Forgive me for not publishing for awhile. Responsibilities win. Avocational endeavors lose.
The dismasting of 16 year old solo sailor Abby Sunderland's boat in the Indian Ocean this week, so that she was mistakenly feared lost by observers around the world, generated a flurry of nasty criticism of the parents by people around the world -- should responsible parents be allowing their teenagers to do such things?
When Robin Lee Graham began his famous solo voyage around the world in 1965, it was still a "National Geographic world" where costumed folk of marvelous lands opened their arms appreciatively to travelers from the West, in the warm afterglow of World War II.
No longer. By and large, the world is filled with hatred and coveting, terrorists and crime. They want to seize us, cook us and eat us for dinner, I think. It really is much changed.
Those social dangers are in addition to the dangers in an environment afflicted with global warming, where the average weather-bearing vortex is 50% larger and more powerful than they used to be, only a few decades ago. The seas are more dangerous than ever, as a consequence.
It sounds like I'm about to condemn Abby Sunderland's parents, right?
Wrong.
As our kids grew up, changes in our society forced me to amend Birds and the Bees discussions with them to include advice respecting extraordinary care even about kissing -- even polite let-me-get-to-know-you kissing -- of all things. Since the 1960s, growth hormone in our meats and unmetabolized birth control pill chemicals spread everywhere in the environment have pushed kids' bodies into puberty years and years earlier. Kids have begun having sex and bearing babies earlier than ever. Kids are contracting venereal diseases earlier than ever -- including the viral kind, for which there is no cure. Finally, kids are now customarily substituting head jobs for venereal sex to avoid pregnancy -- transfering virus-generated venereal disease, and the accompanying warts and sores from the crotches of infected children to their mouths. Thus my Birds and the Bees advice on care even about kissing.
Kissing has become a life-threatening enterprise, with possible devastating lifelong, life-threatening consequences.
So, here is my simple question for readers here: Who is safer? Abby Sunderland, alone on a sailboat in the middle of the wild Indian Ocean?
Or one of our kids on a date?
Surprisingly, it's a difficult question.
Sail on, Abby. Be careful, little honey, but sail on, sail on.
Showing posts with label Health. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Health. Show all posts
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Friday, May 7, 2010
The Strange Case of Morgellons Disease
.
Science has enabled tiny things to do amazing jobs. For example, in the article on the Thousand Year Certificates of Deposit, I calculated the ultimate value of a $1,000 1,000 year CD with 3% interest compounded annually by multiplying $1,000 x (1.03 to the 999th power). I did it with a 3" x 6" x .75" Casio fx-115s Scientific Calculator with a wonderful "X to the Y Power" function and scientific notation yielding results in powers of 10.
That is amazing, isn't it?
But such technology really does have its "dark side."
We really have reached the point where we have bug-sized flying spy machines, like the Scarab in Raymond Z. Gallun's 1936 short story of the same name, able to enter terrorist hideouts -- and homes -- and spy upon events there.
And, we have arrived at the Era of the Nanites.
Nanites -- robots the size of large molecules or somewhat larger, have already entered the stream of commerce around us. There are problems with robot theory. For example, what is referred to as Brownian Motion -- natural molecular vibration -- already places a limit on robot size. If a nanite were to be too small, it would shake too much to be useful. (Theoretically, if a nanite were made to be too small and too simple, it might become an uncollapsed, invisible quantum probability cloud!) But, for example, we already have windows covered with nanites engaged in keeping the windows clean!
Physicians are afraid of nanotechnology, in another way: If self-replicating nanites were to enter a human body, would the body's immune system recognize them as a non-organic threat? Or, instead, would it sit by, idle and stupid, while nanites designed to enter and attach to human bodies and replicate and further infect human bodies until an infected person's body turns into a pile of nanite garbage, do their work and kill a nanite-infected victim?
Which brings us to an amazing topic -- Morgellons Disease.
Several years ago, a really odd item hit the news: People in certain locales were developing a medical condition caused by no identifiable germ in which they would suffer from persistent skin lesions, red, white and blue body hair, and a persistent, utterly maddening sensation of bugs crawling under their skin, biting and stinging them.
Some derisively referred to the disease as "delusional parasitosis." In other words, "The people complaining about this alleged disease are simply nuts."
But, today, the web is full of photos of the skin lesions and accompanying bizarre red, white and blue hairs.
And, to this day, no one has found a microorganism which can be blamed for the condition.
The strange sickness generated its own urban-legend-level explanation: Morgellons Diease is a biological warfare experiment by an intelligence agency contractor using nanites. The utterly-disabling lesions and maddening sensation of bugs crawling, stinging and biting under the skin, intended to disable soldiers of invading armies, are caused by molecule-sized robotic entities released into the atmosphere by Air Force planes flying over locales where the disease has appeared. The red, white and blue body hairs caused by the disease are intended as a joke taunting the enemy with a the concept, "Uncle Sam did this to you."
