Medicine v. psychiatry

I had brain surgery last month. Specifically, a craniotomy and excision of a golfball-sized right frontal lobe meningioma. It was the first major surgery of my life, and the only general anesthesia since a tonsillectomy at age five or six. Here I mean to brag, and maybe relate a couple of things learned.

The brain is not special. It's a boring hunk of meat, utterly malleable. Healing of neurological tissue apparently occurs more efficiently than muscle or bone. On the other hand, the shutting down of an individual's intimate, direct organization and communication lines within his body, and the taking over or appropriation of these life activities by little machines, is a brutally disturbing and traumatic thing. It's the anesthetic that hurts most, not the saw or the knife.

The tumor had begun to debilitate me. It apparently had been very fast-growing. I knew I had started to shuffle, and my attention was unsteady. Left to my own devices, I suspect I would have waited too long and ended up in far worse trouble. Thanks to the stern insistence of people close to me, I got an MRI in the nick of time.

The key factor is honest acknowledgement and conceptual understanding of the vital difference between help and control in human relations. I have been enormously helped by brilliant medical professionals and my loving family.

However there sure were moments when I obeyed orders, period. I regret that my wonderful wife had to nag and gradually wear me down just to get agreement for the initial doctor's appointment. I need to pay her back for such trouble, which she should have been spared.

The physically forced appropriation of breathing, urination and other functions was control. It was necessary for my surgery and it was done spectacularly well, but it was not itself loving. Any pretense that such brutal assaults were helpful to me as a person would have multiplied the trauma. People who need to pretend that force is help are liars and cowards.

My first post-op awareness actually did include some experience of help, however. I was in extreme panic, and I said, "You guys have to get some of this shit off me, right now!" Someone standing there actually understood, and mercifully removed something (no idea what) from my nose. I felt like I’d had some positive, even if de minimis effect, from exercising my own will. There was a future, the panic subsided. The point is it took understanding between me and another person. Not much, just a tiny bit. I'm sure there were protocols and best practices and competencies and clinical data, all about whatever the thing was that was removed from my nose, what the thing was doing in my nose, why it should be there, etc. In that moment, all such explanation would have been experienced as hated machinery. My salvation lay in the quick, live communication alone.

There were a surprizing number of medical professionals in the hospital whom I liked and admired.  A couple days after I came home, I ended up back in the emergency room during a really bad day. It turned out nothing was actually wrong, and I probably shouldn’t have been talked into going. Once you’re in there though, you end up having to follow orders again. I was not willing to have an I-V inserted. Once I knew my blood pressure and EKG were normal, and I had no fever, I told people I was leaving. They were not happy because they wanted to do some blood work, and I just said I didn’t care, I was leaving. The nurse had been unable to get any blood out of my arm after a couple tries, anyway, so just forget it!

Well, this started to look like an impasse, and I figured I’d just sign an AMA form and walk out the door. Then one of the doctors who had actually done my surgery showed up, a very bright lady in her thirties, I think. She listened to my explanation of why I wasn’t sticking around for blood work, and responded that they really, really wanted to check my sodium levels, and carefully explained why. Then she looked at me rather beseechingly and said, “Please..?”

Of course, it was my decision. I liked this doctor and I believed her. She talked me into it. They got an ultrasound machine so they could find a good vein, and they got three vials of blood in no time, and sent me home. Everybody was happy.

I can’t help comparing my very positive experience with these real brain doctors... with what would likely have resulted had I gone another month or two without finding out I had a tumor, and started showing emotional symptoms, and landed in the clutches of the fake “brain doctors”, the psychiatrists that I deal with out at Dick Suck Hospital in Elgin. I’d be dead by now, for sure!

My doctors helped me. They actually cured what was wrong. People like Corcoran, Kareemi, Javed, et al., never cure anyone of anything. They never have, and they never will. They don’t talk their patients into any beneficial or prudent treatment. They bully and coerce and force their slaves into compliance. Even Vik Gill, a Dick Suck Hospital psychiatrist whom I actually like, seems to believe that his patients can’t ever know anything about themselves that could be anywhere near as important as what he knows about them, merely because he’s a psychiatrist.  Psychiatry is not help, it’s brutal, cynical, arrogant, lying control.

People use medicine to repair their bodies, and often get good results. Society uses psychiatry to feel better about getting rid of people. It should stop.

Psychiatria delenda est!