Medical Journey Quotes

Somewhere to our north ran the Ebola River, a tributary of a tributary of the Congo River, but a name that is associated with a horrific medical

I began to come into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the inability to cure a child because of a lack of resources… And I began to see there was something that, at that time, seemed to me almost as important as being a famous researcher or making some substantial contribution to medical science, and this was helping those people.

How come a Palestinian child does not live like an Israeli child? Why do Palestinian children have to toil at any manner of hard jobs just to be able to go to school? How is it that when we are sick. we can't get the medical help the Israeli kids take for granted?

Altogether, our modern inclination toward sloth, the easy availability of processed food, and the prevalence of life-saving medical treatments have made us a long-lived, unhealthy people.

Whilst the Earth Mother finds immense comfort, safety and satisfaction in marriage, domesticity, growing food and children, and enjoys order around her, the Creative Rainbow Mother regularly feels the need to fly free. And if she can’t . . . well, the flip side of her is the Crazy Woman: depressed, unable to touch her power, tied, numb, self-medicating, addicted. Crazy Woman breaks out if we try to spend all our time out in the world, or serving others.’ The

We are increasingly pushed to see more patients in less time.”27 It’s a trend he fears is contributing to a loss of empathy among medical professionals (and in turn to scary rates of depression and burnout).

Different bodies respond differently to different medication; finding the magic potion is pretty much hit-and-miss. This seems obvious, even simplistic, but it's the only consistently true fact in treating mental illness.

I am a physician, and as a consequence I see things most clearly in medical terms. I am arguing that we need an immunization program, one that injects people with respect, dignity, and equality. One that inoculates them against hatred.

Even though our journey as parents of a medically fragile child began with emotional turmoil, it has since become a purposeful odyssey that brings meaning and depth to our lives. This is the road we were born to travel.

Disagreeing with his cousin’s characterization of the Bible as “nonsense,” he wrote that, on the contrary, one could find in it “all of the most difficult questions concerning Morals, Lawmaking, Industry, and Medical Science … resolved in the most simple way, often treated from a contemporary point of view.” He also urged her to read his own letters to her more carefully, saying that each sentence contained something specific and that “if perhaps the surface seems smooth to you, the water is very deep, and often the smoother the surface the deeper the water.

My name is CRPS, or so they say But I actually go by; a few different names. I was once called causalgia, nearly 150 years ago And then I had a new name It was RSD, apparently so. I went by that name because the burn lived inside of me. Now I am called CRPS, because I have so much to say I struggle to be free. I don't have one symptom and this is where I change, I attack the home of where I live; with shooting/burning pains. Depression fills the mind of the body I belong, it starts to speak harsh to self, negativity growing strong. Then I start to annoy them; with the issues with sensitivity, You'd think the pain enough; but no, it wants to make you aware of its trembling disability. I silently make my move; but the screams are loud and clear, Because I enter your physical reality and you can't disappear. I confuse your thoughts; I contain apart of your memory, I cover your perspective, the fog makes it sometimes unbearable to see. I play with your temperature levels, I make you nervous all the time - I take away your independance and take away your pride. I stay with you by the day & I remind you by the night, I am an awful journey and you will struggle with this fight. Then there's a side to me; not many understand, I have the ability to heal and you can be my friend. Help yourself find the strength to fight me with all you have, because eventually I'll get tired of making you grow mad. It will take some time; remember I mainly live inside your brain, Curing me is hard work but I promise you, You can beat me if you feed love to my pain. Find the strength to carry on and feed the fears with light; hold on to the seat because, like I said, it's going to be a fight. But I hope to meet you, when your healthy and healed, & you will silenty say to me - I did this, I am cured is this real? That day could possibly come; closer than I want- After all I am a disease and im fighting for my spot. I won't deny from my medical angle, I am close to losing the " incurable " battle.

I’d just participated in a death. A death. Not a medical procedure. Not a surgical solution to a life problem. Not the valiant step of a woman exercising her right to make medical choices about her own body. The death of a helpless baby, a baby violently ripped away from the safety of the womb, sucked away to be discarded as biohazard waste.

We are accelerating and extending our minds through our computers and algorithms, through our medical prowess and our accumulated knowledge. These minds of ours are the most precious things; we need to cherish all seven-plus billion of them. Walking this rocky globe somewhere today may be a human who will take us to the next level of insight. This person could be anywhere-from Africa to Asia, Oceania to Europe, or in the Americas. This person could even be you. And that journey will be as extraordinary as this one.

Even though we were supposed to have free medical care, the doctors expected us to pay them for the surgery. It sounds harsh, but the government gave them almost nothing, and bribery was the only way for them to survive. Somehow my parents persuaded the doctors to perform the operation if we supplied them with the anesthetic and antibiotics they needed.

Even doctors — or perhaps especially doctors — need to be touched by something personally to understand the suffering of others. We’ve been taught about the enormous power over life and death that is invested in us; we can be deluded into thinking we are almighty. Almost instinctively we view death, incurable disease and disability as challenging our power. We forget that this is all part of life. I guess that we have to defend ourselves against the human suffering that confronts us every day, otherwise we’d quickly go under. Medical jargon helps keep us remote, yet seeing colleagues suffer is hard. If we think too much, we realise that we – and our loved ones – are just as vulnerable as the rest of humanity.

Medical school taught me that a human body can be broken down into individual parts, but life taught me that the body is more than just the sum of those parts

A journey into self diagnosis and treatment was required when the medical profession left me suffering for years with mental illness and chronic fatigue.

On a medical school professor noted for slowly, carefully interviewing the patient: "He taught the love of truth.

