I returned home on Sunday afternoon, I found that Leroy had died rather suddenly on Friday night at his Maryland home, at age 53, just three days after he and his wife decided to contact hospice. It was a shock. I knew he was dying but I hadn't expected it this soon. His last post, the day before, was about a stuffed Bernese Mountain dog, sitting on the bed with him.

More at ABC News. And NPR. And NYT. There's a memorial fund set up.

(Photo of Leroy with his wife Laurie Singer.)

How To Really Be An Expert

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 07:20:00 -0400

Years of experience in your given field does not make you an expert performer. It can help -- if you have 10 years experience or more, that is -- and it can also hurt -- acting unconsciously and missing key information, being overconfident -- but what really helps is to spend most of your time practicing the hardest aspects of your job, profession, skill, talent, or field: "In other words, we like to practice what we know, stretching out in the warm bath of familiarity rather than stretching our skills. Those who overcome that tendency are the real high performers." Another factor that helps make experts expert is "regularly obtaining accurate feedback." This is true for a variety of fields, including nurses, doctors, athletes, crossword puzzle solvers, chess players, drivers, and, perhaps, politicans.

More at "The Science of Experience" in Time.

Bias and Diet

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:55:00 -0400

Stuart Buck at Overcoming Bias looks at the overarching theme of bias in Gary Taubes' book Good Calories, Bad Calories [published as The Diet Delusion in the UK], "a book of some 600 pages (nearly 70 of which are the bibliography). ...

"Why is Taubes so interested in bias? For several decades, it has been the conventional wisdom that dietary fat (and especially saturated fat) contributes to obesity, heart disease, and cancer. Judging from Taubes' exhaustive research -- indeed, I'd be surprised if any other book examined bias within a particular scientific field in such detail -- the conventional wisdom was based on unreliable and slender evidence that, once established and institutionalized in government funding, set a pattern of confirmation bias by which further research was judged (or ignored)."

Examples follow, including that dietary researchers ignored or suppressed "studies showing that diet, cholesterol, and heart disease were not even correlated ... or even that low cholesterol raises other risks of death."

Taubes' contention, by the way, is that heart disease and other "diseases of civilization" are more likely caused by high triglyceride levels, which are elevated by eating refined carbohydrates.

In a January 2008 interview with the Telegraph, he admits "that…

Taking A Life

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:36:17 -0400

"When it became clear he wasn't going to move out of the way, I closed my eyes, covered my face and held my breath.

"By the time we were stationary, four of my eight cars were in the platform and I was on autopilot. I told the passengers there would be a delay in opening the doors due to an 'incident', and was calling the line controller for assistance when I heard a tap on my cab door. A smart man inquired, 'Do you know there's a person under your train?' I looked at the blood on the windscreen momentarily before assuring him that, yes, I was aware.

"He paused for a heartbeat, looked at his watch and said, 'So, how long before we get on the move again?'"

(from "Last Year I Killed a Man," by Vaughan Thomas, in the Guardian, 19 July 2008, via Scott)

Goose + Man Story

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:05:00 -0400

In the Boston Globe, a 5-page piece by Vicki Constantine Croke about making tough veterinary care decisions features a lovely story about Mark Podlaseck and his goose with cancer, Boswell, who seems to like The Iliad.