Death of a family member is a source of stress that most of us experience eventually. Despite this, it is an uncommon subject for film. A wonderful exception is Departures, an Oscar-winner from 2008 (Best Foreign Language film, Japanese title Okuribito), directed by Yojiro Takita.
Posts Tagged ‘medical education’
Stress, Families and Faces
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010Empathy and Stress Illness (1)
Thursday, April 29th, 2010Empathy, the ability to feel what it is like to be another human being, is a key diagnostic tool in the arsenal of clinicians who diagnose stress illness. (You can read a series of posts about this by clicking on the tag ‘empathy’ below.)
Blood Test for Stress Illness?
Wednesday, March 31st, 2010Bethesda, Maryland. April 1. The Center for Irreproducible Results at the National Institution of Health today announced a stunning breakthrough that is certain to benefit hundreds of millions of patients. Dr. Freddie P. Ignobel reports that she has found a blood test that can reliably confirm when physical symptoms are caused by life stresses and not by a disease of an organ or a metabolic problem.
Stress and Blurred Vision
Thursday, March 25th, 2010For years I would teach medical residents about stress illness by telling the true story of a 16 year old girl who came to clinic with intermittent blurred vision (the full story is in my book). I would ask them to pretend she was in the room and to try to diagnose the cause. They would ask questions about her symptoms and “order” tests and I would give them the results. Very few even got close to the answer though a few, to their credit, were able to look beyond physiology alone and figure out that her vision blurred when she was crying. The crying was from severe depression brought on by regular physical abuse by her father.
Assessing Medical Research (3)
Friday, March 5th, 2010Published medical research can be designed in a variety of ways but the greatest credence is given to placebo-controlled randomized trials (PCRT). Ideally, and in simplest form, this design has the following characteristics: Read the rest of this entry »
Assessing Medical Research (2)
Thursday, March 4th, 2010How can a person without formal medical training assess health-related information presented by the news media? We can start with wisdom from over 400 years ago:
Assessing Medical Research (1)
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010In a perfect world, every claim for a new health care treatment that reached you via the news media would be accurate and clear. Unfortunately, the reality is that even experienced clinicians reading the evidence in medical journals need to consider carefully the meaning of the research before they use it to change how they manage their patients. There are many ways for errors in collection, analysis and interpretation of medical research data to creep into even the best published studies. The subject is so complex that one well-reviewed book on how to assess medical research (1) runs to over 300 pages.
5. Medically Unexplained Symptoms in DSM-5
Monday, March 1st, 2010In the last post, I proposed a revision of the Somatoform Disorders section for the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) of the American Psychiatric Association. The DSM-5 group has proposed changing the name from Somatoform Disorders to Somatic Symptom Disorders (SSD) but this term neglects the central role of psychological or cognitive factors. It will also cause confusion with the DSM-5 group’s other new proposal, the term Complex Somatic Symptom Disorder (CSSD). The term CSSD suggests that it is simply a complex form of SSD but that is not at all how the DSM-5 group has defined it. This is why I suggest replacing Somatoform Disorders with Psychosomatic Disorders, not as a diagnostic term (patients consider it stigmatizing) but as a name for this category that is well understood by mental health practitioners, medical clinicians and the public.
4. Medically Unexplained Symptoms in DSM-5
Friday, February 26th, 2010Changes to the Somatoform Disorders section of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association potentially will have greater practical impact than revisions of any other section. This will be the case if the tens of millions of patients (in the U.S. alone) with physical symptoms connected to psychosocial stresses are given an appropriate diagnostic term. To that end, I offer the following ideas to revise the Somatoform Disorders section in the next edition, the DSM-5.
2. Medically Unexplained Symptoms in DSM-5
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010Can we repair the gaping hole in how we classify patients with medically unexplained symptoms (MUS)? Changes are proposed for the fifth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (the DSM-5, due out in May, 2013). Unfortunately, the proposals don’t solve the problems. To see for yourself, you can review and comment here until April 20, 2010. To comment, you first need to register so you can log in with a password. Then you need to go to the Somatoform Disorders and scroll down to find the comment window.