Is the urban legend analysis wrong?
I don't know. Those red, white and blue hairs are awfully strange!
.
Science has enabled tiny things to do amazing jobs. For example, in the article on the Thousand Year Certificates of Deposit, I calculated the ultimate value of a $1,000 1,000 year CD with 3% interest compounded annually by multiplying $1,000 x (1.03 to the 999th power). I did it with a 3" x 6" x .75" Casio fx-115s Scientific Calculator with a wonderful "X to the Y Power" function and scientific notation yielding results in powers of 10.
That is amazing, isn't it?
But such technology really does have its "dark side."
We really have reached the point where we have bug-sized flying spy machines, like the Scarab in Raymond Z. Gallun's 1936 short story of the same name, able to enter terrorist hideouts -- and homes -- and spy upon events there.
And, we have arrived at the Era of the Nanites.
Nanites -- robots the size of large molecules or somewhat larger, have already entered the stream of commerce around us. There are problems with robot theory. For example, what is referred to as Brownian Motion -- natural molecular vibration -- already places a limit on robot size. If a nanite were to be too small, it would shake too much to be useful. (Theoretically, if a nanite were made to be too small and too simple, it might become an uncollapsed, invisible quantum probability cloud!) But, for example, we already have windows covered with nanites engaged in keeping the windows clean!
Physicians are afraid of nanotechnology, in another way: If self-replicating nanites were to enter a human body, would the body's immune system recognize them as a non-organic threat? Or, instead, would it sit by, idle and stupid, while nanites designed to enter and attach to human bodies and replicate and further infect human bodies until an infected person's body turns into a pile of nanite garbage, do their work and kill a nanite-infected victim?
Which brings us to an amazing topic -- Morgellons Disease.
Several years ago, a really odd item hit the news: People in certain locales were developing a medical condition caused by no identifiable germ in which they would suffer from persistent skin lesions, red, white and blue body hair, and a persistent, utterly maddening sensation of bugs crawling under their skin, biting and stinging them.
Some derisively referred to the disease as "delusional parasitosis." In other words, "The people complaining about this alleged disease are simply nuts."
But, today, the web is full of photos of the skin lesions and accompanying bizarre red, white and blue hairs.
And, to this day, no one has found a microorganism which can be blamed for the condition.
The strange sickness generated its own urban-legend-level explanation: Morgellons Diease is a biological warfare experiment by an intelligence agency contractor using nanites. The utterly-disabling lesions and maddening sensation of bugs crawling, stinging and biting under the skin, intended to disable soldiers of invading armies, are caused by molecule-sized robotic entities released into the atmosphere by Air Force planes flying over locales where the disease has appeared. The red, white and blue body hairs caused by the disease are intended as a joke taunting the enemy with a the concept, "Uncle Sam did this to you."
Is the urban legend analysis wrong?
I don't know. Those red, white and blue hairs are awfully strange!
.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Fighting MRSA -- Again
.
A few people have asked me to re-publish my MRSA advice. Here it is...
Please pardon the extremely personal details, here. The disease MRSA unfortunately gets into our most personal nooks and crannies. To fight it successfully, we have to "get personal." Sorry.
About 8 years ago, my wife worked in a privately-owned parolee supervision facility in Camden, New Jersey. She shook hands with a parolee fresh out of Camden County Jail, she scratched an itch on her hand, and within 48 hours she had a MRSA infection.
We did not understand MRSA well, then. The disease quickly spread to our 3 sons, probably via sweat left behind on the toilet seat.
About a year later, I finally got the disease, and I got it big time. It just about killed me.
We have learned a lot. Here is what we learned.
The disease has one great goal -- to eat the iron molecule in your hemoglobin. Its processes, in doing so, dissolve flesh. So, MRSA boils tend to bleed like crazy when they pop -- like giant bullet wounds. If one pops, try to get it to pop in the bathtub. You will understand why when it happens. There will be blood everywhere.
Doctors tell you, "Don't try to pop them!" They are afraid that if you squeeze, they will break on the underside -- into your flesh. This causes a very fast moving, extremely dangerous infection called "cellulitis." If you don't stop it, you will die. (Once I came with about 24 hours of dying. A neighbor of ours -- who did not get it from me -- did die.)
MRSA kills. The variety I had had a 15% death rate -- 1 out of 6 people. Years ago, a client died after I caught it and I sent her a letter without realizing how dangerous it was and how easily it spread. I always wondered, Did I cause that, though the mail?
When, after I, myself, nearly died of cellulitis, I sat down with an infectious disease specialist. He explained that my skin was probably infected with huge invisible patches of MRSA bacteria which were 90% washed off every day I took a shower, but which rejuvenated themselves during the day every day so that by night I had fully reconstituted patches of MRSA all over my body, ready to infect me through a break in the skin, or to similarly infect others. He recommended that I shower 2 to 3 times a day, every day for a year. He prescribed pHisohex as a shower soap.
