I do believe today is the first day I've seen snow in New York this winter

I remember reading a couple years ago about the device in this article, and thinking it was only a matter of time before someone got their feathers ruffled.

In an unrelated matter, I wrote down this fantastic sentence from a Grand Rounds lecture on the psychoanalysis of a large sample of medical students' dreams:
"Symbolic alterations of reality are representations of the real self and attempts at repairing self representation by revealing the real self."

Also, I have to find out if these stories are true (the latter I'm pretty sure about since I heard it from a first hand source). The setting I heard them in was a case conference where attendings were sharing war-stories of when delusions turned out to not really be delusions:
1. A fellow comes into an emergency room in a hospital in Queens seeking refuge because someone is chasing him. "Who's chasing you?" one of the on-call residents ask. "Some crazy dwarf." Eyebrows are raised, knowing looks exchanged, and the patient is escorted to the "other emergency room", where he denies being delusional or hallucinating, and is put in solitary confinement. That is, until later on an agitated dwarf from a Coney Island show is arrested while trying to track this guy down. I really hope it's a true story.
2. Another fellow comes into the Montefiore psychiatric ER for one reason or another paranoid that the CIA is after him. He insists that he was part of an elite team within a national security organization and something went bad, and now they're out to get him. Time passes. It's difficult to track down collateral information about the guy as it appears that he had multiple identities. A few days later, men in military uniform arrive and escort him away.

Some more thoughts on psychiatry

With only one-and-a-half weeks remaining of my psychiatric rotation remaining, I feel that I have deprived whatever loyal blog-readers of mine that might be out there from a veritable cornucopia of fantastic stories from my experience working in inpatient psychiatric wards in a hospital outside of the city. Part of me feels guilty sharing the psychoses of my patients with friends and acquaintances, especially since what seem to me at times to be amusing, embarassing, or completely ridiculous interpretations of reality are, in fact, the cause of devastated lives and tormented minds in people who for the most part did nothing wrong. Unfortunately, many mental illnesses execute a kind of "scorched earth" campaign on the brain, and many patients can never put their lives back together. However, I think that discussing those kinds of experiences can be illuminating of certain parts of the human experience. So if you're interested in some really interesting stories, I'm happy to talk about them in person--no public postings, here. I'm going to try to hold myself to that.

In the meanwhile, I'm working on the geriatric floor. What a great place! Dear old folks that you kind of herd around in a tender way, making sure they know where they are and trying to ease their depression, psychoses, etc.

Words of wisdom from one who has plumbed the depths of the human psyche

Today we had a series of lectures on neuropsychiatry, which were fascinating explorations of the biological and neurological basis for various emotions, cognitive functioning, personality, and many aspects of being human that are now being understood to have a strong physical component as demonstrated by new techniques in functional brain imaging. The department chair--one who has made a career studying this stuff--spent much of his hour giving us advice that included the following:
- Watch out for ice
- If there is no seat belt in a cab, get a different cab
- Wear a helmet when you ride a bike
- Be passionate about what you do
- Don't walk backwards into a street while trying to train your dog

Priceless!

Some interesting stuff on neuropsychiatry:
The story of Phineas Gage
The book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
HM

Ahh, the Times...

In a Freudian slip of sorts, New York Times editorial columnist Paul Krugman says:

"But Mr. Edwards, far more than is usual in modern politics, ran a campaign based on ideas. And even as his personal quest for the White House faltered, his ideas triumphed: both candidates left standing are, to a large extent, running on the platform Mr. Edwards built."

Of course, there really are more than two other candidates standing. The remaining four serious contenders happen to be Republicans, but are of no serious consideration other than a glimpse into how The Other Side thinks and operates. Possibly a simple inattention to detail on Mr. Krugman's part, but an interesting commentary of the universe as seen by the Times nevertheless.

This is what I'm up against...

Yep, this is for real.

Two posts in one day!

I bet you never knew that the guy who developed the lobotomy (also known as the leucotomy), was given a Nobel prize in medicine.

Also, I find that the descriptors of the Nobel Prizes over the years have become significantly less colorful:

1901: "for his work on serum therapy, especially its application against diphtheria, by which he has opened a new road in the domain of medical science and thereby placed in the hands of the physician a victorious weapon against illness and deaths"

2007: "for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells"

What does one do when given huge amounts of free-time doing a rotation at a psychiatric institute?

Blogging of course!

Here is a jem from the New York Times as Maureen Dowd laments that President Bush ("W." to her--a rather unprofessional expression of contempt, if you ask me) had to go to Saudi Arabia basically to beg for lower oil prices:

"Maybe if the president had spent the trillion he squandered on his Iraq odyssey on energy research, we might have broken the oil addiction."

Correction: if we didn't have the war in Iraq, I'm sure we would still be addicted to foreign oil. The idea that with a diversion of war spending from Iraq to the area of energy research could make us less dependent on foreign capital is ridiculous. Without trying to drill for all our oil on our own soil, the transformation of the U.S. economy into one that is not dependent on foreign sources would not only cost a cosmic amount of money, but most likely would take longer than the duration of any administration. And the solution is not as simple as hybrids, ethanol, wind energy, and more-efficient light bulbs. Unfortunately, I just heard that drought in the South threatens to shut down many of their nuclear power plants that rely on massive amounts of water for their cooling systems.

Other great stuff from today:
In the hospital library, this aptly-titled book. I don't think you can find a more authoritative-sounding name than "Lord Brain".