Medical Condition Quotes

If bravery is a medical condition, everybody's misdiagnosed me.

Um," Doc said in a mild voice, "medically speaking, I'm not sure that was the most helpful thing for his condition." "But I feel better," Jared answered, sullen. Doc smiled the tiniest smile. "Well, maybe a few more minutes of unconsciousness won't kill him.

There's a fine line between a superpower and a chronic medical condition.

I wondered if she really was that rude, or if she had some sort of medical condition where the filter between her brain and her mouth had been broken since birth.

From the onset of polio in 1921 until his death, Franklin, his family, his inner circle of advisers, and teams of physicians assiduously disguised the state of his health, promoting the fantasy of a robust leader who was always in excel- lent physical condition for a man his age. Severe heart disease was not admit- ted until twenty-five years after his death, and then only as part of a new and larger cover-up to conceal other severe medical problems. These deceptions still dominate the present-day narrative of Franklin’s health, especially so in his later years.

Today I hit rock bottom but didn’t busy myself with activity to take my mind off it, like I usually do. I allowed myself to sink as deep as possible. It’s like an infection: let it run its course and be done with it. Rising, I felt cleansed.

This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.

Aw, hell!" Kyle grumbled. My gaze flickered toward him at the sound of his voice. I could just see his bright eyes around Jared's elbow, focused on me. " It didn't fall!" He complained. Jared lundged forward, away from me. With a loud smacking sound, his fist hit Kyle's face. Kyle's eyes rolled back in his head, and his mouth fell slack. The room was very quiet for a few seconds. "Um," Doc said in a mild voice, "medically speaking, I'm not sure that was the most helpful thing for his condition." "But I feel better," Jared answered, sullen.

THE MAXIMS OF MEDICINE Before you examine the body of a patient, Be patient to learn his story. For once you learn his story, You will also come to know His body. Before you diagnose any sickness, Make sure there is no sickness in the mind or heart. For the emotions in a man’s moon or sun, Can point to the sickness in Any one of his other parts. Before you treat a man with a condition, Know that not all cures can heal all people. For the chemistry that works on one patient, May not work for the next, Because even medicine has its own Conditions. Before asserting a prognosis on any patient, Always be objective and never subjective. For telling a man that he will win the treasure of life, But then later discovering that he will lose, Will harm him more than by telling him That he may lose, But then he wins. THE MAXIMS OF MEDICINE by Suzy Kassem

We have reached a stage where we often pursue growth for growth’s sake, a condition that in medical terminology would simply be called cancer.

Thank you so much for having the bravery to do this." There's that word again. Bravery. Brave peoples' legs don't shake. Brave people don't feel like puking. Brave people sure don't have to remind themselves how to breathe if they think about that night too hard. If bravery is a medical condition, everybody's misdiagnosed me.

The spirit is one of the most neglected parts of man by doctors and scientists around the world. Yet, it is as vital to our health as the heart and mind. It's time for science to examine the many facets of the soul. The condition of our soul is usually the source of many sicknesses.

It’s hard to get mad at Neal, because he suffers from a medical condition called total fucking stupidity.

You think she's got a personality disorder?" "No, she's just a nasty bitch. An unpleasant personality isn't a medical condition. Just a symptom of not being slapped around the head enough.

Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one’s state of mind, or one’s mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one’s life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct. A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is wilfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place.

What is the meaning of life?" "What is consciousness and the mind?” "Why am I here?" “What is my relationship to God and the universe?" These questions have been asked for centuries, but they are irrelevant to achieving social progress. These are unanswerable questions because they don’t have referents in the real world. The posing of such ambiguous questions doesn’t express concern for fellow human beings, or a desire to elevate their condition. Such musings are gibberish in terms of practicality, and as impotent as wailing over an injured person instead of seeking medical attention for them.

Ella finished her burger and dug into a side of fries. Hi watched, enraptured. She couldn't help but notice. “Would you like one?” “What? Sure.” Hi smiled, made no move. After a moment, Ella nudged the bowl his way. “Careful, they're still hot.” “Oh, no problem.” Hi fumbled for a fry. “I like food that's hot.” I caught Shelton slowly shaking his head. “Oh, shoot!” Ella winced. “I forgot to stop by the office. My mother had to drop off my shin guards.” She slid her fries over to Hi. “Enjoy. They're hot, which apparently you like.” “Got that right. Hot hot hot!” Hi awkwardly shoved another fry into his mouth. “Okay, wow.” Ella gathered her things, then brushed my cheek with a kiss. “Later, Tor.” Shouldering her bag, she hurried from the cafeteria. A loud thunk drew my attention back to the table. Hi's forehead was resting on his tray. “Tell me that wasn't as bad as I think.” “Worse,” Shelton said. “So, so much worse.” Then head rose, then thunked back down. “I don't remember parts. I think I lost time.” I patted his shoulder. “That's probably for the best.” “Such.” Thunk. “A.” Thunk. “Dumbass.” Thunk. Shelton laughed nervously. “See? That's why I don't talk.” Hi's face shot up. “Tell her I have brain seizures. A serious medical condition. Or that I have an evil twin who sometimes takes my place, but can't talk for crap.” “Got it," I promised. His head dropped once more.

What's poking me?" "An involuntary reflex," Jake said, "Roll over at your own risk." "Is it going to be a chronic condition?" "God, I hope so, I'm too young to have those kinds of medical issues." "I have a cure." "What?" he asked. "Sandwiching a pillow between us?" "Amputation." "Never mind," Jake said grimly, "Problem solved.

Male guilt avoidance syndrome,' explained my father. 'It's a recognised medical condition by 2054.

The average seventy-five-year-old suffers from three chronic medical conditions and takes five prescription medicines,

The calcium in your bones came from a star. We are all made from recycled bits and pieces of the universe. This matters because origins matter. For example, if you were born to a reigning monarch but kidnapped by the black market baby underground shortly after birth and sent to America where you were raised by common, unremarkable people from Ohio, and when you were in your thirties working as a humble UPS driver, dignitaries landed their helicopter on the roof of your crummy apartment building and informed you of their thirty-plus year search for you, His Royal Highness, the course of your life might change. You know? Our familial genetic origins -medical histories- inform us of medical conditions which exist in our families and when we know about these specific conditions, we can sometimes take certain actions to prevent them. Which is why I think it’s important to consider that billions of years before we were students and mothers and dog trainers and priests, we were particles that would form into star after star after star until forever passed, and instead of a star what formed was life; simplistic, crude, miraculous. And after another infinity, there we were. And this is why for you, anything is possible. Because you are made out of everything.

Very often conditions are recorded as observable "under thy fingers" [...] Among such observations it is important to notice that the pulsations of the human heart are observed.

Humeyra believed there was something markedly similar about the experience of being overweight and being prone to melancholy. In both cases society blamed the sufferer. No other medical condition was regarded this way.

Why did they all have to tread so very delicately around Celeste's money? It was like wealth was an embarrassing medical condition. It was the same with Celeste's beauty. Strangers gave Celeste the same furtive looks they gave to people with missing limbs, and if Madeline ever mentioned Celeste's looks, Celeste responded with something like shame. "Shhh," she'd say, looking around fearfully in case someone overheard. Everyone wanted to be rich and beautiful, but the truly rich and beautiful had to pretend they were just the same as everyone else. Oh, it was a funny old world.

[On the subject of Heath Ledger's Joker] This character who attracts psychotic henchmen may have lingering symptoms from his own past psychosis. He keeps making involuntary, repetitive movements—flicking his tongue, smacking his mouth—which suggest tardive dyskinesia, a condition that arises as a consequence of long-term or high-dosage use of antipsychotic (neuroleptic) medication.

We cannot outrun our past trauma. We can’t bury it and think that we will be fine. We cannot skip the essential stage of processing, accepting, and doing the hard, yet necessary trauma recovery work. There’s a body-mind connection. Trauma can manifest itself into chronic physical pain, cancer, inflammation, auto-immune conditions, depression, anxiety, PTSD, Complex PTSD, addictions, and ongoing medical conditions.

Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals, which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property. This type can be recorded by television cameras; it can frequently be observed in the process of commission. The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life. The second type originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type. When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same city - Birmingham, Alabama - five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism. When a black family moves into a home in a white neighborhood and is stoned, burned or routed out, they are victims of an overt act of individual racism which many people will condemn - at least in words. But it is institutional racism that keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation, or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it.

Caffeine—which is not only prevalent in coffee, certain teas, and many energy drinks, but also foods such as dark chocolate and ice cream, as well as drugs such as weight-loss pills and pain relievers—is one of the most common culprits that keep people from falling asleep easily and sleeping soundly thereafter, typically masquerading as insomnia, an actual medical condition.