At first I showered thrice daily with pHisohex, but I started getting sick, and I realized that I was poisoning myself with the pHisohex. 3 times a day is too much. So, I switched to the cheapest soap on the shelf -- Ivory. Every day, three times a day, I soaped myself head-to-toe with Ivory -- scalp, hair, skin. The "dark places" were critical -- armpits, crotch, scrotum and anal area. Complete soaping and rinsing was absolutely necessary.
It worked. After I became "the world's cleanest human being," I clearly became non-communicable.
Except in two ways: Sex and potty.
At one point the MRSA entered and attacked a testicle. The doctor said, "IMPOSSIBLE! THE pH IS WRONG!!!" But then he saw my swollen testicle, fell quiet, and asked me if I would agree to castration, to save my life!!!!!!!!!!
It was at that point, in my raw desperation to save my masculinity, that I discovered, on my own, the most effective treatment of MRSA -- POWER WALKING.
At that time, I was deeply, deeply, deeply depressed. So, I forced myself to walk at a forced march rate -- 4 mph -- 9 miles a day, 6 in the early morning, 3 at night, with hard breathing, to work on the depression.
Immediately -- and I mean "immediately," within 24 hours -- the terrifying MRSA infection in the one testicle began to clear up. I thought to myself, "That's too fast a result for the walking to be strengthening my immune system." My theory is that MRSA invades my corpuscles through the same oxygen receptor point on my hemoglobin that oxygen uses in the lungs, in effect lodging a kind of "molecular fat man" in the doorway to the kitchen, literally starving the MRSA to death.
MRSA's average life span is 20 minutes. In a random colony there's going to be substantial front-end and back-end generational overlap. So, to effectively attack the MRSA, the power walking probably has to be a full hour at a bite, at least, to cover "grandparents," "parents" and "kids."
My family doctor, DO Leonard Kabel ("Mr. Castration") was amazed at the results of just walking every day for a week. After 7 days, my giant inflamed testicle had shrunk to below normal size. (Damage. The testicle has taken about 5 years to go back up to normal size.)
Word spread. A pediatrician called me and asked what I had done. He almost cried as he told me about infants in his practice that had died. I told him about the showers and forced march walking, and suggested hyperbaric oxygen for invalids and babies.
So, I had two weapons now -- Ivory soap showers, and a forced-march walk to super-oxygenate the blood. (My fingertips turned bright red after each walk, due to the super-oxygenation.)
Problem solved? No. I could tell, from break-outs after sex, even when sex immediately followed a very, very thorough shower, that I carried MRSA (despite the bad pH) somewhere in my reproductive tract -- probably in the undoubtedly-internally-severely-scarred testicle.
We thought that condoms might help. (My wife is no longer ovulating. So, no life-interest was invaded by condom use, while I protected what Catholic theology calls the "unitive interest.") But, surprisingly, condoms made little difference! I thought, "What??????!!!!"And then I realized that the MRSA bacteria were in my sexual sweat.
I also read that MRSA tends to be enteric -- in the feces in the bowels. What a perfect hiding place!, I thought.
But then I had an idea: Tums. Those disgusting little MRSAs could take testicular pH, and urinary tract pH -- but could they take a cloudburst of Tums?
So, secretly, I decided to risk calcium poisoning.
I bought a large bottle of Tums (I weighed 222 pounds) and, on a Friday (so that I could afford to get very, very sick) I ate 1 Tum every half hour, from sun-up to bedtime. (About 6 a.m. to midnight -- over 30 Tums!!!) I ate plenty of well-masticated food and drank plenty of water mixed with psyllium fiber -- Metamucil -- all day, to drag the Tums into every dark corner of my bowels. (The psyllium fiber kept the calcium from giving me terminal constipation.)
And I got very, very, very sick that night -- the mother of all bellyaches. I was in agony for hours, bent-over double in g-i tract pain.
I recovered by morning, and forced myself to do a power walk, to top it off with a good heavy load of O2. Gradually, we dispensed with the condoms. I even got Rise's permission to dispense with showers before sex, as an experiment. Nothing. So far, so good -- until last week. Pop. One popped-up on my thigh.
But then I saw that one son had an outbreak on his neck. Did I get reinfected by him, or did he get reinfected from me?I don't know. The jury is still out.
Are your boils MRSA? Test: MRSA has a distinctive smell -- a very sweet smell in your armpits and in the crevices to the left and right of your crotch. If it smells wonderful there, in those places, while you are suffering from really nasty boils, in my opinion you've got MRSA.
Another test: Sit in the bathtub, with water pretty hot (and a quarter of a cup of bleach in the bath water). The hot water immediately drives the MRSA out of your skin into the form of little teeny whiteheads. These are incipient MRSA boils. If your bathwater is hot, and if it has the one quarter cup of bleach in it, take a raspy sponge, and dipped it in bleach, and very gently rubbed the whiteheads open. Gently. Gently. (Otherwise, you'll just reinject yourself.) Rinse the sponge like crazy in the bleachy water after each opening.
