Medical Field Quotes

The disturbing part is that no one teaches us how to deal with death at any point during our medical training, or even during our lifetime for that matter, particularly in a field such as mine where death was an inevitable certainty for some patients.

I reached and grabbed ahold of the garden rake that was leaned up against the tree, when suddenly I felt my heart begin to race and I began to feel dizzy as my visual field became black. That is the last thing I recall before awakening to find myself lying on the ground in the front yard, with the handle of the rake resting on my chest.

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

...the current anti-fat bias in the United States and in much of the West was not born in the medical field. Racial scientific literature since at least the eighteenth century has claimed that fatness was ‘savage’ and ‘black.

The art of giving can exist in different forms for different people. For some, the giving of their time acts as a gift to others who need themselves to be heard. Others might find their way in providing knowledge and help to unprivileged. Yet others can make monetary donations to help fund scientific projects and experiments to improve treatments in the medical field. That’s how it works.

I’ve considered lobbying the medical field to rename rheumatoid arthritis something sexier, younger, and more exotic. Something like “The Midnight Death,” or “Impending Vampirism.” Or perhaps to name it after someone famous. Like “Lou Gehrig’s disease, part two: THE RECKONING.

New Rule: Stop pretending your drugs are morally superior to my drugs because you get yours at a store. This week, they released the autopsy report on Anna Nicole Smith, and the cause of death was what I always thought it was: mad cow. No, it turns out she had nine different prescription drugs in her—which, in the medical field, is known as the “full Limbaugh.” They opened her up, and a Walgreens jumped out. Antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, sleeping pills, sedatives, Valium, methadone—this woman was killed by her doctor, who is a glorified bartender. I’m not going to say his name, but only because (a) I don’t want to get sued, and (b) my back is killing me. This month marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of a famous government report. I was sixteen in 1972, and I remember how excited we were when Nixon’s much ballyhooed National Commission on Drug Abuse came out and said pot should be legalized. It was a moment of great hope for common sense—and then, just like Bush did with the Iraq Study Group, Nixon took the report and threw it in the garbage, and from there the ’70s went right into disco and colored underpants. This week in American Scientist, a magazine George Bush wouldn’t read if he got food poisoning in Mexico and it was the only thing he could reach from the toilet, described a study done in England that measured the lethality of various drugs, and found tobacco and alcohol far worse than pot, LSD, or Ecstasy—which pretty much mirrors my own experiments in this same area. The Beatles took LSD and wrote Sgt. Pepper—Anna Nicole Smith took legal drugs and couldn’t remember the number for nine-one-one. I wish I had more time to go into the fact that the drug war has always been about keeping black men from voting by finding out what they’re addicted to and making it illegal—it’s a miracle our government hasn’t outlawed fat white women yet—but I leave with one request: Would someone please just make a bumper sticker that says, “I’m a stoner, and I vote.

Oil companies start every war around the world, insurance companies, the medical field, pharmaceutical companies are partners in crime. Financial institution collect all that the little man earned in the past 10 years and the AI will end humanity once and for all

Many of those in the medical fraternity instantly label treatments in the traditional, natural or holistic health fields as quackery. This word is even used to describe Traditional Chinese Medicine and the Indian Ayerveda, two medical systems which are far older than Western medicine and globally just as popular.

Now I know, you can’t change what’s happened to you or hide it, or spin it, or get over it. All you can do is hold it confidently knowing that the mistakes are yours but so too is the wisdom earned along the punishing passage. Suffering is the catalyst for transformation. The wounds don’t define us; how we went about surviving does. Oddity, in this sickened society of medicated despair, is a blessed state.

Some people work in the medical field, others in the legal field, while I work in the green field. Except in winter, and then I work in the brown field.

In the medical field, it is commonly assumed that the more information practitioners have, the better their decisions. However, this is frequently not so. More

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?

I’ve worked in the medical field for years as a nurse. I try to know the ins and outs of the health-care system, but nothing challenges a person as much as when his or her own family members become ill.

Working in the fields is not in itself a degrading job. It’s hard, but if you’re given regular hours, better pay, decent housing, unemployment and medical compensation, pension plans—we have a very relaxed way of living. But the growers don’t recognize us as persons. That’s the worst thing, the way they treat you. Like we have no brains. Now we see they have no brains. They have only a wallet in their head. The more you squeeze it, the more they cry out.

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.

If you think you have come to the mission field because you are a little better than others, or as the cream of your church, or because of your medical degree, or for the service you can render the African church, or even for the souls you may see saved, you will fail. Remember, the Lord has only one purpose ultimately for each one of us, to make us more like Jesus. He is interested in your relationship with Himself. Let Him take you and mould you as He will; all the rest will take its rightful place.

Equally worrying, and far less recognized, medicine has been slow to confront the very changes that it has been responsible for—or to apply the knowledge we have about how to make old age better. Although the elderly population is growing rapidly, the number of certified geriatricians the medical profession has put in practice has actually fallen in the United States by 25 percent between 1996 and 2010. Applications to training programs in adult primary care medicine have plummeted, while fields like plastic surgery and radiology receive applications in record numbers. Partly, this has to do with money—incomes in geriatrics and adult primary care are among the lowest in medicine. And partly, whether we admit it or not, a lot of doctors don’t like taking care of the elderly.

The moral and medical lessons from this story are even more relevant today. Medicine is in the midst of a vast reorganization of fundamental principles. Most of our models of illness are hybrid models; past knowledge is mishmashed with present knowledge. These hybrid models produce the illusion of a systematic understanding of a disease—but the understanding is, in fact, incomplete. Everything seems to work spectacularly, until one planet begins to move backward on the horizon. We have invented many rules to understand normalcy—but we still lack a deeper, more unified understanding of physiology and pathology.

Conformity is the drug with which many people self-medicate

Once the teams were all in place, Timor and the other Chechen with the silenced weapon crawled forward to within 30-40 meters of the sentries. They took them both out with single shots. They were careful to maintain silence, having also tied the orange tourniquet band from the standard Russian medical field kit to the bolt to prevent it from noisily retracting.

She found it baffling and inexcusable that the medical sciences, which had made so much progress in every field, should lag in such a neglectful way when it came to mental disorders.

A reason. Because you almost make an empty and cold part of me feel full and warm, you make me think it’s possible to leave old hurt behind and heal this wound, and that has nothing to do with your abilities as a field medic or doctor in training, I thought to myself. Because you’re genuinely nice to look at and be with. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I told her.

The most difficult part of writing this book is understanding or, again, at least describing — I don’t think it is possible to understand — how the whole field of medical nutrition could be wrong.

The Arrow Squad had to die. For some inexplicable reason, this midlevel telepath and field medic was its nucleus; cut him out and the resulting fractures would mean the rest would be far easier to eliminate.

Even though he was a devout Catholic, he came to believe that the life force emerged from the action of the fundamental properties of natural forces in the inorganic world, combining into action to give rise to life.

Nonetheless, the appeal of Copenhagen makes some sense, seen in this light. Quantum physics drove much of the technological and scientific progress of the past ninety years: nuclear power, modern computers, the Internet. Quantum-driven medical imaging changed the face of health care; quantum imaging techniques at smaller scales have revolutionized biology and kicked off the entirely new field of molecular genetics. The list goes on. Make some kind of personal peace with Copenhagen, and contribute to this amazing revolution in science . . . or take quantum physics seriously, and come face-to-face with a problem that even Einstein couldn't solve. Shutting up never looked so good.

When someone dies they get very cold and very still. That probably sounds obvious, but when it’s your mother it doesn’t feel obvious—it feels shocking. You watch, winded and reeling, as the medical technicians neutralize the stasis field and power down the synthetic organ metabolizer. But the sentimental gesture of kissing her forehead makes you recoil because the moment your lips touch her skin you realize just how cold and just how still she is, just how permanent that coldness and that stillness feel. Your body lurches like it’s been plunged into boiling water and for the first time in your life you understand death as a biological state, an organism ceasing to function. Unless you’ve touched a corpse before, you can’t comprehend the visceral wrongness of inert flesh wrapped around an inanimate object that wears your mother’s face. You feel sick with guilt and regret and sadness about inconsequential anecdote. You can’t remember anything thoughtful or sweet or tender that you ever did even though logically you know you must have. All you can recall is how often you were small and petty and false. She was your mother and she loved you in a way nobody ever has and nobody ever will and now she’s gone.

