The Art of Truth Is it, or isn’t it? Will eating lots of sugar cause cancer? Do energy drinks cause sudden death? In a “gotcha” media culture where the fate of nations is treated as a sports contest – and presidential debates reported with the same gravity as “Dancing with the Stars” – it pays […]
Fake food, Fake Drugs, Fake… (10/22/12)
Pork-Beef and Other Delectables Swedish diners were surprised recently to discover that 20 tons of beef were ingeniously dyed pork. Some of the meat originated in cash strapped Argentina where it was then routed by the Hungarian company Filetto into Scandinavia. The job appears to be have meticulous – an unknown dye injected by hand […]
Why Did I Get Sick? Creating a Clinical Narrative (10/15/12)
What Happened To Make Me Sick? Why? People want to know. Why they have an illness and new, never before experienced symptoms plagues, obsesses and fascinates patients. The human brain thrives on order, creating it wherever it can. The confusing pixels of a computer monitor processed in the brain come to represent a 1930s film […]
The New Age of Anxiety (10/9/12)
The Future? One of my patients recently told me “I don’t worry about the future. I don’t see a future.” We have been living through a new Age of Anxiety. It does and does not resemble the times W.H. Auden wrote about in his 1948 Pulitzer Prize winning poem of that name. Auden had written […]
What Will Create the Next Epidemic? (10/8/12)
Meningitis, Salmonella, and… Meningitis arrives through contaminated spinal steroid injections by pain specialists. Salmonella infects hundreds of Americans via Dutch smoked salmon sold by Cisco. Dozens die. People are again unnerved by infection. Will there be a new form of AIDS, or SARS, or something truly unknown coming to kill us? And what will we […]
