Medicine has some powerful forefathers. The greeks and the romans. Their proto-doctors are still revered today. Hippocrates is the well known one. It was he that discovered the potential of seizures to change behaviour. Galen, another, discover an orgasm could do the same thing to women.
Two millenia later their treatments had evidence to back them and were popularised in ways the prophets of modern medicine could never understand. For well over a century, perhaps 2, seizures have been induced in mentally ill people. Drugs like camphor, insulin and methalazone or something (bear with my spelling and memory. I'm drunk and stoned) were used to induce seizures to change behaviour as well as light too. Today the only one of these left is ect. And the recent bentall/read study shows even that is probably placebo.
Hysteria was treated by giving women orgasms. Galen is often referenced for its value. The vibrator was invented as an alternative to the manual labour it took doctors back in the day.
I don't know if its galen or hippocrates who discovered lithium from spring water would be used for mania. Might be someone else. Hippocrates is better known for other things and galen too but less known. Anyway, their science was lost till the mid 1800s. They began experimenting with lithium to treat behaviour all those years ago. It was only licensed in the latter half of the 20th century.
What did the romans and greeks ever do for us? Fuck all. They started the pejoratisation of human difference using the paradigm of human difference.
They can suck on my chocolate salty balls as much as a psychiatrist who does a study using mri technology which uses a totally new analytical technique where small brain differences across the brain can be detected and analysed in a way no radiographer could be trained to in a pioneering study which finally delivered on the biomedical model of schizophrenia.
In this study the new technqiue of analysing structural differences in grey matter across the brain rather than focusing on large differences in one bit showed an esxceptionally effective way to accurately diagnose schizophrenia. Its the sort of evidence that richard bentall would be amazed at.
I'm not. Of course there are fucking biological differences in the brain which can eventually be identified. These relate to types, behaviour and all sorts of shit.
Meehls theory of a genetic pretype. Sure. Why not. A genotype which might or might not express as the aptholgised phenotype of schizophrenia. There is the distinct possibility that genetics relates to the construction of the organism and, in smaller ways, to the behaviour and being of the organism.
But what pathologises a type and creates the premise of the research is psychiatry. In truth there is nothing wrong with the different genotype nor phenotype. There's just a bent society. Society is ill.
Where did the infection start? Often I've said that the illness started after the industrial revolution. It was the period of the great confinement (the creation of the asylum system) where the disease began.
It wasn't. The initial phase of the illness was many years ago. The greeks and the romans.
That's what they left us. And no profession to fight against the illness in society
No comments:
Post a Comment