Medical Interpreter Quotes

The medical profession is justly conservative. Human life should not be considered as the proper material for wild experiments.

The medical profession is justly conservative.

Translation software is not making translators obsolete. Has medical diagnostic software made doctors obsolete?

Sadly, interpretation of medical science is frequently influenced by the dark forces of industry, out to make a killing. And

She tries to maintain a nondescript exterior; she learns the sideways glance instead of looking at people directly. She speaks in practised, precise sentences so that she is not misunderstood. She chooses her words carefully, and if someone addresses her in Punjabi, she answers in Urdu, because an exchange in her mother tongue might be considered a promise of intimacy. She uses English for medical terms only, because she feels if she uses a word of English in her conversation she might be considered a bit forward. When she walks she walks with slightly hurried steps, as if she has an important but innocent appointment to keep. She avoids eye contact, she looks slightly over people’s heads as if looking out for somebody who might come into view at any moment. She doesn’t want anyone to think that she is alone and nobody is coming for her. She sidesteps even when she sees a boy half her age walking towards her, she walks around little puddles when she can easily leap over them; she thinks any act that involves stretching her legs might send the wrong signal. After all, this is not the kind of thing where you can leave your actions to subjective interpretations. She never eats in public. Putting something in your mouth is surely an invitation for someone to shove something horrible down your throat. If you show your hunger, you are obviously asking for something.

But science should be based in fact, not fashion. And policy should be based on science. Facts shouldn’t change. And indeed, they don’t. But their interpretation does. Consider the idea that inflammation causes heart disease. First espoused in the late 1800s after the invention of aspirin by Bayer, this idea was relegated to the dustbin of medical science in favor of the cholesterol hypothesis, which reigned for the second half of the twentieth century. But over the last decade, the “inflammation hypothesis” has made a decided comeback, and is now thought to be the primary factor in the genesis of atherosclerotic plaques and thrombosis.

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

When people recover from depression via psychotherapy, their attributions about recovery are likely to be different than those of people who have been treated with medication. Psychotherapy is a learning experience. Improvement is not produced by an external substance, but by changes within the person. It is like learning to read, write or ride a bicycle. Once you have learned, the skills stays with you. People no not become illiterate after they graduate from school, and if they get rusty at riding a bicycle, the skill can be acquired with relatively little practice. Furthermore, part of what a person might learn in therapy is to expect downturns in mood and to interpret them as a normal part of their life, rather than as an indication of an underlying disorder. This understanding, along with the skills that the person has learned for coping with negative moods and situations, can help to prevent a depressive relapse.

At that point, more than 15,000 women were dying each year from cervical cancer. The Pap smear had the potential to decrease that death rate by 70 percent or more, but there were two things standing in its way: first, many women - like Henrietta - simply didn't get the test; and, second, even when they did, few doctors knew how to interpret the results accurately, because they didn't know what various stages of cervical cancer looked like under a microscope. Some mistook cervical infections for cancer and removed a woman's entire reproductive tract when all she needed was antibiotics. Others mistook malignant changes for infection, sending women home with antibiotics only to have them return later, dying from metastasized cancer. And even when doctors correctly diagnosed precancerous changes, they often didn't know how those changes should be treated.

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

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

FLEISCHMANN: Since the days of Sigmund Freud and the advent of psychoanalysis the interpretation of dreams has played a big role in Austria[n life]. What is your attitude to all that? BERNHARD: I’ve never spent enough time reading Freud to say anything intelligent about him. Freud has had no effect whatsoever on dreams, or on the interpretation of dreams. Of course psychoanalysis is nothing new. Freud didn’t discover it; it had of course always been around before. It just wasn’t practiced on such a fashionably huge scale, and in such million-fold, money-grubbing forms, as it has been now for decades, and as it won’t be for much longer. Because even in America, as I know, it’s fallen so far out of fashion that they just lay people out on the celebrated couch and scoop their psychological guts out with a spoon. FLEISCHMANN: I take it then that psychoanalysis is not a means gaining knowledge for you? BERNHARD: Well, no; for me it’s never been that kind of thing. I think of Freud simply as a good writer, and whenever I’ve read something of his, I’ve always gotten the feeling of having read the work of an extraordinary, magnificent writer. I’m no competent judge of his medical qualifications, and as for what’s known as psychoanalysis, I’ve personally always tended to think of it as nonsense or as a middle-aged man’s hobby-horse that turned into an old man’s hobby-horse. But Freud’s fame is well-deserved, because of course he was a genuinely great, extraordinary personality. There’s no denying that. One of the few great personalities who had a beard and was great despite his beardiness. FLEISCHMANN: Do you have something against beards? BERNHARD: No. But the majority of people call people who have a long beard or the longest possible beard great personalities and suppose that the longer one’s beard is, the greater the personality one is. Freud’s beard was relatively long, but too pointy; that was typical of him. Perhaps it was the typical Freudian trait, the pointy beard. It’s possible.

The morbid thought had a power of its own that he could not control. It was not foreseen in his philosophical brand of psychology, where everything flowed neatly from consciousness and sense-perception. The professor admitted that his case was pathological, but there his thinking stopped, because it had arrived at the sacrosanct border-line between the philosophical and the medical faculty.

Far more than a quest for pleasure, chronic substance use is the addict’s attempt to escape distress. From a medical point of view, addicts are self-medicating conditions like depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress or even ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Addictions always originate in pain, whether felt openly or hidden in the unconscious. They are emotional anaesthetics. Heroin and cocaine, both powerful physical painkillers, also ease psychological discomfort. Infant animals separated from their mothers can be soothed readily by low doses of narcotics, just as if it was actual physical pain they were enduring. The pain pathways in humans are no different. The very same brain centres that interpret and “feel” physical pain also become activated during the experience of emotional rejection: on brain scans they “light up” in response to social ostracism just as they would when triggered by physically harmful stimuli. When people speak of feeling “hurt” or of having emotional “pain,” they are not being abstract or poetic but scientifically quite precise. The hard-drug addict’s life has been marked by a surfeit of pain. No wonder she desperately craves relief.

The problem is that many authors of papers in the medical literature allow statistics to become their master rather than their servant: numbers are plugged into a statistical program and the results are interpreted in a cut-and-dried fashion. Statistical significance (that two sets of data are not from the same population) is confused with clinical significance (that differences are sufficiently large to have a biological effect).

I think one of the reasons we don’t hear much about PMDD or give sufferers permission to seek help is because we don’t take women’s pain seriously. It’s just a natural burden we’re supposed to bear for being women. It’s been reported that there is a pain bias in the medical industry. It’s unclear if it’s due to a gender bias in medical staff, lack of research on women or differences between how men and women interpret and communicate pain.

advances in AI are poised to drive dramatic productivity increases and perhaps eventually full automation. Radiologists, for example, are trained to interpret the images that result from various medical scans. Image processing and recognition technology is advancing rapidly and may soon be able to usurp the radiologist’s traditional role. Software can already recognize people in photos posted on Facebook and even help identify potential terrorists in airports.

