Psych bible turns sorrow into sickness
POSTED BY: Magonsdaughter
UPDATED: Tuesday, December 6, 2011 21:46
VIEWED: 5022
PAGE 3 of 4
Quote:Yep. Thank you, thank you.
Originally posted by Bytemite:
[Essentially, if you're literate and discerning, there's not really anything a doctor can tell you that you can't find out on your own.
One of my favorite physicians is Robert Mendelsohn, MD. Wrote a book called Confessions of a Medical Heretic. When I first read it, I thought, "Damn, this guy is kooky!" A few years later, after I had gotten sick and had gotten to know a LOT of physicians, I thought, "Damn, this guy is scary right." Things are so bad in that industry, the truth sounds kooky.
One of my favorite quotations from the book: "Anybody with an eighth grade education and a dictionary can read any medical book."
Another one:
Quote:
That's why it is important to subvert the process [getting unwanted procedures while in labor at the hospital] and get the jump on the doctor as much as possible before the situation gets critical. After you've asked your question, don't take it for granted that you can trust the doctor's answers. Check out whatever he says. Again, read all the sources you can find. You have to know more about it than he does.
Doctors in general should be treated with about the same degree of trust as used car salesmen. Whatever your doctor says or recommends, you have to first consider how it will benefit him.
So, I see doctors as salesmen. Salesmen know a LOT about the products they sell, but they don't usually know what is best for YOU--esp if what is best for you doesn't involve their line of products.
When I go to the grocery store, I don't ask the grocer what I should make for dinner. I decide what I want to make for dinner FIRST, then visit a grocer if I need to buy something from him for dinner. Similarly, I don't ask doctors what I should have for treatment. I decide what I want to treatment FIRST, then visit a doctor if I need to buy something from him for that treatment. I've had so much less conflict with doctors once I realized it was purely a very expensive sales transaction.
There are a few experts in certain diseases or mechanisms, but your average private practitioner? For the most part, they are legal, state-approved drug dealers.
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Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth. -- Lucy Parsons (1853-1942, labor activist and anarcho-communist)
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Quote:I've had a lot of better experiences with homeopathy than naturopathy. And, homeopathy is SOOOO much cheaper. If it doesn't work, you haven't lost much. Conventional medicine and naturopathy tend to be very expensive.
Originally posted by Bytemite:
You might have been talking to CTS? She has some similar viewpoints about self-research and distrust of doctors/big pharm but she's the one who likes naturopathy.
I consider myself a medical atheist and pragmatist. I have no preferred Healing Religion. I will try anything once. I've tried all sorts of things, both conventional and alternative. Some have "worked" and some were a waste of money, in both conventional and alternative modalities. Whatever works, that's my motto.
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Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth. -- Lucy Parsons (1853-1942, labor activist and anarcho-communist)
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Quote:Interesting thought.
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Diagnosing everyone as sick makes everyone part of the system, so everyone gets the currency, and in so doing they set up the international exchange rate, between the global parasitic nation of Pharma, and their host nation. Pharma can set this rate of exchange through manipulation of governments, medical providers and insurance companies.
It is not just in diagnosing normal unhappinesses of life. They have convinced people to FORCE everyone else into the diagnostic/treatment system. Medical consensus and "standards of care" and public health prevention is all about herding us into this box where we HAVE to spend THEIR currency to buy THEIR products and solidify THEIR monopoly.
Again, I don't really get why anti-corporation folks would support this kind hegemony, but medicine appears to be an almost religious blind spot. They will question global warming studies by oil companies, and lung cancer studies by tobacco companies, but they won't question medical studies by pharmaceutical companies, or medical studies by physicians who get vacations from Big Pharm.
The DSM has a lot of legal clout in courts. It is not just a standard of diagnosis, but a preamble to a standard of care. Because of DSM, you get cases like Godboldo and forced drugging of children for ADHD like this one.
http://www.breggin.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&
id=81
I don't really care if they want to pathologize everything under the sun. But I take issue when it becomes the benchmark by which I am judged both socially and legally.