In any event, 3 Ivory Soap showers a day, being careful to get those dark places.
And walk, walk, walk, walk, like a crazy person, for an hour at a stretch.
With those weapons, you can control it -- if you're lucky, until your immune system finally overwhelms it.
It occurred to me that if your skin can't take the beating of 3 soapy showers per day, there's always the cancer-causing tanning booth.
I'll risk cancer to fight flesh-eating MRSA any day of the week.
No matter what, I've described a personal odyssey, here, some of it pretty darn foolish.
If you have MRSA, print this piece and take it to your doctor, and ask him what his opinion is, before you do anything. Please. That Tums thing was really dangerous!
.
A few people have asked me to re-publish my MRSA advice. Here it is...
Please pardon the extremely personal details, here. The disease MRSA unfortunately gets into our most personal nooks and crannies. To fight it successfully, we have to "get personal." Sorry.
About 8 years ago, my wife worked in a privately-owned parolee supervision facility in Camden, New Jersey. She shook hands with a parolee fresh out of Camden County Jail, she scratched an itch on her hand, and within 48 hours she had a MRSA infection.
We did not understand MRSA well, then. The disease quickly spread to our 3 sons, probably via sweat left behind on the toilet seat.
About a year later, I finally got the disease, and I got it big time. It just about killed me.
We have learned a lot. Here is what we learned.
The disease has one great goal -- to eat the iron molecule in your hemoglobin. Its processes, in doing so, dissolve flesh. So, MRSA boils tend to bleed like crazy when they pop -- like giant bullet wounds. If one pops, try to get it to pop in the bathtub. You will understand why when it happens. There will be blood everywhere.
Doctors tell you, "Don't try to pop them!" They are afraid that if you squeeze, they will break on the underside -- into your flesh. This causes a very fast moving, extremely dangerous infection called "cellulitis." If you don't stop it, you will die. (Once I came with about 24 hours of dying. A neighbor of ours -- who did not get it from me -- did die.)
MRSA kills. The variety I had had a 15% death rate -- 1 out of 6 people. Years ago, a client died after I caught it and I sent her a letter without realizing how dangerous it was and how easily it spread. I always wondered, Did I cause that, though the mail?
When, after I, myself, nearly died of cellulitis, I sat down with an infectious disease specialist. He explained that my skin was probably infected with huge invisible patches of MRSA bacteria which were 90% washed off every day I took a shower, but which rejuvenated themselves during the day every day so that by night I had fully reconstituted patches of MRSA all over my body, ready to infect me through a break in the skin, or to similarly infect others. He recommended that I shower 2 to 3 times a day, every day for a year. He prescribed pHisohex as a shower soap.
At first I showered thrice daily with pHisohex, but I started getting sick, and I realized that I was poisoning myself with the pHisohex. 3 times a day is too much. So, I switched to the cheapest soap on the shelf -- Ivory. Every day, three times a day, I soaped myself head-to-toe with Ivory -- scalp, hair, skin. The "dark places" were critical -- armpits, crotch, scrotum and anal area. Complete soaping and rinsing was absolutely necessary.
It worked. After I became "the world's cleanest human being," I clearly became non-communicable.
Except in two ways: Sex and potty.
At one point the MRSA entered and attacked a testicle. The doctor said, "IMPOSSIBLE! THE pH IS WRONG!!!" But then he saw my swollen testicle, fell quiet, and asked me if I would agree to castration, to save my life!!!!!!!!!!
It was at that point, in my raw desperation to save my masculinity, that I discovered, on my own, the most effective treatment of MRSA -- POWER WALKING.
At that time, I was deeply, deeply, deeply depressed. So, I forced myself to walk at a forced march rate -- 4 mph -- 9 miles a day, 6 in the early morning, 3 at night, with hard breathing, to work on the depression.
Immediately -- and I mean "immediately," within 24 hours -- the terrifying MRSA infection in the one testicle began to clear up. I thought to myself, "That's too fast a result for the walking to be strengthening my immune system." My theory is that MRSA invades my corpuscles through the same oxygen receptor point on my hemoglobin that oxygen uses in the lungs, in effect lodging a kind of "molecular fat man" in the doorway to the kitchen, literally starving the MRSA to death.
MRSA's average life span is 20 minutes. In a random colony there's going to be substantial front-end and back-end generational overlap. So, to effectively attack the MRSA, the power walking probably has to be a full hour at a bite, at least, to cover "grandparents," "parents" and "kids."
My family doctor, DO Leonard Kabel ("Mr. Castration") was amazed at the results of just walking every day for a week. After 7 days, my giant inflamed testicle had shrunk to below normal size. (Damage. The testicle has taken about 5 years to go back up to normal size.)
