| On Point: Museum oversteps | | Posted Tuesday, February 06, 2007 12:56:53 PM by Blog57 Team | | When you stroll into the Colorado History Museum in downtown Denver, you expect to encounter exhibits that reflect at least some degree of scholarly detachment. But if you enter the museum today, this is what you'll read on the ground level: "There is only one passion that truly motivates the psychiatric profession - money. Every psychiatric solution . . . was embarked upon, not on the premise that it might help, but to generate a new source of income." And this: "Psychiatry's legacy to the Russian people can be measured by the more than 40 million citizens incarcerated and often forcibly treated in the gulags." Or this: "Some of the worst human rights atrocities in the world are committed inside psychiatric institutions . . ." You will see a film in which an attorney who claims he's deposed half of the psychiatrists in Las Vegas declares that "by and large" they are a "dishonest, deceitful, lying bunch of people." You will learn that between 1950 and 1990, "more Americans died in U.S.... | |
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| | | Deaths elsewhere | | Posted Sunday, November 05, 2006 2:59:21 PM by Blog57 Team | | DR. LAWRENCE C. KOLB, 95 Mental health researcher Dr. Lawrence C. Kolb, a prominent mental health administrator and researcher who helped create the community mental health movement and became the public face of psychiatry for a generation of New Yorkers, died in his sleep Oct. 20 in Orlando, Fla. He was born in Baltimore and completed his medical studies at the Johns Hopkins University in 1934. His long public career began, and ended, with two influential studies of psychological suffering. While a young doctor in the 1940s, he spent hours talking with patients who described feelings of excruciating pain in limbs that had been amputated. The result was a definitive account of what is now widely recognized as phantom limb pain. And in the early 1980s, nearing retirement, he led studies that demonstrated how combat stress could cause clear physical symptoms, a finding that helped prompt the government to undertake studies of post-traumatic symptoms among Vietnam veterans.... | |
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| | | The battle over your aching back | | Posted Saturday, August 26, 2006 11:00:05 AM by Blog57 Team | | John Chiota was ready to try just about anything. After a 2001 car accident, Chiota, a 63-year-old Connecticut lawyer and probate judge, had lower back pain so bad that he often had to hear cases while standing up. Simple tasks like shaving were agony. Physical therapy didn't help. Painkillers worked for a while but then wore off. His doctors suggested surgery but could not guarantee that it would help. Chiota was about give the local acupuncturist a call when he heard about Norman Marcus, a psychiatry and anesthesiology professor who runs a small, private - and controversial - pain institute in Manhattan. "I knew it was off the beaten path," Chiota recalls, "but at that point, I didn't care." Ten days after seeing Marcus and submitting to his therapy, in which he uses a needle to break up knotted muscle tissue - "trigger points" - Chiota was pain-free.... | |
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| | | Trauma may make the brain grow old | | Posted Tuesday, July 25, 2006 12:59:02 AM by Blog57 Team | | A bout of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may do damage to the brain that kick-starts memory problems, scientists have discovered. Even patients who had recovered from a period of stress started to get age-related memory difficulties about a decade earlier than non-traumatized people, they report. Post-traumatic stress, a condition that can cause patients to feel physical pain on remembering a traumatic event, is known to have a number of effects on the mind and body. One of the side effects is that patients tend to be forgetful, unable to remember a story or a list of words after they've heard it, for example. This problem, which could come from emotional distraction and an inability to concentrate, can interfere with everyday tasks.Rachel Yehuda and her team at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York decided to investigate further the link between PTSD and memory problems, by looking at what happens to patients as they age.... | |
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