University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine Professor Edward Shorter (who years ago sold me a used motorcycle) has written a very important book about the nature, mis- and over-diagnosis of depression. How Everyone Became Depressed is available at Amazon and in bookstores.
The stock phrase that “no biological tests exist in psychiatry” has become a mantra, one of those pieces of conventional wisdom that ensures the field remains “on the couch,” dependent for clinical data on what the patient says. Just imagine cardiology dependent on patients’ verbal accounts of their chest pain. “Hurts here, doc.” Hmmmm, is it heartburn or a heart attack?
The claim of “no biological tests” is so universally made that non-specialists imagine that it must be true. But it’s not. It’s false.
This is a must read series of articles on the book by Ned Shorter in Psychology Today.
...The device is still at a prototype stage, with live-animal testing of its output to begin later this year. If successful, Leng’s tissue printer could mark a huge advance in quality of life and survivability for severely burned patients, and dramatically reduce treatment costs. Eventually it could morph into a machine for fabricating internal organs.
Tissue engineering has produced various techniques for building up fabricated skin, usually layer by layer. But that’s a time-consuming process that doesn’t offer much help for people with extensive, life-threatening burns.
“We were interested in easing this process of creating organ-scale tissues,” says Leng, referring to the large patches of skin that could be needed to treat extensive burns. She advanced the idea of the device in her master’s thesis in 2010, and began working on the prototype a year later, with a team that includes her PhD supervisor Axel Guenther, a professor in U of T’s Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.
Mike Lazaridis, inventor of the BlackBerry smartphone, is starting a $100 million quantum technology fund that’s aiming to turn devices like the medical tricorder from “Star Trek” into reality.
Apparently, in the future, doctors with cool devices will be
accorded the respect they deserve
In August 2009, a 49-year-old patient undergoing a hysterectomy alleged Doodnaught kissed her neck, fondled her breasts and placed his penis in her hand and asked her to hold it, Wright said. When she asked the doctor, "Do I have to do this?" he replied, "Yes, it's part of your healing."
The American Academy of Pediatrics announced that the benefits of male circumcision outweighs the risks.
"Intactivists" at Toronto's 2012 Pride parade
There has been mounting scientific evidence to support circumcision for years.
This news will undoubtedly infuriate one of the strangest collections of individuals on the planet, who describe themselves with a pun about their being activists who want to keep male penises intact.
These "intactivists" are obsessed with foreskins.Some of them are people with a sad psychological condition that leads them to blame all their social and emotional problems on having had their foreskin removed in infancy. Some go so far as to try to use bizarre, painful methods to restore their foreskin as adults.
Others are just thoroughly obsessed with foreskins for reasons only they can know. (I suppose I could know too if I bothered to find out, but really, who cares?)
They aren't bad people, these intactivists, they're just nuts, and this recent announcement is most certainly going to rub those nuts the wrong way.
This documentary about Norman Bethune was directed in 1964 for the NFB by Donald Brittain.
Many colleagues and people who knew him were interviewed.
A very interesting subject as Bethune's support for Mao Tze Dong has become a controversial matter regarding the Canadian government's involvement with a Bethune Memorial.
It is worth noting that Bethune went to help Mao well before the Chinese Communist leader became the mass murdering dictator that history remembers. Bethune was an ardent fighter against fascism and a physician whose support for socialized medicine came about at a time when the poor were denied essential medical treatment because they were unable to pay for it.
A team of researchers from the Hebrew University has developed a treatment that completely destroys HIV-infected human cells in laboratory cultures, according to an article published last month in the scientific journal AIDS Research and Therapy.
The stock phrase that “no biological tests exist in psychiatry” has become a mantra, one of those pieces of conventional wisdom that ensures the field remains “on the couch,” dependent for clinical data on what the patient says. Just imagine cardiology dependent on patients’ verbal accounts of their chest pain. “Hurts here, doc.” Hmmmm, is it heartburn or a heart attack?