Word spread. A pediatrician called me and asked what I had done. He almost cried as he told me about infants in his practice that had died. I told him about the showers and forced march walking, and suggested hyperbaric oxygen for invalids and babies.
So, I had two weapons now -- Ivory soap showers, and a forced-march walk to super-oxygenate the blood. (My fingertips turned bright red after each walk, due to the super-oxygenation.)
Problem solved? No. I could tell, from break-outs after sex, even when sex immediately followed a very, very thorough shower, that I carried MRSA (despite the bad pH) somewhere in my reproductive tract -- probably in the undoubtedly-internally-severely-scarred testicle.
We thought that condoms might help. (My wife is no longer ovulating. So, no life-interest was invaded by condom use, while I protected what Catholic theology calls the "unitive interest.") But, surprisingly, condoms made little difference! I thought, "What??????!!!!"And then I realized that the MRSA bacteria were in my sexual sweat.
I also read that MRSA tends to be enteric -- in the feces in the bowels. What a perfect hiding place!, I thought.
But then I had an idea: Tums. Those disgusting little MRSAs could take testicular pH, and urinary tract pH -- but could they take a cloudburst of Tums?
So, secretly, I decided to risk calcium poisoning.
I bought a large bottle of Tums (I weighed 222 pounds) and, on a Friday (so that I could afford to get very, very sick) I ate 1 Tum every half hour, from sun-up to bedtime. (About 6 a.m. to midnight -- over 30 Tums!!!) I ate plenty of well-masticated food and drank plenty of water mixed with psyllium fiber -- Metamucil -- all day, to drag the Tums into every dark corner of my bowels. (The psyllium fiber kept the calcium from giving me terminal constipation.)
And I got very, very, very sick that night -- the mother of all bellyaches. I was in agony for hours, bent-over double in g-i tract pain.
I recovered by morning, and forced myself to do a power walk, to top it off with a good heavy load of O2. Gradually, we dispensed with the condoms. I even got Rise's permission to dispense with showers before sex, as an experiment. Nothing. So far, so good -- until last week. Pop. One popped-up on my thigh.
But then I saw that one son had an outbreak on his neck. Did I get reinfected by him, or did he get reinfected from me?I don't know. The jury is still out.
Are your boils MRSA? Test: MRSA has a distinctive smell -- a very sweet smell in your armpits and in the crevices to the left and right of your crotch. If it smells wonderful there, in those places, while you are suffering from really nasty boils, in my opinion you've got MRSA.
Another test: Sit in the bathtub, with water pretty hot (and a quarter of a cup of bleach in the bath water). The hot water immediately drives the MRSA out of your skin into the form of little teeny whiteheads. These are incipient MRSA boils. If your bathwater is hot, and if it has the one quarter cup of bleach in it, take a raspy sponge, and dipped it in bleach, and very gently rubbed the whiteheads open. Gently. Gently. (Otherwise, you'll just reinject yourself.) Rinse the sponge like crazy in the bleachy water after each opening.
In any event, 3 Ivory Soap showers a day, being careful to get those dark places.
And walk, walk, walk, walk, like a crazy person, for an hour at a stretch.
With those weapons, you can control it -- if you're lucky, until your immune system finally overwhelms it.
It occurred to me that if your skin can't take the beating of 3 soapy showers per day, there's always the cancer-causing tanning booth.
I'll risk cancer to fight flesh-eating MRSA any day of the week.
No matter what, I've described a personal odyssey, here, some of it pretty darn foolish.
If you have MRSA, print this piece and take it to your doctor, and ask him what his opinion is, before you do anything. Please. That Tums thing was really dangerous!
.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Cut Health Care Costs: Get Fat, Smoke Like a Chimney
Many things we do in life seem to generate counter-intuitive results not because life is counter-intuitive, but rather because life is complex and the thinking in our analyses of life is not complex enough.
So, as our society struggles to cheapen the cost of good health care and to extend access to good health care to a maximum number of people, a Dutch study has clearly implied that one effective way to save on health care costs is to encourage people to become obese and to also "smoke like a chimney."
Why?
Well, the study found that, in the long run, life is so prolonged by good health that lifetime health care for healthy people is about 120% as costly as health care for those who eat and smoke themselves to death.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22995659/
In other words, analytically, if avoiding the cost of health care is our primary goal, not health, not life, then keeping people healthy is more expensive.
There is a brutal way to understand the problem.
Who is more expensive to care for? These folks...
...or these folks?...
So, as our society struggles to cheapen the cost of good health care and to extend access to good health care to a maximum number of people, a Dutch study has clearly implied that one effective way to save on health care costs is to encourage people to become obese and to also "smoke like a chimney."
Why?
Well, the study found that, in the long run, life is so prolonged by good health that lifetime health care for healthy people is about 120% as costly as health care for those who eat and smoke themselves to death.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22995659/
In other words, analytically, if avoiding the cost of health care is our primary goal, not health, not life, then keeping people healthy is more expensive.
