Dr. Mike

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church_vid3
Originally uploaded by caehl.

Sometimes this is all you can do to protect yourself.

catabasis

For the information of the public. When one goes into a down-mood, or at the extreme a depression, one is experiencing frustration and anger, which constitute an energy that is able to have no impact on the circumstances.

When the soul is darkened by this, it is not necessarily merely a psychopathology. It is an adjustment of the soul. Or, if you prefer, a reconfiguration of central concepts and plans.  It is a learning of what one should be doing and what one should not be doing. It is a retreat in which one reconnects with one's ideals.

It changes you, making you fundamentally into someone else.

The quality of the sob of love

The quality of the sob of love is from the animal, from the long past. Goodbye, the person who I don't think I can live without. Goodbye, flesh of my flesh. "I love you so much."

(from the ICU)

International Spy Museum

I went to see the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC recently. I recommend it. What's most interesting about it is that it appears to be authentic. With fiction, for example, you never really know how much reality and how much personal paranoid fantasy you're getting. This place is run by former CIA caseworkers.

Rafiki the prophet

I have a patient who is exactly like Rafiki. If she were walking around in that movie, she'd be a prophet. Instead, she's locked up in a psychiatric hospital.

Maybe what we need for these guys is the equivalent of Pride Rock, a few lions and some hyenas.

You go over to Rafiki's hut when you have a cold, she mumbles a few garbled syllables at you, waves her arms in the air, and you're healed.

Pardon the hokey sentiment.

"You only get to keep what you give away."

Hunter Thompson, 1937-2005

HST
Originally uploaded by rev_bri.

The only man with enough balls to call the drones of the 1980's what they were: "Generation of Swine."

curiosity in medicine

I think one of the best qualities in a physician is curiosity. Curiosity helps you see new things, helps you see each patient as an individual. Curiosity drives you to learn from the literature, and to ask questions of colleagues. Curiosity helps you learn about your patient's life, about the details of ther suffering and joy; it helps you plot the nuances of the history in your mind, and helps you toward an accurate diagnosis and effective treatment plan.

As the intro to Harrison's says, "The true physician has a Sheakespearean breadth of interest in the wise and the foolish, the proud and he humble, the soic hero and the whining rogue."

Curiosity is a useful adjunct to using the principles of evidence-based medicine to help individual patients. Sure, you should look things up you don't know, and use the incredibly useful and educational tool of Medline to look for differential diagnoses and answers to problems. But just learning stuff, seeing new stuff for the sake of it helps fill in the gaps of knowledge.

That's what I like about internal medicine - for practical purposes, there is no end to it; they make new knowledge every day, and I'll never be able to know all of it.

"One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient."  - Dr. Francis Peabody.

Uppity iconoclasm in the family

proclamation
Originally uploaded by mikedean.

Queen Victoria put a price of 500 pounds on the head of my great-great-great granfather David Gibson for instigating the Upper Canadian Rebellion of 1837. Redcoats burned down his house. He fled to the USA and worked on the Erie Canal for a while. His wife would come down a visit him once in a while, and several children were conceived during these visits. His house is now a museum in North York, a suburb of Toronto. My grandfather and great-aunt used to spend time in that house when they were growing up.

Power and Justice

"When we understand this point -- namely, that greatness and justice must be indissolubly united -- we understand the true meaning of all that happens in heaven and on earth."

- I Ching, trans. Wilhelm