I trudge toward the porch, entertaining the idea of running the other way. But technically, I shouldn't be in any trouble. It wasn't my car. I'm not the one who got a ticket. Samantha Forza did. And the picture on Samantha Forza's driver's license looks a lot like Rayna. She told Officer Downing that she swerved to keep from hitting a camel, which Officer Downing graciously interpreted as a deer after she described it as "a hairy animal with four legs and a horn." Since no one formed a search party to look for either a camel or a unicorn, I figured we were in the clear. But from Mom's expression, I'm miles from clear. "Hi," I say as I reach the steps. "We'll see about that," she says, grabbing my face and shining a pen light in my eyes. I slap it away. "Really? You're checking my pupils? Really?" "Hal said you looked hazy," she says, clipping the pen back on the neckline of her scrubs. "Hal? Who's Hal?" "Hal is the paramedic who took your signature when you declined medical treatment. He radioed in to the hospital after he left you." "Oh. Well, then Hal would have noticed I was just in an accident, so I might have been a little out of it. Doesn't mean I was high." So it wasn't small-town gossip, it was small-county gossip. Good ole Hal's probably transported hundreds of patients to my mom in the ER two towns over. She scowls. "Why didn't you call me? Who is Samantha?" I sigh and push past her. There's no reason to have this conversation on the porch. She follows me into the house. "She's Galen's sister. I didn't call because I didn't have a signal on my cell. We were on a dead road." "Where was Galen? Why were you driving his car?" "He was home. We were just taking it for a drive. He didn't want to come." Technically, all these statements are true, so they sound believable when I say them. Mom snorts and secures the dead bolt on the front door. "Probably because he knows his sister is life threatening behind the wheel." "Probably.

Probability theory naturally comes into play in what we shall call situation 1: When the data-point can be considered to be generated by some randomizing device, for example when throwing dice, flipping coins, or randomly allocating an individual to a medical treatment using a pseudo-random-number generator, and then recording the outcomes of their treatment. But in practice we may be faced with situation 2: When a pre-existing data-point is chosen by a randomizing device, say when selecting people to take part in a survey. And much of the time our data arises from situation 3: When there is no randomness at all, but we act as if the data-point were in fact generated by some random process, for example in interpreting the birth weight of our friend’s baby.

It’s not for the weak or faint of heart. It will take a toll on you. Your body will hurt. Your soul will ache. Your family life will suffer. No one will understand what you do or why you do it, but you do it. You will work nights. You will work weekends. Holidays. You will bathe the elderly, the weak. You will clean their body, their bodily fluids. You will have to know every medication, what it does, when to stop it, when to give it, and how to get it into people. You will have to know how to interpret blood tests, when the doctor must know. You will have thirty seconds to start an IV, how to hook up an EKG machine. You will need to know how to interpret tracing or when you should give or take away oxygen. You will experience joy, grief, and sorrow in a day, sometimes within the same hour. You are the glue between the patient, the family, the doctor. It’s you who will keep everyone happy, as comfortable as possible. Code blue. Trauma evaluation. Labor. Delivery. Surgery. Babies. Postpartum. Psychology. These and more will all need to be learned. And when you think you know everything, you don’t. You’re just starting. I was asked to write this essay on why

Believing in race can be compared to believing in astrology. People who have faith in astrology find constant confirmation that horoscope predictions are reliable and that astrological signs determine personality types. For the faithful, the twelve divisions of the zodiac are as accurate as Blumenbach’s five divisions of human beings. The funny thing is, biostatisticians can find significant medical differences according to astrological signs. In the 1990s, a major randomized clinical trial compared the effectiveness of an intravenous drug, an oral aspirin, and a placebo to treat 17,000 patients who were hospitalized with signs of a heart attack. The study found a huge overall statistical benefit for patients who got the aspirin over the placebo. To test the strength of the outcome, the researchers divided the patients into twelve subgroups by their astrological signs. They found that the zodiac made a difference: their statistical analysis showed that patients born under Gemini or Libra suffered an adverse effect from aspirin.72 Unsurprisingly, physicians laughed off this finding because it was more scientifically plausible to interpret the results as an insignificant coincidence. But an astrology enthusiast would take it as proof that zodiac signs determine people’s health and drug response.

This symbolism may well have been based, originally, on some visionary experience, such as happens not uncommonly today during psychological treatment. For the medical psychologist there is nothing very lurid about it. The context itself points the way to the right interpretation. The image expresses a psychologem that can hardly be formulated in rational terms and has, therefore, to make use of a concrete symbol, just as a dream must when a more or less “abstract” thought comes up during the abaissement du niveau mental that occurs in sleep. These “shocking” surprises, of which there is certainly no lack in dreams, should always be taken “as-if,” even though they clothe themselves in sensual imagery that stops at no scurrility and no obscenity. They are unconcerned with offensiveness, because they do not really mean it. It is as if they were stammering in their efforts to express the elusive meaning that grips the dreamer’s attention.62 [316]       The context of the vision (John 3 : 12) makes it clear that the image should be taken not concretistically but symbolically; for Christ speaks not of earthly things but of a heavenly or spiritual mystery—a “mystery” not because he is hiding something or making a secret of it (indeed, nothing could be more blatant than the naked obscenity of the vision!) but because its meaning is still hidden from consciousness. The modern method of dream-analysis and interpretation follows this heuristic rule.63 If we apply it to the vision, we arrive at the following result: [317]       1. The MOUNTAIN means ascent, particularly the mystical, spiritual ascent to the heights, to the place of revelation where the spirit is present. This motif is so well known that there is no need to document it.64 [318]       2. The central significance of the CHRIST-FIGURE for that epoch has been abundantly proved. In Christian Gnosticism it was a visualization of God as the Archanthropos (Original Man = Adam), and therefore the epitome of man as such: “Man and the Son of Man.” Christ is the inner man who is reached by the path of self-knowledge, “the kingdom of heaven within you.” As the Anthropos he corresponds to what is empirically the most important archetype and, as judge of the living and the dead and king of glory, to the real organizing principle of the unconscious, the quaternity, or squared circle of the self.65 In saying this I have not done violence to anything; my views are based on the experience that mandala structures have the meaning and function of a centre of the unconscious personality.66 The quaternity of Christ, which must be borne in mind in this vision, is exemplified by the cross symbol, the rex gloriae, and Christ as the year.

