January 31st, 2011 by Dinah Miller, M.D. in Health Tips, Research
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Meditation sounds like a great idea from the perspective of a psychiatrist: Anything that calms and focuses the mind is a good thing (and without pharmaceuticals, even better).
Personally, I tried transcendental meditation as a kid (more to do with my mother than with me) and found it to be boring. I have trouble keeping my thoughts still. They wander to what I want for dinner, and should I write about this on Shrink Rap, and will Clink and Victor ever eat crabcakes with me again, and did I remember to give my last patient informed consent, and a zillion other things. Holding my thoughts still is work.
The New York Times Well blog has an article on meditation and brain changes. In “How Meditation May Change the Brain,” Sindya N. Bhanoo writes:
The researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. The findings will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.
M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes.
Lower stress, lower blood pressure, higher empathy. I may have to give meditation another try.
*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*
January 21st, 2011 by AnneHansonMD in Better Health Network, Opinion
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There’s been a lot of stories in the news lately about homicides committed in hospitals. Just out of curiosity, I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) website and pulled some data from their Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries. It confirmed what I suspected — that homicides of workers in hospitals have increased at twice the rate as correctional facilities, where worker homicides have remained stable. Here’s the graph I was able to make from the BLS data:
The red bars (hospital murders) are up to six and seven homicides per year while the blue bars (correctional facility murders) have remained stable at about three per year. This is only for the employees who have been murdered, not all murder victims.
When we consider the cost and repercussions of increased hospital security, think about this trend. We people wonder if it’s safe to be a forensic psychiatrist in corrections, and I will bring out these numbers. It does seem to be safer to work in prison than in a hospital.
*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*
January 16th, 2011 by Dinah Miller, M.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion
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I’ve followed in bits and pieces — sometimes for Shrink Rap, sometimes because the issues fill my email inbox, sometimes because there’s no escape. Oh, and lots of the players have familiar names.
In the December 27th issue of Wired magazine, Gary Greenberg writes a comprehensive article on the debates around the revision of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) upcoming revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) entitled “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness.” Do read it. Here’s an excerpt:
I recently asked a former president of the APA how he used the DSM in his daily work. He told me his secretary had just asked him for a diagnosis on a patient he’d been seeing for a couple of months so that she could bill the insurance company. “I hadn’t really formulated it,” he told me. He consulted the DSM-IV and concluded that the patient had obsessive-compulsive disorder.
“Did it change the way you treated her?” I asked, noting that he’d worked with her for quite a while without naming what she had.
“No.”
“So what would you say was the value of the diagnosis?”
“I got paid.” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*
January 5th, 2011 by AnneHansonMD in Better Health Network, Humor, News, Research
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I was surfing around the Net one day and I found this article about scientists who are creating a machine that will detect acetone in someone’s breath. Acetone can be a sign that someone suffers from diabetes, so in theory this machine could use scent to diagnose this disease.
That story brought to mind other stories I’ve heard about people using dogs to sniff out cancer in people. According to this article:
“The results of the study showed that dogs can detect breast and lung cancer with sensitivity and specificity between 88% and 97%. The high accuracy persisted even after results were adjusted to take into account whether the lung cancer patients were currently smokers. Moreover, the study also confirmed that the trained dogs could even detect the early stages of lung cancer, as well as early breast cancer.”
People have even tried “smelling” schizophrenia. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*
December 28th, 2010 by Dinah Miller, M.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion
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Meg sent me a link to Happiness in The World (what an upbeat name for a medical blog!) and The Danger of Early Closure. She wanted to know how it pertains to psychiatry. The author writes:
Sometimes doctors gather all the clues correctly, think all the right things based on those clues, and still get it wrong. But in this case, another significant thought error contributed to the misdiagnosis: My tendency to come to early closure.
Early closure, it turns out, is a danger that lies in wait mostly for seasoned clinicians (far more commonly, at least, than for medical students and residents). Because seasoned clinicians rely more on pattern recognition to make diagnoses and often come to their conclusions rapidly, they’re at far greater risk for leaping toward those conclusions without examining all other should present (luckily for us all, this is the exception and not the rule).
At other times, however, these mistakes are made because the physician was simply in a hurry, or tired, or didn’t care enough to think through the evidence in ways he should have, saw a pattern he thought he recognized, and stopped asking the most important question a physician can ever ask: What else could this be? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*