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Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth. -- Lucy Parsons (1853-1942, labor activist and anarcho-communist)
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Oh believe me, that used car salesman analogy sooo works.
The doc I use for scratch and dent type stuff, he's a decent enough old coot and willing to patch up stuff without asking too many questions, plus being local and cheap, sure...
However, he's also always, ALWAYS trying to push an MRI and Cholesteral(sp?) screening, not because of any actual medical concern, but because he's receiving kickbacks from the place that runs the MRI for his referrals, and the makers of a certain supposed anti-cholesterol drug pay for his golf junkets.
I am not however entirely sure an "eighth grade education" is up to it when you get into stuff like the work of Doc Perry, hell even *I* struggle with trying to puzzle out WTF he's trying to say a lot of the time since I lack the medical education and terminology and have to then look THAT up, yadda yadda, but for more general things there's a point to that, yeah.
I think that a lot of times, trying to figure a diagnosis is like fishing in a pond, while the doctor has a deeper "pond" there's still no assurance you're gonna catch the right fish there - if you'll pardon my heavily mangled analogy.
Also, regarding natural medicine - and I don't often mention this cause folks get the notion I am against modernized medicine en-masse, which is far from true...
I *DO* know a lot about old-school healing of the type modern medicine is based upon, and there's times when that might do a better job of things, particularly when modern medicine is overkill - it's gentler, some might say weaker, but do you really need specifically x amount of milligrams of something when all you need is temporary symptom abatement while you find/heal the root cause ?
Of course, modern medicine seems to be far, far more about treating symptoms over and over rather than addressing and fixing root causes cause it's more profitable that way, and I see that as foolish as taking nyquil for tuberculosis - case in point: acute febrile neutrophilic dermatosis.
If you actually read up on it, 90% of the descriptions are medicalese-doubletalk-jargon for "We have no idea", in fact that's EXACTLY what "idiopathic" MEANS - this one being a rather personal annoyance for me since the stress of being out of my safe zone will trigger a relapse and if symptom-abatement is all we have then that leaves me kinda hanging, don't it ?
All that said, modern medicine ain't without it's miracles neither - Corvera was a freakin mad genious, using sea coral to bulk up the shattered wreck of my tibia so that we didn't have to lose the knee when we hadda saw off the mangled remains of my right leg, and the prosthetics and other reinforcement stuff which keep me functioning are something of a wonder themselves, although we bent quite a few medical "rules" in the doing of all that, sure.
As with anything else, medicine is only as good as the human beings delivering it, who should never be regarded as infallible, cause that leads to disaster, often as not.
Also, I think the patient has a responsibility to be an INFORMED one, that they should never abdicate, cause that cuts both ways too - if you shoulda known better, then YOU shoulda known better, ehe ?
-Frem
I do not serve the Blind God.
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CTS,
Most people's minds don't bend around corners. If you call something medicine they can't see it as anything else, like economics, if you call it economics, they can't see it as an invading army (like the euro) If you call it charity, they can't see it as genocide, etc.
This just serves the power, because then the debate becomes trapped in the frame of "medicine" and then it's "this is bad medicine" which turns into a cry for "better medicine" which invariably means "more medicine."
That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.
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Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Niki,
this is neither here nor there, but since I adopted your color coded text idea (good idea, btw. It's cut in half the time I spend hunting through threads) I've started trying my best to quote colored text as colored, to make your text purple when I quote it. You have to set the font inside the quote and then again outside of it.
While I'm at it, I recommend to everyone to chose a color. I recall Rap being orange briefly. It's a good idea, you know whose words are which much more easily.
It's like miniature golf, for words.
That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.
Maybehaps I'll give it a try...
ETA: Naaahhhh - that's too close to your color. I'll have to play with it and tweak it a bit.