Summary There is a small group of cases, initially treated as rape where there is no evidence of an assault: primarily where a third party makes the report and the victim subsequently denies; or where the victim suspects being assaulted while asleep, unconscious or affected by alcohol/drugs but the medical/forensic examination suggests no sex has taken place. How the police should designate such cases is problematic. - Eight per cent of reported cases in the sample were designated false by the police. - A higher proportion of cases designated false involved 16- to 25-year-olds. - A greater degree of acquaintance between victim and perpetrator decreased the likelihood of cases being designated false. - Cases were most commonly designated false on the grounds of: the complainant admitting it; retractions; evidential issues; and non co-operation by the complainant. - In a number of cases the police also cited mental health problems, previous allegations, use of alcohol/drugs and lack of CCTV evidence. - The pro formas and the interviews with police officers suggested inconsistencies in the complainant’s account could be interpreted as ‘lying’. - The authors’ analysis suggests that the designation of false allegations in a number of cases was uncertain according to Home Office counting rules, and if these were excluded, would reduce the proportion of false complaints to three per cent of reported cases. - This is considerably lower than the estimates of police officers interviewed." A gap or a chasm?: attrition in reported rape cases.

State sponsored medicine and science can function as ideology, inspiring blind commitment, fanatical defensiveness and denial, particularly of outcomes inconsistent with the preferred explanatory model. The social etiology of compromised health, insists on an understanding of these conditions and the way they impact the objectivity or neutrality of scientific and medical interpretation.

William Bedwell was both a leading mathematician and, because his readings in medieval mathematical studies had led him down this path, an Arabist, one of England’s first. He was no admirer of Islam, being the author of a vituperative book on ‘the blasphemous seducer Mohammed’, but he was captivated by the theological, medical and mathematical genius of the Arabs. Arabic, he was also convinced, was an invaluable tool in the interpretation of Hebrew.

As we gain an understanding of what's going on internally, we need to apply that same kind of awareness and understanding to others and to the environment around us. I've done ongoing research on the experiences of North Americans who volunteer overseas for one or two weeks. Most of these volunteers travel to developing countries where they help with disaster relief, build medical clinics, teach English, or engage in religious mission work. Of all the comments made by these North American travelers, the most common statement made upon their return is something like, “Even though those people have so little, they're so happy!” There's something endearing about hearing a group of relatively wealthy North Americans talk about their amazement that people with so little could be so happy. My question is, are the people they observed really happy? I've asked several hundred of these volunteers, “What makes you think they're happy?” They most often respond, “Because they were always smiling and laughing. And they were so generous to us. They fed us better than they eat themselves.” Part of becoming more aware of others requires we slow down to ask what familiar behaviors might mean in a different culture. The observation made by these American travelers is usually accurate—the locals they're meeting are in fact smiling and generous. But the question is whether the North Americans are accurately interpreting what those behaviors mean. First, if you don't speak the language and you're just meeting someone for the first time, what do you do? After some feeble attempts at saying things like “Hola!” “Gross Got!” or “Nee how!” there's often some nervous laughter that ensues. It's really awkward. So the locals might be expressing happiness or their smiles might just be a nervous response. Then add that in places like Thailand, where there are twenty-three different smiles, each smile communicates something different. And in one small, extremely polite community in New Zealand, smiling reactions are a way of expressing that they feel deeply offended.4 As I've consistently said, the point isn't to learn every nuanced meaning. But with heightened awareness of others, an individual will realize that while smiles might reflect genuine happiness, they just as well might be a nervous cross-cultural response that indicates little about one's level of contentment.

The historical record also shows that attitudes toward homosexuality have little to do with whether people believe it occurs in animals or not, and consequently, in its "naturalness". True, throughout much of recorded history, the charge of "unnaturalness" - including the claim that homosexuality did not occur in animals - was used to justify every imaginable form of sanction, control, and repression against homosexuality. But many other interpretations of "naturalness" were also prevalent at various times. Indeed, the very fact that homosexuality was thought to be "unnatural" - that is, not found in nature - was sometimes used to justify its *superiority* to heterosexuality. In ancient Greece, for example, same-sex love was thought to be purer than opposite-sex love because it did not involve procreation or "animal-like" passions. On the other hand, homosexuality was sometimes condemned precisely because it was considered *closer* to "nature", reflecting the base, uncontrolled sexual instincts of the animal world. The Nazis used this reasoning (in part) to target homosexuals and other "subhumans" for the concentration camps (where homosexual men subjected to medical experiments were referred to as test animals), while sexual relations between women were disparaginly characterized as "animal love" in late eighteenth-century New England . The irrationality of such beliefs is highlighted in cases where charges of "unnaturalness" were combined, paradoxically, with accusations of animalistic behavior. Some early Latin texts, for instance, simultaneously condemned homosexuals for exhibiting behavior unknown in animals while also denouncing them for imitating particular species (such as the hyena or hare) that were believed to indulge in homosexuality. In our own time, the fact that a given characteristic of a minority human population is biologically determined has little to do with whether that population should be - or is - discriminated against. Racial minorities, for example, can claim a biological basis for their difference, yet this has done little to eliminate racial prejudice. Religious groups, on the other hand, can claim no such biological prerogative, and yet this does not invalidate the entitlement of such groups to freedom from discrimination. It should be clear, then, that whether homosexuality is biologically determined or not - none of these things guarantee the acceptance or rejection of homosexuality or in itself renders homosexuality "valid" or "illegitimate".

Page 44: A Chinese immigrant arriving in Bangkok is assured of ready assistance from his dialect group, and this help is offered without question by people who speak his own language and know his needs. Through them, he is put in contact with relatives or persons from his own village in China. They see that he is housed and given work. Later the association stands always ready to give help when needed—to offer advice on sending remittances to China, to provide interpreters when dealing with officials, and to intercede when the immigrant runs afoul of the government’s red tape. Like the prototype institutions of China, the dialect association provides educational and medical facilities—more elaborate in fact than anything available in the rude villages of South China, and a continuing system of protective services in times of crisis or misfortune. In Thailand the individual Chinese who needs a loan, a job, or help of any kind will ordinarily appeal to his relatives first as he would in China. When these are unable to help, he can usually get assistance from his dialect association. While the type of problem brought to the attention of the dialect association may differ from problems faced in China, the fact remains that the association stands ready to help the individual Chinese in precisely the same manner and with the same spirit as he would expect from his clan group in China. Furthermore, just as everyone with the same surname and family origin was considered a member of the clan in China and therefore entitled to assistance from other members, so in Thailand all persons of a certain dialect groups are considered ipso facto members of the dialect association and thereby entitled to its full assistance.