Scholars in other disciplines found it useful, and the ideas of heuristics and biases have been used productively in many fields, including medical diagnosis, legal judgment, intelligence analysis, philosophy, finance, statistics, and military strategy.

It was Arthur Sackler who would be credited not just with this campaign but with revolutionizing the whole field of medical advertising. In the words of one of his longtime employees at McAdams, when it came to the marketing of pharmaceuticals, “Arthur invented the wheel.

The I Ching insists upon self-knowledge throughout. The method by which this is to be achieved is open to every kind of misuse, and is therefore not for the frivolous-minded and immature; nor is it for intellectualists and rationalists. It is appropriate only for thoughtful and reflective people who like to think about what they do and what happens to them -- a predilection not to be confused with the morbid brooding of the hypochondriac. As I have indicated above, I have no answer to the multitude of problems that arise when we seek to harmonize the oracle of the I Ching with our accepted scientific canons. But needless to say, nothing "occult" is to be inferred. My position in these matters is pragmatic, and the great disciplines that have taught me the practical usefulness of this viewpoint are psychotherapy and medical psychology. Probably in no other field do we have to reckon with so many unknown quantities, and nowhere else do we become more accustomed to adopting methods that work even though for a long time we may not know why they work. Unexpected cures may arise from questionable therapies and unexpected failures from allegedly reliable methods. In the exploration of the unconscious we come upon very strange things, from which a rationalist turns away with horror, claiming afterward that he did not see anything. The irrational fullness of life has taught me never to discard anything, even when it goes against all our theories (so short-lived at best) or otherwise admits of no immediate explanation. It is of course disquieting, and one is not certain whether the compass is pointing true or not; but security, certitude, and peace do not lead to discoveries.

During the time that Landsteiner gave me an education in the field of immunology, I discovered that he and I were thinking about the serologic problem in very different ways. He would ask, What do these experiments force us to believe about the nature of the world? I would ask, What is the most. simple and general picture of the world that we can formulate that is not ruled by these experiments? I realized that medical and biological investigators were not attacking their problems the same way that theoretical physicists do, the way I had been in the habit of doing.

In the field of medicine, Galen, the Alexandrian scientist, propounded a view that is still around, nowadays called 'alternative medicine.'It was taught in many medical schools until the mid-nineteenth century and now is becoming popular again. Human health is the result of the balance of humors, or temperaments. Physical exercise, bathing, and herbal remedies keep the four temperaments in balance, or restore balance, in case one, such as melancholia (depression), comes to dominate. Today's transactional psychiatry teaches much the same medical doctrine as Galen did.

Curtis grew up to become King Cuz. A gangster well respected for his brain and his derring-do. His set, the Rollin’ Paper Chasers, was the first gang to have trained medics at their rumbles. A shoot-out would pop off at the swap meet and the stretcher-bearers would cart off the wounded to be treated in some field hospital set up behind the frontlines. You didn’t know whether to be sad or impressed. It wasn’t long after that innovation that he applied for membership to NATO. Everybody else is in NATO. Why not the Crips? You going to tell me we wouldn’t kick the shit out of Estonia?

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

No doubt there are other inferior clinics out there. Poor care, overpricing, and rude staffers can be found in every medical field. But you don’t find people using examples of it to inveigh against an entire specialty—railing against the greed of orthopedic surgeons (average 2012 salary, $315,000) or calling for surprise inspections of dentists because every year a few people die from preventable errors during dental procedures.8 Only in abortion care do the few bad providers taint all the others—and taint them so much that opponents can pass laws that would virtually shut down the entire field in the name of patient safety. No

The entire world has benefited and prospered since the decisive defeat of Yellow Fever, an unconventional and far-reaching military victory derived from the field medical discoveries of U.S. Army Major Dr. Walter Reed, designed and carried out by U.S. Army Major Dr. William Gorgas with the overall support under the command of U.S. Army General Leonard Wood.

If they’re not practicing deliberately, even experts can see their skills backslide. Ericsson shared with me an incredible example of this. Even though you might be inclined to trust the advice of a silver-haired doctor over one fresh out of medical school, it’s been found that in a few fields of medicine, doctors’ skills don’t improve the longer they’ve been practicing

medical indicators, monitor our health conditions on our phones, and share the data with doctors and researchers. Doudna added that the pandemic had accelerated the convergence of science with other fields. “The engagement of non-scientists in our work will help achieve an incredibly interesting biotechnology revolution,” she predicted. This was molecular biology’s moment.

Even harder to admit is how depressed I was. As the social stigma of depression disappears, the aesthetic stigma increases. It’s not just that depression has become fashionable to the point of banality. It’s the sense that we live in a reductively binary culture: you’re either healthy or you’re sick, you either function or you don’t. And if that flattening of the field of possibilities is precisely what’s depressing you, you’re inclined to resist participating in the flattening by calling yourself depressed. You decide that it’s the world that’s sick,, and that the resistance of refusing to function in such a world is healthy. You embrace what clinicians call “depressive realism.” It’s what the chorus in Oedipus Rex sings: “Alas, ye generations of men, how mere a shadow do I count your life! Where, where is the mortal who wins more of happiness than just the seeming, and, after the semblance, a falling away?” You are, after all, just protoplasm, and some day you’ll be dead. The invitation to leave your depression behind, whether through medication or therapy or effort of will, seems like an invitation to turn your back on all your dark insights into the corruption and infantilism and selfdelusion of the brave new Me World.

Actually, very few topics of scientific research can be studied with controlled experiments. There are many fields that everyone accepts as science, even though laboratory experiments are difficult if not impossible—fields like astronomy, evolutionary biology, geology, and paleontology. The prestigious British Medical Journal published a tongue-in-cheek article claiming to examine whether parachutes help prevent deaths in people who jump out of airplanes. The authors had eliminated anecdotal evidence from consideration, including in their review only randomized controlled trials. Of course, they couldn’t find a single experiment in which people were randomly assigned to jump out of an airplane either with or without a parachute. They concluded: “The perception that parachutes are a successful intervention is based largely on anecdotal evidence.

[ Dr. Lois Jolyon West was cleared at Top Secret for his work on MKULTRA. ] Dr. Michael Persinger [235], another FSMF Board Member, is the author of a paper entitled “Elicitation of 'Childhood Memories' in Hypnosis-Like Settings Is Associated With Complex Partial Epileptic-Like Signs For Women But Not for Men: the False Memory Syndrome.” In the paper Perceptual and Motor Skills,In the paper, Dr. Persinger writes: On the day of the experiment each subject (not more than two were tested per day) was asked to sit quietly in an acoustic chamber and was told that the procedure was an experiment in relaxation. The subject wore goggles and a modified motorcycle helmet through which 10-milligauss (1 microTesla) magnetic fields were applied through the temporal plane. Except for a weak red (photographic developing) light, the room was dark. Dr. Persinger's research on the ability of magnetic fields to facilitate the creation of false memories and altered states of consciousness is apparently funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency through the project cryptonym SLEEPING BEAUTY. Freedom of Information Act requests concerning SLEEPING BEAUTY with a number of different intelligence agencies including the CIA and DEA has yielded denial that such a program exists. Certainly, such work would be of direct interest to BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA and other non-lethal weapons programs. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. Persinger as an Interview Source in his book on remote viewing operations conducted under Stargate, Grill Flame and other cryptonyms at Fort Meade and on contract to the Stanford Research Institute. Schnabel states (p. 220) that, “As one of the Pentagon's top scientists, Vorona was privy to some of the strangest, most secret research projects ever conceived. Grill Flame was just one. Another was code-named Sleeping Beauty; it was a Defense Department study of remote microwave mind-influencing techniques ... [...] It appears from Schnabel's well-documented investigations that Sleeping Beauty is a real, but still classified mind control program. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. West as an Interview Source and says that West was a, “Member of medical oversight board for Science Applications International Corp. remote-viewing research in early 1990s.

