Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: Health and wellness

  • A Rat Made of Diamonds

    The human mind is capable of making many things appear real. For example, this elderly lady who:
    …sought medical help because she believed that an abdominal operative procedure would be necessary to remove a "rat and a teddy bear made of diamonds" that she believed had grown within her.
    I continue to be grateful that the majority of my perceptions continue to be shared by those around me, such as, for example, the fact that there is a nest of rats in our compost heap and that I, and our farmer neighbour, can at least attest to the fact that (a) they aren’t made of diamonds and (b) so far we have trapped nine of the buggers.  

  • R.I.P. Jan

    I mentioned a few weeks back that one of our neighbours had been told that he did not have long to live. Alas, the doctors’ prognosis was accurate, for yesterday we attended his funeral. He was a popular man, and 200 friends and neighbours were there yesterday to say farewell. As is traditional in this part of the Netherlands, his coffin was brought in by members of his family and his nearest neighbours. The service was simple, but moving, with his three daughters speaking about his life, and music (chosen by Jan) by Bach and Schumann.
     
    He will be missed.

  • Piscine Pedicure

    Fancy spending up to eight hours a day in a pool with hundreds of fish nibbling on your scabby old skin? Yes? Then "Doctor Fish" – otherwise known as Garra rufa sound just the thing for you. Me? I think I’ll pass, at least until some dependable clinical trials have been done…

  • The Perfect Man For The Job

    The director of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organization has clearly the perfect name… He must be the right man for the job.

  • Epicurus Or Heidegger?

    How do you live your life? By not worrying about death? Or by letting the realisation that life is finite, and death inevitable, shape what you do in the time allotted?
     
    Epicurus argued that the fear of death was irrational. "Where death is, I am no longer," he said, "and where I am, death is not." Epicurus’ point is that there is nothing to fear in death itself, what people really fear is the process of dying and the pain that all too often accompanies the final illness.
     
    Heidegger, on the other hand, argued that death is a constant presence in life, and renamed human existence "being towards death". Heidegger therefore rejected the Epicurean idea that death is irrelevant to our lives. To understand life fully, Heidegger argued, one must understand oneself as finite.
     
    These two points of view are explored by the philospher Havi Carel in a compelling piece in The Independent. The question is thrown into sharp focus for her by the fact that she has, at most, 10 years left to live. Ten years that will increasingly be marked by illness and pain. 
     
    Perhaps it’s just me, but I don’t feel the two viewpoints are an "either/or" situation; to me it feels like a "both/and". I don’t fear death, and I know that it’s inevitable. Perhaps that’s because, as Carel argues, I am in good health. Perhaps if I were in her situation I might feel differently. I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently because one of our neighbours has recently been told he has only a few months, perhaps just a few weeks, left to live. He seems to have accepted this with equanimity – he’s more concerned about how his wife will cope – and is busy putting his affairs in order in readiness. His forthrightness is admirable, and is an example that I hope to follow when my time comes.
     
    (hat tip to Julian Baggini over at Talking Philosophy for the link to the Carel article)

  • Inappropriate Professions

    The Angry Professor writes about a student, Hans. Read it, particularly the kicker at the end. Talk about the blind leading the blind…

  • Stroke of Insight

    The older I get, the more likely it is that I will have a stroke. Apparently, the risk of having a stroke more than doubles each decade after the age of 55. Here’s a link to a fascinating interview with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, who had a stroke and who describes the experience.

  • Cold Turkey

    I’ve been fortunate enough never to have had to take anti-depressants in my life. The real kicker appears to be when people stop taking them, as Holly Finch has found out.

  • No-Body

    I know that self-awareness makes us to be a very strange species, but sometimes I come across something that I find extremely difficult to understand. Here’s an example: a healthy woman who sees herself as incomplete – because she has too many legs.
     
    Update: Vaughan, over at Mind Hacks, has some more information about this.

  • The Ten-Step Guide

    Mr. Eugenides indulges in a spot of "shooting fish in a barrel". Oh, I say, good shot, sir!

  • Another Dose of Woo

    The telly was in severe danger of being broken last night. I came very close to hurling something at it. As it was, the dog was treated to some fairly colourful language. The cause of all this was a programme on BBC Two called "Trust Me, I’m a Healer". It was about a so-called shaman, Peter Aziz, who claims to heal patients with the help of dragons, tree spirits and hallucinogenic drugs. Yeah, right. At one point, with a completely straight face, he said:
    The emotions are actually stored in the cells of the body. In every single molecule of DNA in the body, there’s a crystal which forms, storing that emotion. And it’s these crystals that form in the DNA which affect the function of the body. And so only when you release those emotions that are stored does the body then heal.
    Excuse me while I just count to ten. No, sorry, Peter, that’s just crap. And for this you charge 40 quid an hour? There’s plenty more where that came from on his web site, which has practically broken my woo-meter.
     