To live a hard life was to make solid and impregnable every way in, until no openings remained and the soul hid in darkness, and no one else could hear its screams, its railing at injustice, its long, agonizing stretches of sadness. Hardness without created hardness within. Sadness was, she well knew, not something that could be cured. It was not, in fact, a failing, not a flaw, not an illness of spirit. Sadness was never without reason, and to assert that it marked some kind of dysfunction did little more than prove ignorance or, worse, cowardly evasiveness in the one making the assertion. As if happiness was the only legitimate way of being. As if those failing at it needed to be locked away, made soporific with medications; as if the causes of sadness were merely traps and pitfalls in the proper climb to blissful contentment, things to be edged round or bridged, or leapt across on wings of false elation. Scillara knew better. She had faced her own sadness often enough. Even when she discovered her first means of escaping it, in durhang, she’d known that such an escape was simply a flight from feelings that existed legitimately. She’d just been unable to permit herself any sympathy for such feelings, because to do so was to surrender to their truth. Sadness belonged. As rightful as joy, love, grief and fear. All conditions of being. Too often people mistook the sadness in others for self-pity, and in so doing revealed their own hardness of spirit, and more than a little malice.

From the cover blurb on the University of Wisconsin Press edition, writer unknown: Discussing memoirs, diaries, collaborative narratives, photo documentaries, essays, and other forms of life writing, G. Thomas Couser shows that these books are not primarily records of medical conditions; they are a means for individuals to recover their bodies (or those of loved ones) from marginalization and impersonal medical discourse. Responding to the recent growth of illness and disability narratives in the United States....

You must be the only woman in the whole entire world who is immune to the Ashbrooke Effect," Olivia said. "Amazing. You are a medical marvel." "First of all, the Ashbrooke Effect is not an actual medical condition," Emma lectured, after another sip of her drink. "Secondly, I refuse to believe it even exists at all." "I suffer from it even thinking out him," Olivia said. "My heart is fluttering and my skin feels hot. I must be blushing all over." "That's probably all the sherry you've been drinking," Emma remarked.

preventable diseases kill off half our population. And even if science were allowed to try, it could do little, because the majority of human beings are not yet human beings at all, but simply machines for the creating of wealth for others. They are penned up in filthy houses and left to rot and stew in misery, and the conditions of their life make them ill faster than all the doctors in the world could heal them; and so, of course, they remain as centers of contagion, poisoning the lives of all of us, and making happiness impossible for even the most selfish. For this reason I would seriously maintain that all the medical and surgical discoveries that science can make in the future will be of less importance than the application of the knowledge we already possess, when the disinherited of the earth have established their right to a human existence.

In medical school, doctors are taught to view the human body as a random mistake-ridden vessel that has to be forced into submission with surgery, antibiotics, antihypertensives, antihistamines, anti-inflammatories, and other medical interventions. The natural extension of this paradigm over the past 100 years has been for the medical profession to condition human beings not to trust anyone but certified medical doctors to fix these defective aberrations of creation.

If I say, “I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome,” I’m likely to be discredited as a witness to my own condition. I’ve had doctors tell me there’s no such thing as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. One doctor said: “Just drink some coffee.

So long as we have wage slavery," answered Schliemann, "it matters not in the least how debasing and repulsive a task may be, it is easy to find people to perform it. But just as soon as labor is set free, then the price of such work will begin to rise. So one by one the old, dingy, and unsanitary factories will come down— it will be cheaper to build new; and so the steamships will be provided with stoking machinery , and so the dangerous trades will be made safe, or substitutes will be found for their products. In exactly the same way, as the citizens of our Industrial Republic become refined, year by year the cost of slaughterhouse products will increase; until eventually those who want to eat meat will have to do their own killing— and how long do you think the custom would survive then?— To go on to another item— one of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption; and one of the consequences of civic administration by ignorant and vicious politicians, is that preventable diseases kill off half our population. And even if science were allowed to try, it could do little, because the majority of human beings are not yet human beings at all, but simply machines for the creating of wealth for others. They are penned up in filthy houses and left to rot and stew in misery, and the conditions of their life make them ill faster than all the doctors in the world could heal them; and so, of course, they remain as centers of contagion , poisoning the lives of all of us, and making happiness impossible for even the most selfish. For this reason I would seriously maintain that all the medical and surgical discoveries that science can make in the future will be of less importance than the application of the knowledge we already possess, when the disinherited of the earth have established their right to a human existence.

She navigated away from the Parish Council message board and dropped into her favorite medical website, where she painstakingly entered the words "brain" and "death" in the search box. The suggestions were endless. Shirley scrolled through the possibilities, her mild eyes rolling up and down, wondering to which of these deadly conditions, some of them unpronounceable, she owed her present happiness.

And whenever you hear a condition described as a "contested disease," the odds are good that the "contest" is between, on the one hand, mostly women patients who believe their condition to be an organic one and, on the other hand, a medical establishment that assumes their "medically unexplained symptoms" are all in their heads.

The trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry puts its research money into the search for magic bullets in the form of chemicals because pills mean money. If energy healing could be made into tablet form, drug manufacturers would get interested quickly. Instead, they identify deviations in physiology and behavior that vary from some hypothetical norm as unique disorders or dysfunctions, and then they educate the public about the dangers of these menacing disorders. Of course, the over-simplified symptomology used in defining the dysfunctions prevalent in drug company advertisements has viewers convinced they are afflicted by that particular malady. “Do you worry? Worry is a primary symptom of ‘medical condition’ called anxiety disorder. Stop your worry. Tell your doctor you want Addictazac, the new passion-pink drug.

Voluntary euthanasia occurs only when, to the best of medical knowledge, a person is suffering from an incurable and painful or extremely distressing condition. In these circumstances one cannot say that to choose to die quickly is obviously irrational.

Discrimination is the most polite word for abuse aka denying equal opportunity by anyone in power based on age, ancestry, color, disability (mental and physical), exercising the right to family care and medical leave, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, military or veteran status, national origin, political affiliation, race, religious creed, sex (includes pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and related medical conditions), and sexual orientation.

As someone who cannot drive for various reasons, I am at the mercy of public transit, a system that has worse side effects than over the counter medication.

This is said to civilized men who are to venture into countries where sacred cows are fed, while children are left to starve - where female infants are killed or abandoned by the roadside- where men go blind, medical help being forbidden by their religion - where women are mutilated, to insure their fidelity - where unspeakable tortures are ceremonially inflicted on prisoners - where cannibalism is practiced. Are these the ‘cultural riches’ which a Western man is to greet with ‘brotherly love’? Are these the ‘valuable elements’ which he is to admire and adopt? Are these the ‘fields’ in which he is not to regard himself as superior? And when he discovers entire populations rotting alive in such conditions, is he not to acknowledge, with a burning stab of pride - of pride and gratitude - the achievements of his nation and his culture, of the men who created them and left him a nobler heritage to carry forward?

But I can do any kind of dance,” he continued, smiling at my incredulity. “I also do swing, modern. What would you like to dance to?” “No way,” I said. “I’m not dancing with my therapist.” I wasn’t concerned that he was being sexually suggestive or creepy; I knew that he had no intention of that. It was more that I didn’t want to use my therapy time that way. I had things to talk about, like how I was coping with my medical condition. But part of me also knew that this was just an excuse I was giving myself, that this intervention could be useful, that the movement of dance allows our bodies to express our emotions in a way that words sometimes can’t. When we dance, we express our buried feelings, talking through our bodies instead of our minds—and that can help us get out of our heads and to a new level of awareness. That’s partly what dance therapy is about. It’s another technique some therapists use. But still—no.

I have blogged previously about the dangerous and deadly effects of science denialism, from the innocent babies unnecessarily exposed to deadly diseases by other kids whose parents are anti-vaxxers, to the frequent examples of how acceptance of evolution helps us stop diseases and pests (and in the case of Baby Fae, rejection of evolution was fatal), to the long-term effects of climate denial to the future of the planet we all depend upon. But one of the strangest forms of denialism is the weird coalition of people who refuse to accept the medical fact that the HIV virus causes AIDS. What the heck? Didn’t we resolve this issue in the 1980s when the AIDS condition first became epidemic and the HIV virus was discovered and linked to AIDS? Yes, we did—but for people who want to deny scientific reality, it doesn’t matter how many studies have been done, or how strong the scientific consensus is. There are a significant number of people out there (especially among countries and communities with high rates of AIDS infections) that refuse to accept medical reality. I described all of these at greater length in my new book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten our Future.

Spiritual depression presents itself in much the same way as clinical depression—but not quite. The marks of distinction are crucial, yet hard for the untrained to recognize. They make the difference between interpreting the source of depression as a problem that may require medication or as a process of transformation that is best served by reflection, discussion of the stages of the dark night, and understanding the nature of mystical prayer. I have met many people who have been treated for depression and other conditions when they were, in fact, in the deep stages of a spiritual crisis. Without the proper support, that crisis becomes misdirected into a problem with relationships, a problem with one’s childhood, or a chronic malaise. Spiritual crises are now a very real part of our spectrum of health challenges and we need to acknowledge them with the same authority as we do clinical depression.