Three hundred and fifty years ago, Shulgin notes, the Church proclaimed, “The earth is the center of the universe, and anyone who says otherwise is a heretic.” Today, the government proclaims, “All drugs that can expand consciousness are without medical or social justification, and anyone who uses them is a criminal.” In Galileo’s time, the authorities said, “We do not need to actually look through that mysterious contraption.” Now the government says, “There is no need to actually taste those mysterious compounds.” In the past, the Church said, “How dare you claim that the earth is not the center of the universe?” Today the government says, “How dare you claim that an understanding of God is to be found in a white powder?

He fulfilled the bipolar checklist. See? And so they gave him some pretty heavy-duty medication. It slowed him way down, to a drooling fat kid. And they declared the meds a success.” It

Do you work a job that slowly kills you so you can afford health coverage to pay medical expenses? Or do you live right with the earth and make your own way, keep things simple, and take care of yourself?

Medical errors in hospitals are estimated to cause more than 400,000 deaths per year in the U.S. alone—making it the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer—with another 4–6 million cases of serious harm.34

This is... Rey!" the girl said suddenly. "And we're out of the..." She paused and then, "...Han system! We're carrying medical equipment supplies to the southern region." She grinned excitedly, clearly extemporizing. "We're expected!

Julius brooded. He could see Julius despising the medical school of Pavia. Tobie said, "Nicholas managed the journey from Flanders all right. Deferred to you, joked discreetly with me, got on like a dyeworks on fire with the muleteers.

There wasn’t one defining moment on my journey from medically induced coma to Academic All-American; there were many. It was a gradual evolution, a long series of small wins and tiny breakthroughs. The only way I made progress—the only choice I had—was to start small.

Meth users include men and women of every class, race, and background. Though the current epidemic has its roots in motorcycle gangs and lower-class rural and suburban neighborhoods, meth, as Newsweek reported in a 2005 cover story, has “marched across the country and up the socioeconomic ladder.” Now, “the most likely people and the most unlikely people take methamphetamine,” according to Frank Vocci, director of the Division of Pharmacotherapies and Medical Consequences of Drug Abuse at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

He looked at her as if she were already one of the ugly nameless bodies in the mortuary, and with a medical man's sober, somewhat cynical mind, he saw her in front of him, stripped and sliced open. That was his revenge. He caught himself regarding the whole world in that way.

The problems with modern medicine run deep; clearly they won’t all be solved by mind–body therapies. But trying to improve medical outcomes by treating patients as the complex human beings we are, rather than simply as physical bodies, seems to me to be not such a bad place to start.

Donna made it obvious that not only is addiction a developmental journey, but it’s a journey that continues through the period of recovery. In fact, by the time I’d finished my interviews with Donna, the term “recovery” no longer made sense to me. “Recovery” implies going backward, becoming normal again. And it’s a reasonable term if you consider addiction a disease. But many of the addicts I’ve spoken with—including Donna—see themselves as having moved forward, not backward, once they quit, or even while they were quitting. They often find they’ve become far more aware and self-directed than the person they were before their addiction. There’s no easy way to explain this direction of change with the medical terminology of disease and recovery. Instead of recovering, it seems that addicts keep growing, as does anyone who overcomes their difficulties through deliberation and insight.

Psychologists now also talk about the nocebo effect. Words and expectations can impact our bodies to heal or harm us. And in recent years doctors have started to do research that recognizes the validity of this nocebo effect. The nocebo effect for doctors means that they acknowledge there is power in the words they speak, power to encourage healing or power to unintentionally impede the healing process.1 Think about it. You are with a nurse, and she says, “You are a high-risk patient.” Medical science is now saying these kinds of statements can negatively impact the physical health of patients. I love

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

I'm Dr. Ethan Kane, director of the Hauer Institute. My senior medical staff joins me in welcoming all of you to Maryland and to Liberty General Hospital. Think of it! You've been chosen to make an extraordinary journey with us. You'll be making medical history, making some very good money as well, and this will be the best experience you've ever had. I guarantee it!

Pain relief is a billiondollar market, and drug companies have no incentive to fund trials that would reduce patients’ dependence on their products, he points out. And neither have medical insurers, because if medical costs come down, so do their profits. The trouble with hypnosis and other psychological therapies, he says, is that “there’s no intervening industry that has the interest in pushing it.

In another time, we called them miraculous healings and left the scientific community out of it when they didn’t have the capacity to understand what was really going on. But today, what if I were to tell you that the science for quantum healing is available and that this knowledge makes perfect sense according to the views of modern quantum physics? Not only that, but we can teach you a step-by-step approach to make these events more likely to occur.

Cassie, if I do treatment, I’m most likely going to be too sick to want to do any of those things. It may only prolong my life for a short time. And leaving my parents with an enormous amount of debt because of medical bills is not what I want. How can I do that to them?” “They love you, Xuan. There’s no price tag on your life.” “What would you do if you were me?” “I would fight!” I shouted. “I’ve been trying to accept my fate, and I think you need to as well.

There are a few who envy me. They want to know what they have to do to get my job, to be who I am. “It’s only death, how hard can it be?” Here, I silently reply, take it all. Every festering remnant of the people no one cared about in life, much less in death; all the broken children who will never know that I had grieved for them. Take it all. Just leave me my car keys so I can go home permanently. Someone else can listen to the bullshit Death loves to spew. He never shuts up.

Many Chinese-born scientists have returned from abroad to continue their research, not just out of patriotism but because Chinese research facilities have become so cutting-edge. The Communist revolution’s annihilation of traditional thinking has also made for an astonishingly free approach to areas such as medical research; scientists can try things that are banned in the West by strict ethics laws. (I would not be surprised if the first cloned human being is already lurking somewhere along the banks of the Yangtze River.)