The term “allopathic” was coined by a German physician named Samuel Hahnemann in the 19th century. It is derived from the two Greek words, “allos” meaning “opposite” and “pathos,” meaning “disease.” Hahnemann was a homeopathic physician (a type of Wholistic medicine), and he came up with this term to describe and separate himself and the members of his profession from the MDs of his time that espoused the use of dangerous and harmful medical treatments such as blood-letting, and the use of large doses of toxic substances, like mercury. Modern day MDs are not so happy with the term “allopath,” and will go out of their way to try to convince you that what they do is practice “Medicine,” - that they in fact are the sole proprietors of the entire medical field. But they are not. What they do is just ONE PIECE of the medical pie. “Allopathic” is an entirely appropriate eponym for what MDs do, and Hahnemann should be applauded for his insight.

I raised my hand to stop him. “Whoa—here’s where skeptics have a field day,” I told him. “The gospels tell us he began to sweat blood at this point. Now, c’mon, isn’t that just a product of some overactive imaginations? Doesn’t that call into question the accuracy of the gospel writers?” Unfazed, Metherell shook his head. “Not at all,” he replied. “This is a known medical condition called hematidrosis. It’s not very common, but it is associated with a high degree of psychological stress.

Parallel to the idea of the US Constitution as covenant, politicians, journalists, teachers, and even professional historians chant like a mantra that the United States is a “nation of immigrants.” From its beginning, the United States has welcomed—indeed, often solicited, even bribed—immigrants to repopulate conquered territories “cleansed” of their Indigenous inhabitants. From the mid-nineteenth century, immigrants were recruited to work mines, raze forests, construct canals and railroads, and labor in sweatshops, factories, and commercial farm fields. In the late twentieth century, technical and medical workers were recruited. The requirements for their formal citizenship were simple: adhere to the sacred covenant through taking the Citizenship Oath, pledging loyalty to the flag, and regarding those outside the covenant as enemies or potential enemies of the exceptional country that has adopted them, often after they escaped hunger, war, or repression, which in turn were often caused by US militarism or economic sanctions. Yet no matter how much immigrants might strive to prove themselves to be as hardworking and patriotic as descendants of the original settlers, and despite the rhetoric of E pluribus unum, they are suspect. The old stock against which they are judged inferior includes not only those who fought in the fifteen-year war for independence from Britain but also, and perhaps more important, those who fought and shed (Indian) blood, before and after independence, in order to acquire the land. These are the descendants of English Pilgrims, Scots, Scots-Irish, and Huguenot French—Calvinists all—who took the land bequeathed to them in the sacred covenant that predated the creation of the independent United States. These were the settlers who fought their way over the Appalachians into the fertile Ohio Valley region, and it is they who claimed blood sacrifice for their country. Immigrants, to be accepted, must prove their fidelity to the covenant and what it stands for.

Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine. In the early twentieth century, you needed only a high school diploma and a one-year medical degree to practice medicine. By the century’s end, all doctors had to have a college degree, a four-year medical degree, and an additional three to seven years of residency training in an individual field of practice—pediatrics, surgery, neurology, or the like. In recent years, though, even this level of preparation has not been enough for the new complexity of medicine.

After manufacture, the units go into the field. With consumer products, that means they go into millions of homes where any bugs you created are enjoyed by many. With medical, aviation, or other critical products, your bugs may be catastrophic (which is why you get to do so much paperwork). With scientific or monitoring equipment, the field could be a place where the unit cannot ever be retrieved (or retrieved only at great risk and expense; consider the devices in volcano calderas), so it had better work.

I can’t give this letter a storybook ending in the world’s eyes. Today finds Bob back to his regular schedule and the boys spending extra time talking with me flopped across the foot of my bed, which seems to be my permanent residence for now. My head symptoms have not changed. The medication has not settled well, and so the struggle continues. Whether I am in the valley or soaring above the mountain tops, God is there with me. I thank God that I am able to be His child. Now that’s a true storybook ending!

Torrens kicked at the door until it was finally opened. The farm couple and three youngsters had been eating breakfast in the common room. The yard dog would have bounded in had not Torrens kicked the door shut. 'I want a bed. Quilts. A hot drink. I am a doctor. This woman is my patient.' The farm couple was terrified. The look on the face of Torrens cut short any questions. They did as he ordered. One of the children ran to fetch his medical kit from the cart. The woman motioned for Torrens to set Caroline on a straw pallet. The farmer kept his distance, but his wife, shyly, fearffully, ventured closer. She glanced at Torrens, as if requesting his permission to help. Between them, they made Caroline as comfortable as they could. Torrens knelt by the pallet. Caroline reached for his hand. 'Leave while you can. Do not burden yourself with me.' 'A light burden.' 'I wish you to find Augusta.' 'You have my promise.' 'Take this.' Caroline had slipped off a gold ring set with diamonds. 'It was a wedding gift from the king. It has not left my finger since then. I give it to you now - ' Torrens protested, but Caroline went on - 'not as a keepsake. You and I have better keepsakes in our hearts. I wish you to sell it. You will need money, perhaps even more than this will bring. But you must stary alive and find my child. Help her as you have always helped me.' 'We shall talk of this later, when you are better. We shall find her together.' 'You have never lied to me.' Caroline's smile was suddenly flirtacious. 'Sir, if you begin now, I shall take you to task for it.' Her face seemed to grow youthful and earnest for an instant. Torrens realized she held life only by strength of will. 'I am thinking of the Juliana gardens,' Caroline said. 'How lovely they were. The orangerie. And you, my loving friend. Tell me, could we have been happy?' 'Yes.' Torrens raised her hand to his lips. 'Yes. I am certain of it.' Caroline did not speak again. Torrens stayed at her side. She died later that morning. Torrens buried her in the shelter of a hedgerow at the far edge of the field. The farmer offered to help, but Torrens refused and dug the grave himself. Later, in the farmhouse, he slept heavily for the first time since his escape. Mercifully, he did not dream. Next day, he gave the farmer his clothing in trade for peasant garb. He hitched up the cart and drove back to the road. He could have pressed on, lost himself beyond search in the provinces. He was free. Except for his promise. He turned the cart toward Marianstat.

Every diagnostic challenge in medicine can be imagined as a probability game. This is how you play the game: you assign a probability that a patient’s symptoms can be explained by some pathological dysfunction—heart failure, say, or rheumatoid arthritis—and then you summon evidence to increase or decrease the probability. Every scrap of evidence—a patient’s medical history, a doctor’s instincts, findings from a physical examination, past experiences, rumors, hunches, behaviors, gossip—raises or lowers the probability.

Of course, to speak of the dark night of the soul is anathema to many in the psychiatric field. I was told by one of my psychiatrists over the years not to equate depression with any religious experience such as the dark night of the soul. I never asked him why; I just assumed that he didn't want religious language to be mixed with medical. I did try to tell him, however, that religious language covers all and every aspect of being, that I could not simply separate it from his profession's language and concepts. He looked disgusted.

Grant never wavered in his commitment to freed people. It would be army commanders in the field, not Washington politicians, who worked out many of the critical details in caring for the recently enslaved. Frederick Douglass never forgot the service Grant rendered to his people, arguing that General Grant “was always up with, or in advance of authority furnished from Washington in regard to the treatment of those of our color then slaves,” and he cited the food, work, medical care, and education Grant supplied in the months before the official Emancipation Proclamation.34

These things may sound trivial, but they are signs of adjustment in our human aspect of life. We are just your average family. I’m happy to report we’re all saved by grace and living in His power. Because of the unique culture we live in, we face different struggles in this earthly journey. It is always fun to sit back and marvel at how God will work out each of the situations that distract us from fellowship with Him. These distractions can strengthen us in our walk if we allow God to take hold. Or, they can keep us away from our source of life and strength: God, our maker.

