The inventive language created by doctors the world over to insult their patients - or each other - is in danger of becoming extinct.
So says a doctor who has spent four years charting more than 200 colourful examples. ... Top medical acronyms CTD - Circling the Drain (A patient expected to die soon) GLM - Good looking Mum GPO - Good for Parts Only TEETH - Tried Everything Else, Try Homeopathy UBI - Unexplained Beer Injury ... And the number of terms for patients believed to be somewhat intellectually challenged is enormous.
From LOBNH (Lights On But Nobody Home), CNS-QNS (Central Nervous System - Quantity Not Sufficient), to the delightful term "pumpkin positive", which refers to the implication that a penlight shone into the patient's mouth would encounter a brain so small that the whole head would light up.
http://www.ted.com Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt...
The patient was a 37-year-old man who had been physically abused as a boy by his schizophrenic mother, often while he lay in bed trying to fall asleep. Nevertheless, he had grown into a reasonably normal, gainfully employed adult, and he thought that the worst was behind him, until one night he awoke to find an intruder rummaging through his dresser drawers. After that, his nightmares began — terrifying, recurrent dreams in which the intruder was a middle-age woman and a knife dangled with Damoclesian contempt from the ceiling fan over his head. ... In a recent paper in Psychological Bulletin, Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Levin proposed that dreaming served to create what they call “fear extinction memories,” the brain’s way of scrambling, detoxifying and finally discarding old fearful memories, the better to move on and make synaptic space for any novel threats that may show up at the door. “The brain learns quickly what to be afraid of,” Dr. Nielsen said. “But if there isn’t a check on the process, we’d fear things in adulthood we feared in childhood.”
Ordinary bad dreams rarely recapitulate unpleasant events from real life but instead cannibalize them for props and spare parts, and through that reinvention, Dr. Nielsen explained, the fears are defanged. “A bad dream that doesn’t lead to awakening is successful in dealing with intense emotion,” he said. “It’s disturbing, but there is some kind of resolution to the extent we don’t wake up.”
By this scenario, nightmares, in allowing you to escape prematurely, represent a failure of the “fear extinction” system. “Bad dreams are functional, nightmares dysfunctional,” he said.
i read this when it was first online on 23rd Oct after some minor league odd dreams last night it came back to me so i meme it now for your reading pleasure
plus i'm reminded of something i have believed for years that art is like the dreams of a culture - an expression of the cultural unconsciousness - those that study narratology talk about the creation of a magical resolution, clearly sometimes it is a nightmare like in Kafka's The Trial, a sustained surreal journey that ends with the execution of K. I looked for some old text books to explain magical resolution but couldn't find what i was looking for but it's about closure, resolving the story arc and having a happy ending (obviously The Trial isn't a happy ending but like Shakespearean tragedy the nightmare has closure). The Tempest is a rather literal example of magical resolution. A Midsummer Nights Dream, Fanny Hill, Pride and Prujudice. Sometimes there is too much magic and the ending is perceived as too forced, too contrived and the book or film isn't satisfactory. Peter F Hamilton's conclusion to his Nightsdawn trilogy springs to my mind.
edit googling magical resolution i came across a great example "Neo’s triumph over the Agents is a magical resolution" from here absolutely the ending of The Matrix is a great and rather more contempory example of a magic resolution which is artistically successful Neo is dead/dying but revives by hacking the Matrix itself
Stuart Baker-Brown, 43, a photographer and writer based in Dorset, was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1996. On World Mental Health Day, he delivers a unique personal insight into how his condition has nurtured his artistic expression.
i don't have schizophrenia but i have had schizophreniform psychosis (the difference being the duration of my episodes [under 6 months]) and a lot of those experiences go into the poetry i write
Justine Nyinobajambere, 30, can barely walk, because both feet are leathery, pus-oozing stumps with flies feasting on them. She has already lost two of her four children, perhaps in part because her deformity makes it difficult to get food and water for them. All that suffering could have been prevented for 3 cents a year.
Scientists have transformed mouse skin cells into embryonic stem cells and proved their potency by using the new cells to produce baby mice.
The experiments are seen as a major advance for regenerative medicine, which aims to custom-build tissues and cells to repair ailing and ageing bodies.
Scientists caution there are serious safety issues that must be resolved before the techniques could ever be used on people, but say the advance points to a new way of making embryonic stem cells for patients from their own cells.
There is no need to destroy embryos, and the procedure might allow researchers to sidestep many of the ethical objections now dogging stem-cell research.
Until now, the only way to obtain embryonic stem cells has been to take them from an embryo. Producing cells that are a genetic match for a patient would entail making a clone of that person and harvesting the cells when the cloned embryo is days old, which raises thorny ethical issues and is illegal in several countries, including Canada.
The new work promises cells free of such contentious issues.
"You could take a skin cell, or a blood cell, and reprogram it with these four genes to make embryonic stem cells," Mr. Rudnicki said. The cells could then be turned into any type of cells required for therapeutic use, be they neurons to treat Alzheimer's or insulin producers for diabetics.
He cautions that significant hurdles still need to be overcome.
Zanshin means “the remaining mind” and also “the mind with no remainder.” This is the mind of complete action. It is the moment in kyudo (Zen archery) after releasing the arrow. This is “ Om makurasai sowaka” in oryoki practice and drinking the rinse water. In shodo, it is finishing the brush stroke and the hand and brush moving smoothly off the paper. In taking a step, it is the weight rolling smoothly and the next step arising. In breathing in completely, it is this breath. In breathing out completely, it is this breath. In life, it is this life. Zanshin means complete follow through, leaving no trace. It means each thing, completely, as it is.
When body, breath, speech and mind are broken from each other and scattered in concept and strategy, then no true action can reveal itself. There is only hesitation, or trying to push oneself past hesitation. This is the mind of hope and fear, which arises because one is trying to live in some other moment, instead of in the moment that arises now. One is comparing, planning, or trying to maintain an illusion of control in the midst of a reality which is completely beyond control.
“When Steve and Leslie Shaeffer’s daughter, Selah, was diagnosed at age 4 with a potentially fatal tumor in her jaw, they figured their health insurance would cover the bulk of her treatment costs.” But “shortly after Selah’s medical bills hit $20,000, Blue Cross stopped covering them and eventually canceled her coverage retroactively.”
So begins a recent report in The Los Angeles Times titled “Sick but Insured? Think Again,” which offers a series of similar horror stories, and suggests that these stories represent a growing trend: more and more health insurers are finding ways to yank your insurance when you get sick
I read an article like that and I thank God/Buddha/Vishnu/Allah/the quantum flux of the cosmos for the 1945 Labour government, in my country, which introduced our wonderfully socialist National Health Service so I, with my mental health problems, am looked after and one of my friends doesn't have to worry about bills whilst her son is treated for non-hodgkins lymphoma - at times like that you don't need the stress
