 THE UNDEFEATED MIND Fall 2012 |
 Photo: Steve Snodgrass First aid is defined as the immediate care given to an acutely injured or ill person. It can literally be life-saving so it behooves all of us to know some basic principles. What follows are some rules that cover common conditions and general practices: Continue reading…  Photo: Robert S. Donovan I once made a determination to call a friend on the phone every day for one year. He was new to the practice of Nichiren Buddhism and struggling with a misery of an intensity I’d rarely seen. Anxiety and depression were overwhelming him and ruining the quality of his everyday life. I’d hoped to encourage him by leveraging some discipline of my own. Most days we’d talk for under two minutes. My goal wasn’t to engage him in a lengthy and significant dialogue every day, which would have been exhausting to us both, but rather simply to remind him I was there and to try to bolster his determination to do something that he said he wanted to do and that I thought would help resolve his suffering. Continue reading…  Photo: scubadive67 WARNING: The time required to read this post will violate my five-minute rule—by a wide margin. This isn’t so much to punish readers for my decision to read all 1,163 pages of the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (HR3590) and all 337 pages of the “Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010″ (HR4872)—known collectively as the health care law—but rather because a shorter post couldn’t possibly do an analysis of it justice (not that a longer post will either, but here goes…). Continue reading…  Photo: Cl@re Bear A few years ago, a patient of mine was diagnosed with lung cancer. A metastatic work up revealed a small mass in his liver that had the radiographic appearance of a benign liver cyst. But in the setting of a newly diagnosed lung cancer, we couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a metastatic lesion, so we decided to biopsy it. Due to scheduling issues, we couldn’t get it done for seven days. Two days into the seven, he called me in a panic over the possibility that the lesion in his liver was cancer, a fact, if true, he understood would change his prognosis from good to dismal. I offered him a prescription for Valium, which he accepted gratefully, and then suggested a strategy to help him manage his anxiety that took him by surprise: denial. Continue reading… |
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