Body in MindRamblings (and music) of a guitar-playing shrink |
You can find a whole lot of stuff on Tumblr, of all sorts. I rather liked this photoset of Ruby Wax:
She highlights a good point: in psychiatric illness you don’t have broken limbs, or coughed-up mucus, or whatever other easily-visible sign with which to proclaim “I am sick”. I’m sure that must add to the stigma, and the moralising and judgemental attitudes often levelled at people with psychiatric illness.
… Or so David Healey has said at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association.
I’ve always seen Healey as one of the anti-psychiatry psychiatrists, but what is quoted here from his talk is actually reasonable and sensible. He doesn’t appear anti-psychiatry – or even anti-antidepressants, despite his very public attacks on them. I agree with what he said about the role of the doctor being
… to manage risks, not view drugs as harmless. “Medical treatment is poison and the art of medicine is trying to find the right dose,”
(via Psychiatrist Contends the Field Is ‘Committing Professional Suicide’ | Healthland | TIME.com)
I’m also thinking it’ll be we’ll worth getting Ben Goldacre’s book: Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients.
I found this interesting: David Gorski at Science-Based Medicine discussing a study examining doctors' attitudes to drug company-funded studies.
Shock horror, doctors would seem to regard industry funding of studies as a negative factor, and view the results accordingly.
As Gorski points out, it might be that this impression is somewhat excessive, and not (always) warranted… It rather hurts the caricature of us as mindless Pharma drones though.
This is just bloody terrible, and makes me want to get into the self-publishing business …
Via Ben Goldacre I’ve read this morning about the copyright owners of the Folstein Mini Mental State Examination, and their efforts to extract money for its use (which in one sense is fair, but they’ve ignored their copyright for the last thirty years, during which the test has become ubiquitous and pretty much indispensable), and, it seems, to get rid of an open-access alternative developed and validated at Harvard.
Dick move, PAR. Totes dick move.
For clinicians, the risk of infringement is real. Photocopying or downloading the MMSE probably constitutes infringement; those who publish the MMSE on a Web site or pocket card could incur more severe penalties for distribution. Even more chilling is the “takedown” of the Sweet 16, apparently under threat of legal action from PAR (although PAR has not commented publicly). Are the creators of any new cognitive test that includes orientation questions or requires a patient to recall three items subject to action by PAR? However disputable the legal niceties, few physicians or institutions would want to have to argue their case in court.
So … If we ask someone where they are, and to remember a few things, we’re infringing copyright? And a screening tool that does so must be pulled down and kept away from use? I guess if it might impede money-making then that’s only right and proper….
You know, I think the Mind Hacks blog said it best:
Cashing-in on a simple and now, clinically essential, bedside test that you’ve ignored for three decades makes you seem, at best, greedy.
Taking down open-access equivalents because they also ask people the location and date and to remember a handful of words and numbers makes you a seem like a cock and a danger to clinical progress.
Yep.
Cocks.
So as I said: self-publishing … I feel like photocopying thousands of copies, and just handing them out on street corners, and leaving them in letterboxes, and giving it to everyone.
Maybe I’ll post PAR a bunch of IOUs…
And a photo of my middle finger.
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If this doesn’t make you rage-cry, we can no longer be friends
A friend on Facebook posted one of the most awful things I’ve read in ages: a report of a mother bear killing herself, then her cub – to avoid the torture and agony of bile-farming.
I knew about bile-farming. I did not know that the bears try to suicide by hitting themselves in the abdomen – so they are kept in iron vests to prevent them from doing so.
And we have the temerity, the bald-faced audacity to describe such cruelty as “inhumane”. As far as I’m aware, the only animal to behave so fucking abominably is homo sapiens.
Seriously, fuck humans.
Maybe the rest of this planet will be better off if/when we do wipe ourselves out. Maybe rather than representing the pinnacle of evolution, as so many of us think, hominid evolution was actually the greatest evolutionary mistake on this world.
Oh, and even if one doesn’t want to consider the idea that this behaviour strongly suggests consciousness, and thinks that the mother bear was just hugging her cub, and was maddened by pain so didn’t realise she was hugging too hard, so it died – and then just happened to run into the wall and die because she was maddened by the pain… That’s not really any better. Is it?
Personally I would suggest that a bear knows very well that hugging very hard, and hitting things in the head are a couple of ways it kills things – so it could well have known exactly what it was doing. Not that it’s any better or worse that way.
And all of this incredible cruelty and lack of empathy for a so-called treatment to “remove ‘heat’ from the body as well as treat high fever, liver ailments and sore eyes” based on a bloody ridiculous irrational belief-system. So also fuck Traditional Chinese Pretend-Medicine.