Mental illness is no different than a heart condition. In the same way a faulty valve can cause harm to the body and require medication and care, so does a malfunctioning brain. Insanity is a crude, culturally loaded term setting the sufferer apart in a way which will not aid the patient’s recovery. The way we regard those whose brains hinder them with fault or injury is a prejudice, not a diagnosis.” Dr. North

If you tell someone you have depression, they will often say, "Oh, I've been depressed before, too." The difference lies between being depressed and having depression. Everyone's been depressed at one time or another, but these are far from being the same things. One is a passing mood. The other is a chronic illness that does not come and go, ebb and flow, is here one day and gone the next. The difference between being depressed and having depression is that one is a mood and the other is an illness. One is a momentary bout of melancholy. The other is a debilitating condition that requires medical treatment. Would you feel better about having a cancerous lesion if I likened it to the rash I had last week? The difference between being depressed and having depression is the difference between a mood that will soon pass, and a serious illness that disrupts your ability to function and will take years to treat. The difference between being depressed and having depression is the difference between Cleveland and Bangkok, or your frying pan and the surface of the sun. So, no, we (depressives) do not feel better when you tell us about your rash. We'll do our best to be polite about it, but no, it really doesn't help at all.

Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. In some persons this sense of being cut off from their rightful resources is extreme, and we then get the formidable neurasthenic and psychasthenic conditions, with life grown into one tissue of impossibilities, that so many medical books describe. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum. In elementary faculty, in co-ordination, in power of inhibition and co ntro l, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject — but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest of us, it is only an inveterate habit — the habit of inferiority to our full self — that is bad.

My dear Gorgas, Instead of being simply satisfied to make friends and draw your pay, it is worth doing your duty, to the best of your ability, for duty’s sake; and in doing this, while the indolent sleep, you may accomplish something that will be of real value to humanity. Your good friend, Reed Dr. Walter Reed encouraging Dr. William Gorgas who went on to make history eradicating Yellow Fever in Havana, 1902 and Panama, 1906, liberating the entire North American continent from centuries of Yellow Fever epidemics.

In fact, they turned out to be unprecedented. In America and across the Western world, adolescents were reporting a sudden spike in gender dysphoria—the medical condition associated with the social designation “transgender.” Between 2016 and 2017 the number of gender surgeries for natal females in the U.S. quadrupled, with biological women suddenly accounting for—as we have seen—70 percent of all gender surgeries.1 In 2018, the UK reported a 4,400 percent rise over the previous decade in teenage girls seeking gender treatments.2 In Canada, Sweden, Finland, and the UK, clinicians and gender therapists began reporting a sudden and dramatic shift in the demographics of those presenting with gender dysphoria—from predominately preschool-aged boys to predominately adolescent girls.

by letter in Morse code. Kittinger says it was a joke, but Simons didn’t take it that way. (Morse code has always been a tough medium for humor.) In his memoir Man High, Simons recalls thinking that “the weird and little understood breakaway phenomenon could be taking hold of Kittinger’s mind,…that he…was gripped in this strange reverie and was hellbent on flying on and on without regard for the consequences.” Simons compared the breakaway phenomenon to “the deadly raptures of the deep.” “Rapture of the deep” is a medical condition

I have asked them to pay attention to what they have just said. In particular to their use of the phrase “mental illness”. While it is true, i continued, that people in deprived situations are likely to suffer a great deal more than those who are more affluent, on what grounds are we correct to use medical language to describe that suffering? Do we use it because we have simply been taught to use it or because we have objective that it is somehow better to medicalise such suffering than it is to view it as many social scientists might as non-medical, non-pathological yet understandable human response to harmful social, relational, political and environmental conditions?

They were not medical problems to rehabilitate. We were not medical problems. I was never going to undo the damage polio had done to my nerve cells and walk again, nor was this my goal. The disabled veterans coming home from the Vietnam War were never going to grow their limbs back or heal their spinal cords and walk again. My friends with muscular dystrophy were never going to not have been born with muscular dystrophy. Accidents, illnesses, genetic conditions, neurological disorders, and aging are facts of the human condition, just as much as race or sex.

Much of what bureaucrats do, after all, is evaluate things. They are continually assessing, auditing, measuring, weighing the relative merits of different plans, proposals, applications, courses of action, or candidates for promotion. Market reforms only reinforce this tendency. This happens on every level. It is felt most cruelly by the poor, who are constantly monitored by an intrusive army of moralistic box-tickers assessing their child-rearing skills, inspecting their food cabinets to see if they are really cohabiting with their partners, determining whether they have been trying hard enough to find a job, or whether their medical conditions are really sufficiently sever to disqualify them from physical labor. All rich countries now employ legions of functionaries whose primary function is to make poor people feel bad about themselves. (p. 41)

A patient suffering with cancer of the throat was informed of a new X-ray machine that would cure his condition. This man could neither read nor write, nor was he informed about any of the instruments or procedures of medical practice. When he first sat down in the doctor's office and received into his mouth a thermometer with which the doctor sought to take his temperature, he believed he was undergoing X-ray treatment. The doctor, alert to the practices of psychology, recognized this, and after leaving the thermometer in the patient's mouth for ten minutes, excused him and told him to return in two days. Three weeks of treatment with a thermometer cured this patient's cancerous condition! Obviously, it wasn't the thermometer that did it. It was Faith!

There is a significant hereditary contribution to ADD but I do not believe any genetic factor is decisive in the emergence of ADD traits in any child. Genes are codes for the synthesis of the proteins that give a particular cell its characteristic structure and function. They are, as it were, alive and dynamic architectural and mechanical plans. Whether the plan becomes realized depends on far more than the gene itself. It is determined, for the most part, by the environment. To put it differently, genes carry potentials inherent in the cells of a given organism. Which of multiple potentials become expressed biologically is a question of life circumstances. Were we to adopt the medical model — only temporarily, for the sake of argument — a genetic explanation by itself would still be unsuitable. Medical conditions for which genetic inheritance are fully or even mostly responsible, such as muscular dystrophy, are rare. “Few diseases are purely genetic,” says Michael Hayden, a geneticist at the University of British Columbia and a world-renowned researcher into Huntington’s disease. “The most we can say is that some diseases are strongly genetic.” Huntington’s is a fatal degeneration of the nervous system based on a single gene that, if inherited, will almost invariably cause the disease. But not always. Dr. Hayden mentions cases of persons with the gene who live into ripe old age without any signs of the disease itself. “Even in Huntington’s, there must be some protective factor in the environment,” Dr. Hayden says.

...his condition in Roanoke is a strong testament that lassitude, indifference and the peculiarities of his thought were primarily the consequences of his illness and not of the early attempts to treat it. The popular view that anti-psychotics were chemical straight jackets that suppressed clear thinking and voluntary activity seems not to be borne out in Nash's case. If anything, the only periods when he was relatively free of hallucinations, delusions and the erosion of will were the periods following either insulin treatment or the use of anti psychotics. In other words, rather than reducing Nash to a zombie, medication seemed to reduce zombie like behavior.

At that meal in the small kitchen, Diane hadn’t identified the girl’s race. And when Belle had asked, had the girl with Lawrence been Negro or white? her sister-in-law had blushed and said she couldn’t remember. Belle knew then, even if Diane didn’t suffer from a medical condition, she truly didn’t care what race somebody was. Instead of pleasing Belle, this discovery made her furious, and she walked to the stove, though the burners were off and had cooled. Belle stirred a pot of lukewarm greens to cover the noise of her loud breathing. Her outraged exhalations, as she considered that Diane was a white woman who could walk through the world and stay blessedly unaware of the color line.

Defective is an adjective that has long been deemed too freighted for liberal discourse, but the medical terms that have supplanted it—illness, syndrome, condition—can be almost equally pejorative in their discreet way. We often use illness to disparage a way of being, and identity to validate that same way of being. This is a false dichotomy. In physics, the Copenhagen interpretation defines energy/matter as behaving sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle, which suggests that it is both, and posits that it is our human limitation to be unable to see both at the same time. The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Paul Dirac identified how light appears to be a particle if we ask a particle-like question, and a wave if we ask a wavelike question. A similar duality obtains in this matter of self. Many conditions are both illness and identity, but we can see one only when we obscure the other. Identity politics refutes the idea of illness, while medicine shortchanges identity. Both are diminished by this narrowness. Physicists gain certain insights from understanding energy as a wave, and other insights from understanding it as a particle, and use quantum mechanics to reconcile the information they have gleaned. Similarly, we have to examine illness and identity, understand that observation will usually happen in one domain or the other, and come up with a syncretic mechanics. We need a vocabulary in which the two concepts are not opposites, but compatible aspects of a condition. The problem is to change how we assess the value of individuals and of lives, to reach for a more ecumenical take on healthy. Ludwig Wittgenstein said, ―All I know is what I have words for.‖ The absence of words is the absence of intimacy; these experiences are starved for language.

Many survivors of relational and other forms of early life trauma are deeply troubled and often struggle with feelings of anger, grief, alienation, distrust, confusion, low self-esteem, loneliness, shame, and self-loathing. They seem to be prisoners of their emotions, alternating between being flooded by intense emotional and physiological distress related to the trauma or its consequences and being detached and unable to express or feel any emotion at all - alternations that are the signature posttraumatic pattern. These occur alongside or in conjunction with other common reactions and symptoms (e.g., depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem) and their secondary manifestations. Those with complex trauma histories often have diffuse identity issues and feel like outsiders, different from other people, whom they somehow can't seem to get along with, fit in with, or get close to, even when they try. Moreover, they often feel a sense of personal contamination and that no one understands or can help them. Quite frequently and unfortunately, both they and other people (including the professionals they turn to for help) do misunderstand them, devalue their strengths, or view their survival adaptations through a lens of pathology (e.g., seeing them as "demanding", "overdependent and needy", "aggressive", or as having borderline personality). Yet, despite all, many individuals with these histories display a remarkable capacity for resilience, a sense of morality and empathy for others, spirituality, and perseverance that are highly admirable under the circumstances and that create a strong capacity for survival. Three broad categories of survivorship, with much overlap between them, can be discerned: 1. Those who have successfully overcome their past and whose lives are healthy and satisfying. Often, individuals in this group have had reparative experiences within relationships that helped them to cope successfully. 2. Those whose lives are interrupted by recurring posttraumatic reactions (often in response to life events and experiences) that periodically hijack them and their functioning for various periods of time. 3. Those whose lives are impaired on an ongoing basis and who live in a condition of posttraumatic decline, even to the point of death, due to compromised medical and mental health status or as victims of suicide of community violence, including homicide.

