medicine

Some good, some bad

/ from outside / , , ,

A similar process occurs in therapy. After a while, clients internalise the warmth and understanding of their therapist, turning it into an internal resource to draw on for strength and support. A new, compassionate voice flickers into life, silencing that of the inner critic – itself an echo of insensitive earlier attachment figures. But this transformation doesn’t come easy. As the poet WH Auden wrote in The Age of Anxiety (1947): “We would rather be ruined than changed.” It is the therapist’s job, as a secure base and safe haven, to guide clients as they journey into unfamiliar waters, helping them stay hopeful and to persist through the pain, sadness, anger, fear, anxiety and despair they might need to face.

Source: How you attach to people may explain a lot about your inner life | Science | The Guardian

We are all the voices of our past, then.

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Abortion sometimes is necessary

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Because of the nature of the abortion fight in the country, let me say this plainly: what happened to me was not the clinic’s fault. It was not the doctor’s fault. It was not his staff’s fault. There was no error of medical judgment or medical practice. It is the fault of forty years of pushing abortion care out of hospitals and stigmatizing and marginalizing women and care providers to the point where only four doctors in the United States are foolish enough to risk getting shot point-blank every day on their way to work to provide late-term abortions. It is the fault of legislators terrorizing physicians with spurious investigations instead of funding abortion research and finding ways to make the procedure safer. It is the fault of giving extremist, hateful, radicalizing discourse equal airtime with scientific fact and medical expertise. What would it look like, if we truly funded women’s healthcare? I wish I knew.

Source: Rivers Of Babylon: The Story Of A Third-Trimester Abortion – The Rumpus.net

Sometimes it isn’t anyone’s fault but there are people who want to blame someone, so they turn to the mother. “She’s the one to blame!”, they say.

They’re wrong. And they cannot be allowed to win.

Abortion sometimes is necessary Read More »

“Children Are Dying”

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PN is now considered one of the most important accomplishments in modern medicine—which makes it all the more distressing that unnecessary shortages are reducing its efficacy. “It breaks my heart,” says Dudrick, now a professor emeritus at Yale. “This is because big pharma isn’t making enough money on these components. It’s tragic. I just don’t know how they sleep at night.”

via “Children Are Dying” | People & Politics | Washingtonian.

The IMSS has it bad, but this is worse. This is trickle-down economics for you.

This is what the powers that be in Mexico want.

“Children Are Dying” Read More »

Better someplace without smokers than one full of suicidal smokers

/ ruidoz / , , , , ,

I watch and read quite the scandal about the anti-tobacco law project intended to stop the consumption of cigarettes inside of closed businesses. Noesh told me about a comment (left here, it’s the one by Ruy Feben) about applying the same principles to alcohol drinkers and people with AIDS.

The law is going to pass anyway, so why argue.

Where I made the connection is when I saw this article on The New York Magazine titled “This Is My Brain on Chantix”. In short, it’s the experience someone had when trying to use the drug known as Chantix(Varenicline) to stop smoking and caused him psychological issues. In addition to the ones someone else had who after taking the drug proceeded to attack his fiancee to the point she had to get a neighbor’s help and the neighbor, panicking, shot him with a firearm through the front door. If you didn’t read the article you can guess what the result was.

So now the law is not only protecting non-smokers from second hand smoke. It protects smokers from having to use a drug which might result being worse than the original condition. Let’s leave out the fact the drug underwent human testing with people of white race withouth a history of psychiatric patologies.

The most unsettling thing about sleeping on Chantix is that I never felt like I was truly asleep. Some part of me remained on guard. It was more like lucid dreaming, what I thought it might feel like to be hypnotized. And it didn’t entirely go away come morning. As I showered, shaved, and scrambled into clothes, I tried to shake a weird, paranoid sense that I’d just been psychically raped by a household appliance.

Just imagine… feel being raped by an clothes iron or a hairdryer. Or worse yet, a gangbang between the washer, the dryer and the dishwasher.

I joked to my friends that Chantix was the ultimate quit-smoking drug, because when you kill yourself, there’s no chance of relapse.

The words of Elizabeth McCullough, who also tried going through the treatment.

I see no problem in the law passing. I believe it a good thing I could get a pair of beers at a bar and leave without smelling like someone else’s smoke. Specially the benefit to the smoker of not having to use a drug with which the could be really Bad Times. A Cronenberg movie is to be watched, not to be lived. Or would you rather wake dream that microbus is after your ass?

Better someplace without smokers than one full of suicidal smokers Read More »