36. Meditation, a World of Difference
In serious meditation you will also find the sharpening of the own instrument to empathy. Meditation has many faces. It makes no sense to list many forms of meditation that differ greatly among themselves. Here below I prefer to enumerate some elements of what meditation is and is not, according to me. What meditation is Read the full article…
35. Pedophilia is Not a Matter for Children
No one is guilty of pedophilia, but indeed of actions that might result from it. A pedophile is not just someone who is molesting children by lack of adults. A pedophile feels sexually strongly attracted to children. This attraction comes from ‘somewhere outside conscious thinking’ just as, mutatis mutandis, when someone feels more and more Read the full article…
34. From Burnout to Butterfly
People are reborn in order to spread out their wings. Burnout is a pupating Nature is not as stupid as it looks. Especially not if one only looks at it with only half an eye to already decide that it is stupid. So, a lot of ‘illness’ is a healthy response to an unhealthy environment. Read the full article…
33. Phobia: Anxiety for the Spider Within
The real spider is present in the phobic person himself. Anxiety is not the same as fear I ‘get a little scared’ when I see the dentist approaching with his squirt. There are more pleasant situations. There is a little fear involved. Someone who faints at the idea or the sight of a syringe, however, Read the full article…
32. Hypnocus Pocus & Co.
“Everything that is possible with hypnosis is also possible without hypnosis.” Freud, suggestion, Braid, Liège At the beginning of his career, Freud flirted with hypnosis. Evil tongues claim that this was not his favorite because he could not get along very well with ‘the nonconscious’. So, he developed, with the help of psychoanalysis, a vision Read the full article…
31. Psychosis: a Needless Tsunami
A tsunami requires a surfboard About ripples and a tsunami Is an abnormality of the brain the cause of psychosis? One can at least search for that. Probably one will find, in due course, more and more elements that fit the bill. I am sure one will. Everything that happens at a psychological level, has Read the full article…
30. The Cheapest War is No War
o Mega savings by making peace The enemy ‘disease’? Our medicine is an attacking medicine. It is targeted at an enemy, called ‘disease’. To this end it uses weapons, called ‘pharmaceutical products’, ‘surgery’ and so on. But first it will, as befits an atttacking medicine, identify the enemy: ‘medical history’, ‘clinical investigations’, ‘laboratory ‘ etc. Read the full article…
29. Chronic Functional Pain: All for One?
Different functional pain syndromes have more similarities than differences. Chronic functional pain as one syndrome The following quote is from Mayer & Bushnell, editors of ‘Functional Pain Syndromes’, 2009, from their word for this Yearbook, published by the ‘International Association for the Study of Pain’ (possibly the most scientifically renowned Association of the world that Read the full article…
28. The Meaning of Meaning
Deep meanings sicken and heal. Nothing has meaning except meaning itself ‘Meaning’ only lives in a signifier (meaning-giver). This text for example, has no meaning for a turtle unless it likes to eat the paper on which the text is printed. More generally: If there is no one to understand this text, then it’s just Read the full article…
27. Why We Sink into CAM
CAM is like an amoeba. Not more rational than trial and error and some super simplicity. Common sense According to research in the US, it are mainly people with a higher education that practice CAM (Complementary & Alternative Medicine). Does this mean that common sense sees through the CAM thing much faster? Or do highly Read the full article…
26. Do You Not Smoke Right Now, or Do You Not Smoke Anymore?
Smoking does not (necessarily) make the smoker Psyche, nicotine It’s common knowledge that the physical aspect is just a little part of the total addiction. The biggest part of an addiction is present ‘in the mind’. Nicotine is not much more than the leverage of the jack with which the real smoking addiction is being Read the full article…
25. Life is Attention
Life is attention. Attention is life. Definition of ‘life’ Any doctor has ever learned a definition of ‘life’… and at the same time of the existence of at least one vague zone: viruses. A virus does not grow, does not eat and actually it does not multiply itself. Instead of this, it is ‘replicated’ by Read the full article…
24. Empathy in 1, 2, 3 – Part 3: ‘Beyond the Conceptual’
“Where two of you are together, I am present.” The human mind: rather a chest of drawers or a cloud? One could see the human mind as a collection of boxes, a kind of chest of drawers in which one can store all kinds of things. There is a clear subdivision. In each tray, there Read the full article…
23. Empathy in 1, 2, 3 – Part 2: ‘Openness’
Most important in empathy: Do not stand in the way of it. Openness to meaningful patterns By this I mean YOUR openness. It may feel like intuition or a deep sensation. You may have already heard of ‘non-conceptual communication’: in addition to everything a patient tells you at a verbal conceptual level, he/she always sends Read the full article…
22. Empathy in 1, 2, 3 – Part 1: ‘Silence’
Silence is the mental space in which the patient may be him/herself. Harsh destination In a previous column, you could read about the importance of empathy. [see: “Empathy: What it Was, Is and… Will Be?“] An empathic doctor does not need to be convinced of that. A non-empathic doctor does, because for him it is, Read the full article…
21. Empathy: What it Was, Is and… Will Be?
Empathy is difficult to conceptualize because it is ‘beyond the conceptual’. What it was In the second half of the 19th century, bedside manners were the main instrument of the doctor. The time of bloodletting, purgatives, and leeches (in 1827 in France still good for an import of 33 million specimens, in addition to the Read the full article…
20. The Little Man of Pain Inside Our Brain
Pain Neuromatrix: science, no fiction R.Melzack, Nobel Prize winner on the basis of his Gate Control Theory, has subsequently also developed the Pain Neuromatrix theory. In this theory he locates even more the mechanism that produces pain – so the fact of ‘feeling’ pain – within the brain itself. The Pain Neuromatrix is a distributed Read the full article…