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 […]
Who’s Using All Those Sleeping Pills? (10/3/12)
So Who Is Using Sleeping Pills? Lots of people – especially people not prescribed them. According to the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (reported in the BBC), a full third of adult Britons complain of insomnia. Fully half of these insomniacs take prescription sleeping pills their doctors don’t know about. Thirty percent take them for at least […]
The Numbers Fetish (9/24/12)
Are You More Than Your Lab Test Numbers? I’ve heard the story many times: a patient comes into a doctor’s office for a “checkup”. He or she is handed glowing lab reports, told they’re in the peak of health – walks out and drops dead. So our lives are more than the sum of our […]