Update: The Tornado that might be on your evening news hit Adairsville [White Arrow]. bypassing 1boringoldman headquarters [Red Arrow] as it moved on northeast… The universe owes me one nap…
It was the best of times… Conflicts Policies And Antidepressant Prescribing Pharmalot By Ed Silverman January 29th, 2013 Do conflict of interest policies adopted by residency programs actually work? To test this notion, a group of researchers examined prescribing data for several widely promoted antidepressants and found that psychiatrists who encountered restrictive policies were less […]
Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it … Edmund Burke French philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, is known for an interpretation of the philosophical giant Georg Hegel – specifically the idea that we are at the end of history. I’m way out of my depth here, but it goes something like this: "The well-known ‘End […]
Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World … Christopher Columbus This is obviously a view of a limited history, from a single person, in one place, at one slice of time – inseparable from my personal history even if I tried. Maybe it’s more a remembrance of things past than history. But […]
History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided … Konrad Adenauer A few years back, I heard Rosalyn Carter speak at a dinner. Her talk was organized around just one simple fact. "The largest mental hospital in America is the L.A. County Jail," she said. And I thought about Philippe Pinel and […]
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon. … Napoleon Bonaparte In on history 1 … I was musing about my own early look at psychiatry when I arrived from internal medicine. I think I read those dusty old books trying to understand how it had become so different from […]
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it … George Santayana It’s pretty easy to criticize medicine, but psychiatry is particularly vulnerable because of its position at the subjective edge. Forty years ago, when I changed specialties, my friends had heart to heart talks with me, trying to help me understand that […]
[apropos of nothing, this evening’s sunset] At my daughter’s graduation, the seniors were scheduled to march in through a historical arch on the side of the college square, but instead, carefully walked around it. It was a monument to ten student missionaries who had been killed in 1900 in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion. It took […]
Sometimes, it’s not the weight of a single piece of evidence that confirms an impression, a diagnosis, or a jury’s decision. It’s a series of things that rises above being just a suspicious trend into the range of an obviously motivated pattern. In my own criticisms of the DSM-5, I’ve stayed away from allegations that […]