Thought As Action Ideas change the world. They also change your body. In the early nineteenth century scientists worked eagerly to discover the fundamentals of chemistry. Using progressively more accurate equipment they measured the ratio of oxygen to hydrogen in water, of oxygen to carbon in what we now call carbon dioxide. The ratios they […]
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 […]
Are You A Figment of Someone’s Imagination? (9/20/12)
Nothing is Always Something Could I and everything I know be nothing more than lines of computer code? The movie “The Matrix” and the manga and books it spawned enthralled and appalled. Yet the idea of the universe as “mere” artificially created information lies at the base of much human creativity. Mathematical equations describe multiple […]
Simple Ways to Live Longer – the Kungsholmen Study (9/18/12)
Keeping Healthy in Kungsholmen Modifiable lifestyle factors can add six years to men and five years’ to women’s lifespan at age 75. They can even expand survival four years in those aged 85. These are some of the results of an important study from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm published in the British Medical Journal. […]