Building on the Pentagon’s anthrax simulation (1999) and the intelligence agency’s “Dark Winter” (2001), Atlantic Storm (2003, 2005), Global Mercury (2003), Schwartz’s “Lockstep” Scenario Document (2010), and MARS (2017), the Gates-funded SPARS scenario war-gamed a bioterrorist attack that precipitated a global coronavirus epidemic lasting from 2025 to 2028, culminating in coercive mass vaccination of the global population. And, as Gates had promised, the preparations were analogous to “preparing for war.”191 Under the code name “SPARS Pandemic,” Gates presided over a sinister summer school for globalists, spooks, and technocrats in Baltimore. The panelists role-played strategies for co-opting the world’s most influential political institutions, subverting democratic governance, and positioning themselves as unelected rulers of the emerging authoritarian regime. They practiced techniques for ruthlessly controlling dissent, expression, and movement, and degrading civil rights, autonomy, and sovereignty. The Gates simulation focused on deploying the usual psyops retinue of propaganda, surveillance, censorship, isolation, and political and social control to manage the pandemic. The official eighty-nine-page summary is a miracle of fortune-telling—an uncannily precise month-by-month prediction of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic as it actually unfolded.192 Looked at another way, when it erupted five years later, the 2020 COVID-19 contagion faithfully followed the SPARS blueprint. Practically the only thing Gates and his planners got wrong was the year. Gates’s simulation instructs public health officials and other collaborators in the global vaccine cartel exactly what to expect and how to behave during the upcoming plague. Reading through the eighty-nine pages, it’s difficult not to interpret this stunningly prescient document as a planning, signaling, and training exercise for replacing democracy with a new regimen of militarized global medical tyranny. The scenario directs participants to deploy fear-driven propaganda narratives to induce mass psychosis and to direct the public toward unquestioning obedience to the emerging social and economic order. According to the scenario narrative, a so-called “SPARS” coronavirus ignites in the United States in January 2025 (the COVID-19 pandemic began in January 2020). As the WHO declares a global emergency, the federal government contracts a fictional firm that resembles Moderna. Consistent with Gates’s seeming preference for diabolical cognomens, the firm is dubbed “CynBio” (Sin-Bio) to develop an innovative vaccine using new “plug-and-play” technology. In the scenario, and now in real life, Federal health officials invoke the PREP Act to provide vaccine makers liability protection.

More and more, providers are being held to higher (legal) standards of care without the appropriate support from their employers. That is, medics are being investigated and sanctioned at a more aggressive rate than ever before over smaller and smaller clinical infractions. To get with the times, agencies need to spend much more of their allotted training time on skills like 12 lead EKG application and interpretation, assessment algorithms, and intubation or advanced parenteral route access, for example. The list of available and important topics is as long and diverse as the national, state, and local scopes of practice. On the other hand, agencies that resist this reality cannot be surprised to discover that their care is generally substandard, for which there can be grave legal consequences. They can’t throw their bottles on the floor and cry because they don’t have them. I predict that any agency that emphasizes drilling on patient care as much as or even more than firefighting will very quickly see a dramatic shift in the culture from EMS apathy to EMS advocacy. That culture shift should be a welcome bonus; the key benefit being finally providing the superior care about which they already brag. Yes, there will be some resistance at first and that is great. Resistance is the surest way to quickly identify those who are not committed, because they will whine and complain the most and they will require the most work. If they are not willing to do the work, then maybe they don’t belong.

But his own interpretation is that the improvement in medical outcomes was brought about primarily by “a shift in clinicians’ belief—by showing them that the rate of infection was not inevitable and could be controlled, in a way that appealed to their professional ethos as doctors and nurses.

There simply are no truly independent sources of research in the US. Industry funding has extended its reach into every sector, from medical journals that present and interpret the research to universities and contract research entities that conduct the research to patient advocacy organizations that promote various treatments to medical education for doctors to the agencies that are supposed to protect the public interest—including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and, of course, the FDA.

hemophilia, hemofilia

psychoanalysis has proved less successful as a critique of culture in general for several reasons: the oligarchic style of leadership, its establishment in private institutions and refusal to join in the debate of the University, its attempts to stay linked with the medical, and scientific, establishment, and, perhaps most importantly, its eventually exclusive focus on the mental pathology of individuals and theorising restricted to treatment aims within a medical model.

There is nothing wrong in building flyovers in Delhi. What is not fair is when we do not also build an approach road to villages across the nation. There is nothing wrong in having fountains with coloured lights in the capital. After all, Delhi should be beautiful. But it is unjustified when we have not provided drinking water to all our villages. There is nothing wrong in having a modern, private hospital in Bombay, or the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi, or other large medical institutions in our big cities. But it is not justified when we have not arranged to have two drops of a medicine put into the eyes of a farmer’s newborn baby, and that baby goes blind. While this would have cost us nothing, we have preferred to spend crores of rupees in building five-star hospitals in cities. Why does this happen? Because policy making is in our hands – in the hands of the elite – and naturally, even unconsciously perhaps, when we make policies we make policies that suit us; we usurp the resources of this land somewhat shamelessly to benefit ourselves. The most charitable interpretation of it is that we do it unconsciously.

disease.’” —Lance Dodes, MD, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School (retired); author of Breaking Addiction and The Heart of Addiction “Stanton Peele has helped us understand the most tortuous aspects of addiction and recovery, without ever joining the parade of conventional experts…who happen to be marching the wrong way.” —Marc Lewis, author of The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease; professor

Although interpreted as nonreligious, chiropractic is premised on a vitalistic, harmonial philosophy and fulfills many of the same functions as religion. More than a medical service, chiropractic helps explain life’s struggles, cope with present stressors, and anticipate the future with hope.

Abortion is one of the most commonly performed medical procedures in the United States, and it is tragic that many women who have abortions are all too often mischaracterized and stigmatized, their exercise of moral agency sullied. Their judgment is publicly and forcefully second-guessed by those in politics and religion who have no business entering the deliberation. The reality is that women demonstrate forethought and care; talk to them the way clergy do and witness their sense of responsibility. Women take abortion as seriously as any of us takes any health-care procedure. They understand the life-altering obligations of parenthood and family life. They worry over their ability to provide for a child, the impact on work, school, the children they already have, or caring for other dependents. Perhaps the woman is unable to be a single parent or is having problems with a husband or partner or other kids.2 Maybe her contraception failed her. Maybe when it came to having sex she didn’t have much choice. Maybe this pregnancy will threaten her health, making adoption an untenable option. Or perhaps a wanted pregnancy takes a bad turn and she decides on abortion. It’s pretty complicated. It’s her business to decide on the outcome of her pregnancy—not ours to intervene, to blame, or to punish. Clergy know about moral agency through pastoral work. Women and families invite us into their lives to listen, reflect, offer sympathy, prayer, or comfort. But when it comes to giving advice, we recognize that we are not the ones to live with the outcome; the patient faces the consequences. The woman bears the medical risk of a pregnancy and has to live with the results. Her determination of the medical, spiritual, and ethical dimensions holds sway. The status of her fetus, when she thinks life begins, and all the other complications are hers alone to consider. Many women know right away when a pregnancy must end or continue. Some need to think about it. Whatever a woman decides, she needs to be able to get good quality medical care and emotional and spiritual support as she works toward the outcome she seeks; she figures it out. That’s all part of “moral agency.” No one is denying that her fetus has a moral standing. We are affirming that her moral standing is higher; she comes first. Her deliberations, her considerations have priority. The patient must be the one to arrive at a conclusion and act upon it. As a rabbi, I tell people what the Jewish tradition says and describe the variety of options within the faith. They study, deliberate, conclude, and act. I cannot force them to think or do differently. People come to their decisions in their own way. People who believe the decision is up to the woman are typically called “pro-choice.” “Choice” echoes what is called “moral agency,” “conscience,” “informed will,” or “personal autonomy”—spiritually or religiously. I favor the term “informed will” because it captures the idea that we learn and decide: First, inform the will. Then exercise conscience. In Reform Judaism, for instance, an individual demonstrates “informed will” in approaching and deciding about traditional dietary rules—in a fluid process of study of traditional teaching, consideration of the personal significance of that teaching, arriving at a conclusion, and taking action. Unitarian Universalists tell me that the search for truth and meaning leads to the exercise of conscience. We witness moral agency when a member of a faith community interprets faith teachings in light of historical religious understandings and personal conscience. I know that some religious people don’t do

