Comments: 0 - Date: September 2nd, 2007 - Categories: Uncategorized
Google Surprise: Looking for varieties of morning glories on Google got this.
Comments: 0 - Date: September 1st, 2007 - Categories: Uncategorized
Man of the People A sensible haircut.
Comments: 0 - Date: September 1st, 2007 - Categories: Uncategorized
A Study in Contrasts: Medical professional organization political donations in 1990 and in 2006. The reason? Surely it must be tort reform.
Nurses have a different pattern of giving.
Nurses have a different pattern of giving.
Comments: 0 - Date: September 1st, 2007 - Categories: Uncategorized
PSA: Looking for reliable up to date basic information on your prescription drugs? There's a link in the left hand column to Epocrates MedSearch Drug Lookup , a public use version of the popular physician PDA tool, Epocrates.
Comments: 0 - Date: September 1st, 2007 - Categories: Uncategorized
Second Hand Book Reviews: From The New England Journal, a review of The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder
, a critique of the cookbook of psychiatric diagnosis. It shaped the thinking of a whole generation of physicians:
As the title of this book — The Loss of Sadness — implies, psychiatrists who are influenced by the diagnostic practices that are encouraged in the DSM have become surprisingly imperceptive to the emotional miseries that life events evoke in their patients. These psychiatrists tend to perceive all such states of mind as major depressive disorder, with the result that they may reach for the prescription pad before they take a history. They practice, with the DSM as their guide, what Sir William Osler once dubbed "penny-in-the-slot therapeutics."
...Concentrating on depression, Horwitz and Wakefield describe how practicing psychiatrists gradually came to think about and treat specific states of demoralization and discouragement that arose from life contexts in the same way they treated pathologic mood disorders....
...The authors note that the DSM-III — by sorting conditions according to their resemblances, rather than by seeking essential differences — medicalized human suffering, diminished attention to human meaning in the field of psychiatry, and hampered communication between patients and physicians. This process encouraged psychiatrists to think only in terms of medications ....
Some would argue that the loss of sadness is a good thing. If all it takes is a pill to eliminate sorrow and anger, then the world's a better place, right? Maybe not. Do poets on Prozac create great works?
, a critique of the cookbook of psychiatric diagnosis. It shaped the thinking of a whole generation of physicians: As the title of this book — The Loss of Sadness — implies, psychiatrists who are influenced by the diagnostic practices that are encouraged in the DSM have become surprisingly imperceptive to the emotional miseries that life events evoke in their patients. These psychiatrists tend to perceive all such states of mind as major depressive disorder, with the result that they may reach for the prescription pad before they take a history. They practice, with the DSM as their guide, what Sir William Osler once dubbed "penny-in-the-slot therapeutics."
...Concentrating on depression, Horwitz and Wakefield describe how practicing psychiatrists gradually came to think about and treat specific states of demoralization and discouragement that arose from life contexts in the same way they treated pathologic mood disorders....
...The authors note that the DSM-III — by sorting conditions according to their resemblances, rather than by seeking essential differences — medicalized human suffering, diminished attention to human meaning in the field of psychiatry, and hampered communication between patients and physicians. This process encouraged psychiatrists to think only in terms of medications ....
Some would argue that the loss of sadness is a good thing. If all it takes is a pill to eliminate sorrow and anger, then the world's a better place, right? Maybe not. Do poets on Prozac create great works?