ETA2: Better. It's supposed to be a mustard yellow, but appears more orangey on the screen. Colors have limits, especially on a black background. Most blues will really strobe if you're not careful, and you won't be able to focus on them easily at all.
Like this one.
Oooh, I like this one better.
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservatives." - John Stuart Mill
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Here's a subtler blue, Mike
This is 009FFF
Some simple colors
This is FF0000
This is FFAF00
This is FFFF00
This is AFFF00
This is 00FF00 [reserved]
This is 00AFFF
This is 0000FF
This is AF00FF
This is FF00FF
This is FF00AF
Niki is 9999CC
Niki used to be 48D1CC
That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.
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I have a HUGE problem with overdiagnosis and calling normal human experiences illness, this coming from someone who definitely has a mental illness and has no doubt about it. The DSM 5 scares me because it has all these whacky new diagnoses in it. One that bothers me is "psychotic risk disorder". I mean if the person isn't having psychosis then why would we want to label them like that? Sometimes labels do more harm than good and I don't believe in treating something unless it is actually happening, none of this "well its possible that it might happen so lets jump the gun" stuff, especially when it comes to kids.
Its normal to be really depressed for the first six months or more after your spouse dies. My grandma lost a ton of weight after my grandpa passed and was bummed out. The problem with her is that she was already starting to show signs of old age brain differences, which notably increased after his death. Sometimes when old people do have depression (she's been pissy always but it keeps getting worse the older she gets) it can masquerade as dementia/alzheimers, and if the person tries things for the depression the memory loss symptoms go away. But we can't figure this out with my grandma because she is clever enough to see where the doctor is going when he asks certain questions so she lies. At any rate she's still able to take care of herself and her symptoms of whatever-it-is have plateaued in the last six months so that's at least something. For context my grandpa died two years ago and I started noticing little problems about three years ago. Not exactly what we're talking about but hey.
I think that there are a lot of good points in this discussion.
Byte, I'm seeing the natural doctor and the pdoc, double duty. The naturopath is fairly new, I've been using her amino acid for two months now, haven't noticed a change from it. But my labs will come back soon so we'll see what we can do with that.
"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya
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Huh. Wikipedia told me that homeopathy was a subcategory of naturopathy. She done me wrong, that wikipedia.
Riona: I'd like to hear about the labs if you feel up to discussing. Most of the time I have no damn idea what I'm talking about, but I can hit the ground running and get a clue real quick.
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I think the main problem here is that people don't really get what a disorder actually is. In general, someone is clinically disordered if the behaviour negatively affects their life in a significant way and it pervades most, if not all, areas of their life. Also, these behaviours have to NOT have an obvious cause (more on this below).
So, given the above, the grieving widow cannot be diagnosed with major depressive disorder because her grief has an obvious cause. Similarly, with the child.
When it comes to the psychological (i.e. personality disorders), their might be an "obvious cause" but _not_ something that would indicate such a reaction or conduct. So, the definition holds.
I actually have a saying, It's not that I hate Psychiatry, it's that I hate Psychiatrists.
In other words, we can only know what we know and nothing more. Medicine is pretty much dancing around a fire worshiping it compared to real Science and Psychiatry is that to Medicine. We have to keep that in mind. The DSM is a "living document" for a reason. It's because they don't know everything and new information comes up all the time (something that Psychiatrists need to be reminded of). To freak out of this is nonsense i.e. we don't over surgeons, or engineers designing buildings/bridges, etc, etc, etc.
Basically, if you don't want to get screwed, do your research. But, don't use wikipedia as a primary source. Use it as a starting point. If you don't eventually end up at pubmed, you're either not done, or doing it wrong.
p.s. If you take anything written in the news media at face value, you're doing it wrong. Stop it. Check the sources and do your own research. There's so much spin, etc these days it's embarrassing.
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I am on The Original List (twice). We are The Forsaken and we aim to burn!
"We don't fear the reaper"
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