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What Should A Psychiatrist Do In A Classic Insanity Case?


The voice at the other end of the line was angry and accusatory: “You didn’t even talk to me! You never knew my son! You didn’t talk to any of us!”

I explained to her that since she had never even met the defendant, there was no way she could have any information that would be relevant to the accused’s state of mind at the time of the crime. The victim and the defendant were total strangers and there was no apparent reason for the killing, which made the crime even more tragic. Her son was dead in a random incident, in a crime that was unquestionably motivated only by the defendant’s untreated psychiatric symptoms.

The defendant’s family was equally shocked and horrified. They were all hardworking solid citizens, with no history of criminal contacts, substance abuse or mental illness. When their daughter started getting sick Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*

Patient Inaction Can Hurt Their Families Too

Dr. Mehmet Oz recently had a piece in Time titled “What I Learned from My Cancer Scare” in which he became the the more humbled Mr. Mehmet Oz.  As noted previously here, Dr. Oz last summer had a colonoscopy at age 50 and much to everyone’s surprise had a precancerous colon polyp.  He was advised to follow-up again for a repeat test in 3 months.

As the Time magazine piece noted, he didn’t return for 9 months despite repeated reminders from his doctor.

From this experience, he essentially stumbled upon what has been challenging American medicine and primary care.  How do we enable patients to do the right thing and get the screening tests done and treatments necessary to avoid premature death and maintain a high quality of life?  As a highly trained professional, Dr. Oz knows the risks and benefits of not doing a preventive screening test.  As a doctor, he knows all of the secret protocols and codespeak we use when calling patients or asking them to see us in the office for important matters.  As a doctor, he also understood the importance of a repeat colonoscopy to ensure no more colon growths.

Yet he didn’t return for 9 months.  Why? Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Saving Money and Surviving the Healthcare Crisis*

Why Is Weight Gain Contagious? Monkey See, Monkey Do

Woman-on-scale-with-friends

One of the big health news stories of 2007 was a study showing that your friends influence the size of your waist (and the rest of your body). Like any study, it raised as many questions as it answered, including why this happens. A new study from Arizona State University looked into that question by testing three pathways by which friends might influence one another’s body size:

  1. Collaboration. Over time, you might start to share the ideas of the people close to you after talking with them about what the proper body size is. Then you might choose your food and exercise habits in order to reach that body size, whether that means eating more food to look like your plus-sized friends, or less food to look like your thin ones.
  2. Peer pressure. You feel bullied into trying to look like your friends and family members. They make you feel bad about your body, so you go about eating and exercising to look like them.
  3. Monkey see, monkey do. You change your habits to mirror those of your friends without necessarily thinking or talking about an ideal body weight. Alexandra Brewis Slade, PhD, one of the Arizona State researchers, gave an example of this pathway that most of us can relate to: You’re at a restaurant with friends and the waiter brings over the dessert menu. Everyone else decides not to order anything, so you pass, too, even though you were dying for a piece of chocolate mousse cake.

All three of these pathways are based on the idea that loved ones share social norms, the implicit cultural beliefs that make some things okay, others not. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*

Mood Scores: Which Day Of The Week Has The Lowest Rating?


You know that 1979 Boomtown Rats song, “I Don’t Like Mondays.” (This Youtube music video features a very young-looking Bob Geldof.)  The song is about the 1979 shooting spree on a Monday morning at a San Diego elementary school. The shooter’s only state reason for doing it was that she didn’t like Mondays.

The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload
And nobody’s gonna go to school today
She’s gonna make them stay at home

It turns out that — contrary to popular impression that Mondays are the worst day of the week — Tuesdays are the worst day of the week.  According to a piece by Chris Hall (@hallicious) on HealthCentral, Tuesdays are the worst day of the week (moodwise) while Sundays are the best. This is based on mood rating scores from 500 users of the Mood 24/7 service, which HealthCentral licenses from Johns Hopkins University. After you sign up for the free service, the software sends you a text message at random times, and you text back your mood rating for that day.

So, you’d think that the latest date of the coming apocalypse, October 21, might be on a Tuesday. But it’s not — it’s on a Friday.  Maybe it will get moved again.—–

*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*

Father To Daughter: The Lessons Of Illness

Ruthie and Andrew

When I was diagnosed with leukemia my daughter, Ruthie, was just two and a half. She has vague memories of our household being turned upside down with worried, hushed conversations and friends and relatives calling A LOT. Because a leading specialist, Dr. Michael Keating from MD Anderson Cancer Center, advised against having treatment right away (something better was coming along), I did not have treatment for more than four years. By then Ruthie was seven. She has vivid memories then of me going off to Houston, accompanied by her mom, for a week of initial treatment and then successive weeks of treatment every month for quite a while back here in Seattle. She also remembers me tired, nauseous and, some days, in bed.  The better memory is me participating in a clinical trial that worked and then returning to a full and active life.

Ruthie and I had never really talked about her observations of this until last night. Now, almost 18, Ruthie will be headed to college soon. It’s been a “journey.” As with many teenagers, they can be rebellious and oppositional, at times. But, in most cases, they eventually return to that loving person you remember. Ruthie has been making that return and, as she does, we’ve been talking more.

Last Friday night Ruthie called me in a panic. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Andrew's Blog*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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