Hello Everyone!

About my favorite topic to think and talk about is the brain. I have been interested in psychology, behavior, and the nervous system ever since  elementary school when I had an idea wanted to go into medicine. I practice neurology and I’m proud to say  I am interested in humans from the inside out, especially experience, thoughts and feelings.  I catalog a vast variety of human experiences, my own and others.

Centering my studies on the human nervous system has allowed me to draw certain conclusions:

First of all it is possible to glean an awful lot about human nature by studying the biology and physiology of the body and nervous system, but such an approach has its limitations. For instance I highly doubt that behavior actually begins in the brain, though the brain is an actuator or tool  of behavioral output. If a person is sad or is in pain, you may need to do more than physical things or prescribe drugs to make him better.  It will probably never be possible to know a person well even if you know everything about his brain and conversely you cannot know for certain what is going in inside of a person’s head by looking at external behavior. I can’t even know if most persons who seem to be in coma might be thinking and certainly what they are thinking.

A lot of medical doctors nowadays, are starting to wonder that for all we are spending on medical care, recent reckoning place this at about one sixth of our GNP, we are not getting the bang for our buck, in terms of improvement in person’s health. Instances in which modern medicine dramatically improves one’s lot or saves lives,  do occur, and are truly beautiful to see, but they are very few. All too often medicine is intervening too late, to be of very much service. Many of us wonder if practicing medicine is too fraught with the emergency of the moment, rather than  preventing disasters  in the first place which would be far more productive in improving people’s lives.   For instance, very many diseases, diabetes, heart and vascular disease, even certain infectious diseases, depression, ADHD seem directly to correlate with our advanced society fostering inactivity, unhealthy lifestyles, excessive consumption and want, and focussing directly in the opposite direction of  true human needs. This is a huge topic which should be discussed more often than it is which would be welcome here.

As a young doctor I was psyched. I saw a lot of misery and so much I could do.  I felt I was fully ready to slay at least one of the horsemen of the apocalypse.  It took me years to  learn how limited was my capacity to heal.  I learned to be more humble and mostly that scientific medical knowledge, far from being the be all and end all I thought it was,  not only evolves and changes drastically within one practitioner’s lifetime,   but medical practitioners  needs to work with  others in disparate fields if we are to truly of any use. By the time one comes to the doctor health problems are far advanced and often the tip of the iceberg, too late to really help. Time an again we learn how we should have intervened much earlier.   Medicine, much like other institutions such as  education,  is deeply embedded in the social fabric.

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