Aristotle tells us that the high-pitched voice of the female is one evidence of her evil disposition, for creatures who are brave or just (like lions, bulls, roosters and the human male) have large deep voices…. High vocal pitch goes together with talkativeness to characterize a person who is deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control. Women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into this category. Their sounds are bad to hear and make men uncomfortable…. Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death…. Woman is that creature who puts the inside on the outside. By projections and leakages of all kinds—somatic, vocal, emotional, sexual—females expose or expend what should be kept in…. [As Plutarch comments,] “…she should as modestly guard against exposing her voice to outsiders as she would guard against stripping off her clothes. For in her voice as she is blabbering away can be read her emotions, her character and her physical condition.”… Every sound we make is a bit of autobiography. It has a totally private interior yet its trajectory is public. A piece of inside projected to the outside. The censorship of such projections is a task of patriarchal culture that (as we have seen) divides humanity into two species: those who can censor themselves and those who cannot…. It is an axiom of ancient Greek and Roman medical theory and anatomical discussion that a woman has two mouths. The orifice through which vocal activity takes place and the orifice through which sexual activity takes place are both denoted by the wordstoma in Greek (os in Latin) with the addition of adverbs ano and kato to differentiate upper mouth from lower mouth. Both the vocal and the genital mouth are connected to the body by the neck (auchen in Greek, cervix in Latin). Both mouths provide access to a hollow cavity which is guarded by lips that are best kept closed.

In 1970, when Dr. Edgar Berman said women’s hormones during menstruation and menopause could have a detrimental influence on women’s decision making, feminists were outraged. He was soon served up as the quintessential example of medical male chauvinism.12 But by the 1980s, some feminists were saying that PMS was the reason a woman who deliberately killed a man should go free. In England, the PMS defense freed Christine English after she confessed to killing her boyfriend by deliberately ramming him into a utility pole with her car; and, after killing a coworker, Sandie Smith was put on probation—with one condition: she must report monthly for injections of progesterone to control symptoms of PMS.13 By the 1990s, the PMS defense paved the way for other hormonal defenses. Sheryl Lynn Massip could place her 6-month-old son under a car, run over him repeatedly, and then, uncertain he was dead, do it again, then claim postpartum depression and be given outpatient medical help.14 No feminist protested. In the 1970s, then, feminists

North American society tries to bury many problems under tons of medications, preferring to ignore the social and cultural causes of people’s stressed mental states. The long-term social consequences of massive drug intake in the treatment of depression, ADD and a host of other conditions are yet to be known. I, too, am concerned about this, even though I prescribe medications to others and continue to take one myself.

The medical uncertainty compounds patients' own uncertainty. Because my unwellness did not take the form of a disease I understood, with a clear-cut list of symptoms and a course of treatment, even I at times interpreted it as a series of signs about my very existence. Initially, the illness seemed to be a condition that signified something deeply wrong with me⁠—illness as a kind of semaphore. Without answers, at my most desperate, I came to feel (in some unarticulated way) that if I could just tell the right story about what was happening, I could make myself better. If only I could figure out what the story was, like the child in a fantasy novel who must discover her secret name, I could become myself again. It took years before I realized that the illness was not just my own; the silence around suffering was our society's pathology.

We are all of us exposed to grief: the people we love die, as we shall ourselves in due course; expectations are disappointed and ambitions are thwarted by circumstance. Finally, there are some who insist upon feeling guilty over the ill they have done or simply on account of the ugliness which they perceive in their own souls. A solution of a kind has been found to this problem in the form of sedatives and anti-depressant drugs, so that many human experiences which used to be accepted as an integral part of human life are now defined and dealt with as medical problems. The widow who grieves for a beloved husband becomes a 'case', as does the man saddened by the recollection of the napalm or high explosives he has dropped on civilian populations. One had thought that guilt was a way, however indirect, in which we might perceive the nature of reality and the laws which govern our human experience; but it is now an illness that can be cured. Death however, remains incurable. Though we might be embarrassed by Victorian death-bed scenes or the practices of mourning among people less sophisticated than ourselves, the fact of death tells us so much about the realities of our condition that to ignore it or try to forget it is to be unaware of the most important thing we need to know about our situation as living creatures. Equally, to witness and participate in the dying of our fellow men and women is to learn what we are and, if we have any wisdom at all, to draw conclusions which must in their way affect our every thought and our every act.

Throughout the human life span there remains a constant two-way interaction between psychological states and the neurochemistry of the frontal lobes, a fact that many doctors do not pay enough attention to. One result is the overreliance on medications in the treatment of mental disorders. Modern psychiatry is doing too much listening to Prozac and not enough listening to human beings; people’s life histories should be given at least as much importance as the chemistry of their brains. The dominant tendency is to explain mental conditions by deficiencies of the brain’s chemical messengers, the neurotransmitters. As Daniel J. Siegel has sharply remarked, “We hear it said everywhere these days that the experience of human beings comes from their chemicals.” Depression, according to the simple biochemical model, is due to a lack of serotonin — and, it is said, so is excessive aggression. The answer is Prozac, which increases serotonin levels in the brain. Attention deficit is thought to be due in part to an undersupply of dopamine, one of the brain’s most important neurotransmitters, crucial to attention and to experiencing reward states. The answer is Ritalin. Just as Prozac elevates serotonin levels, Ritalin or other psychostimulants are thought to increase the availability of dopamine in the brain’s prefrontal areas. This is believed to increase motivation and attention by improving the functioning of areas in the prefrontal cortex. Although they carry some truth, such biochemical explanations of complex mental states are dangerous oversimplifications — as the neurologist Antonio Damasio cautions: "When it comes to explaining behavior and mind, it is not enough to mention neurochemistry... The problem is that it is not the absence or low amount of serotonin per se that “causes” certain manifestations. Serotonin is part of an exceedingly complicated mechanism which operates at the level of molecules, synapses, local circuits, and systems, and in which sociocultural factors, past and present, also intervene powerfully. The deficiencies and imbalances of brain chemicals are as much effect as cause. They are greatly influenced by emotional experiences. Some experiences deplete the supply of neurotransmitters; other experiences enhance them. In turn, the availability — or lack of availability — of brain chemicals can promote certain behaviors and emotional responses and inhibit others. Once more we see that the relationship between behavior and biology is not a one-way street.

In the car inching its way down Fifth Avenue, toward Bergdorf Goodman and this glamorous party, I looked back on my past with a new understanding. This sickness, the “endo-whatever,” had stained so much—my sense of self, my womanhood, my marriage, my ability to be present. I had effectively missed one week of each month every year of my life since I was thirteen, because of the chronic pain and hormonal fluctuations I suffered during my period. I had lain in bed, with heating pads and hot-water bottles, using acupuncture, drinking teas, taking various pain medications and suffering the collateral effects of them. I thought of all the many tests I missed in various classes throughout my education, the school dances, the jobs I knew I couldn’t take as a model, because of the bleeding and bloating as well as the pain (especially the bathing suit and lingerie shoots, which paid the most). How many family occasions was I absent from? How many second or third dates did I not go on? How many times had I not been able to be there for others or for myself? How many of my reactions to stress or emotional strife had been colored through the lens of chronic pain? My sense of self was defined by this handicap. The impediment of expected pain would shackle my days and any plans I made. I did not see my own womanhood as something positive or to be celebrated, but as a curse that I had to constantly make room for and muddle through. Like the scar on my arm, my reproductive system was a liability. The disease, developing part and parcel with my womanhood starting at puberty with my menses, affected my own self-esteem and the way I felt about my body. No one likes to get her period, but when your femininity carries with it such pain and consistent physical and emotional strife, it’s hard not to feel that your body is betraying you. The very relationship you have with yourself and your person is tainted by these ever-present problems. I now finally knew my struggles were due to this condition. I wasn’t high-strung or fickle and I wasn’t overreacting.

At the dinner table... CALVIN, looking like an x-ray version of himself: Bombarded by high energy photons, Calvin is transformed into a living x-ray. CALVIN: Although this condition will facilitate future medical diagnoses, it does make Calvin's presence at the dinner table a disgusting ordeal. CALVIN: Everyone can see Calvin's food being ground into mushy pulp and swallowed! At this moment, Calvin chews up a large spoonful of creamed corn! CALVIN'S DAD, leaning in at the dinner table: For gosh sakes, close your mouth when you chew!! You think we want to SEE that? CALVIN, physically back to normal, except that his mouth is open amazingly wide, with full view of his current mouthful: MKGHH! SMACK! BLAGHKH!