More generally, according to McKenzie, abandonment can be interpreted in many different ways by a child, but it always results in separation anxiety and guilt. He writes, “Thus the human infant is very sensitive and can be terrified or overwhelmed by what it experiences as a threat of separation from its mother. Not just the obvious separations such as the mother dying, but subtle ones such as the family moving to a new house, the birth of a sibling, or an older child getting sick and requiring all the mother’s attention for a period of time. And if there are five older siblings there is five times the chance of this happening. There are literally thousands of events that can cause the infant to experience a separation trauma and feel threatened—by physical OR emotional separation.” A child in its greed for love does not enjoy having to share the affection of its parents with its brothers and sisters; and it notices that the whole of their affection is lavished upon it once more whenever it arouses their anxiety by falling ill. It has now discovered a means of enticing out its parents’ love and will make use of that means as soon as it has the necessary psychical material at its disposal for producing an illness. — Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

The rich have interchangeable heads and their interpretations of law and religion are just as manufactured, false, interchangeable and disposable as the fake moral screen. They have an entire media system to dispense their manipulations of those scrambling for food shelter and some illusion of security. Our borders are opening and closing to refugees of the countries our government pillages, based solely on whether or not those governments toe our party line. The u.s. uses its economic blockades to starve entire populations and accelerate peoples’ deaths from malnutrition or collapsed medical care systems. The bureaucratic distancing technique in washington d.c. creates poverty and mass death in another region of the hemisphere and allows officials here to proclaim that the attacked country’s political system is what has made it fail. Because I am born into a created system of corruption does not mean I have to turn the other way when the fake moral screens are unfurled. I am just as capable of creating my own moral contexts. In fact, using our government’s techniques, I can reinvent and redefine a screen for my own needs.

Ars longa, vita brevis is a Latin translation of an aphorism coming originally from Greek. It roughly translates to "skillfulness takes time and life is short". The aphorism quotes the first two lines of the Aphorisms by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates: "Ὁ βίος βραχύς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή". The familiar Latin translation ars longa, vita brevis reverses the order of the original lines, but can express the same principle. Translations The original text, a standard Latin translation, and an English translation from the Greek follow. Greek: Ho bíos brakhús, hē dè tékhnē makrḗ, ho dè kairòs oxús, hē dè peîra sphalerḗ, hē dè krísis khalepḗ. Latin: Vīta brevis, ars longa, occāsiō praeceps, experīmentum perīculōsum, iūdicium difficile. English: Life is short, and craft long, opportunity fleeting, experimentations perilous, and judgment difficult. Interpretation Despite the common usage of the Latin version, Ars longa, vita brevis, the usage caveat is about the Greek original that contains the word tékhnē (technique and craft ) that is translated as the Latin ars (art) as in the usage The Art of War. The authorship of the aphorism is ascribed to the physician Hippocrates, as the preface of his medical text: “The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate”. Similar sayings The late-medieval author Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) observed "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne" ("The life so short, the craft so long to learn", the first line of the Parlement of Foules). The first-century CE rabbi Tarfon is quoted as saying "The day is short, the labor vast, the workers are lazy, the reward great, the Master urgent." (Avot 2:15)

In contrast to phobias (such as a spider phobia, which is based on a specific irrational fear", posttraumatic stress is the result of a fundamental reorganization of the central nervous system based on having experienced an actual threat of annihilation, (or seeing someone else being annihilated). which reorganizes self-experience (as helpless) and the interpretation of reality (the entire world is a dangerous place).

You know how I always interpreted that? These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship. "Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you, as I'm sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you're looking for, no matter how much of them you have." I glanced around Morrie's study. It was the same today as it had been the first day I arrived. The books held their same places on the shelves. The papers cluttered the same old desk. The outside rooms had not been improved or upgraded. In fact, Morrie really hadn't bought anything new-except medical equipment-in a long, long time, maybe years. The day he learned that he was terminally ill was the day he lost interest in his purchasing power. So the TV was the same old model, the car that Charlotte drove was the same old model, the dishes and the silverware and the towels- all the same. And yet the house had changed so drastically. It had filled with love and teaching and communication. It had filled with friendship and family and honesty and tears. It had filled with colleagues and students and meditation teachers and therapists and nurses and a cappella groups. It had become, in a very real way, a wealthy home, even though Morrie's bank account was rapidly depleting.

The care of the sick unfolds in stories. The effective practice of healthcare requires the ability to recognize, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others. Medicine practiced with narrative competence is a model for humane and effective medical practice. It addresses the need of patients and caregivers to voice their experience, to be heard and to be valued, and it acknowledges the power of narrative to change the way care is given and received.

pierce. The understanding of this Hebrew verb is problematic. Traditionally translated “pierce,” this Hebrew verb occurs only here, and can only be translated here as “pierce” if it is emended. As it stands, it indicates that the psalmist’s hands and feet are “like a lion” (see NIV text note), which some commentators have interpreted to mean that the psalmist’s hands and feet were trussed up on a stick as a captured lion would be. Unfortunately, despite all the lion hunting scenes that are preserved and described, no lion is shown being transported this way. If a verb is desirable here, a suitable candidate must be found among the related Semitic languages. The most likely one is similar to Akkadian and Syriac cognates that have the meaning “shrink” or “shrivel.” Akkadian medical texts speak of a symptom in which the hands and feet are shrunken. Although Mt 27 uses several other lines from this psalm (e.g., Mt 27:35, 39, 43, 46), Mt 27 is of no help here, because it does not refer to this verse. Since Matthew omits it, he likely did not read the psalm as referring to the piercing of hands and feet.