She had a significant following in Paris, where a group of hashish-eating daredevils, under the leadership of Dr. Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet, had been experimenting with monster doses (ten times the amount typically ingested at the soirees of Le Club des Haschischins) to send the soul on an ecstatic out-of-the-body journey through intrepid spheres. It was via Parisian theosophical contacts that the great Irish poet and future Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats first turned on to hashish. An avid occultist, Yeats much preferred hashish to peyote (the hallucinogenic cactus), which he also sampled. Yeats was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its literary affiliate, the London-based Rhymers Club, which met in the 1890s. Emulating Le Club des Haschischins, the Rhymers used hashish to seduce the muse and stimulate occult insight.6 Another member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, was a notorious dope fiend and practitioner of the occult arts. Crowley conducted magical experiments while bingeing on morphine, cocaine, peyote, ether, and ganja.

Eventually that energy will flow out as either hostility or love. The energy must and will find a form, a shape, in our lives. It is now, as we wade into the secret distress of the feminine and encounter the largeness of the wound, that we need to be very conscious and keep the despair we might feel from becoming channeled into bitterness. We have to work very hard to keep it flowing toward compassion. The Tamper-Proof Bottle During those months when I was forming my feminist critique, I watched a friend struggle to open a tamper-proof bottle of medication.

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 truth about productivity is that it's not really about the apps, it's not really about having a perfect system or about being disciplined or motivated more than anyone else. When I think of my own life and how I do things like: YouTube channel, entrepreneurship, medical school, being a doctor, none of it feels like suffering, none of it feels like a grind. So, when my housemate says: "It's 11 o'clock at night, why are you still working?", it's always a bit surprising because it really doesn't feel like work because it's actually fun. The main insight that I've realized is that productivity isn't really about getting more things done, it's mostly about LEARNING TO ENJOY THE JOURNEY.

Often during our journey I heard William mention “the simple,” a term by which some of his brothers denoted not only the populace but, at the same time, the unlearned. This expression always seemed to me generic, because in the Italian cities I had met men of trade and artisans who were not clerics but were not unlearned, even if their knowledge was revealed through the use of the vernacular. And, for that matter, some of the tyrants who governed the peninsula at that time were ignorant of theological learning, and medical, and logical, and ignorant of Latin, but they were surely not simple or benighted. So I believe that even my master, when he spoke of the simple, was using a rather simple concept. But unquestionably Salvatore was simple.

The three most important Arab witnesses of the French occupation were the historians Abd al-Rahman al-Jabartī, Hasan al-Attar and Niqula Turk. Al-Jabartī felt that the invasion was God’s punishment on Egypt for ignoring Islamic principles. He saw the French as the new Crusaders, but made no secret of his admiration for French weaponry, military tactics, medical advances, scientific achievements and interest in Egyptian history, geography and culture. He enjoyed his interaction with the savants and was impressed by Napoleon’s lack of ostentation and the way that on his journey to Suez he took engineers and Muslim merchants with him instead of cooks and a harem. Yet still he saw him as a rapacious, untrustworthy, atheistic beast, and was delighted when jihad was declared against the infidels.62

She cannot help but see a lifespan as a journey, indeed as a pilgrimage. This isn’t fashionable these days, but it’s her way of seeing. A life has a destination, an ending, a last saying. She is perplexed and exercised by the way that now, in the twenty-first century, we seem to be inventing innumerable ways of postponing the sense of arrival, the sense of arriving at a proper ending. Her inspections of evolving models of residential care and care homes for the elderly have made her aware of the infinitely clever and complex and inhumane delays and devices we create to avoid and deny death, to avoid fulfilling our destiny and arriving at our destination. And the result, in so many cases, has been that we arrive there not in good spirits, as we say our last farewells and greet the afterlife, but senseless, incontinent, demented, medicated into amnesia, aphasia, indignity.

Prisoners drank water piped in from the river, the same river that other convicts located upstream used as a toilet. “[I]t is a water that no population of human creatures inside or outside of the prison walls should be condemned to drink,” the inspector wrote. Rows of coke ovens outside their barracks turned the coal into the carbon-rich fuel coal companies used to produce the steel for the railroad tracks it was laying throughout the South. Convicts breathed gas, carbon, and soot from the stoves every night. The emissions killed the trees for hundreds of yards around. Yet according to a report by Alabama’s inspector of convicts, the high mortality rates were based not on the conditions of their incarceration but on the “debased moral condition of the negro . . . whose systems are poisoned beyond medical aid by the loathsome diseases incident to the unrestrained indulgence of lust . . . now that they are deprived of the control and care of a master.

Although there are no set methods to test for psychiatric disorders like psychopathy, we can determine some facets of a patient’s mental state by studying his brain with imaging techniques like PET (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanning, as well as genetics, behavioral and psychometric testing, and other pieces of information gathered from a full medical and psychiatric workup. Taken together, these tests can reveal symptoms that might indicate a psychiatric disorder. Since psychiatric disorders are often characterized by more than one symptom, a patient will be diagnosed based on the number and severity of various symptoms. For most disorders, a diagnosis is also classified on a sliding scale—more often called a spectrum—that indicates whether the patient’s case is mild, moderate, or severe. The most common spectrum associated with such disorders is the autism spectrum. At the low end are delayed language learning and narrow interests, and at the high end are strongly repetitive behaviors and an inability to communicate.

found myself constantly drawn to the subject of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), which I have concluded is inextricably linked to psychopathy, although this link is rarely mentioned in medical papers or among the psychiatric profession generally. As with psychopathy, people with NPD make up approximately 1 per cent of the population with rates greater in men. Another direct comparison between those suffering with NPD and psychopathy/sociopathy is that both types are characterised by exaggerated feelings of self-importance. In its moderate to extreme forms these people are excessively preoccupied with personal adequacy, power, prestige and vanity; mentally unable to see the destructive damage they are causing themselves and others. Symptoms of the NPD disorder include seeking constant approval from others who are successful in positions of power in whatever form it may be. Many are selfish, grandiose pathological liars; their egos and sense of self-esteem over-inflated, while at once they are torn between exaggerated self-appraisal and the reality that they might never amount to much.

