Why is it that medical men and women practising the honorable profession of psychiatry are sometimes disrespectfully referred to as ‘headshrinkers’, or ‘shrinks’, or even, by a deliberate mispronunciation of the word, as ‘trick cyclists’? Perhaps the answer is to be found in a production of the American Psychiatric Association – where else? – called Diagnostic and Statistical [...]
There was a news item on the BBC recently about a trial of cannabis in patients with Parkinson’s disease who also have visual hallucinations. Parkinson’s disease is undoubtedly a brain disorder but are visual hallucinations also abnormal? One such patient was presented, an elderly man who had hallucinations – they might better be called visions – of his [...]
Many medical research papers are difficult to understand: they're written in an opaque style replete with jargon, commonly use non-standard abbreviations, and contain many unnecessary words. Often the sentences are so long that it’s difficult to hold in one’s mind the ideas being presented at the beginning until the end, so there's a tendency uncritically to accept what [...]