Turning to the Gospels, if lepra was little different from eczema or scurvy medically speaking, why did the Gospel writers care to present Jesus performing a miracle that was roughly equivalent to using dandruff shampoo or an antifungal ointment twice a week? What does the fact that Jesus overcomes something as seemingly mundane as skin blemishes say about his mission and identity? Surely there were more pressing medical conditions in the first century upon which Mark, Matthew, and Luke could have focused! The answer must be that they did not want to demonstrate Jesus’s opposition to Jewish ritual concerns about lepra, as is so often the argument of New Testament scholars; rather, these early followers of Jesus wanted to depict him in a way that showed his opposition to the very existence of lepra itself. The difference between these two interpretations is substantial. The former denies the reality and power of ritual impurity; the latter acknowledges its reality but believes that Jesus’s power transcends the power that creates the ritual impurity.

Fervor of faith is not the problem, bigotry of faith is the problem. Or to put it simply. Religion is not the problem, fundamentalism is the real problem. But we must be aware of what a fundamentalist is. A fundamentalist is not necessarily a person who takes the scripture literally, rather, a fundamentalist is a person who deems their own religion as the only true religion, and all others as heresy. Some fundamentalists do interpret the scripture metaphorically, and still manage to remain a bigot. After all, you see outside, what is inside. So the point is, if you want to see integration in the world, first you gotta irrigate your heart, not your colon, of all division. Until you understand undivision, you won't understand divinity. No sabes unidad, no sabes divinidad. Even if you have never heard of Jesus, even if you have never heard of Buddha, even if you have never heard of Moses and Mohammed, even if you have never heard of Nanak and Naskar, you can still be divine. But if you never treat another person with kindness and dignity, you can never be divine. It's your behavior that makes you religious, not your belief. Besides, even in this day and age, if your belief still keeps raising walls, instead of bringing them down, it's time you seek medical help. Because you see, bigotry is not a legal problem, it is a medical problem, just like alcoholism is a medical problem. Fundamentalism is not a neurodivergence, fundamentalism is a lethal neuropsychiatric condition, which requires immediate medical attention.

When no interpreter was present, the doctor and the patient stumbled around together in a dense fog of misunderstanding whose hazards only increased if the patient spoke a little English, enough to lull the doctor into mistakenly believing some useful information had been transferred. When an interpreter was present, the duration of every diagnostic interview automatically doubled. (Or tripled. Or centupled. Because most medical terms had no Hmong equivalents, laborious paraphrases were often necessary. In a recently published Hmong-English medical glossary, the recommended Hmong translation for “parasite” is twenty-four words long; for “hormone,” thirty-one words; and for “X chromosome,” forty-six words.) The prospect of those tortoise-paced interviews struck fear into the heart of every chronically harried resident.

This could have been easily explained by medical experts skilled in helping the public weigh the pros and cons of health decisions. Many media outlets, however, seemed gripped by the fear that anything more than a passing report on possible risks would damage vaccine uptake and provide fodder for the conspiracy crowd. Except the opposite turned out to be true: without easy access to reliable, in-depth information about vaccine risks, rumors about friends of friends falling ill or dropping dead after getting “the jab” coursed through the digital grapevine. A door was left wide open for my doppelganger and other attention-economy hustlers to position themselves as fearless medical investigators, combing through raw vaccine trial data and supposedly suppressed CDC reports that people without medical degrees generally lack the expertise to interpret. Of course that didn’t stop them from cherry-picking every self-reported claim or actual negative reaction to support their incessant cries that a vaccine “genocide” was underway and being covered up by the Big Pharma–funded lackeys in the lamestream media.

The solfeggio is a six-note scale and is also nicknamed “the creational scale.” Traditional Indian music calls this scale the saptak, or seven steps, and relates each note to a chakra. These six frequencies, and their related effects, are as follows: Do 396 Hz Liberating guilt and fear Re 417 Hz Undoing situations and facilitating change Mi 528 Hz Transformation and miracles (DNA repair) Fa 639 Hz Connecting/relationships Sol 741 Hz Awakening intuition La 852 Hz Returning to spiritual order Mi has actually been used by molecular biologists to repair genetic defects.115 Some researchers believe that sound governs the growth of the body. As Dr. Michael Isaacson and Scott Klimek teach in a sound healing class at Normandale College in Minneapolis, Dr. Alfred Tomatis believes that the ear’s first in utero function is to establish the growth of the rest of the body. Sound apparently feeds the electrical impulses that charge the neocortex. High-frequency sounds energize the brain, creating what Tomatis calls “charging sounds.”116 Low-frequency sounds drain energy and high-frequency sounds attract energy. Throughout all of life, sound regulates the sending and receiving of energy—even to the point of creating problems. People with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder listen too much with their bodies, processing sound through bone conduction rather than the ears. They are literally too “high in sound.”117 Some scientists go a step further and suggest that sound not only affects the body but also the DNA, actually stimulating the DNA to create information signals that spread throughout the body. Harvard-trained Dr. Leonard Horowitz has actually demonstrated that DNA emits and receives phonons and photons, the electromagnetic waves of sound and light. As well, three Nobel laureates in medical research have asserted that the primary function of DNA is not to synthesize proteins, but to perform bioacoustic and bioelectrical signaling.118 While research such as that by Dr. Popp shows that DNA is a biophoton emitter, other research suggests that sound actually originates light. In a paper entitled “A Holographic Concept of Reality,” which was featured in Stanley Krippner’s book Psychoenergetic Systems, a team of researchers led by Richard Miller showed that superposed coherent waves in the cells interact and form patterns first through sound, and secondly through light.119 This idea dovetails with research by Russian scientists Peter Gariaev and Vladimir Poponin, whose work with torsion energies was covered in Chapter 25. They demonstrated that chromosomes work like holographic biocomputers, using the DNA’s own electromagnetic radiation to generate and interpret spiraling waves of sound and light that run up and down the DNA ladder. Gariaev and his group used language frequencies such as words (which are sounds) to repair chromosomes damaged by X-rays. Gariaev thus concludes that life is electromagnetic rather than chemical and that DNA can be activated with linguistic expressions—or sounds—like an antenna. In turn, this activation modifies the human bioenergy fields, which transmit radio and light waves to bodily structures.120

I changed my way of interpreting the messages by merely allowing it to happen, feeling the pain as a momentary wave of anger flowing over me that needed to express itself because I had never learned how. “Ok, you’ve said what you wanted—be gone with you now, Pain!

But there are also several potential problems. One example is interpretation of medical jargon, such as the frequent use of “SOB,” for shortness of breath, which could be taken by the patient to mean something altogether different in reading the statement “the patient appears SOB.” And then there’s NERD, which actually means “no evidence of recurrent disease.