It must be noted that there is no proof that it is justified to apply the label somatisation to such conditions as chronic fatigue syndrome and several more illnesses that established medicine has so for failed to explain scientifically. ……Don't hesitate to ask questions about scientific evidence behind this talk about somatisation. Be persistent, because a diagnosis of somatisation is definitely not an innocuous label. It will close various doors and lead (to) treatments that usually get nowhere.

Food has become a cause of disease rather than a guardian of health in the modern world. Once regarded as the central pillar of life and the most effective of all medicines, food is now a major contributing factor in cancer, heart disease, arthritis , mental illness, and many other pathological conditions. Virtually monopolized by agricultural and industrial cartels, public food supplies, are processed and packaged to produce profits and prolong shelf life, not to promote health and prolong human life. It seems incredible that public health authorities permit the unrestricted use of hydrogenated vegetable oils, refined sugar, chemical preservatives, toxic pesticides, and over 5,000 other artificial food additives that have repeatedly been proven to cause cancer, impair immunity, and otherwise erode human health, while restricting the medical use of nutrients, herbs, acupuncture, fasting, and other traditional therapies that have been shown to prevent and cure the very diseases caused by chemical contaminants in food and water.

Illness in this society, physical or mental, they are not abnormalities. They are normal responses to an abnormal culture. This culture is abnormal when it comes to real human needs. And.. it is in the nature of the system to be abnormal, because if we had a society geared to meet human needs.. would we be destroying the Earth through climate change? Would we be putting extra burden on certain minority people? Would we be selling people a lot of goods that they don't need, and, in fact, are harmful for them? Would there be mass industries based on manufacturing, designing and mass-marketing toxic food to people? So we do all that for the sake of profit. That's insanity. It is not insanity from the point of view of profit, but it is insanity from the point of view of human need. And so, in so many ways this culture denies and even runs against counter to human needs. When you mentioned trauma.. given how important trauma is in human life and what an impact it has.. why have we ignored it for so long? Because that denial of reality is built in into this system. It keeps the system alive. So it is not a mistake, it is a design issue. Not that anybody consciously designed it, but that's just how the system survives. Now.. the average medical student to THIS DAY (I say the average.. there are exceptions) still doesn't get a single lecture on trauma in 4 years of medical school. They should have a whole course on it, Because I can tell you that trauma is related to addiction, all kinds of mental illness and most physical health conditions as well. And there is a whole lot of science behind that, but they don't study that science. Now that reflects this society's denial of trauma, the medical system simply reflects the needs of the larger society, I should say, the dominant needs of the larger society.

More laying hens are slaughtered in the United States than cattle or pigs. Commercial laying hens are not bred for their flesh, but when their economic utility is over the still-young birds are trucked to the slaughterhouse and turned into meat products. In the process they are treated even more brutally than meat-type chickens because of their low market value. Their bones are very fragile from lack of exercise and from calcium depletion for heavy egg production, causing fragments to stick to the flesh during processing. The starvation practice known as forced molting results in beaded ribs that break easily at the slaughterhouse. Removal of food for several days before the hens are loaded onto the truck weakens their bones even more. Currently, the U.S. egg industry and the American Veterinary Medical Association oppose humane slaughter legislation for laying hens on the basis that their low economic value does not justify the cost of 'humane slaughter' technology. The industry created the inhumane conditions that are invoked to rationalize further unaccountability and cruelty.

Many of the Chinese medical texts dating back from 2,000 years ago lament the ills of 'modern times' and allude to the traditional 'good old days' another 3,000 years before that. A common theme in these texts is the decline in human health due to careless lifestyles and the deterioration in human relations due to lack of love: degenerative conditions that Taoist alchemy as well as psychoneuroimmunology would link as symptoms of the same syndrome. In his essay entitled 'Loving People' Chang San-feng, the thirteenth-century master, summed it up by saying: 'Therefore to those who want to know the way to deal with the world, I suggest, Love People.' This is a potent description for health and longevity that generates positive healing energy throughout the human system by stimulating the internal alchemy of psychoneuroimmunology.

Pierre Janet, a French professor of psychology who became prominent in the early twentieth century, attempted to fully chronicle late- Victorian hysteria in his landmark work The Major Symptoms of Hysteria. His catalogue of symptoms was staggering, and included somnambulism (not sleepwalking as we think of it today, but a sort of amnesiac condition in which the patient functioned in a trance state, or "second state," and later remembered nothing); trances or fits of sleep that could last for days, and in which the patient sometimes appeared to be dead; contractures or other disturbances in the motor functions of the limbs; paralysis of various parts of the body; unexplained loss of the use of a sense such as sight or hearing; loss of speech; and disruptions in eating that could entail eventual refusal of food altogether. Janet's profile was sufficiently descriptive of Mollie Fancher that he mentioned her by name as someone who "seems to have had all possible hysterical accidents and attacks." In the face of such strange and often intractable "attacks," many doctors who treated cases of hysteria in the 1800s developed an ill-concealed exasperation.

This is the exact opposite of that lazy acquiescence in irrationality which is sometimes urged by those who only know that psychoanalysis has shown the prevalence of irrational beliefs, and who forget or ignore that its purpose is to diminish this prevalence by a definite method of medical treatment. A closely similar method can cure the irrationalities of those who are not recognized lunatics, provided they will submit to treatment by a practitioner free from their delusions. Presidents, Cabinet Ministers, and Eminent Persons, however, seldom fulfil this condition, and therefore remain uncured.

Harm reduction is often perceived as being inimical to the ultimate purpose of “curing” addiction—that is, of helping addicts transcend their habits and to heal. People regard it as “coddling” addicts, as enabling them to continue their destructive ways. It’s also considered to be the opposite of abstinence, which many regard as the only legitimate goal of addiction treatment. Such a distinction is artificial. The issue in medical practice is always how best to help a patient. If a cure is possible and probable without doing greater harm, then cure is the objective. When it isn’t — and in most chronic medical conditions cure is not the expected outcome — the physician’s role is to help the patient with the symptoms and to reduce the harm done by the disease process. In rheumatoid arthritis, for example, one aims to prevent joint inflammation and bone destruction and, in all events, to reduce pain. In incurable cancers we aim to prolong life, if that can be achieved without a loss of life quality, and also to control symptoms. In other words, harm reduction means making the lives of afflicted human beings more bearable, more worth living. That is also the goal of harm reduction in the context of addiction. Although hardcore drug addiction is much more than a disease, the harm reduction model is essential to its treatment. Given our lack of a systematic, evidencebased approach to addiction, in many cases it’s futile to dream of a cure. So long as society ostracizes the addict and the legal system does everything it can to heighten the drug problem, the welfare and medical systems can aim only to mitigate some of its effects. Sad to say, in our context harm reduction means reducing not only the harm caused by the disease of addiction, but also the harm caused by the social assault on drug addicts.

book. Myeloma as a description has its origins with the Greek medical genius Hippocrates, who did the earliest known work on cancer, which he called karkinoma (carcinoma) because the tumors often resembled a crab, karkinos in ancient Greek. In modern descriptions, the condition is complex and treacherous: Plasma cells in the bone marrow become malignant and produce tumors, causing destruction of the bone and resulting in pathologic fracture and pain. A secretory form of the disease is characterized by the presence of Bence-Jones protein, a monoclonal immunoglobulin, which can cause anemia and kidney disease

If any field needs integration, it is medicine. If any field needs an integrative paradigm that can make sense out of all the different models of healing, it is medicine. The weaknesses of the conventional medical model have been clear for some time. Its procedures are too invasive and have too many harmful side effects. There is no conventional medical model for the treatment of most chronic and degenerative diseases (germ theory and genetic predisposition are not adequate explanations for most conditions in this category). Last, but not least, conventional medicine is expensive. In contrast, there are so many

different subject. The story of the serotonin hypothesis for depression, and its enthusiastic promotion by drug companies, is part of a wider process that has been called ‘disease-mongering’ or ‘medicalisation’, where diagnostic categories are widened, whole new diagnoses are invented, and normal variants of human experience are pathologised, so they can be treated with pills. One simple illustration of this is the recent spread of ‘checklists’ enabling the public to diagnose, or help diagnose, various medical conditions. In 2010, for example, the popular website WebMD launched a new test: ‘Rate your risk for depression: could you be depressed?’ It was funded by Eli Lilly, manufacturers of the antidepressant duloxetine, and this was duly declared on the page, though that doesn’t reduce the absurdity of what followed. The test consisted of ten questions, such as: ‘I feel sad or down most of the time’; ‘I feel tired almost every day’; ‘I have trouble concentrating’; ‘I feel worthless or hopeless’; ‘I find myself thinking a lot about dying’; and so on. If you answered ‘no’ to every single one of these questions – every single one – and then pressed ‘Submit’, the response was clear: ‘You may be at risk for major depression’.