[...] The problems I’ve discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption, Jan 15 2009)

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.

held on to Edward’s hand, gave him some of the best eye contact I’d given anyone in a while, and Dr. Fields tried to stitch me up ahead of my body’s healing. Even with the ardeur days from being fed I was healing too fast for normal medical help. Fuck. Edward talked low to me. He whispered about the case, tried to get me to think about work. It worked for a while, and then the painkiller was all gone and I was still being stitched up. I couldn’t think about work. He talked about his family, about what Donna was doing with her metaphysical shop, about Peter in school and in martial arts. He was working on his second black belt. Becca and her musical theater, and the fact that he was still taking her to dance class twice a week, that amused me enough for me to say, “I want to see you sitting with all the suburban moms in the waiting area.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU WOULD do if tens of thousands of Israelis were being murdered by Palestinians? If heroin deaths in Israel suddenly tripled and 90 percent of the heroin was coming into Israel through the Palestinian territories—some of it through a tunnel the length of six football fields?1 If ISIS butchers were on Israel’s border? If you guessed, “Give them in-state college tuition, driver’s licenses, and free medical care,” you would be wrong. In 2012, Israel had sixty thousand illegal aliens, which would be the equivalent of a mere 2 million illegals in America. Warning that the illegals would overwhelm Israel and destroy the nature of the country, Netanyahu vowed to complete a border fence. Even opposition leader Yair Lapid supported a fence, as well as “the arrest and deportation of infiltrators.”2

When I got home, I thought about the fact that Einstein supposedly used to stock his wardrobe with the same suits and shoes so he’d never have to think about what he was going to wear. I lack the intellect it takes to solve problems that way. I’ve advanced nothing in the field of psychology, and my paper on PTSD was given little attention; I wrote that psychological disorders with a genetic link, such as borderline personality disorder, might seem impossible to treat, while PTSD, which is based in trauma that has been experienced, seems easy to tackle, at least to the layperson. The opposite is true. It can be difficult to find the right medication for genetic disorders, but they can be sufficiently treated. Conversely, PTSD never goes away. One might think that our genes are so elementary that we cannot escape them, but our experiences have the ability to do far greater damage.

Every day, on his right and left, another soul escapes toward the sky, and it sounds to him as if he can hear faraway music, as if a door has been shut on a grand old radio and he can listen only by putting his good ear against the material of his cot, although the music is soft, and there are moments when he is not certain it is there at all. There is something to be angry at, Werner is sure, but he cannot say what it is. “Won’t eat,” says a nurse in English. Armband of a medic. “Fever?” “High.” There are more words. Then numbers. In a dream, he sees a bright crystalline night with the canals all frozen and the lanterns of the miners’ houses burning and the farmers skating between the fields. He sees a submarine asleep in the lightless depths of the Atlantic; Jutta presses her face to a porthole and breathes on the glass. He half expects to see Volkheimer’s huge hand appear, help him up, and clap him into the Opel. And Marie-Laure? Can she still feel the pressure of his hand against the webbing between her fingers as he can feel hers?

So certain were experts that neonates felt no pain that through the mid-1980s major surgeries on newborn babies were sometimes performed without anesthesia. These included major cardiovascular procedures requiring prying open rib cages, puncturing lungs, and tying off major arteries. Though provided with no pharmacologic agents to blunt the pain that cracking ribs or cutting through the sternum might have induced, babies were given powerful agents to induce paralysis—ensuring an immobile (and undoubtedly terrified) patient on whom to operate. Jill Lawson’s remarkable story of her premature son, Jeffrey, and his unanesthetized heart surgery provides a heartbreaking account of such a procedure. After Jeffrey’s death in 1985, Lawson’s campaign to educate the medical profession about the need to treat pain in the young literally changed the field. And likely led to improved awareness of pain in animals, too. bA technique called clicker training pairs a metallic tick-tock! with a food treat every time the animal performs a desired behavior. Eventually the animal comes to associate the sound of the clicker with the feel-good neurochemical rewards of the food. When the treat is discontinued, the animal will continue doing the behavior, because

There are two months left to the deployment and the men devise all kinds of ways to quantify that: number of patrols, number of KOP rotations, number of mefloquine Mondays. It’s starting to dawn on them that they’ll probably never walk to the top of Honcho Hill again or get dropped onto the Abas Ghar. When they’re down at the KOP they use the communal laptops to try to arrange girlfriends for themselves when they get back. The men who already have girlfriends arrange to have them stock up on beer, steak, whatever they’ve been craving for the past year. The men will fly into Aviano Air Base, take a two-hour bus ride to Vicenza, turn in their weapons, and then form up on a parade ground called Hoekstra Field. As soon as they’re discharged they can do whatever they want. The drinking starts immediately and continues until unconsciousness and then resumes whenever and wherever the men wake up. They find themselves at train stations and on sidewalks and in police stations and occasionally at the medical facilities. In past years one drunken paratrooper was struck by a train and killed and another died of an overdose. They’d made it through the dangers of combat and died within sight of their barracks in Vicenza. “Y’all will only be remembered for the last thing you ever did,” Caldwell warned them one warm spring night.

Major General Leonard Wood Leonard Wood was an army officer and physician, born October 9, 1860 in Winchester, New Hampshire. His first assignment was in 1886 at Fort Huachuca, Arizona where he fought in the last campaign against the fierce Apache warrior Geronimo. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for carrying dispatches 100 miles through hostile territory and was promoted to the rank of Captain, commanding a detachment of the 8th Infantry. From 1887 to 1898, he served as a medical officer in a number of positions, the last of which was as the personal physician to President William McKinley. In 1898 at the beginning of the war with Spain, he was given command of the 1st Volunteer Cavalry. The regiment was soon to be known as the “Rough Riders." Wood lead his men on the famous charge up San Juan Hill and was given a field promotion to brigadier general. In 1898 he was appointed the Military Governor of Santiago de Cuba. In 1920, as a retired Major General, Wood ran as the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States, losing to Warren Harding. In 1921 following his defeat, General Wood accepted the post of Governor General of the Philippines. He held this position from 1921 to 1927, when he died of a brain tumor in Boston, on 7 August 1927, at 66 years of age after which he was buried, with full honors, in Arlington National Cemetery.

to express my differences with the Church. Contraceptives save the lives of millions of women and children. That’s a medical fact. And that’s why I believe all women everywhere, and of any faith, should have information on the healthy timing and spacing of pregnancies, and access to contraceptives if they want them. But there is a big difference between believing in family planning and taking a lead advocacy role for a cause that goes against a teaching of my church. That is not something I was eager to do. When I was trying to decide if I should go ahead, I talked it over with my parents, with priests and nuns I’ve known since childhood, with some Catholic scholars, and with Bill and the kids. One of my questions was “Can you take actions in conflict with a teaching of the Church and still be part of the Church?” That depends, I was told, on whether you are true to your conscience, and whether your conscience is informed by the Church. In my case, the teachings of the Catholic Church helped form my conscience and led me into this work in the first place. Faith in action to me means going to the margins of society, seeking out those who are isolated, and bringing them back in. I was putting my faith into action when I went into the field and met the women who asked me about contraceptives. So, yes, there is a Church teaching against contraceptives—but there is another Church teaching, which is love of neighbor.