Food allergies are no joking matter. We have a friend who left a Paris restaurant on a gurney because a waiter took it upon himself to interpret her stated Capsicum annuum (bell peppers) allergy as merely an intolerance. Another friend is fatally allergic to Arachis hypogaea (peanuts). Serious allergy sufferers carry epinephrine pens that can inhibit some allergic reactions. They never take risks, because the appearance of EMTs—emergency medical technicians—and a stretcher kills the vibe of any celebration. And any veteran chef who’s seen a severe allergy attack unfold at a party will work in good faith to make damn sure it never happens again. But more and more Americans dress up mild intolerances and preferences for food in allergy drag, perhaps to absolve themselves of the rudeness of expecting to be served a customized plate. Chefs and waiters share stories of such behavior constantly: guests who are “allergic” to dairy until the chocolate pudding comes out for dessert. The “celiac” who needs his first course and second course gluten-free and then asks for a second slice of cake. “It’s every party now,” Robb Garceau, now executive chef at Neuman’s Kitchen, told us. “Guest says: ‘I need a vegan first course!’ So we build a special salad just for her. And then we send her a vegan main. But she’s seen somebody else’s salmon. Captain tells me: ‘She wants the fish course.’ And I’m like: ‘What?! You were vegan half an hour ago!

In point of fact, all tables of values, all the "thou shalts" known to history and ethnology, need primarily a physiological, at any rate in preference to a psychological, elucidation and interpretation: all equally require a critique from medical science.

Stochastic and Reactive Effects Replication may be difficult to achieve if the phenomenon under study is inherently stochastic, that is, if it changes with time. Moreover, the phenomenon may react to the experimental situation, altering its characteristics because of the experiment. These are particularly sticky problems in the behavioral and social sciences, for it is virtually impossible to guarantee that an individual tested once will be exactly the same when tested later. In fact, when dealing with living organisms, we cannot realistically expect strict stability of behavior over time. Researchers have developed various experimental designs that attempt to counteract this problem of large fluctuations in behavior. Replication is equally problematic in medical research, for the effects of a drug as well as the symptoms of a disease change with time, confounding the observed course of the illness. Was the cure accelerated or held back by the introduction of the test drug? Often the answer can only be inferred based on what happens on average to a group of test patients compared to a group of control patients. Even attempts to keep experimenters and test participants completely blind to the experimental manipulations do not always address the stochastic and reactive elements of the phenomena under study. Besides the possibility that an effect may change over time, some phenomena may be inherently statistical; that is, they may exist only as probabilities or tendencies to occur. Experimenter Effects In a classic book entitled Pitfalls in Human Research, psychologist Theodore X. Barber discusses ten ways in which behavioral research can go wrong.11 These include such things as the “investigator paradigm effect,” in which the investigator’s conceptual framework biases the way an experiment is conducted and interpreted, and the “experimenter personal attributes effect,” where variables such as age, sex, and friendliness interact with the test participants’ responses. A third pitfall is the “experimenter unintentional expectancy effect”; that is, the experimenter’s prior expectations can influence the outcome of an experiment. Researchers’ expectations and prior beliefs affect how their experiments are conducted, how the data are interpreted, and how other investigators’ research is judged. This topic, discussed in chapter 14, is relevant to understanding the criticisms of psi experiments and how the evidence for psi phenomena has often been misinterpreted.

For the first time in ten years, we have an honest interpretation of what happened to our family. We understand that while Emily has an anxiety disorder, let’s call it that, and has a very hard time regulating her emotions, a lot of her symptoms are learned. They can be unlearned. She became a grab bag of every imaginable disease. Labels were put on top of labels. She was kidnapped by the system. The medical system and the drug companies. We let her be kidnapped. We are going to get our daughter back. We understand it is going to take time and we have a lot of work to do here. We have to unlearn our reactions, too. We also get that we have been part of the drama. We know we are not innocents.

There are literally thousands of people who have been through the mental health system who have not had the spiritual aspect of their experience honoured. The spiritual dimension has been completely overshadowed by the interpretation given to their experience by the medical model.

The typical medical interpretation of microscopic colitis does not include the possibility of constipation as a symptom, nor alternating diarrhea and constipation, and yet many MC patients have those symptoms rather than chronic diarrhea. ...Unless a patient comes to a gastroenterologist complaining of watery diarrhea, MC will probably be completely off the doctor's radar. Few colonoscopies are done to investigate cases of constipation, and without a colonoscopy or sigmoidoscopy plus biopsies, diagnosis of MC is impossible. In cases such as these, the default diagnosis will almost surely be irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), so the patient will be very unlikely to receive any treatment that is effective at relieving the inflammation that's causing the symptoms.

AT 3:00 P.M. SHARP on August 23, 2012, Colonel Edgar escorted the two men into Mattis’s office on MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. The sixty-one-year-old general was an intimidating figure in person: muscular and broad shouldered, with dark circles under his eyes that suggested a man who didn’t bother much with sleep. His office was decorated with the mementos of a long military career. Amid the flags, plaques, and coins, Shoemaker’s eyes rested briefly on a set of magnificent swords displayed in a glass cabinet. As they sat down in a wood-paneled conference room off to one side of the office, Mattis cut to the chase: “Guys, I’ve been trying to get this thing deployed for a year now. What’s going on?” Shoemaker had gone over everything again with Gutierrez and felt confident he was on solid ground. He spoke first, giving a brief overview of the issues raised by an in-theater test of the Theranos technology. Gutierrez took over from there and told the general his army colleague was correct in his interpretation of the law: the Theranos device was very much subject to regulation by the FDA. And since the agency hadn’t yet reviewed and approved it for commercial use, it could only be tested on human subjects under strict conditions set by an institutional review board. One of those conditions was that the test subjects give their informed consent—something that was notoriously hard to obtain in a war zone. Mattis was reluctant to give up. He wanted to know if they could suggest a way forward. As he’d put it to Elizabeth in an email a few months earlier, he was convinced her invention would be “a game-changer” for his men. Gutierrez and Shoemaker proposed a solution: a “limited objective experiment” using leftover de-identified blood samples from soldiers. It would obviate the need to obtain informed consent and it was the only type of study that could be put together as quickly as Mattis seemed to want to proceed. They agreed to pursue that course of action. Fifteen minutes after they’d walked in, Shoemaker and Gutierrez shook Mattis’s hand and walked out. Shoemaker was immensely relieved. All in all, Mattis had been gruff but reasonable and a workable compromise had been reached. The limited experiment agreed upon fell short of the more ambitious live field trial Mattis had had in mind. Theranos’s blood tests would not be used to inform the treatment of wounded soldiers. They would only be performed on leftover samples after the fact to see if their results matched the army’s regular testing methods. But it was something. Earlier in his career, Shoemaker had spent five years overseeing the development of diagnostic tests for biological threat agents and he would have given his left arm to get access to anonymized samples from service members in theater. The data generated from such testing could be very useful in supporting applications to the FDA. Yet, over the ensuing months, Theranos inexplicably failed to take advantage of the opportunity it was given. When General Mattis retired from the military in March 2013, the study using leftover de-identified samples hadn’t begun. When Colonel Edgar took on a new assignment as commander of the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases a few months later, it still hadn’t started. Theranos just couldn’t seem to get its act together. In July 2013, Lieutenant Colonel Shoemaker retired from the army. At his farewell ceremony, his Fort Detrick colleagues presented him with a “certificate of survival” for having the courage to stand up to Mattis in person and emerging from the encounter alive. They also gave him a T-shirt with the question, “What do you do after surviving a briefing with a 4 star?” written on the front. The answer could be found on the back: “Retire and sail off into the sunset.

