19. Your medication or your life
One of the shocks of my professional life came rather late: after 7 years of study, 8 years of medical practice and several years of working on a medical decision support system. It came while reading about how many categories of medication act more than purely symptomatically. Or better said: how many don’t. ◊◊◊ Actually Read the full article…
18. Meditate and win!
Some people in the East (OK, not the average shopkeeper in a tourist resort) practice meditation for years, daily meditating many hours. They make progress towards ‘something’ over this time. Apparently they find it worthwhile … ◊◊◊ In the West, what is called ‘meditation’ is promulgated by many as a good method to cope with Read the full article…
17. Antidepressants: doors wide shut
Antidepressants have not been invented. They have been discovered. It happened through people taking drugs for another purpose. Some of these reported a diminishment in feelings of depression. ◊◊◊ As one says, the rest is history. ◊◊◊ Looking closer at it, the aim of that what has been discovered, is to indiscriminately diminish the suffering. Read the full article…
16. Materialism is the opium of modern people
Materialism nowadays resembles a religion in many aspects. People ‘believe’ in it not just in a superficial way. They ‘believe’ in it in a very deep, semi-religious way. In addition to this, present-day materialism often leaves aside rationalism and in doing so, goes back to magic. ◊◊◊ Of course, nothing seems more real than something Read the full article…
15. The message in the bottle: homeopathy
Classic ‘pure’ homeopathy: one takes a number of drops of ‘messaged’ water and gets better. That’s what we are told and guess what, it’s true indeed. ◊◊◊ What is also true is that the person not only takes the water, but also ‘takes’ the expectation that this water will help him. Question: which of both Read the full article…
14. Being critical is a good thing
Many people like to be ‘critical’ or ‘skeptical’. That’s a good thing. Or would be… ◊◊◊ …if it would really mean what it says. Being ‘critical / skeptical’ (let’s suppose it designates the same thing) means that a person has the energy and desire, one can rightly say ‘the guts’ to look at something from Read the full article…
13. Is medical science ready for emotions?
Emotions and health: in the agelong history of medicine, there has seldom been any doubt about the influence of the one on the other. Still, although it may well be of the utmost importance to us all, we don’t see medical science reach many definite conclusions on this domain. So: is the problem in the Read the full article…
12. ‘The cure sanctifies the means’… no way, mister!
‘I don’t care how it works, as long as it works.’ Western society is obsessed with ‘things that work’. We like to see distinctive results. It gives us a sense of achievement, control and if possible also progression towards ‘a better world’. ◊◊◊ I couldn’t agree more: it should work! ◊◊◊ At the same time, Read the full article…
11. Depression: in need of the lost soul
According to medical textbooks, depression is defined on the one hand as a number of symptoms: seeing the future bleak, having profound feelings of guilt and hopelessness, appetite and sleep disturbances etc. On the other hand, it’s looked upon as a hormonal or brain transmitter disorder. ◊◊◊ So we have the symptoms and we have Read the full article…
10. Not the smoking makes the smoker
Do you agree with the following? A ‘smoker’ who hasn’t smoke for a while, is still a ‘smoker’ as long as he keeps having the addiction inside. It doesn’t matter whether he hasn’t smoked for an hour, a day, a week or several years. ◊◊◊ This is of course a somewhat unusual definition of ‘smoker’. Read the full article…
9. Anorexia: being hungry for another kind of food
Hypothesis: an anorectic is someone who is in dire need of ‘soul food’ and because this is not available, enacts this deep need into not taking any other food either. ◊◊◊ This doesn’t make every anorectic a kind of saint, unless you assume that in the end we are all ‘saints’. What’s in a word. Read the full article…
8.ADHD: children in need of attention, twice
‘Attention’ is a very strange phenomenon. At first sight, and as far as we are normally used to think about it, it’s very easy. One focuses one’s attention on something to some degree or not at all. That’s all there is to it, no? ◊◊◊ No. Pay attention now. ◊◊◊ To make this clear, compare Read the full article…
7. An eye-opener on double-blind studies
The core of present-day scientific medicine is more and more boiling down to ‘evidence based medicine’ (EBM). The essence of EBM is double-blind studies: comparing a new supposedly-active substance to placebo whereby both prescriber(s) and patients are ignorant (‘blind’) in regard to whether they get placebo or the ‘active’ substance. ◊◊◊ Nice. ◊◊◊ Everything (really: Read the full article…
6. Phobia: let the spiders talk to you
If you have a phobia for spiders and you go to a therapist, there’s a big chance that he will subject you to a ‘systematic desensitization’. This is: you are gradually brought into contact with ‘spider’ until you can stand its presence or even touch the real thing. Simple procedure, no? And doesn’t it work? Read the full article…
3 Why Do the Obese Continue Eating?
Most obese people fight against the own ‘wanting’ as against an invisible enemy. No hocus pocus! We know that the calories which are present in a human body have been entered there one way or the other. No hocus pocus. Therefore losing weight is the most simple thing to do, namely: not doing something. Then Read the full article…
2 The Link Between Yawning and a Painkiller
The placebo effect is substantial AND we do not have to deceive the patient for it. Someone yawns. Seeing this, someone else gets an urge to yawn. Or someone (you perhaps?) reads about yawning and already feels an urge towards it. A well-known phenomenon. But what is the cause of it? There can only be Read the full article…
5. Yummy yummy, Mr. Pavlov, yummy yummy
Pavlov took a dog and gave him food (unconditioned stimulus = UCS) paired with the sound of a bell. After a while, the sound of the bell (conditioned stimulus = CS) gave the same response as the UCS, namely: drooling. Pavlov considered his dog conditioned very well. He and others showed again and again this Read the full article…