Although they will miss his presence if he dies, his condition is too burdensome to require his continued presence. In such circumstances, what is selfish is the insistence that the prospective suicide remain alive, not that he seek his own demise. The argument about selfishness can backfire in another way. Just as it is sometimes the case that those who kill themselves have accorded insufficient weight to the interests of others, so it is sometimes the case that those who do not kill themselves make this error. Consistent with what I have already said, I do not think that the interests of others are decisive. Nevertheless, there are situations in which a person's interest in continued life is negligible, because he will die soon anyway, and the quality of his life is appalling. If seeing out his days, rather than taking his own life earlier, would spell financial ruin for his family (because of the costs of his medical care), then it may well be unduly selfish not to take one's own life.

Is pathological anxiety a medical illness, as Hippocrates and Aristotle and modern pharmacologists would have it? Or is it a philosophical problem, as Plato and Spinoza and the cognitive-behavioral therapists would have it? Is it a psychological problem, a product of childhood trauma and sexual inhibition, as Freud and his acolytes would have it? Or is it a spiritual condition, as Søren Kierkegaard and his existentialist descendants claimed? Or, finally, is it—as W. H. Auden and David Riesman and Erich Fromm and Albert Camus and scores of modern commentators have declared—a cultural condition, a function of the times we live in and the structure of our society?

The conceptual problem at the center of contemporary healthcare is the confusion between disease processes and disease origins. Instead of asking why an illness occurs and trying to remove the conditions that led to it, medical researchers try to understand the mechanisms through which the disease operates, so that they can then interfere with them. These mechanisms, rather than the true origins, are seen as the causes of disease in current medical thinking. In the process of reducing illness to disease, the attention of physicians has moved away from the patient as a whole person. By concentrating on smaller and smaller fragments of the body – shifting its perspective from the study of bodily organs and their functions to that of cells and, finally, to the study of molecules – modern medicine often loses sight of the human being, and having reduced health to mechanical functioning, it is no longer able to deal with the phenomenon of healing. Over the past four decades, the dissatisfaction with the mechanistic approach to health and healthcare has grown rapidly both among healthcare professionals and the general public. At the same time, the emerging systems view of life has given rise to a corresponding systems view of health, as we discuss in Chapter 15, while health consciousness among the general population has increased dramatically in many countries. The

CCA finds ways to minimize its obligation to provide adequate health care. At the out-of-state prisons where California ships some of its inmates, CCA will not accept any prisoners who are over sixty-five years old, have mental health issues, or serious conditions like HIV. The company's Idaho prison contract specified that the 'primary criteria' for screening incoming offenders was 'no chronic mental health or health care issues.' The contracts of some CCA prisons in Tennessee and Hawaii stipulate that the states will bear the cost of HIV treatment. Such exemptions allow CCA to tout its cost efficiency while taxpayers assume the medical expenses for the inmates the company won't take or treat.

People who are starving and dressed in rags don’t want to hear someone read a list of propositional “good news.” They want to see the good news in action. The church doesn’t hold revival meetings and call it a day — we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, dig wells, and staff medical clinics. Social action isn’t an optional part of evangelism; it is evangelism. This is an important correction to the overspirituality that dominated evangelical Christianity just a generation ago. But the both/and of holistic mission still misses the heart of Jesus if we don’t see that the church needs the poor as much as the poor need the church. Jesus didn’t embrace the poor only because he pitied them or because he knew he had the resources to help them. Jesus embraced the poor because they were rushing into the kingdom ahead of the scribes and Pharisees — those who called themselves God’s people. Jesus welcomed people who knew poverty because they were ready to receive what he had to offer. Religious people, he said, could learn something from them. Our spiritual lives are linked to the material conditions of our life. When we feel like we don’t need much materially, we often have trouble remembering why we need God. We comfortable Americans can go through an entire day without thinking of God. But Jesus gave the poor more than food to eat and relief from their sickness. He restored them to God’s beloved community.

When I first stopped trying to fix other people, I turned my attention to 'curing' myself. I was in a hurry to get this healing process over. I wanted immediate recovery from the effects of growing up in a family riddled with alcoholism and from being married to an alcoholic. I looked forward to the day I would graduate from Al-Anon and get on with my life. As year two and year three passed, I was still in the program. I began to despair as the character defects I had worked so long to overcome came back to haunt me, particularly during times of stress and during periods when I didn't attend meetings. I have severe arthritis in my joints. To cope with my condition, I have to assess my body each day and patiently respond to its needs. Some days I need a warm bath to get going in the morning. On other days I apply a medicated rub to the painful areas. Yet other days some light stretching and exercise help to loosen me up. I'ave accepted that my arthritis will never go away. It's a condition I manage daily with consistent, on-going care. One day I made a connection between my medical condition and my struggle with recovery. I began to look at myself as having 'arthritis of the personality,' requiring patient, continuous care to keep me from 'stiffening' into old habits and attitudes. This care includes attending meetings, reading Al-Anon literature, calling my sponsor, and engaging in service. Now, as long as I practice patience, recovery is a manageable and adventurous process instead of an arduously sought end point.

A statistician for the Prudential Insurance Company predicted the imminent extinction of Black people in his epic book that relied on the 1890 census figures. Unlike the Plessy ruling, Frederick Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro received plenty of attention in 1896. Packed with statistical tables and published by the American Economic Association, the book was a pioneering work in American medical research, and it catapulted Hoffman into scientific celebrity in the Western world as the heralded father of American public health. At “the time of emancipation,” he wrote, southern Blacks were “healthy in body and cheerful in mind.” “What are the conditions thirty years after?” Well, “in the plain language of the facts,” free Blacks were headed toward “gradual extinction,” pulled down by their natural immoralities, law-breaking, and diseases. Hoffman supplied his employer with an excuse for its discriminatory policies concerning African Americans—that is, for denying them life insurance. White life insurance companies refused to insure a supposedly dying race. Yet another racist idea was produced to defend a racist policy.3

There is virtually no condition of human beings, physical or mental — there are a few exceptions — that we call pathology that does not reflect social and cultural background and issue. And we can't understand any of this without looking at the larger picture. Medicine is very interesting that way. If you go to a dermatologist with inflamed skin, he's going to give you steroid cream. If you go to a rheumatologist with an inflamed joint, what kind of medication are they gonna give you? Steroid very often. If you go to a lung specialist with asthma, what kind of inhaler are you gonna get? Steroid. If you go to a gastroenterologist with an inflamed intestine, what kind of medication are you gonna get? Steroids. Now what are steroids? They are copies of cortisol. What is cortisol? It is a stress hormone. We are treating everything with stress hormones. Maybe it should occur to us that stress has something to do with the onset of these conditions. And that stress is not an individual problem. Stress is a social problem. And so if we are seeing more of this or that condition, let's consider that we are looking at the manifestations of something in the culture.

Some parents resist the idea of ADD for fear of seeing their children labeled and categorized. They do not like the idea of pinning a medical diagnosis on a child who, except in certain areas of functioning, seems quite well. Such fears are not baseless. Too often ADD seems no more than a judgment that characterizes a child as a problem student, incapable of normal activity. How people use language is quite revealing. People commonly say that this adult or that child “is ADD.” That, indeed, is labeling, identifying the whole person with an area of weakness or impairment. No one is ADD, and no one should be defined or categorized in terms of it or any other particular problem. Recognizing a child’s ADD should be simply a way of understanding that helping him calls for some knowledgeable and creative approaches, not a judgment that there is anything fundamentally or irretrievably wrong with him. This recognition should enable us to support the child in fullfilling his potential, not to further limit him. That even open-minded people may have difficulty coming to terms with this diagnosis is only to be expected. Our usual mode of thinking about illness (or anything else, for that matter) is not comfortable with ambiguity. A patient either has pneumonia or does not; she either has some illness affecting the mind or does not. There is a popular discomfort with any condition of the mind perceived as “abnormal.” But what if illness is not a separate category, if there is no line of distinction between the “healthy” and the “nonheaithy,” if the “abnormality” is just a greater concentration in an individual of disturbed brain processes found in everyone? Then perhaps there are no fixed, immutable brain disorders, and we could all be vulnerable to mental breakdowns or malfunctions under the pressure of stressful circumstances. We could all go crazy. Maybe we already have.

WHAT EES ALL DEES STUFF? IN AFRICA WE DOAN HAVE ALL DEES STUFF!! WE HAVE DEE BABEE!!!" His message was simple. It goes to the heart of what we in HypnoBirthing frequently puzzle over: Why has all the "stuff" that denies the normalcy of birth and portrays it as an inevitably risky and dangerous medical event become a routine part of most childbirth education classes? Why are couples in a low- or no-risk category being prepared for circumstances that only rarely occur? Even more puzzling, why do parents accept the negative premise that birth is a dangerous, painful ordeal at best or a medical calamity at worst? Why do they blindly accept the "one-size-fits-all" approach?" If what couples are hearing in childbirth classes is far removed from what they want their birthing experiences to be, why do they spend so much time entertaining negative outcomes that can color and shape their birth expectations and ultimately affect their birth experience? In other words, if it's not what they're wanting, why would they "go there"? In HypnoBirthing, we doan have all dees stuff, and deliberately so." HypnoBirthing helps you to frame a positive expectation and to prepare for birth by developing a trust and belief in your birthing body and in nature's undeniable orchestration of birthing. By teaching you the basic physiology of birth and explaining the adverse effect that fear has upon the chemical and physiological responses of your body we help you to learn simple, self-conditioning techniques that will easily bring you into the optimal state of relaxation you will use during birthing. This will allow your birthing muscles to fully relax. In other words, we will help you prepare for the birth your plan and want for yourselves and your baby, rather than the birth that someone else directs. We will help you look forward to your pregnancy and birthing with joy and love, rather than fear and anxiety.