If you can’t make a good prediction, it is very often harmful to pretend that you can. I suspect that epidemiologists, and others in the medical community, understand this because of their adherence to the Hippocratic oath. Primum non nocere: First, do no harm. Much of the most thoughtful work on the use and abuse of statistical models and the proper role of prediction comes from people in the medical profession.88 That is not to say there is nothing on the line when an economist makes a prediction, or a seismologist does. But because of medicine’s intimate connection with life and death, doctors tend to be appropriately cautious. In their field, stupid models kill people. It has a sobering effect. There is something more to be said, however, about Chip Macal’s idea of “modeling for insights.” The philosophy of this book is that prediction is as much a means as an end. Prediction serves a very central role in hypothesis testing, for instance, and therefore in all of science.89 As the statistician George E. P. Box wrote, “All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”90 What he meant by that is that all models are simplifications of the universe, as they must necessarily be. As another mathematician said, “The best model of a cat is a cat.”91 Everything else is leaving out some sort of detail. How pertinent that detail might be will depend on exactly what problem we’re trying to solve and on how precise an answer we require.

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.

If they’re not practicing deliberately, even experts can see their skills backslide. Ericsson shared with me an incredible example of this. Even though you might be inclined to trust the advice of a silver-haired doctor over one fresh out of medical school, it’s been found that in a few fields of medicine, doctors’ skills don’t improve the longer they’ve been practicing. The diagnostic accuracy of professional mammographers, for example, doesn’t get more accurate over the years. Why would that be? For most mammographers, practicing medicine is not deliberate practice, according to Ericsson. It’s more like putting into a tin cup than working with a coach. That’s because mammographers usually only find out if they missed a tumor months or years later, if at all, at which point they’ve probably forgotten the details of the case and can no longer learn from their successes and mistakes. One field of medicine in which this is definitively not the case is surgery. Unlike mammographers, surgeons tend to get better with time. What makes surgeons different from mammographers, according to Ericsson, is that the outcome of most surgeries is usually immediately apparent—the patient either gets better or doesn’t—which means that surgeons are constantly receiving feedback on their performance. They’re always learning what works and what doesn’t, always getting better. This finding leads to a practical application of expertise theory: Ericsson suggests that mammographers regularly be asked to evaluate old cases for which the outcome is already known. That way they can get immediate feedback on their performance.

AS SHE HEALED, the women changed tactics and stopped their berating. Now they brought their embroidery and crocheting, and finally they used Ethel Fordham’s house as their quilting center. Ignoring those who preferred new, soft blankets, they practiced what they had been taught by their mothers during the period that rich people called the Depression and they called life. Surrounded by their comings and goings, listening to their talk, their songs, following their instructions, Cee had nothing to do but pay them the attention she had never given them before. They were nothing like Lenore, who’d driven Salem hard, and now, suffering a minor stroke, did nothing at all. Although each of her nurses was markedly different from the others in looks, dress, manner of speech, food and medical preferences, their similarities were glaring. There was no excess in their gardens because they shared everything. There was no trash or garbage in their homes because they had a use for everything. They took responsibility for their lives and for whatever, whoever else needed them. The absence of common sense irritated but did not surprise them. Laziness was more than intolerable to them; it was inhuman. Whether you were in the field, the house, your own backyard, you had to be busy. Sleep was not for dreaming; it was for gathering strength for the coming day. Conversation was accompanied by tasks: ironing, peeling, shucking, sorting, sewing, mending, washing, or nursing. You couldn’t learn age, but adulthood was there for all. Mourning was helpful but God was better and they did not want to meet their Maker and have to explain a wasteful life. They knew He would ask each of them one question: “What have you done?” (122-123)

In a matter of sixty short minutes, that thing could whisk Neil away to civilization, I thought. Hmm. My goodness, that was a beautiful prospect. Somehow I had to get on that chopper with him. I packed in thirty seconds flat, everything from the past three months. I taped a white cross onto my sleeve, and raced out to where Neil was sat waiting. One chance. What the heck. Neil shook his head at me, smiling. “God, you push it, Bear, don’t you?” he shouted over the noise of the rotors. “You’re going to need a decent medic on the flight,” I replied, with a smile. “And I’m your man.” (There was at least some element of truth in this: I was a medic and I was his buddy--and yes, he did need help. But essentially I was trying to pull a bit of a fast one.) The pilot shouted that two people would be too heavy. “I have to accompany him at all times,” I shouted back over the engine noise. “His feet might fall off at any moment,” I added quietly. The pilot looked back at me, then at the white cross on my sleeve. He agreed to drop Neil somewhere down at a lower altitude, and then come back for me. “Perfect. Go. I’ll be here.” I shook his hand firmly. Let’s just get this done before anyone thinks too much about it, I mumbled to myself. And with that the pilot took off and disappeared from view. Mick and Henry were laughing. “If you pull this one off, Bear, I will eat my socks. You just love to push it, don’t you?” Mick said, smiling. “Yep, good try, but you aren’t going to see him again, I guarantee you,” Henry added. Thanks to the pilot’s big balls, he was wrong. The heli returned empty, I leapt aboard, and with the rotors whirring at full power to get some grip in the thin air, the bird slowly lifted into the air. The stall warning light kept buzzing away as we fought against gravity, but then the nose dipped and soon we were skimming over the rocks, away from base camp and down the glacier. I was out of there--and Mick was busy taking his socks off. As we descended, I spotted, far beneath us, this lone figure sat on a rock in the middle of a giant boulder field. Neil’s two white “beacons” shining bright. I love it. I smiled. We picked Neil up, and in an instant we were flying together through the huge Himalayan valleys like an eagle freed. Neil and I sat back in the helicopter, faces pressed against the glass, and watched our life for the past three months become a shimmer in the distance. The great mountain faded into a haze, hidden from sight. I leaned against Neil’s shoulder and closed my eyes. Everest was gone.

FASCIA: THE TIES THAT BIND Imagine a collagen-rich, stretchy slipcover for every organ, nerve, bone, and muscle in our bodies, and you start to get a sense of how fundamental connective tissue—specifically fascia—is to the entire body. Suspending our organs inside our torso, connecting our head to our back to our feet, fascia protects, supports, and literally binds our body together. Fascia can be gossamer-thin and translucent, like a spider web, or thick and tough like rope. Ounce for ounce, fascia is stronger than steel. Other specialized types of connective tissue include bones, ligaments, tendons, cartilage, and fat (adipose) tissue. Even blood, strictly speaking, is considered connective tissue. But to me, the most exciting aspect of the latest research on connective tissue relates to fascia. Fascia is the stretchy tissue that forms an uninterrupted, three-dimensional web within our body. Our body has sheets, bags, and strings of fascia of varying thickness and size, some superficial and some deep. Fascia envelops both individual microscopic muscle filaments as well as whole muscle groups, such as the trapezius, pectorals, and quadriceps. For example, one of the largest fascia configurations in the body is known as the “trousers,” a massive sheet of fascia that crosses over the knees and ends near the waist, giving the appearance of short leggings. This fascia trouser is thicker around the knees and thinner as it continues up the legs and over the hips, thickening again near the waist. When the fascia trouser is healthy, supple, and resilient, it acts like a girdle, giving the body a firm shape. Fascia helps muscles transmit their force so we can convert that force into movement. The system of fascia is bound by tensile links (think of the structure of a geodesic dome, like the one at Epcot in Disney World), with space and fluid between the links that can help absorb external pressure and more evenly distribute force across the fascial structure. This allows our bodies to withstand tremendous force instead of absorbing it in one local area, which would lead to increased pain and injury. Fascia is also a second nervous system in and of itself, with almost 10 times the number of sensory nerve endings as muscle. Helene Langevin, director of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Harvard Medical School, has done landmark studies on the function and importance of connective tissue and its impact on pain. One of the leading researchers in the field today, Langevin describes fascia as a “living matrix” whose health is essential to our well-being.