point. We work on the principle that behavior reflects personality and generally divide the profiling process into seven steps: 1. Evaluation of the criminal act itself. 2. Comprehensive evaluation of the specifics of the crime scene or scenes. 3. Comprehensive analysis of the victim or victims. 4. Evaluation of preliminary police reports. 5. Evaluation of the medical examiner’s autopsy protocol. 6. Development of a profile with critical offender characteristics. 7. Investigative suggestions predicated on construction of the profile. As the final step indicates, offering a profile of an offender is often only the beginning of the service we offer. The next level is to consult with local investigators and suggest proactive strategies they might use to force the UNSUB’s hand— to get him to make a move. In cases of this nature we try to stand off at a distance and detach ourselves, but we still may be thrust right into the middle of the investigation. This may involve meeting with the family of a murdered child, coaching family members how to handle taunting phone calls from the killer describing how the child died, even trying to use a sibling as bait in an effort to lure the killer to a particular place.

However we decide to apportion the credit for our improved life spans, the bottom line is that nearly all of us are better able today to resist the contagions and afflictions that commonly sickened our great-grandparents, while having massively better medical care to call on when we need it. In short, we have never had it so good. Or at least we have never had it so good if we are reasonably well-off. If there is one thing that should alarm and concern us today, it is how unequally the benefits of the last century have been shared. British life expectancies might have soared overall, but as John Lanchester noted in an essay in the London Review of Books in 2017, males in the East End of Glasgow today have a life expectancy of just fifty-four years—nine years less than a man in India. In exactly the same way, a thirty-year-old black male in Harlem, New York, is at much greater risk of dying than a thirty-year-old male Bangladeshi from stroke, heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. Climb aboard a bus or subway train in almost any large city in the Western world and you can experience similar vast disparities with a short journey. In Paris, travel five stops on the Metro’s B line from Port-Royal to La Plaine—Stade de France and you will find yourself among people who have an 82 percent greater chance of dying in a given year than those just down the line. In London, life expectancy drops reliably by one year for every two stops traveled eastward from Westminster on the District Line of the Underground. In St. Louis, Missouri, make a twenty-minute drive from prosperous Clayton to the inner-city Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood and life expectancy drops by one year for every minute of the journey, a little over two years for every mile. Two things can be said with confidence about life expectancy in the world today. One is that it is really helpful to be rich. If you are middle-aged, exceptionally well-off, and from almost any high-income nation, the chances are excellent that you will live into your late eighties. Someone who is otherwise identical to you but poor—exercises as devotedly, sleeps as many hours, eats a similarly healthy diet, but just has less money in the bank—can expect to die between ten and fifteen years sooner. That’s a lot of difference for an equivalent lifestyle, and no one is sure how to account for it.

I came here in part to figure out why things are like they are. ... I wanted to know why things are different. ... It's because of the people. Things are different here because the people are different. Not the environment, or the weather, or the geography or anything. The people. If things are going to be better, you have to want them to be better. I'm not sure I see that. They seem to be fine with the way things are. And so, I guess, they're fine. Why do foreign people try to come in and impose on them to advance technologically, economically, medically, morally, whatever, when they just want to be peasants? Or maybe the way to put it is: They are peasants, and they don't have a burning desire to be anything more, or anything else. Maybe 'more' is the wrong word.

These studies compare women who choose hospital birth with those who try to deliver at home (regardless of whether they have their babies there or end up transferring to hospital for pain relief or medical intervention). It turns out that simply by choosing home birth, women are less likely to require drugs to induce or speed up labor or relieve pain; less likely to be cut open or to tear; and less likely to need a C-section or instrumental delivery. Their babies are born in better shape and are more likely to breastfeed.

The authors of a 2012 Cochrane review (the medical profession’s gold standard analysis) on home versus hospital births blamed the higher complication rate in hospital on “impatience and easy access to many medical procedures.”13

According to Casiglia, if such effects were better understood they could have a range of potential medical applications. We might use hypnosis to boost blood flow to the brain (protecting against cognitive impairment as we age); to the extremities (to help people with poor circulation in their hands and feet); or even to direct a toxic drug to a particular part of the body. At the moment, this last one “is science fiction,” Casiglia admits, but not completely inconceivable—he says he has recently found that hypnotized volunteers can increase blood supply to their intestines on demand.

Donald Goellnicht. The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, 1984,

In the lab, Snow World consistently cuts pain scores by 35%, says Hoffman, compared to around 5% for music. And when used in combination with pain medication, it reduces patients’ pain ratings by an extra 15–40% on top of what they get with drugs.9 The researchers see the effects not just in subjective pain scores but in brain scans too, with activity in pain-related brain areas almost completely extinguished.

This massive medical tourism to seek health services was unprecedented in American history. Never before had tens of thousands of patients traveled such great distances for medical services. The cost of transportation, food, and lodging while in transit delayed services and added to the cost. As a result, follow-up care in case of complications became more complex.9 Women endured substantial financial and personal hardships during these journeys in order to obtain safe, legal abortions that were not available locally.