For as medical men sometimes,   although they could quickly cover over the scars of wounds, keep back   and delay the cure for the present, in the expectation of a better and   more perfect recovery, knowing that it is more salutary to retard the   treatment in the cases of swellings caused by wounds, and to allow the   malignant humours to flow off for a while, rather than to hasten a   superficial cure, by shutting up in the veins the poison of a morbid   humour, which, excluded from its customary outlets, will undoubtedly   creep into the inner parts of the limbs, and penetrate to the very   vitals of the viscera, producing no longer mere disease in the body,   but causing destruction to life; so, in like manner, God also, who   knows the secret things of the heart, and foreknows the future, in much   forbearance allows certain events to happen, which, coming from without   upon men, cause to come forth into the light the passions and vices   which are concealed within, that by their means those may be cleansed   and cured who, through great negligence and carelessness, have admitted   within themselves the roots and seeds of sins, so that, when driven   outwards and brought to the surface, they may in a certain degree be   cast forth and dispersed. [2342]   And thus, although a man may appear   to be afflicted with evils of a serious kind, suffering convulsions in   all his limbs, he may nevertheless, at some future time, obtain relief   and a cessation from his trouble; and, after enduring his afflictions   to satiety, may, after many sufferings, be restored again to his   (proper) condition.  For God deals with souls not merely with a view to   the short space of our present life, included within sixty years [2343]   or more, but with reference to a perpetual and never-ending period,   exercising His providential care over souls that are immortal, even as   He Himself is eternal and immortal. 

There's a psychologist called Mary & Diamond who at Brooklyn in California, in the 80s studied rats. And they took rats at different ages. Newborns, some of whom they deliberately brain damaged, adult, middle-aged, elderly rats. And they exposed these rats to different levels of environmental stimulation, better food, more playmates, toys to play with and so on. They found out a couple of months later that the rats, at any age, including the brain-damaged rats, who had the better stimulation, they were smarter. But in the autopsy then they also found that in the front part of their brain they had larger nerve-cells with more connections with other nerve-cells and richer blood supply. In other words that environmental stimulation actually caused a change in the state of the brain, even in the older rats. And that's called neuroplasticity. The capacity of the brain to develop new circuits. So whether it comes to ADHD, addiction, depression or other childhood disorders or any other issue with adults as well, if we recognize them not as ingrained, genetically-determined diseases, but as problems of development, then the question becomes very different. Then the question becomes not just "how do we treat the symptoms?" (and addiction itself is a symptom, depression is a symptom), but "how do we help people develop out of these conditions?" In other words, it is not a medical question, purely, but a developmental question. And development always requires the right environment. Now, if you're a gardener you know that. If you are growing plants in your backyard and you want them to grow into healthy, functioning beings, botanical beings, you want to provide them with the right nurturing, the right nutrition, minerals, water, sunlight and so on. So the real question is how do we provide the conditions for further development for people whose development was impaired in the first place? Now we know how to do that. We are just not doing it.

Romanians, however, paid a terrible price for Ceauşescu’s privileged status. In 1966, to increase the population—a traditional ‘Romanianist’ obsession—he prohibited abortion for women under forty with fewer than four children (in 1986 the age barrier was raised to forty-five). In 1984 the minimum marriage age for women was reduced to fifteen. Compulsory monthly medical examinations for all women of childbearing age were introduced to prevent abortions, which were permitted, if at all, only in the presence of a Party representative. Doctors in districts with a declining birth rate had their salaries cut. The population did not increase, but the death rate from abortions far exceeded that of any other European country: as the only available form of birth control, illegal abortions were widely performed, often under the most appalling and dangerous conditions. Over the ensuing twenty-three years the 1966 law resulted in the death of at least ten thousand women. The real infant mortality rate was so high that after 1985 births were not officially recorded until a child had survived to its fourth week—the apotheosis of Communist control of knowledge. By the time Ceauşescu was overthrown the death rate of new-born babies was twenty-five per thousand and there were upward of 100,000 institutionalized children. The

cause of cavities, even more damaging than sugar consumption, bad diet, or poor hygiene. (This belief had been echoed by other dentists for a hundred years, and was endorsed by Catlin too.) Burhenne also found that mouthbreathing was both a cause of and a contributor to snoring and sleep apnea. He recommended his patients tape their mouths shut at night. “The health benefits of nose breathing are undeniable,” he told me. One of the many benefits is that the sinuses release a huge boost of nitric oxide, a molecule that plays an essential role in increasing circulation and delivering oxygen into cells. Immune function, weight, circulation, mood, and sexual function can all be heavily influenced by the amount of nitric oxide in the body. (The popular erectile dysfunction drug sildenafil, known by the commercial name Viagra, works by releasing nitric oxide into the bloodstream, which opens the capillaries in the genitals and elsewhere.) Nasal breathing alone can boost nitric oxide sixfold, which is one of the reasons we can absorb about 18 percent more oxygen than by just breathing through the mouth. Mouth taping, Burhenne said, helped a five-year-old patient of his overcome ADHD, a condition directly attributed to breathing difficulties during sleep. It helped Burhenne and his wife cure their own snoring and breathing problems. Hundreds of other patients reported similar benefits. The whole thing seemed a little sketchy until Ann Kearney, a doctor of speech-language pathology at the Stanford Voice and Swallowing Center, told me the same. Kearney helped rehabilitate patients who had swallowing and breathing disorders. She swore by mouth taping. Kearney herself had spent years as a mouthbreather due to chronic congestion. She visited an ear, nose, and throat specialist and discovered that her nasal cavities were blocked with tissue. The specialist advised that the only way to open her nose was through surgery or medications. She tried mouth taping instead. “The first night, I lasted five minutes before I ripped it off,” she told me. On the second night, she was able to tolerate the tape for ten minutes. A couple of days later, she slept through the night. Within six weeks, her nose opened up. “It’s a classic example of use it or lose it,” Kearney said. To prove her claim, she examined the noses of 50 patients who had undergone laryngectomies, a procedure in which a breathing hole is cut into the throat. Within two months to two years, every patient was suffering from complete nasal obstruction. Like other parts of the body, the nasal cavity responds to whatever inputs it receives. When the nose is denied regular use, it will atrophy. This is what happened to Kearney and many of her patients, and to so much of the general population. Snoring and sleep apnea often follow.

The federal government could make a Rolls Royce affordable for every American, but we would not be a richer country as a result. We would in fact be a much poorer country, because of all the vast resources transferred from other economic activities to subsidize an extravagant luxury. [...] To have politicians arbitrarily change the price tags, so that prices no longer represent the real costs, is to defeat the whole purpose [of an economy: to make trade-offs, with the prices of a market economy representing the costs of producing things]. Reality doesn't change when the government changes price tags. Talk about "bringing down health care costs" is not aimed at the costly legal environment in which medical science operates, or other sources of needless medical costs. It is aimed at price control, which hides costs rather than reducing them. [...] Whether in France during the 1790s, the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik revolution, or in newly independent African nations during the past generation, governments have imposed artificially low prices on food. In each case, this led to artificially low supplies of food and artificially high levels of hunger. People who complain about the "prohibitive" cost of housing, or of going to college, for example, fail to understand that the whole point of costs is to be prohibitive. [...] The idea [that "basic necessities" should be a "right"] certainly sounds nice. But the very fact that we can seriously entertain such a notion, as if we were God on the first day of creation, instead of mortals constrained by the universe we find in place, shows the utter unreality of failing to understand that we can only make choices among alternatives actually available. [...] Trade-offs [as opposed to solutions] remain inescapable, whether they are made through a market or through politics. The difference is that price tags present all the trade-offs simultaneously, while political 'affordability' policies arbitrarily fix on whatever is hot at the moment. That is why cities have been financing all kinds of boondoggles for years, while their bridges rusted and the roadways crumbled.

Given the central place that technology holds in our lives, it is astonishing that technology companies have not put more resources into fixing this global problem. Advanced computer systems and artificial intelligence (AI) could play a much bigger role in shaping diagnosis and prescription. While the up-front costs of using such technology may be sizeable, the long-term benefits to the health-care system need to be factored into value assessments. We believe that AI platforms could improve on the empirical prescription approach. Physicians work long hours under stressful conditions and have to keep up to date on the latest medical research. To make this work more manageable, the health-care system encourages doctors to specialize. However, the vast majority of antibiotics are prescribed either by generalists (e.g., general practitioners or emergency physicians) or by specialists in fields other than infectious disease, largely because of the need to treat infections quickly. An AI system can process far more information than a single human, and, even more important, it can remember everything with perfect accuracy. Such a system could theoretically enable a generalist doctor to be as effective as, or even superior to, a specialist at prescribing. The system would guide doctors and patients to different treatment options, assigning each a probability of success based on real-world data. The physician could then consider which treatment was most appropriate.