There is a brutal way to understand the problem.
Who is more expensive to care for? These folks...
...or these folks?...
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
The Madness of Psychiatry
Psychiatric problems exist. I'm not denying that. I have had several brain-physiology-based psychiatric cases as clients over the years. The two profoundly schizophrenic cases stand out in my mind.
In one case, the client used to march around his parents' back yard at night, waving a butcher knife in the air at God, screaming at God that God should not be asking him to stab his family! The newest medication worked wonders on him: He became so normal that today he can laugh at some of the goofy things he would say and do.
In another case, a minister friend's sister was the schizophrenic. She loved it when I paid a visit to their household to talk about her case. No medication worked for her at all. She was "as crazy as a bug in the rug." I used to tease her about God talking to her. She loved, and was greatly amused by, my teasing. What amused her so much was that I believed that her voices were fake. Profound belief in the reality of the voices is one of the hallmarks of schizophrenia. I have read that some suspect that the reason why schizophrenics can't be shook from their belief in the reality of the voices is that the real disease of schizophrenia is runaway feelings of fear arising from bad brain chemistry or wiring, and that the schizophrenics, being otherwise rational, cause the voices in their heads by a mighty internal effort, to rationalize the crazy levels of otherwise groundless fear filling their heads.
A wonderful, wonderful Vietnamese girl I used to babysit, little Nhu, heard me mention once to her mom, who wished to major in child psychology, that there was a fascinating group of portraits of cats by artist Louis Wain which, when arranged in the order of their production, reflected the artist's journey into insanity. The little girl pushed me for years to find the series. Here it is...
Though psychiatric problems are real, one has to be very, very, very, very cautious about our psychiatric diagnostic and treatment system. I can't say "very" enough times. Our father used to tell us, when we were kids, "Beware of friends who say, 'I want to be a psychiatrist when I grow up.' In almost every case, they want to do that because they have psychological problems needing to be solved."
Our father's prejudice was too broad a brush. Nonetheless, they reflect the profound skepticism one must have toward the psychiatric diagnosis and treatment system. It is so dangerous and twisted.
The 2008 movie The Changeling, based on a true story, was about a woman in 1928 whose child disappears, who is later replaced by an impostor by police. The impostor is too short, and circumcised. When the mother contests the child's identity, she is committed to an insane asylum by police as "delusional." The insane asylum refuses to let her out unless she admits that she is crazy!
Well, the system really is like that, to this day. In 1973, in the famous Rosenhan Experiment, a psychologist tested the competence of the system. He dispatched people with zero psychological deficit and no psychiatric treatment history at all to 12 different psychiatric hospitals, where each complained of having heard voices once, but otherwise acted perfectly normal and happy.
In all 12 instances the people were diagnosed as psychotic. All were described as suffering from ongoing symptoms of psychological illness. All were prescribed psychotropic drugs. None were allowed to be released unless they admitted that they were mentally ill and agreed to continue taking antipsychotic medication. Some took months to get out -- even after Rosenhan visited the institutions and verified the existence of his study!
Interestingly, in several of the cases the genuinely crazy patients committed with Rosenhan's fakes could tell that the fakes weren't really crazy.
The psychiatrists could not, in any case.
Rosenhan did a flip-side experiment. He told a well-known teaching hospital that he had sent several fakes into the wards, and challenged them to distill the fakes from the mentally ill patients.
In reality, there were none.
The hospital selected 41 out of 193 as eligible for the diagnosis of "normal."
I think that psychiaty is extremely prone to error, for a variety of reasons. (1) The psychiatrist's personal pride (-- "How dare you imply that you are competent enough to think that my diagnosis might be mistasken!!!") (2) Money. I have seen my share of reports finding psych patients eligible for release just as the coverage ran out! (3) The innate "softness" of the evidence of psychic dysfunction.
In one case, the client used to march around his parents' back yard at night, waving a butcher knife in the air at God, screaming at God that God should not be asking him to stab his family! The newest medication worked wonders on him: He became so normal that today he can laugh at some of the goofy things he would say and do.
In another case, a minister friend's sister was the schizophrenic. She loved it when I paid a visit to their household to talk about her case. No medication worked for her at all. She was "as crazy as a bug in the rug." I used to tease her about God talking to her. She loved, and was greatly amused by, my teasing. What amused her so much was that I believed that her voices were fake. Profound belief in the reality of the voices is one of the hallmarks of schizophrenia. I have read that some suspect that the reason why schizophrenics can't be shook from their belief in the reality of the voices is that the real disease of schizophrenia is runaway feelings of fear arising from bad brain chemistry or wiring, and that the schizophrenics, being otherwise rational, cause the voices in their heads by a mighty internal effort, to rationalize the crazy levels of otherwise groundless fear filling their heads.
A wonderful, wonderful Vietnamese girl I used to babysit, little Nhu, heard me mention once to her mom, who wished to major in child psychology, that there was a fascinating group of portraits of cats by artist Louis Wain which, when arranged in the order of their production, reflected the artist's journey into insanity. The little girl pushed me for years to find the series. Here it is...