    What really got me fuming during the film was the way he gives false hope to those poor unfortunates who are gullible enough to believe him. The film followed two such people. One was Margo, who had cancer of the colon. A lovely woman, but completely taken in by Aziz’s hokum. She has, of course, died. I think the nadir of the film was when Aziz almost (but not quite – he was obviously canny enough to realise the danger) said that his treatments for Margo would have been successful if she hadn’t have gone and had chemotherapy.
     
    The film was made by Jason Massot, who I think was clearly too easy on Aziz, but then again, perhaps that was what enabled Aziz to give free reign to his nonsensical claims, and condemn himself out of his own mouth. Had I been in Massot’s shoes, I would have found it difficult to keep filming. I would have wanted to stop the camera and shake Aziz warmly by the throat every few minutes.

  • Get Unhooked

    A great anti-smoking campaign. I wish that my nearest and dearest would get unhooked.

  • Hearing Voices

    And another tip of the hat to Mind Hacks. This time for the entry illustrating schizoaffective disorder, with a link to an article describing the symptoms, written by someone who suffers from it. Hell on earth comes closest to what I think it must be like. I consider myself fortunate that, thus far, I have remained reasonably sane.

  • World AIDS Day

    Remember, today is World AIDS Day.
     
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    (hat tip to Sleepykisser for the image)

  • Cotard’s Delusion

    The White Queen, in Alice Through The Looking Glass, claimed to be able to believe in six impossible things before breakfast. If quality, not quantity, is the measure, then Cotard’s Delusion must score pretty highly on the "impossible things" scale. This is the strong, unshakeable belief held by the sufferer that he or she is, in fact, dead. Mind Hacks draws our attention to a good article in the FT about the condition.

  • World AIDS Day

    Just six days to go to this year’s World AIDS Day on the 1st December. The theme for this year is accountability. The EU Commission has also launched its AIDS – Remember me? web site – a somewhat odd little web site aimed at yoof.

  • Public Service Announcement

    Maceij Ceglowski (the intelligence behind Idle Words) has started the Bedbug Registry, where travellers can report sighting of bedbugs in the hotels they visit. The University of Kentucky has a particularly illuminating web page on the species.
     
    It all brings back memories of the first time I stayed in San Francisco. When I got to my room and switched on the light, I saw, with some horror, the pattern on the carpet fleeing to the walls…

  • The Faster You Go

    A striking Road Safety advertisment from New Zealand. Although, to be strictly accurate, it ain’t the speed that causes the mess – it’s the sudden stopping that does it.

  • Pratt By Name…

    …Pratt by Nature. Physician, heal thyself. It’s a sad story, really. I feel sorry not only for the patient(s), but for the doctor as well. But the astounding thing appears to be that she is carrying on practicing medicine. She should be removed at once.

  • Do We Laugh Or Cry?

    As regular readers know, I follow the blog of Dr. John Crippen over at NHS Blog Doctor. Dr. Crippen has now found a kindred spirit in Dr. Francis Rant, whose eponymous blog – Dr. Rant – is a masterpiece of bile directed at the goons who appear to be in charge of the British National Health Service. Take this entry, for example; it’s a wonder that the good doctor doesn’t burst a blood vessel. Mind you, I think he/she is absolutely right to be pissed off at the fatuous 5-a-day initiative. Looking beyond the jolly web site reveals the true horror. Reams and reams of turgid management-speak apparently produced by dozens of brain-dead drones, who sit around murdering the English language all day. That’s where the 10 million pounds of British lottery players’ money is going. For example:
    The five pilot sites also carried out their own evaluations. These were mainly aimed at understanding the process for implementing the intervention. They also assessed any changes in the influences on fruit and vegetable consumption. The evaluation methods included countywide surveys, postal questionnaires, in-depth interviews with individuals and food mapping.
    Doncha just love it: "understand the process", "implement the intervention", "in-depth interviews", "food mapping". And then after this drivel, you suddenly realise that they can’t organise a piss-up in a brewery:
    Each site developed its own evaluation strategy and tools, so it is not possible to compare results of the five local evaluations.
    Erm, didn’t anyone think that it would have been a good idea to have been able to design the pilots so that data could have been compared? Of course, then, there would have been a single design team. This way, we got five teams (doubtless at five times the cost) all busily reinventing their own particular wheels. Dear god, words fail me.