To their surprise, they found that dopamine actively regulates both the formation and the forgetting of new memories. In the process of creating new memories, the dCA1 receptor was activated. By contrast, forgetting was initiated by the activation of the DAMB receptor. Previously, it was thought that forgetting might be simply the degradation of memories with time, which happens passively by itself. This new study shows that forgetting is an active process, requiring intervention by dopamine. To prove their point, they showed that by interfering with the action of the dCA1 and DAMB receptors, they could, at will, increase or decrease the ability of fruit flies to remember and forget. A mutation in the dCA1 receptor, for example, impaired the ability of the fruit flies to remember. A mutation in the DAMB receptor decreased their ability to forget. The researchers speculate that this effect, in turn, may be partially responsible for savants’ skills. Perhaps there is a deficiency in their ability to forget. One of the graduate students involved in the study, Jacob Berry, says, “Savants have a high capacity for memory. But maybe it isn’t memory that gives them this capacity; maybe they have a bad forgetting mechanism. This might also be the strategy for developing drugs to promote cognition and memory—what about drugs that inhibit forgetting as a cognitive enhancers?” Assuming that this result holds up in human experiments as well, it could encourage scientists to develop new drugs and neurotransmitters that are able to dampen the forgetting process. One might thus be able to selectively turn on photographic memories when needed by neutralizing the forgetting process. In this way, we wouldn’t have the continuous overflow of extraneous, useless information, which hinders the thinking of people with savant syndrome. What is also exciting is the possibility that the BRAIN project, which is being championed by the Obama administration, might be able to identify the specific pathways involved with acquired savant syndrome. Transcranial magnetic fields are still too crude to pin down the handful of neurons that may be involved. But using nanoprobes and the latest in scanning technologies, the BRAIN project might be able to isolate the precise neural pathways that make possible photographic memory and incredible computational, artistic, and musical skills. Billions of research dollars will be channeled into identifying the specific neural pathways involved with mental disease and other afflictions of the brain, and the secret of savant skills may be revealed in the process. Then it might be possible to take normal individuals and make savants out of them. This has happened many times in the past because of random accidents. In the future, this may become a precise medical process.

The field of public health refers to the conditions that are not medical but that can produce or undermine health as the “social determinants of health.” These are the socioeconomic, environmental, and behavioral factors that research over many decades has shown to be strong influences on health.

armour in battle. I am also thankful for Captain Peter Stocking and Dr Justin Pepperell for ensuring I was factually correct in medical and surgical aspects. Finally, Mr Norman Franks was kind enough to lend his deep expertise on air power and help me comprehend the air contribution to the campaign. I have hugely appreciated the large number of veterans who have ensured that my historical understanding of the Army of 1944 has stayed on track. A full list of those who have helped is enclosed at the back of this book, but I would particularly like to single out Sydney Jary, Joe Lawler, Jon Majendie, Ian Hammerton, Ken Tout and Jack Swaab. Most of all I am indebted to Field Marshal the Lord Bramall

reveals the extent to which psychiatry is tightly tied to capitalistic corporate interests, how closely allied the field is with the major pharmaceutical houses, where millions, even billions, of dollars are made in mere months. This is why, although lithium had worked so well for so many people, drug developers set about discovering new mood stabilizers that had patent and profit possibilities, whipping up in their high-tech cauldrons scores of new pharmaceuticals to treat bipolar disorder or, better yet, converting already existing medications—drugs, say, for epilepsy—into treatments.

Dr. Jules Coleman of the University of Colorado Medical School in 1947 suggested that social casework involved a more “far-reaching respect of person than is found in psychiatry, or, for that matter, medicine and lamented the worship of psychotherapy by caseworkers: The caseworker has good reason to be beguiled by the lures of psychotherapy, to seize upon the points of similarity and to skim lightly over the gulfs of difference, particularly if the practice of psychotherapy is unwisely and unthinkingly accorded undue prestige values. As if the practice of casework did not suffice! As if doing psychotherapy made the caseworker a better and more valuable person!53 In the same year, long before the private practice of psychotherapy would become a major trend in social work practice, Ruth Smalley expressed the fears of many in the field regarding the fascination with psychotherapy: “A blight which is in danger of falling on the profession of social work is a lack of confidence and respect for itself. It is almost as though it thinks that it can find dignity, status, and helpfulness only by becoming something it is not.

The majority of the ruling classes did not save their blame and recriminations just for those working class people who were able to walk away from St. Peter’s Fields free of injury. Many of the wounded did not seek medical treatment for they were certain that it would invite retribution from the authorities. Rumours of such a spiteful attitude had a strong basis in fact. Despite the pain and the temptation to swoon again into a state of unconsciousness Thomas and Jacob shook their heads, just a little, as much as the soreness would allow. ‘Oh, no, sir; our cause is just. We mun stick together an’ demand the vote an’ better workin’ conditions,’ answered Jacob. ‘While them laws as keeps the price o’ bread up too ’igh is there we gotter keep goin’, sir. Folks is starving’ while wages is pressed down by factory owners,’ added Thomas.

Psychologists need to be interested and learn about PNES so they can be a part of this field. The more people who are involved, the more people will become aware of it. It’s about education, education, education. Educating the public, the medical personnel and everyone across the board.

The average American watches almost three hours of television per day.[ 8] For someone born now who will live to age eighty, that’s a total of eight years of television watching –straight, not including time for sleeping. Said another way, TV-watching for the average American is like having a full-time, 40-hour-per-week job for over more than thirty years. If someone replaced this television time with growth activities, say, attending medical school or learning to compose music, he or she could become an expert in seven different fields according to Dr. K. Anders Ericsson’s theory of 10,000 hours.[ 9]

Despite all of our technology, our bodies are just not ready for a world so completely tamed by our desire for comfort. Without stimulation, the responses that were designed to fight environmental challenges don’t always lie dormant. Sometimes they turn inward and wreak havoc on our insides. An entire field of medical research on autoimmune diseases suggests they originate from fundamental disconnect between the outside world and an understimulated biology.

Superconductivity, since it was quantized, meaning that only discrete bundles of energy exist as opposed to a continuous flow, has not waned in importance. Once Cooper, Bardeen, and Schrieffer figured out how superconductivity worked, others were able to find useful applications for it. Superconductivity is at the heart of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-medical scans used to probe anatomical form and function. Some situations, such as tests for tumors, require far more precision than an X-ray scan. Strong and uniform magnetic fields are needed. The efficient electric currents in a superconductor generate the large magnetic fields, which optimize the MRI scanning operation.

John’s adolescence was marked by loss. When he was thirteen his father died, swiftly followed by his two sisters. Shortly after he turned seventeen his eldest brother, James, whose progress through his chosen medics, career had taken him to London, became unable to work due to ill health and returned to the farm, lying for days on one of the beds that pulled out from the walls of the two-roomed cottage like drawers, coughing himself to death at least while John watched or was nearby; and I find it hard to imagine, now, when death is largely hedged about with treatment plans, when it does not often come senseless out of nowhere, but can be postposted, or if not, then at least explained, what grief must have been like when that boundary was a curtain you could put your hand through. It is easy to think that when death could be so quickly turned to, a matter of mistral and all families counted lost children in their numbers, that loss must have been a blunter thing- that having so much practice, they must have been better at it, or inoculated, that it cannot have been for them such devastation, this laying waste- as the birth of a tenth child might be of less account in a busy week than the loss of a pair of, so that the date of it was not looked for until later, when it was found to have been forgotten. It is easy to think that in an age without anaesthetics, when legs might be hacked off on kitchen tables, teeth pulled sigh pliers taking gobbets of jaw and gun away with the , that pain must have been somehow a less precise, less devastating thing, the alternative being unthinkable- that it was just the same but persisting, could only be endured, to universal to allow concession; and so John Hunter watched the bodies of those he loved carried out of the tiny farmhouse one by one, making their last journey to the church, and afterwards he went about the business of his day, he went to school or to the fields, and then at last, summoned by William, the sole surviving brother he barely remembered, he went to London and, did not return.

I struggle to establish in the minds of my students that all opinions are not created equal. There are informed opinions and uniformed opinions, educated opinions and uneducated opinions. I point out that when one is ill,one goes to a medical doctor rather than a friend, and that is based upon the assumption that the medical doctor's "opinion" is worth more than the average person's, not because the doctor is better than anyone else, but because he has studied in the field and knows more about it.

parasitology is one of the lower-paying of all the medical specialties. To go into the field, you have to truly care about helping people.