We’re wedded to drugs, scans, all this high-tech stuff. Something as simple and mundane as hypnosis can’t be seen as being any good.” Embracing hypnotherapy would require rethinking not just trial design, he says, but how to do medicine. “The standard medical model of treatment is take a history, give them a drug, send them away, if the drug doesn’t work, give them another drug and so on. This

still secretly reading the New Testament that the church had given me every moment I could. I would hide it under my pillow and read it morning and night. I read in Romans 14:11: “Every knee shall bow to Me, and every tongue shall confess to God” (NKJV). I was now acknowledging that Jesus is my Lord in my mother tongue. As I tried to walk out my new faith with my family, God healed my body. I had always been sickly, often getting colds and headaches and goiters. I prayed for Jesus to heal me as I suffered from tiredness and pain throughout my body and found it hard to catch my breath. My mother had even recently taken me to the hospital, fearing I had inherited the heart problem that had killed her father. After inviting Jesus into my life, all of my symptoms left. I felt strong physically and could breathe normally. “I am healed!” I told my mother. Before she would even think about letting me throw away my medication, Mama insisted I go back to the doctor to be tested. When we were able to get to the hospital, the doctor pronounced me 100 percent fit and had no explanation for my sudden recovery. “It’s a miracle!” she said as she led us out of her office.

You see, I suffer from a disease that you cannot see; a disease that there is no cure for and that keeps the medical community baffled at how to treat and battle this demon, who’s[sic] attacks are relentless. My pain works silently, stealing my joy and replacing it with tears. On the outside we look alike you and I; you won’t see my scars as you would a person who, say, had suffered a car accident. You won’t see my pain in the way you would a person undergoing chemo for cancer; however, my pain is just as real and just as debilitating. And in many ways my pain may be more destructive because people can’t see it and do not understand....” “Please don’t get angry at my seemingly [sic] lack of interest in doing things; I punish myself enough, I assure you. My tears are shed many times when no one is around. My embarrassment is covered by a joke or laughter…” “I have been called unreliable because I am forced to cancel plans I made at the last minute because the burning and pain in my legs or arms is so intense I cannot put my clothes on and I am left in my tears as I miss out on yet another activity I used to love and once participated in with enthusiasm.” “And just because I can do a thing one day, that doesn’t mean I will be able to do the same thing the next day or next week. I may be able to take that walk after dinner on a warm July evening; the next day or even in the next hour I may not be able to walk to the fridge to get a cold drink because my muscles have begun to cramp and lock up or spasm uncontrollably. And there are those who say “But you did that yesterday!” “What is your problem today?” The hurt I experience at those words scars me so deeply that I have let my family down again; and still they don’t understand….” “On a brighter side I want you to know that I still have my sense of humor….I love you and want nothing more than to be a part of your life. And I have found that I can be a strong friend in many ways. Do you have a dream? I am your friend, your supporter and many times I will be the one to do the research for your latest project; many times I will be your biggest fan and the world will know how proud I am at your accomplishments and how honored I am to have you in my life.” “So you see, you and I are not that much different. I too have hopes, dreams, goals… and this demon…. Do you have an unseen demon that assaults you and no one else can see? Have you had to fight a fight that crushes you and brings you to your knees? I will be by your side, win or lose, I promise you that; I will be there in ways that I can. I will give all I can as I can, I promise you that. But I have to do this thing my way. Please understand that I am in such a fight myself and I know that I have little hope of a cure or effective treatments, at least right now. Please understand….

the first research study on abused wives was published by the King Saud specialist Medical Center and it found ninety percent of the women in the study had seen their mothers go through the same abuse?

Special needs foster parents. I happen to think that any foster parents who take in children in need are pretty amazing in their own right. But we have a very special place in our hearts for those people who, for a variety of reasons (be it their calling in life or they have a medical specialty and training) provide homes for children who are developmentally challenged or have special needs.

start with some more general types of books that deal with issues that every adoptive parent will face—issues of attachment, how to deal with the feelings of an adoptive child, etc. Of course there is no shortage of books that deal with any medical or educational issue that your child may face, so those will always be at your disposal when you need them.

For example, the percentage of people who responded to placebo in trials of a particular ulcer medication ranged from 59% in Denmark to just 7% in Brazil.3 The same placebo can have positive, zero or negative effects depending on what we’re told about it, and the effects can change over time.

Unfortunately, our medical system generally asks women to choose between two extremes: they can have either holistic care at home, but without immediate access to life-saving medical technology, or interventionist, impersonal care in the hospital.

After an argument with his girlfriend, however, he overdosed on his remaining capsules and collapsed at his local hospital with a racing heart and worryingly low blood pressure. Medical staff gave him more than a gallon and a half of intravenous fluids over four hours before the message got through from the trial organizers that the patient had been in their placebo group. His symptoms disappeared within 15 minutes.

In a medical system based on evidence from trial results, the medicine we end up with depends on the trials that are carried out. So perhaps it’s not surprising that in Western medicine, there is little attempt to nurture and harness patients’ psychological resources. Despite

Historically, among early tribes and aboriginal peoples, when an individual had a breakdown, it was seen as a blessing or omen, a breakthrough. That person often became a healer, shaman, or prophet. He or she would leave the tribe and go into the forest or desert on an initiatory journey. They were believed to have left the ordinary world behind to connect with the non-ordinary realm to bring new information back to the tribe. We have no such initiations in Western mainstream society so people sometimes experience psychotic breaks and then we medicate that. Some people need to go crazy to find themselves; their belief system has to shatter before they can discover who they really are.

I hope one day the transgenerational curse won’t be used as a tool to ostracize and stigmatize the mentally ill. Mental illness is a serious medical condition that you can’t make go away by praying more, repenting more, or even giving more. It’s not a curse to be broken but a disorder to be treated.

I had several reasons for writing this book. First and foremost was to tell the story of Donna’s courageous battle against triple-negative breast cancer. Moreover, I felt writing would help me deal with my profound grief following the loss of my wife, soul mate and best friend. Furthermore, I sought to increase awareness about this form of breast cancer. Triple-negative breast cancer affects less than 20 percent of all breast cancer patients. Triple-negative breast cancer is more aggressive and difficult to treat than other forms of breast cancer. Triple-negative breast cancer is also more likely to spread beyond the breast and be fatal within five years. It is my hope that this book will be helpful for caregivers who find themselves looking after a loved one who is fighting this terrible disease! When Donna was diagnosed, I had no idea what that entailed or what I needed to do to support her. I learned on the fly, made mistakes along the way, and witnessed how vital a caregiver’s support can be.