For the attitude of society towards the criminal appears to be that of a community of stark lunatics. In effect, society addresses the professional criminal somewhat thus: "' You wish to practice crime as a profession, to gain a livelihood by appropriating--by violence or otherwise--the earnings of honest and industrious men. Very well, you may do so on certain conditions. If you are skilful and cautious you will not be molested. You may occasion danger, annoyance and great loss to honest men with very little danger to yourself unless you are clumsy and incautious; in which case you may be captured. If you are, we shall take possession of your person and detain you for so many months or years. During that time you will inhabit quarters better than you are accustomed to; your sleeping-room will be kept comfortably warm in all weathers; you will be provided with clothing better than you usually wear; you will have a sufficiency of excellent food; expensive officials will be paid to take charge of you; selected medical men will be retained to attend to your health; a chaplain (of your own persuasion) will minister to your spiritual needs and a librarian will supply you with books. And all this will be paid for by the industrious men whom you live by robbing. In short, from the moment that you adopt crime as a profession, we shall pay all your expenses, whether you are in prison or at large.' Such is the attitude of society; and I repeat it is that of a community of madmen. ~ Humphrey Challoner

Needless to say, elderly people taking steroids may also experience the same side effects as younger persons. So, if you are a senior and need to be on a long course of steroids, what should you do? We would suggest a practical approach—which could apply to anyone on steroids, regardless of age, but may be particularly relevant for seniors because they are particularly vulnerable to side effects: • Understand and verify the need for steroids in your own situation, weighing the anticipated benefit with the possible risks. This means that you should explore the range of other treatments that may be available for your particular condition. You need to learn about the benefits and risks of any other treatment suggested. In other words, get all the information you can prior to going on treatment, be it with steroids or other medications. • Be sure that your health is well-assessed before or at the start of therapy. If you have underlying, separate health conditions, those should be noted and followed while you are on steroids. • Assess bodily systems that might particularly be affected by being on steroids. This means an assessment of your skeletal health, your eyes, your teeth, and your internal organs. • Request guidance about staying active. Physical therapy should be planned, to minimize the chances that your muscles and joints will be overtaxed or that any existing damage might get worse. • Ask to reassess the length and dose of your medication course at various intervals. A reasonable interval is every couple of months, if you are on a long course of steroids.

Outlawing drugs in order to solve drug problems is much like outlawing sex in order to win the war against AIDS. We recognize that people will continue to have sex for nonreproductive reasons despite the laws and mores. Therefore, we try to make sexual practices as safe as possible in order to minimize the spread of the AIDS viruses. In a similar way, we continually try to make our drinking water, foods, and even our pharmaceutical medicines safer. The ubiquity of chemical intoxicants in our lives is undeniable evidence of the continuing universal need for safer medicines with such applications. While use may not always be for an approved medical purpose, or prudent, or even legal, it is fulfilling the relentless drive we all have to change the way we feel, to alter our behavior and consciousness, and, yes, to intoxicate ourselves. We must recognize that intoxicants are medicines, treatments for the human condition. Then we must make them as safe and risk free and as healthy as possible. Dream with me for a moment. What would be wrong if we had perfectly safe intoxicants? I mean drugs that delivered the same effects as our most popular ones but never caused dependency, disease, dysfunction, or death. Imagine an alcohol-type substance that never caused addiction, liver disease, hangovers, impaired driving, or workplace problems. Would you care to inhale a perfumed mist that is as enjoyable as marijuana or tobacco but as harmless as clean air? How would you like a pain-killer as effective as morphine but safer than aspirin, a mood enhancer that dissolves on your tongue and is more appealing than cocaine and less harmful than caffeine, a tranquilizer less addicting than Valium and more relaxing than a martini, or a safe sleeping pill that allows you to choose to dream or not? Perhaps you would like to munch on a user friendly hallucinogen that is as brief and benign as a good movie? This is not science fiction. As described in the following pages, there are such intoxicants available right now that are far safer than the ones we currently use. If smokers can switch from tobacco cigarettes to nicotine gum, why can’t crack users chew a cocaine gum that has already been tested on animals and found to be relatively safe? Even safer substances may be just around the corner. But we must begin by recognizing that there is a legitimate place in our society for intoxication. Then we must join together in building new, perfectly safe intoxicants for a world that will be ready to discard the old ones like the junk they really are. This book is your guide to that future. It is a field guide to that silent spring of intoxicants and all the animals and peoples who have sipped its waters. We can no more stop the flow than we can prevent ourselves from drinking. But, by cleaning up the waters we can leave the morass that has been the endless war on drugs and step onto the shores of a healthy tomorrow. Use this book to find the way.

She looked thoughtful. “Who knows? Perhaps now is the time to see through the habit. Accidents, illness, healing, they’re all more mysterious than any of us ever imagined. I believe that we have an undiscovered ability to influence what happens to us in the future, including whether we are healthy—although, again, the power has to remain with the individual patient. “There was a reason that I didn’t offer an opinion concerning how badly you were hurt. We in the medical establishment have learned that medical opinions have to be offered very carefully. Over the years the public has developed almost a worship of doctors, and when a physician says something, patients have tended to take these opinions totally to heart. The country doctors of a hundred years ago knew this, and would use this principle to actually paint an overly optimistic picture of any health situation. If the doctor said that the patient would get better, very often the patient would internalize this idea in his or her mind and actually defy all odds to recover. In later years, however, ethical considerations have prevented such distortions, and the establishment has felt that the patient is entitled to a cold scientific assessment of his or her situation. “Unfortunately when this was given, sometimes patients dropped dead right before our eyes, just because they were told their condition was terminal. We know now that we have to be very careful with these assessments, because of the power of our minds. We want to focus this power in a positive direction. The body is capable of miraculous regeneration. Body parts thought of in the past as solid forms are actually energy systems that can transform overnight. Have you read the latest research on prayer? The simple fact that this kind of spiritual visualization is being scientifically proven to work totally undermines our old physical model of healing. We’re having to work out a new model.” She paused and poured more water on the towel around my ankle, then continued, “I believe the first step in the process is to identify the fear with which the medical problem seems to be connected; this opens up the energy block in your body to conscious healing. The next step is to pull in as much energy as possible and focus it at the exact location of the block.” I was about to ask how this was done, but she stopped me. “Go ahead and raise your energy level as much as you can.” Accepting her guidance, I began to observe the beauty around me and to concentrate on a spiritual connection within, evoking a heightened sensation of love. Gradually the colors became more vivid and everything in my awareness increased in presence. I could tell that she was raising her own energy at the same time. When I felt as though my vibration had increased as much as possible, I looked at her. She smiled back at me. “Okay, now you can focus the energy on the block.” “How do I do that?” I asked. “You use the pain. That’s why it’s there, to help you focus.

In a physician's office in Kearny Street three men sat about a table, drinking punch and smoking. It was late in the evening, almost midnight, indeed, and there had been no lack of punch. The gravest of the three, Dr. Helberson, was the host—it was in his rooms they sat. He was about thirty years of age; the others were even younger; all were physicians. "The superstitious awe with which the living regard the dead," said Dr. Helberson, "is hereditary and incurable. One needs no more be ashamed of it than of the fact that he inherits, for example, an incapacity for mathematics, or a tendency to lie." The others laughed. "Oughtn't a man to be ashamed to lie?" asked the youngest of the three, who was in fact a medical student not yet graduated. "My dear Harper, I said nothing about that. The tendency to lie is one thing; lying is another." "But do you think," said the third man, "that this superstitious feeling, this fear of the dead, reasonless as we know it to be, is universal? I am myself not conscious of it." "Oh, but it is 'in your system' for all that," replied Helberson; "it needs only the right conditions—what Shakespeare calls the 'confederate season'—to manifest itself in some very disagreeable way that will open your eyes. Physicians and soldiers are of course more nearly free from it than others." "Physicians and soldiers!—why don't you add hangmen and headsmen? Let us have in all the assassin classes." "No, my dear Mancher; the juries will not let the public executioners acquire sufficient familiarity with death to be altogether unmoved by it." Young Harper, who had been helping himself to a fresh cigar at the sideboard, resumed his seat. "What would you consider conditions under which any man of woman born would become insupportably conscious of his share of our common weakness in this regard?" he asked, rather verbosely. "Well, I should say that if a man were locked up all night with a corpse—alone—in a dark room—of a vacant house—with no bed covers to pull over his head—and lived through it without going altogether mad, he might justly boast himself not of woman born, nor yet, like Macduff, a product of Cæsarean section." "I thought you never would finish piling up conditions," said Harper, "but I know a man who is neither a physician nor a soldier who will accept them all, for any stake you like to name." "Who is he?" "His name is Jarette—a stranger here; comes from my town in New York. I have no money to back him, but he will back himself with loads of it." "How do you know that?" "He would rather bet than eat. As for fear—I dare say he thinks it some cutaneous disorder, or possibly a particular kind of religious heresy." "What does he look like?" Helberson was evidently becoming interested. "Like Mancher, here—might be his twin brother." "I accept the challenge," said Helberson, promptly. "Awfully obliged to you for the compliment, I'm sure," drawled Mancher, who was growing sleepy. "Can't I get into this?" "Not against me," Helberson said. "I don't want your money." "All right," said Mancher; "I'll be the corpse." The others laughed. The outcome of this crazy conversation we have seen.