However, Pauling’s interest in these carotenoids and flavonoids was confined to their chemical structures and the influence of structure on optical properties; he did not address their health functions. In 1941 Pauling was diagnosed with Bright’s disease, or glomerulonephritis, which was at the time an often-fatal kidney disorder. On the advice of physicians at the Rockefeller Institute, he went to San Francisco for treatment by Thomas Addis, an innovative Stanford nephrologist. Addis prescribed a diet low in salt and protein, plenty of water, and supplementary vitamins and minerals that Pauling followed for nearly 14 years and completely recovered. This was dramatic firsthand experience of the therapeutic value of the diet. Revelations When Pauling cast about for a new research direction in the 1950s, he realized that mental illness was a significant public health problem that had not been sufficiently addressed by scientists. Perhaps his mother’s megaloblastic madness and premature death caused by B12 deficiency underlay this interest. At about this time, Pauling’s eldest son, Linus Jr., began a residency in psychiatry, which undoubtedly prompted Pauling to consider the nature of mental illness. Thanks to funding from the Ford Foundation, Pauling investigated the role of enzymes in brain function but made little progress. When he came across a copy of Niacin Therapy in Psychiatry (1962) by Abram Hoffer in 1965, Pauling was astonished to learn that simple substances needed in minute amounts to prevent deficiency diseases could have therapeutic application in unrelated diseases when given in very large amounts. This serendipitous and key event was critically responsible for Pauling’s seminal paper in his emergent medical field. Later, Pauling was especially excited by Hoffer’s observations on the survival of patients with advanced cancer who responded well to his micronutrient and dietary regimen, originally formulated to help schizophrenics manage their illness.19,20 The regimen includes large doses of B vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin E, beta-carotene, selenium, zinc, and other micronutrients. About 40 percent of patients treated adjunctively with Hoffer’s regimen lived, on average, five or more years, and about 60 percent survived four times longer than controls. These results were even better than those achieved by Scottish surgeon Ewan Cameron, Pauling’s close clinical collaborator, in Scotland. After a long and extremely productive career at Caltech,

One of the best countries of the world where one can expect best MBBS education is none other than China. After successful completion of English medium MBBS in China from any of the Recognized Medical Universities approved by WHO (World Health Organization) will offer a successful career in Medical field across the globe.

Today, Americans spend billions of dollars every year to maintain a strong national defence as a deterrent against external attack by foreign powers, but they fail entirely to apply the same principle of preventive defence to their own health. They eat, drink, and live indiscriminately and treat their bodies as engines of pleasure, without the slightest regard for the damage their habits inflict on their health. When they get sick, they run to the doctor or hospital for a quick fix and never imagine that their ailments are self-inflicted. Those ailments are then further compounded at the clinic, because more often than not they are not correctly diagnosed owing to the lack of a comprehensive and systematic view of the human body and human health. Western medical practice has become increasingly fragmented into narrow fields of specialty, and patients are referred to 'specialists' based entirely on what parts of the body exhibit their symptoms. It does not occur to Western medical specialists that symptoms may appear in parts of the body far removed from the root cause of the disease, although this remains a fundamental tenet of traditional Chinese medicine.

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Pharmacy The Institute is approved by AICTE & Pharmacy Council of India and is affiliated to Pt. B.D. Sharma University of Health Sciences, Rohtak. Courses Offered: Bachelor in Pharmacy A Bachelor of Pharmacy (Abbreviated B Pharma) is a graduate education degree in the field of pharmacy. The degree is the basic condition for practicing in many countries as a pharmacist and it is about developing necessary skills for counseling patients about understanding and using the properties of medicines. Bachelor of Pharmacy (B.Pharm) is an undergraduate degree course in the field of Pharmacy education. The students those are interested in the medical field (except to become a doctor) can choose this course after the completion of class 12th. After the completion of this degree, the students can practice as a Pharmacist. Pharmacists can work in a range of industries related to the prescription, manufacture & provision of medicines. The duration of this course is 4 years. The B.Pharm is one of the popular job oriented course among the science students after class 12th. In this course the students study about the drugs and medicines, Pharmaceutical Engineering, Medicinal Chemistry etc. This course provides a large no. of job opportunities in both the public and private sector. There are various career options available for the science students after the completion of B.Pharm degree. The students can go for higher studies in the Pharmacy i.e. Master of Pharmacy (M.Pharm). This field is one of the evergreen fields in the medical sector, with the increasing demand of Pharma professional every year. B.Pharm programme covers the syllabus including biochemical science & health care. The Pharmacy Courses are approved by the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) & Pharmacy Council of India (PCI). B.Pharma – Bachelor in Pharmacy Program Mode Regular Duration 4 Years No. of Seats 60 Eligibility Passed 10+2 examination with Physics and Chemistry as compulsory subjects along with any one of the Mathematics/ Biotechnology/ Biology. Obtained at least 47% marks in the above subjects taken together. Lateral Entry to Second Year: Candidate must have passed Diploma in Pharmacy course of a minimum duration of 2 years or more from Haryana Board of Technical Education or its equivalent with at least 50% marks in aggregate of all semesters/ years.

Although each of her nurses was markedly different from the others in looks, dress, manner of speech, food and medical preferences, their similarities were glaring. There was no excess in their gardens because they shared everything. There was no trash or garbage in their homes because they had a use for everything. They took responsibility for their lives and for whatever, whoever else needed them. The absence of common sense irritated but did not surprise them. Laziness was more than intolerable to them; it was inhuman. Whether you were in the field, the house, your own backyard, you had to be busy. Sleep was not for dreaming; it was for gathering strength for the coming day. Conversation was accompanied by tasks; ironing, peeling, shucking, sorting, sewing, mending, washing, or nursing. You couldn't learn age, but adulthood was there for all. Mourning was helpful but God was better and they did not want to meet their Maker and have to explain a wasteful life. They knew He would ask each of them one question: "What have you done?

Fiscal Numbers (the latter uniquely identifies a particular hospitalization for patients who might have been admitted multiple times), which allowed us to merge information from many different hospital sources. The data were finally organized into a comprehensive relational database. More information on database merger, in particular, how database integrity was ensured, is available at the MIMIC-II web site [1]. The database user guide is also online [2]. An additional task was to convert the patient waveform data from Philips’ proprietary format into an open-source format. With assistance from the medical equipment vendor, the waveforms, trends, and alarms were translated into WFDB, an open data format that is used for publicly available databases on the National Institutes of Health-sponsored PhysioNet web site [3]. All data that were integrated into the MIMIC-II database were de-identified in compliance with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act standards to facilitate public access to MIMIC-II. Deletion of protected health information from structured data sources was straightforward (e.g., database fields that provide the patient name, date of birth, etc.). We also removed protected health information from the discharge summaries, diagnostic reports, and the approximately 700,000 free-text nursing and respiratory notes in MIMIC-II using an automated algorithm that has been shown to have superior performance in comparison to clinicians in detecting protected health information [4]. This algorithm accommodates the broad spectrum of writing styles in our data set, including personal variations in syntax, abbreviations, and spelling. We have posted the algorithm in open-source form as a general tool to be used by others for de-identification of free-text notes [5].

There was a sheep-breeding crisis in Western Australia during the 1940s. Otherwise healthy sheep weren’t getting pregnant or were losing their young before giving birth. Everyone was stumped until some bright agricultural specialists discovered the little culprit—European clover. This type of clover produces a potent phytoestrogen called formononetin as a natural defense against grazing predators. And, yes, if you’re a plant, a sheep is a predator! Accustomed to the humidity of Europe, the imported clover plants were struggling to cope with the drier Australian climate. When clover has a bad year—not enough rain or sunshine, or too much rain or sunshine—it protects itself by limiting the size of the next generation of predators. It increases production of formononetin and prevents the birth of baby grazers by sterilizing their would-be parents. The next time you’re looking for some convenient birth control, you don’t have to snack on a field of clover, of course. But if you take many forms of the famous “Pill,” you’re not doing something all that different. The gifted chemist Carl Djerassi based his development of the Pill on just this kind of botanical birth control. He wasn’t using clover, though; he was using sweet potatoes—the Mexican yam to be exact. He started with disogenin, a phytoestrogen produced by the yam, and from that base, he synthesized the first marketable contraceptive pill in 1951.