Frederick Law Olmsted had found the same situation—houses at which there was “no other water-closet than the back of a bush or the broad prairies”—on his journey through the Hill Country in 1857. He had been shocked then, because the America he knew had advanced beyond such primitive conditions. Now it was 1937; four more generations had been living in the Hill Country—with no significant advance in the conditions of their life. Many of the people of Lyndon Johnson’s congressional district were still living in the same type of dwelling in which the area’s people had been living in 1857: in rude “dog-run” shelters one board thick, through which the wind howled in the winter. They were still squatting behind a bush to defecate. Because of their poverty, they were still utterly bereft not only of tractors and feed grinders, but of modern medical assistance—and were farming by methods centuries out of date.

In her enthralling debut, Circle of Chalk, Christina McClelland tackles the complicated and sometimes controversial subject of IVF with compassion and honesty. McClelland doesn’t shy away from the messiness but rather invites the reader into the decades’ long journey. The story twists and turns until the very last page. Elizabeth Musser, author of The Swan House, When I Close My Eyes, The Promised Land

I got fed up of my doctors saying ‘Your medical insurance does not cover the tests that you need’ during my journey through the USA healthcare system.

Some of us see ourselves as people born with a unique birth defect, one that can be “cured” by the intervention of the medical profession, and think of that journey in terms of physical transition. Some of us see ourselves as people who want to celebrate the fantasy aspects of gender, who want to enjoy the sense of escape and joy and eros that embracing an alter ego sometimes provides. Some of us see ourselves as people who reject the medical community and who are less interested in winding up at one gender destination or another than in the journey itself, a voyage that may or may not have a clear end point. Some of us hope to free ourselves from the binary poles of gender, want a personal and political liberation from the tyranny of culturally defined gender markers, and wish to express ourselves as we please, anywhere along the wide spectrum.

I'm increasingly convinced that nearly all recovery symptoms are the result of self-induced fears and anxieties, correctable blood sugar issues, caffeine overdose, or the need for a medication adjustment or treatment of a hidden condition that appears after ending use of one or more of the thousands of chemicals present in tobacco.

Barefoot running can help you develop great form, but it’s merely a means to an end. If you like running without shoes, great. If you prefer something on your feet, that’s great too. I agree that modernity has brought with it a host of bad habits and disastrous unintended consequences, not only in running (an overdependence on heavily cushioned shoes being chief among them, and the sense that running is reserved for only a select few), but in eating, too. Fast foods, mass production, grotesquely large servings—those by themselves have made us sick. Modernity has also brought us electricity, penicillin, and open heart surgery, of course. Altogether, our modern inclination toward sloth, the easy availability of processed food, and the prevalence of life-saving medical treatments

Have you been on Google lately? Maybe for health reasons you like to check causes of chest pain, diarrhea, and fainting; examples of treatments for a sore throat; side effects of medications? The list is endless. If you are like most people I encounter, you may feel quite armed with the medical information on the internet. You may feel like you have an idea about most things, you know what can cause some symptoms, and some things to do for a number of health problems. Right? Wrong. Let me start by saying that each human being, every situation, and every point in time are all unique. Diabetes can look a hundred different ways and be managed a hundred different ways.

Greg Abbott was a great track star in high school, having never lost a race, but in 1984 a tree fell on him while he was jogging through the wealthy enclave of Houston’s River Oaks, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. He had just graduated from law school and had no health insurance. Fortunately, he won a $9 million judgment from the homeowner whose tree had fallen, and from the tree company that had inspected the tree and failed to recommend its removal. Later, as a member of the Texas Supreme Court, and then as attorney general, Abbott supported measures that capped pain-and-suffering damages in medical malpractice cases at $250,000.

Clifford” is an important psychedelic researcher, group leader, and writer. He is currently writing a book of personal essays. Student days at the University of California at San Diego were a whirlwind blending of 1960s’ issues with the academic pressure necessary to enter postgraduate training of some sort. My personal choices were between psychology and medicine. My introduction to psychedelics had convinced me of their value. I was taking a biology course to prepare for medical school, and we were studying the development of the chick embryo. After the first meeting of the one-quarter-long course, I realized that in order to stay alert, a tiny dose of LSD could be useful. With that in mind, I licked a small, but very potent, tablet emblazoned with the peace sign before every class. This produced a barely noticeable brightening of colors and created a generalized fascination with the course and my professor, who was otherwise uninteresting to me. Unfortunately, when finals came around, my health disintegrated and I missed the final exam. The next day I called my professor and begged for mercy. She said, “No problem, come to my lab.” “When shall we schedule this?” She suggested immediately. With some dismay, I agreed that I would meet her within an hour. I reached into the freezer and licked the almost exhausted fragment of the tablet I had used for class. I decided that there was so little left I might as well swallow it all. At

Trains half a mile long have started carrying millions of laptops, shoes, clothes and other non-perishable items in one direction and electronics, car parts and medical equipment in the other on a journey that takes sixteen days – considerably faster than the sea route from China’s Pacific ports. With

