I sometimes wonder what it must be like to live a life without the intervention of modern medicine. What must it be like when your teeth fit together just fine without braces, when you can see without corrective lenses, when you’ve required no surgery to remove oversized adenoids, tonsils, or appendices, when your robust joints have required no surgery, when your skin grows no cancers…
In one study, Benedetti found that Alzheimer’s patients
with impaired cognitive function get less pain relief
from analgesic drugs than normal volunteers do. Using
advanced methods of EEG analysis, he discovered that the
connections between the patients’ prefrontal lobes and
their opioid systems had been damaged. Healthy volunteers
feel the benefit of medication plus a placebo boost.
Patients who are unable to formulate ideas about the
future because of cortical deficits, however, feel only
the effect of the drug itself. The experiment suggests
that because Alzheimer’s patients don’t get the benefits
of anticipating the treatment, they require higher doses
of painkillers to experience normal levels of relief.
In the healthcare article of the year, Dr. Atul Gawande has done some outstanding reporting: he has described the core problems of the United States’ healthcare system. He has also pointed out beacons for reform to pursue — the foremost being the Mayo Clinic right here in Rochester, Minnesota:
I suppose this could be considered another entry in my ‘happiness’ series, but this comes from a very different angle. I just finished a flat-out fantastic article in the New Yorker called The Way We Age Now, by Atul Gawande. What Dr. Gawande did was summarize the steeply declining geriatric profession and link it to anecdotal evidence for necessary changes in medicine’s attitude towards geriatrics.
Michael Jackson. A Star Tribune review of a local opera. The musical group Barenaked Ladies. How could these topics be anything but non sequiturs in a stream-of-conscious rambling? I did not know either until about ten minutes ago. That’s when I decided to write this post instead of simply linking to the Star Tribune’s review of an opera about a man called the “Elephant Man.” He lived in the mid 1800s and had an extremely rare genetic disorder called “Proteus syndrome.” He is pictured at right. More on that picture in a second. You see, I was reading that opera review, and frankly could have cared less about the actual opera … I was fascinated about the real story of this man who was shunned from society and what disease he actually had. Towards the end, the review finally mentions this man, Joseph Merrick. It says he died simply by laying flat; the weight of his head broke his neck. It was three feet around at time of death.