It is worth pondering how much of our struggle with avarice is linked to a tendency to value things solely in terms of their usefulness. When the older generation laments that they are only a burden to society, since they are no longer capable of useful work or productive labor, and their medical care is a constant drain on others’ resources, have they internalized a system of value that measures people’s true worth in terms of a cost–benefit analysis? Time spent with children also becomes “unprofitable” in more than one sense, for we have precious little in the way of tangible payoff to show for such investments. The very use of metaphors of financial transactions to describe personal care for other human beings points to a conceptual framework tilted toward the distortions of avarice. The salary charts for the helping professions, especially compared to the salaries of those who work in financial fields managing investments, also point not so subtly to implicit assumptions of what is truly of value and worth. We are measured by our usefulness, and our usefulness is measured by the production of things and the possession of money. Greed now invades human life and its value in this subtler way as well.

A few thousand years later, scientists finally put saffron to the test in a head-to-head trial against the antidepressant drug Prozac for the treatment of clinical depression. Both the spice and the drug worked equally well in reducing depression symptoms.44 As you can see in the box here, this may not be saying much, but at the very least, the saffron was safer in terms of side effects. For example, 20 percent of people in the Prozac group suffered sexual dysfunction, a common occurrence with many antidepressant medications, whereas no one in the saffron group did. However, saffron may be one of those rare cases in which the natural remedy is more expensive than the drug. Saffron is the world’s most expensive spice. It is harvested from crocus flowers, specifically the dried stigmas (the threadlike tips inside the flower), which are ground up to make the spice. You need more than fifty thousand crocuses—enough to cover a football field—to produce just a single pound of saffron.45 A Prozac-equivalent dose of saffron may cost more than twice as much as the drug, but a subsequent study found that even just smelling saffron appeared to have psychological benefits. Though researchers diluted the spice so much that the study subjects couldn’t detect its odor, they still noted a significant drop in stress hormones measured in women who sniffed the saffron for twenty minutes compared with those who spent twenty minutes smelling a placebo, along with significant improvement in the women’s symptoms of anxiety.

Clustering analysis developed originally from anthropology in 1932, before it was introduced to psychology in 1938 and was later adopted by personality psychology in 1943 for trait theory classification. Today, clustering analysis is used in data mining, information retrieval, machine learning, text mining, web analysis, marketing, medical diagnosis, and numerous other fields.

Hebrews 11:8, NASB, says, “By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was going.” I sure do not know what I’m going to do here this semester or in Togo, but I do know that God knows what He is doing—so my attitude must be to trust God entirely. I’m glad He doesn’t let us know what He has planned next; He just continues to reveal who He is. Some days I feel alone here, but being alone with God isn’t bad either. My solitude with Him has been special. --Shirley Cropsey, January 13, 1982

I gave haircuts this morning. The boys think I should do them just like the short-term beautician who was here. Their regular cut with her was a shave up the side coming to a v in the back. Right. Well, I did my best. Josh thinks he may need to wear a hat all weekend. The All West African baseball tournament is in Lomé, and he doesn’t have two days to wait until a bad haircut turns into a good one. Grandpa always said, ‘The only difference between a good haircut and a bad haircut is two days.

The only medical advance attributable to the Black Death is in the field of public health. In 1374 the Venetian Republic appointed three officials with the duty of inspecting and excluding all infected vessels from the ports. In 1377 Ragusa

You may consider me sentimental or realistic since I perceive that the world's scientists of Intelligence Agencies can develop such as coronavirus, cancer, and other chemicals to harm humans, especially its political foes, whether those hold high status or low grade. In such fields, every option is possible. I suffered from two incidents in my life by the International Intelligence Agencies, first in 1980 and second in 2016, first causing esophagus damage and stomach hernia, and second metastatic prostate cancer. I tried for years and years to investigate the first incident, but Dutch police refused even to write a report about that. Such refusal created doubts in my mind that Dutch Secret Agencies played an evil role in damaging and destroying my life since why the authorities had been ignoring and refusing. Before diagnosing metastatic prostate cancer, when urologists were not paying attention, I went to a Brazilian Homeopath, Miriam Sommer, in The Hague; after a month's discussion, she told me that she was sure that I was poisoned in 1980, not to kill, but severe physical damage and it happened. She put a couple of tablets under my tongue to suck, and I did that. However, later I became suspicious of why she did do that. Dutch urologists, one year from the start of 2016 to 2017, refused to check what I requested per International Medical Guidelines, they overlooked it, and consequently, in February 2017, they diagnosed as last stage prostate cancer, which was not curable. The Dutch medical system is very awkward; it does not meet International Medical Guidelines; they let the patients suffering from the disease and treat them in a gravely poor way, paying no proper care and attention. In this regard, I am unaware of others' experiences. I want that both incidents, which caused me unexplained damage and the destruction of my career and life, the Dutch authorities should investigate on a high-level scale as guidelines before criminals disappear, can lead to a positive result; otherwise, I am right to realize that Institutions of the Dutch government had victimized me, violating International Law and human rights.

A heaping tablespoon of ground-up zeolite had the surface area of a football field.

Enhancing Diabetes Management: The Role of Blood Glucose Monitors from Med Supply US Introduction In the modern landscape of diabetes care, continuous monitoring of blood glucose levels has become an invaluable tool for individuals striving to manage their condition effectively. Among the pioneering names in this field is Med Supply US, a brand that has been making waves in New York, Miami, and Florida by offering state-of-the-art Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) services. Let's delve into how these Blood Glucose Monitors are revolutionizing diabetes management. Continuous Glucose Monitoring: A Game-Changer Gone are the days of frequent finger pricks and sporadic glucose checks. Med Supply US is at the forefront of empowering individuals with diabetes to monitor their blood glucose levels seamlessly and gain insights in real-time. CGMs have ushered in a new era of convenience, accuracy, and comprehensive data analysis, allowing for a more proactive approach to diabetes care. Benefits of CGMs by Med Supply US Med Supply US has carved a niche for itself in the diabetes management landscape, offering a range of benefits that set it apart: Accurate Monitoring: CGMs provide continuous readings throughout the day and night, eliminating the guesswork associated with traditional glucose monitoring methods. This accuracy is pivotal for making informed decisions about diet, medication, and activity levels. Real-time Data: With CGMs, individuals receive real-time data on their glucose levels. This not only keeps them informed but also enables prompt action in response to fluctuations, reducing the risk of extreme highs and lows. Trend Analysis: Med Supply US's CGMs offer comprehensive data analysis, highlighting trends and patterns in glucose levels over time. This aids in identifying factors that impact blood sugar, thus facilitating better management strategies. Alerts and Notifications: CGMs from Med Supply US come equipped with customizable alerts and notifications. This feature helps users stay vigilant about their glucose levels, especially during critical moments.

The emerging field dedicated to the study of how an environment can change an organism without alterations to its DNA is called epigenetics.

I didn’t invent my regimen from whole cloth. It’s built on a foundation of scientific data generated by leading medical professionals and other experts in the field: people like Dr. Neal Barnard, founder and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and T. Colin Campbell, professor emeritus of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University and author of The China Study, a groundbreaking book published in 2005 that examines the close relationship between the consumption of animal proteins and the onset of chronic and degenerative illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, and obesity. In one of the largest epidemiological studies ever conducted, Professor Campbell and his peers determined that a plant-based, whole-food diet can minimize and actually reverse the development of these chronic diseases. Equally influential is Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn’s book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. A former surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, as well as a Yale-trained rower who garnered Olympic gold at the 1956 Melbourne Summer Games, Dr. Esselstyn concludes from a twenty-year nutritional study that a plant-based, whole-food diet can not only prevent and stop the progression of heart disease, but also reverse its effects.