Though psychiatric problems are real, one has to be very, very, very, very cautious about our psychiatric diagnostic and treatment system. I can't say "very" enough times. Our father used to tell us, when we were kids, "Beware of friends who say, 'I want to be a psychiatrist when I grow up.' In almost every case, they want to do that because they have psychological problems needing to be solved."
Our father's prejudice was too broad a brush. Nonetheless, they reflect the profound skepticism one must have toward the psychiatric diagnosis and treatment system. It is so dangerous and twisted.
The 2008 movie The Changeling, based on a true story, was about a woman in 1928 whose child disappears, who is later replaced by an impostor by police. The impostor is too short, and circumcised. When the mother contests the child's identity, she is committed to an insane asylum by police as "delusional." The insane asylum refuses to let her out unless she admits that she is crazy!
Well, the system really is like that, to this day. In 1973, in the famous Rosenhan Experiment, a psychologist tested the competence of the system. He dispatched people with zero psychological deficit and no psychiatric treatment history at all to 12 different psychiatric hospitals, where each complained of having heard voices once, but otherwise acted perfectly normal and happy.
In all 12 instances the people were diagnosed as psychotic. All were described as suffering from ongoing symptoms of psychological illness. All were prescribed psychotropic drugs. None were allowed to be released unless they admitted that they were mentally ill and agreed to continue taking antipsychotic medication. Some took months to get out -- even after Rosenhan visited the institutions and verified the existence of his study!
Interestingly, in several of the cases the genuinely crazy patients committed with Rosenhan's fakes could tell that the fakes weren't really crazy.
The psychiatrists could not, in any case.
Rosenhan did a flip-side experiment. He told a well-known teaching hospital that he had sent several fakes into the wards, and challenged them to distill the fakes from the mentally ill patients.
In reality, there were none.
The hospital selected 41 out of 193 as eligible for the diagnosis of "normal."
I think that psychiaty is extremely prone to error, for a variety of reasons. (1) The psychiatrist's personal pride (-- "How dare you imply that you are competent enough to think that my diagnosis might be mistasken!!!") (2) Money. I have seen my share of reports finding psych patients eligible for release just as the coverage ran out! (3) The innate "softness" of the evidence of psychic dysfunction.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
My War with MRSA
Please pardon the extremely personal details, here. The disease MRSA unfortunately gets into our most personal nooks and crannies. To fight it successfully, we have to "get personal." Sorry.
About 8 years ago, my wife worked in a privately-owned parolee supervision facility in Camden, New Jersey. She shook hands with a parolee fresh out of Camden County Jail, she scratched an itch on her hand, and within 48 hours she had a MRSA infection.
We did not understand MRSA well, then. The disease quickly spread to our 3 sons, probably via sweat left behind on the toilet seat.
About a year later, I finally got the disease, and I got it big time. It just about killed me. We have learned a lot. Here is what we learned.
The disease has one great goal -- to eat the iron molecule in your hemoglobin. Its processes, in doing so, dissolve flesh. So, MRSA boils tend to bleed like crazy when they pop -- like giant bullet wounds. If one pops, try to get it to pop in the bathtub. You will understand why when it happens. There will be blood everywhere.
Doctors tell you, "Don't try to pop them!" They are afraid that if you squeeze, they will break on the underside -- into your flesh. This causes a very fast moving, extremely dangerous infection called "cellulitis." If you don't stop it, you will die. (Once I came with about 24 hours of dying. A neighbor of ours -- who did not get it from me -- did die.)
MRSA kills. The variety I had had a 15% death rate -- 1 out of 6 people. Years ago, a client died after I caught it and I sent her a letter without realizing how dangerous it was and how easily it spread. I always wondered, Did I cause that, though the mail?
When, after I, myself, nearly died of cellulitis, I sat down with an infectious disease specialist. He explain that my skin was probably huge invisible patches of MRSA bacteria which were 90% washed off every day I took a shower, but which rejuvenated themselves every day so that by night I had fully reconstituted patches of MRSA all over my body, ready to infect me through a break in the skin, or to similarly infect others.
He recommended that I shower 2 to 3 times a day, every day for a year. He prescribed pHisohex as a shower soap.
At first I showered thrice daily with pHisohex, but I started getting sick, and I realized that I was poisoning myself with the pHisohex. 3 times a day is too much.
So, I switched to the cheapest soap on the shelf -- Ivory.
Every day, three times a day, I soaped myself head-to-toe with Ivory -- scalp, hair, skin. The "dark places" were critical -- armpits, crotch, scrotum and anal area. Complete soaping and rinsing was absolutely necessary.
It worked. After I became "the world's cleanest human being," I clearly became non-communicable.
Except in two ways: Sex and potty.