Here too Luke speaks to our day. Throughout the world, people are coming to the conviction that poverty is in large measure the result of injustice. Those of us who are more affluent, who have never really known hunger, nakedness, and lack of medical services, and who consider ourselves producers of wealth, find it difficult to understand such an interpretation of reality. We look for people who are poor through their own fault, and then claim that we are willing to help “the worthy poor,” but not the rest. Conveniently, we then conclude that the worthy poor are just a few, and that therefore no radical action is needed. The poor in Luke are the supposedly unworthy poor. Quite frequently, “the poor and the sinners” were lumped together. After all, the poor could not offer proper sacrifices, could not keep themselves clean of ritual contamination, and had to deal with many things that the godly considered unclean. It is to these poor that the message is good news. It is to these poor that the great reversal is announced. Thus once again Luke comes into our present reality speaking a word that, though unwelcome by many, our age needs to heed.

The promise of artificial intelligence in medicine is to provide composite, panoramic views of individuals’ medical data; to improve decision making; to avoid errors such as misdiagnosis and unnecessary procedures; to help in the ordering and interpretation of appropriate tests; and to recommend treatment.

Charles Lewis had investigated the deaths from diphtheria of several children whose parents were Peculiar People, members of a Wesleyan sect formed in Essex in 1838. In accordance with their interpretation of a passage in St James’s Epistle, the parents had not called a doctor when their children fell ill, and instead tried to cure them through prayer and the anointment of oil. The Children’s Act of 1889 enabled the state to prosecute a parent for the ill-treatment or culpable neglect of a child, and an amendment of 1894 specified that failure to obtain medical help could be an offence. Yet all that the coroner’s court was able to do in the Peculiar People cases was give a verdict of death from natural causes – it was hard to prove that a death from diphtheria could have been prevented or even delayed by medical intervention. Lewis announced that he was ‘sick and tired’ of having these cases reported to him when he was powerless to act, and demanded that the law be tightened up. When a Peculiar father explained to him, ‘I stand up for the Lord’, Lewis returned: ‘You can lie [down] and die, if you like, but it is cowardly, most cowardly, to allow helpless children to do so.

The fading relevance of the nature–nurture argument has recently been revived by the rise of evolutionary psychology. A more sophisticated understanding of Darwinian evolution (survival of the fittest) has led to theories about the possible evolutionary value of some psychiatric disorders. A simplistic view would predict that all mental illnesses with a genetic component should lower survival and ought to die out. ‘Inclusive fitness’, however, assesses the evolutionary value of a characteristic not simply on whether it helps that individual to survive but whether it makes it more likely that their offspring will survive. Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene gives convincing explanations of the evolutionary advantages of group support and altruism when individuals sacrifice themselves for others. A range of speculative hypotheses have since been proposed for the evolutionary advantage of various behaviour differences and mental illnesses. Many of these draw on ethological games-theory (i.e. the benefits of any behaviour can only be understood in the context of the behaviour of other members of the group). So depression might be seen as a safe response to ‘defeat’ in a hierarchical group because it makes the individual withdraw from conflict while they recover. Mania, conversely, with its expansiveness and increased sexual activity, is proposed as a response to success in a hierarchical tussle promoting the propagation of that individual’s genes. Changes in behaviour that look like depression and hypomania can be clearly seen in primates as they move up and down the pecking order that dominates their lives. The habitual isolation and limited need for social contact of individuals with schizophrenia has been rather imaginatively proposed as adaptive to remote habitats with low food supplies (and also a protection against the risk of infectious diseases and epidemics). Evolutionary psychology will undoubtedly increasingly influence psychiatric thinking – many of our disorders fit poorly into a classical ‘medical model’. Already it has helped establish a less either–or approach to the discussion. It is, however, a highly controversial area – not so much around mental disorders but in relation to social behaviour and particularly to gender specific behaviour. Here it is often interpreted as excusing a very male-orientated, exploitative worldview. Luckily that is someone else’s battle.

Metherell’s conclusions were consistent with the findings of other physicians who have carefully studied the issue. Among them is Dr. William D. Edwards, whose 1986 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded, “Clearly, the weight of the historical and medical evidence indicates that Jesus was dead before the wound to his side was inflicted. . . . Accordingly, interpretations based on the assumption that Jesus did not die on the cross appear to be at odds with modern medical knowledge.”10

I believe ADHD is a constellation of symptoms that our society interprets as a medical condition [...]. ADHD certainly "exists," in the sense that many children exhibit behaviors that parents and teachers can see and doctors can measure. But in my view ADHD is neither an unnatural condition of childhood nor an illness that requires medication. Often, behaviors tagged as ADHD are normal childhood responses to stressful situations. I believe ADHD is overdiagnosed and overmedicated and that well-meaning parents from all backgrounds have been duped into believing that their perfectly normal and healthy child needs powerful psychostimulant medications just to be "normal" and successful. I believe this is harmful to parents and to children, and I believe there is a better way.

Not lightly should you transport aluminum trays of oily Pakistani food in the back of your mother’s car. This is one of many lessons I learned as part of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) in university. Through tragically not reflected in catering, a glorious diversity has generally characterized attendance at MSA events across the varied campuses of North America’s colleges and universities: the second-generation children of Hyderabadi physicians suffering toward medical school themselves, well-heeled scions of Syrian engineers from the Midwest on break from serial brunching, African-American Muslims bemused by immigrant angst, occasional pompously coiffed upper-crust Pakistanis expiating sins incurred while clubbing and the odd Saudi exchange student committed to bringing order to this religious soup.

Any joke or humorous incident has the following form. You narrate a story step-by-step, leading your listener along a garden path of expectation, and then you introduce an unexpected twist, a punch line, the comprehension of which requires a complete reinterpretation of the preceding events. But that’s not enough: No scientist whose theoretical edifice is demolished by a single ugly fact entailing a complete overhaul is likely to find it amusing. (Believe me, I’ve tried!) Deflation of expectation is necessary but not sufficient. The extra key ingredient is that the new interpretation must be inconsequential. Let me illustrate. The dean of the medical school starts walking along a path, but before reaching his destination he slips on a banana peel and falls. If his skull is fractured and blood starts gushing out, you rush to his aid and call the ambulance. You don’t laugh. But if he gets up unhurt, wiping the banana off his expensive trousers, you break out into a fit of laughter. It’s called slapstick. The key difference is that in the first case, there is a true alarm requiring urgent attention. In the second case it’s a false alarm, and by laughing you inform your kin in the vicinity not to waste their resources rushing to his aid. It is nature’s “all’s okay” signal.