I love you, Harper.” His hands reached up but he only cupped her hips, letting her continue on her journey. She pressed a kiss to the scar across his right deltoid, an old injury from one of his first deployments, then his left collarbone, broken on a training trip to California. Then, moving carefully, she pressed kisses to the new scar still healing on his chest. That one had been too close to taking his life. Thank goodness he had been able to receive medical care as quickly as he did. Cat moved down Harper’s muscled abs and the slim line of black hair there. “I think everything about you is beautiful.” He puffed out a little laugh but she looked up at him with reproach. “I do. Your body is superb, even wounded. It always has been. That’s why I always have to beat the nurses off you.” She flashed him a grin. “Your mind is devious and brilliant, but I love that. The loyalty to your family and your men is humbling.” She stroked a finger over the tattoo that echoed those sentiments on his right pectoral. “Your unfailing courage in the face of everything that has happened is astounding. I know whatever we have to face you will conquer with that same indomitable, dogged, Navy SEAL will. And your heart,” she moved back up his chest to press a kiss to his sternum, “your heart is more loving and willing to try than I ever could have hoped. We’re going to put our family back together,” she promised. Harper stared up at her for several long seconds before he closed his eyes, but not before she’d seen the shine of moisture in their depths. He pulled her down on top of him, burying his face into her neck. “You are every bit the woman you’ve always been, calm and understanding, willing to put up with my shit. And I have to tell you. All of those things you see in me? I wouldn’t be any of them without you. And I mean that. You’ve supported me through everything. You flew across the country to be at my bedside even though you didn’t know the kind of reaction you’d receive. It amazes me that you would take that chance. But I’m so glad you did. I love you, Catherine Marie Preston. I always have.” She flashed a smile at the use of her full name. “And I love you, Harper Broderick Preston. I always will.” They

Forbearance or Deferment: Which Way to Go? Repaying student loan is a long journey as The Student Loan Help Center CEO, Bruce Mesnekoff said, at times you might face some potholes on the road, making your ride a bit difficult but there are some ways you can opt for help. Student loan forbearance and deferment are such two options which help you when you are facing money crunch and need some time to repay your student loans. Both of the options are specific to every individual depending on your financial state. Forbearance or deferment can be considered if you want to postpone your repayment for some duration or want to decrease the amount. Both of these are discussed in detail in this article. Forbearance Forbearance is used when you are facing monetary issues for a short period of time i.e. when you know you will come out of the money problems soon. Forbearance is provided for maximum period of one year at one time.Now there are two kinds of forbearance, mandatory and discretionary. When forbearance is must it’s called mandatory and this happens when: Your student loan repayment is 20% or more of your grossly monthly income. You are eligible for public loan forgiveness You are enrolled in dental internship or medical internship You are serving in a national service position Forbearance may or may not be provided by servicer if you are facing financial crunch or illness. One word of caution here would be to at least pay your interest every month because during forbearance you accruemonthly interest and if you don’t pay it as it gets added to principal. As a result you have to a pay huge amount at the end of the loan and also after forbearance is over to become current. Deferment Deferment also works onsimilar lines as forbearance. Though there is one advantage that subsidized direct loan, Perkins loans, federal Stafford loans do notaccrue interest during deferment, only non-subsidized loans accrue interest. You can defer loan repayment for the entire duration if you are in school or on military duty. If you are unemployed or facing any financial hardship the deferment period is of three years. You can qualify for deferment under following circumstances: If you are in school If you are on active military duty If you are qualifying for Perkins loan cancellation If you are unemployed If you are receiving federal or state assistance. Using deferment or forbearance is good option to keep your account “current” and save it from becoming delinquent or going in default. It saves your credit rating. If provided the opportunity to choose out of the two, always try and go for deferment if you can qualify for it as it’s more economical than forbearance. Contact The Student Loan Help Center to know more about Consolidation of your Student Loans.

For everything that's known about Lyme disease, there are still an extraordinary number of unknowns in some fairly fundamental areas.

Tony faked mental illness. That’s when you have hallucinations and delusions. Mental illness comes and goes. It can get better with medication. Tony is a psychopath. That doesn’t come and go. It is how the person is.” Faking

name. It was truly a revolution in psychiatry, and a gold rush for drug companies, who suddenly had hundreds of new disorders they could invent medications for, millions of new patients they could treat. “The

Oftentimes omnivores feel threatened by herbivores. But why? Neither one neither the others aren’t better peer see. It is just that herbivores automatically reduce a lot of unnecessary environmental, medical, financial costs and suffering involved.

illusionists have to know how to cure someone. The real art in performing such a magic trick these days, is in complying with the various regulations imposed by the Animal Protection activists. We need medical professionals to acknowledge that our families are worth protecting too and not to succumb

Right Diet: Let go of eating anything with a face - animals, birds or fish. Meditate on feelings of pleasure and pain, since people and creatures have such feelings in common. Find out about the methods of the meat industry from start to finish. Arable land produces far more food for humans. Buy organic food to protect the environment from the destructive effects of intensive agriculture, support local farms and local shops. Use as much as possible, fair trade imported goods. The Internet offers a wealth of information on the impact of diet, food and drink on humans and animals. Use medication from the pharmaceutical industry as the very last resort. Right Letting Go: Let go of your car. Or, if you believe you must have a car, then try to keep to one car per household and share your car with others. Drive sparingly and conserve fuel by staying well within speed limits. Only use the car for very necessary journeys. Make the same modest sized car last over many years. Use public transport or walk as much as possible.

For instance, in 1990, the FDA raided the offices of Dr. Jonathan Wright, a fully qualified physician with an M.D. from the University of Michigan Medical School, terrorized the staff with drawn guns, and seized all the vitamins and herbs they could find. They never did file criminal charges against Dr. Wright for the heresy of giving his patients cheap medicines instead of expensive ones*, but this raid was only one of hundreds of similar Gestapo-style operations, creating what libertarians call “a chilling effect” on scientific freedom.

We have two options, medically and emotionally: give up or fight like hell.