At one point the MRSA entered and attacked a testicle. The doctor said, "IMPOSSIBLE! THE pH IS WRONG!!!" But then he saw my swollen testicle, fell quiet, and asked me if I would agree to castration, to save my life!!!!!!!!!!
It was at that point, in my raw desperation to save my masculinity, that I discovered, on my own, the most effective treatment of MRSA -- POWER WALKING.
At that time, I was deeply, deeply, deeply depressed. So, I forced myself to walk at a forced march rate -- 4 mph -- 9 miles a day, 6 in the early morning, 3 at night, with hard breathing, to work on the depression.
Immediately -- and I mean "immediately," within 24 hours -- the terrifying MRSA infection in the one testicle began to clear up. I thought to myself, "That's too fast for the walking to be strengthening my immune system." My theory is that MRSA invades my corpuscles through the same oxygen receptor point on my hemoglobin that oxygen uses in the lungs, in effect lodging a kind of "molecular fat man" in the doorway to the kitchen, literally starving the MRSA to death.
MRSA's average life span is 20 minutes. In a random colony there's going to be substantial front-end and back-end generational overlap. So, to effectively attack the MRSA, the power walking probably has to be a full hour at a bite, at least, to cover "grandparents," "parents" and "kids."
My family doctor, DO Leonard Kabel ("Mr. Castration") was amazed at the results of just walking every day for a week. After 7 days, my giant inflamed testicle had shrunk to below normal size. (Damage. It has taken about 5 years to go back up to normal size.)
Word spread. A pediatrician called me and asked what I had done. He almost cried as he told me about infants in his practice that had died. I told him about the showers and forced march walking, and suggested hyperbaric oxygen for invalids and babies.
So, I had two weapons now -- Ivory soap showers, and a forced-march walk to super-oxygenate the blood. (My fingertips turned bright red!)
Problem solved? No. I could tell, from break-outs after sex, even when sex immediately followed a very, very thorough shower, that I carried MRSA (despite the bad pH) somewhere in my reproductive tract -- probably in the undoubtedly-internally-severely-scarred testicle.
We thought that condoms might help. (My wife is no longer ovulating. So, no life-interest was invaded by condom use, while I protected what Catholic theology calls the "unitive interest.") But, surprisingly, condoms made little difference! I thought, "What??????!!!!"
And then I realized that it was in my sexual sweat.
I also read that MRSA tends to be enteric -- in the feces in the bowels. What a perfect hiding place!, I thought.
But then I had an idea: Tums.
Those disgusting little MRSAs could take testicular pH, and urinary tract pH -- but could they take a cloudburst of Tums?
So, secretly, I decided to risk calcium poisoning.
I bought a large bottle of Tums (I weighed 222 pounds) and, on a Friday (so that I could afford to get very, very sick) I ate 1 Tum every half hour, from sun-up to bedtime. (About 6 a.m. to midnight -- nearly 30 Tums!!!)
I ate plenty of well-masticated food and drank plenty of water all day, to drag the Tums into every dark corner of my bowels.
And I got very, very, very sick that night -- the mother of all bellyaches. I was in agony for hours, bent-over double in g-i tract pain.
I recovered by morning, and forced myself to do a power walk, to top it off with a good heavy load of O2. Gradually, we dispensed with the condoms. I even got Rise's permission to dispense with showers before sex, as an experiment. Nothing. So far, so good -- until last week. Pop. One popped-up on my thigh.
But then I saw that one son had an outbreak on his neck. Did I get reinfected by him, or did he get reinfected from me?
I don't know. The jury is still out.
Are your boils MRSA? Test: MRSA has a distinctive smell -- a very sweet smell in your armpits and in the crevices to the left and right of your crotch. If it smells wonderful there, in those places, while you are suffering from really nasty boils, in my opinion you've got MRSA.
Another test: Sit in the bathtub, with water pretty hot (and a quarter of a cup of bleach in the bath water). The hot water immediately drives the MRSA out of your skin into the form of little teeny whiteheads. These are incipient MRSA boils.
If your bathwater is hot, and if it has the one quarter cup of bleach in it, I took a raspy sponge, and dipped it in bleach, and very gently rubbed the whiteheads open. Gently. Gently. (Otherwise, you'll just reinject yourself.) Rinse the sponge like crazy in the bleachy water after each opening.
In any event, 3 Ivory Soap showers a day, being careful to get those dark places.
And walk, walk, walk, walk, like a crazy person, for an hour at a stretch.
With those weapons, you can control it -- if you're lucky, until your immune system finally overwhelms it.
It occurred to me that if your skin can't take the beating of 3 soapy showers per day, there's always the cancer-causing tanning booth.
I'll risk cancer to fight flesh-eating MRSA any day of the week.
No matter what, I've described a personal odyssey, here, some of it pretty darn foolish.
If you have MRSA, print this piece and take it to your doctor, and ask him what his opinion is, before you do anything. Please. That Tum thing was really dangerous!
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