In Defense Recently a journalist asked to summarize important facts about sleep. Here’s an attempt to defend sleep – and it’s role in human regeneration. Some will be interested by a new large European study showing that the worse the insomnia, the worse future heart failure. Yet the story is much bigger than that: The […]
Driving While Asleep
Safe Driving? Recently Toyota unveiled a new self-driving Lexus – joining a very long list of manufacturers working on self-directed transport. We may need self driving cars soon. People are falling asleep at the wheel – all the time. The CDC and You Recently the Centers for Disease Control conducted a large telephone survey. Nearly […]
How To Get Off Sleeping Pills (1/15/13)
When Pill = Sleep In America alone, tens of millions take sleeping pills to sleep each night. Yet sleeping pills don’t produce natural sleep. They worsen memory. They increase the risk of death. But people can’t stop. Physically or behaviorally addicted, they know pill = sleep. Here are some reasons why that happens – and […]
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 […]