Even here, however, the element of mythology tinges our picture of the junkie. Heroin withdrawal is, indeed, terrible, but it is not necessarily the worst form of drug withdrawal. Some authorities suspect that withdrawal from barbiturate addiction is even more stressful, and this is indicated by the fact that there are hardly any records of heroin junkies actually dying of withdrawal syndrome (although they often wish for death). Barbiturate addicts, however, often die in the same circumstances, unless they receive careful medical attention. (William S. Burroughs has noted that his one barbiturate withdrawal was more agonizing than his 11 heroin withdrawals.)

It is necessary to emphasize that DeQuincey, Coleridge and Cocteau were exceptionally talented (and exceptionally disturbed) individuals. In DeQuincey’s case, furthermore, the extravagant and glorious visions he describes were all experienced, as Dr. Robert DeRopp notes, “between sleeping and waking,” when all talented people, even without opium, can project their imaginations most vividly. (This is technically known as hypnagogic hallucination, needs no drugs and is practiced as a method of mind expansion by some occult schools, such as Louis Culling’s “Great Body of God.”) For the majority of opium addicts whose medical records exist, no such psychedelic effects are recorded, and most of them have the same depressed or soporific experiences as morphine or heroin addicts. In short, if you are looking for psychedelic effects, use the real psychedelics; unless you’re an artist of DeQuincey’s or Coleridge’s stature, you are very unlikely to find them on opium.

Scientists such as Jonathan Quick of the Harvard Medical School believe there will be another major outbreak of something – in our air, food, or blood – in the next fifty years.

The idea that cardiac arrest constitutes death is outdated by about 50 years. Many laypeople still believe that if someone comes back from cardiac arrest, then they have “died” and returned to life, but the medical community long ago revised its definitions of death to center on the brain, not the heart….Cardiac arrest is relevant to death only in terms of its effect on the brain.

It’s rare to find a therapist and a novelist in the same person. Kris Hammoud is exactly that. She weaves her medical knowledge of countless patient-journeys into a spell-binding story of self-discovery that creates an echo-chamber for self-reflection and revelation. Every page is an opportunity for the reader to reflect on the influences in one’s own life as a pathway to explain the present. The story of Anna is the story of us all if we are willing to be honest with ourselves and open to answers.” – John Patton, author Brainless Health & CEO of ProVention Health Foundation

When Alexandra David-Néel finally returned to Paris and wrote about Tummo and other Buddhist breathing techniques and meditations in her 1927 book, My Journey to Lhasa, few doctors and medical researchers believed the stories.

If you, the reader, were by some magic instantly transported to the top of Mount Everest, you would have to deal with the medical fact that in the first few minutes you’d be unconscious, and in the next few minutes you’d be dead. Your body simply cannot withstand the enormous physiologic shock of being suddenly placed in such an oxygen-deprived environment. What a climber must do, as we did over several weeks, is to start at Base Camp, climb up, and then climb back down again. Rest and repeat. You keep doing this over and over on Everest, always pushing a little higher each time until (you hope) your body begins to acclimatize. You basically say to your body, “I am going to climb this thing, and I’m taking you with me. So get ready.” But you must be patient. Climb too fast and you elevate your risk of high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), in which your lungs fill with water and you can die unless you get down the mountain very fast. Even deadlier is high-altitude cerebral edema (HACE), which causes the brain to swell. HACE can induce a fatal coma unless you are quickly evacuated. There’s no way to know beforehand if you are susceptible to these medical conditions. Some people develop symptoms at altitudes as low as ten thousand feet. Moreover, veteran climbers who’ve never encountered either problem can develop HAPE or HACE without warning. Similarly unpredictable is a much more common menace, hypoxia, caused by reduced supply of oxygen to the brain. In its milder forms, hypoxia induces euphoria and renders the sufferer a little goofy. Severe hypoxia robs you of your judgment and common sense, not a welcome complication at high altitude. Climbers call the condition HAS, High-Altitude Stupid.

In life as in story," writes Arthur Frank, "one event is expected to lead to another." Our medical system has sold us a story of remedy, progress, technology, professionalism, and trimph. Frank suggests that our society is willing to hear only those illness narratives that conform to the idae of "restitution": "I was well, I got sick, I am well again." "It's nothing," we insist before a procedure, knowing that medicine will shortly deliver a triumph." "I'm fine," we say afterward, as though nothing has fundamentally shifted inside us. We crave the clean plot arc, one those around us can understand and stomach. When we try to tell the story of the phone calls, pointless and insane, our listeners lean away. And yet we cannot separate individual treatments, however sophisticated, from the system in which they are rendered, if that system is providing nto safety and care but frustration, futility, and impotence. If that system creates experiences that look less like restitution and more like what Frank calls chaos narratives. "In the chaos narrative, troubles go all the way down to bottomless depths," writes Frank. "What can be told only begins to suggest all that is wrong. The second feature of the chaos narrative...is the syntatic structure of 'and then and then and then.'... "The lack of any coherent sequence is an initial reason why chaos stories are hard to hear;...they are threatening. The anxiety these stories provoke inhibits hearing...The story traces the edges of a wound that can only be told around...In the lived chaos there is no mediation, only immediacy. The body is imprisoned in the frustrated needs of the moment." Chaos narratives, writes Frank, expose the fundamental contingency at the heart of living, allthe ways we cannot control our bodies or our lives, all the ways our lives can be wasted, and they are, for this reason, unbearable.

These “social determinants of health” play a major role, in fact, the major role, in determining a person’s health and well-being. Studies have shown that as much as 90 percent of a person’s life expectancy depends on these factors, and only 10 percent on medical care.

Menopause is not a medical condition, it is an earthquake, shaking us to our deepest foundations, wiping out the edifices we've so carefully constructed on what we once imagined to be the solid ground of our life.

While medication had kept me alive, it had been psychoanalysis that had helped me find a life worth living.