I wouldn’t call grief “mundane,” but I agree that most well-informed people can recognize the difference in grief and “a serious problem” (clinical depression). If I have misinterpreted your thoughts, please correct me.
You are right that grief (or some other common problem) can be a trigger for clinical depression. The grieving person may know the difference, but sometimes a person with clinical depression won’t understand the difference. They may not recognize the symptom of their confusion as being a sign of depression, for example.
The part of the brain which is most affected by depression also can affect the judgment centers of the brain. One may not realize that the mental numbness – the state of seemingly having no feelings at all – is also deep depression.
But it may be responsible. Genetics are sometimes another cause. The important thing is that people need to familiarize themselves with all of the symptoms that Hentor the Barbarian posted. They also need to know that clinical depression is not a sign of weakness. It is not a character flaw. And while there are things that many depressed people can do to help themselves feel better, sometimes self-help is not the answer. Being informed is important for both the person with depression and the caregiver or responsible mate alike.
Clinical depression can be a terminal illness. It shouldn’t be ignored. The right medication can make all the difference in the world. My family doctor has been reducing the number of xanax that I take daily. He also gives away samples of medications for the more explicitly physical illnesses such as hypertension. Most of the medications he prescribes have a $5 co-pay at the pharmacy. The insurance company is the one getting much money from me.
Ok folks…First of all I posted this topic to get others opinions. I am in no way a medical professional or scientist. I have heard of Max Gerson in the past and just found it interesting. I try to keep an open mind about things not saying I believe in it by any means. What I do believe is eating a healthy diet with lots of fruits and vegetables, exercise, not smoking etc can help prevent certain cancers. Cancer can not survive in an acidic environment which is what happens to our blood from eating processed and cooked food all the time. So when we eat the healthier foods our blood tends to be more at an alkaline level. That I DO believe! What upsets me is all these new adds the drug companies come up for new ailments like the Shift Change disorder, seriously??? And every all last longer telling you about the side effects from the medicine and they all seem worse than the actual ailment you think you may have like shift change disorder cough* cough*. Now I will say I do take antidepressant and medicine for my thyroid which the thyroid medicine is necessary to live and the antidepressant helps keep my panic attacks at bay. Now is it necessary? Probably not, there are so many other alternatives like Yoga, counseling, exercising, etc. However, like so many other Americans in our fast pace society it is easier to just pop a pill. I wish my Doctor would have prescribed me a yoga class 2 days a week, exercise and put me on a healthy diet years ago before I realized all this, I tried to come off the medicine and it threw me for a whirl wind!! I received a letter in the mail to participate in a blind study for depression and to received $800 if I follow through with the study… Crazy!! Oh and about Max Gersons license being pulled, who ever pulls Medical Doctors licenses is who pulled it, sorry for the miss print, thanks for the Jokes, haha. Also you can’t tell me Antibiotics are not over prescribed…So are loratabs, Xanax and antidepressants. Almost every woman I know is on them.
His therapy doesn’t work at all and it can really hurt patients. Why shouldn’t he have lost his license? If he didn’t deserve to have his license pulled, nobody does.
Thanks for the info! Like I said I like to keep an open mind. I’ll still keep eating a lot of fruits and veggie’s and stay away from all the sugars and processed foods! I hear America has the highest cancer and obesity rate, is this true? Is it from all the processed foods and sugars in our diet?
I meant “mundane” in the sense of “universal”, not in the sense of “routine.” Otherwise, you’ve got it.
You’re right here, too. My psychiatrist once told me that the real challenge in his practice isn’t screening out the “nervous Nellies” (his term, not mine) and people with otherwise situational problems, but encouraging people who need it to seek help. If it takes commercials and print ads for drugs to get people to come in, it’s worth it, as far as he’s concerned. And, as I said (rather clumsily, I admit) in my previous post, most PCPs are happy to do basic screening and, if something’s not right, refer the patient to a psychiatrist for further evaluation and management.
Now that I think about it, I’ve never been to a PCP who wrote an initial prescription for a psychoactive medication; I had to go to a psychiatrist first. Once the dose and medication were worked out, my PCP would handle the maintenance and lab work. If anything needed to be changed, I’d get sent back to the psychiatrist. (I now see the same shrink quarterly, so he handles all of the maintenance stuff. My PCP isn’t in the picture anymore, at least not for that.)
Whenever I see or hear the phrase “you can’t tell me that x is/is not happening”, I take that to mean “I’m going to believe what I want to believe and you can’t tell me any different.”
That said, you must not know many women if almost every woman you know is on Lortab, Xanax and/or an anti-depressant. Most of the women I know aren’t on any of them.
Whenever I see or hear the phrase “you can’t tell me that x is/is not happening”, I take that to mean “I’m going to believe what I want to believe and you can’t tell me any different.”
That said, you must not know many women if almost every woman you know is on Lortab, Xanax and/or an anti-depressant. Most of the women I know aren’t on any of them.
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If antibiotics were not over prescribed you would not hear in the news that our bodies are becoming more and more resistant to the drugs. Take MRSA for instance, it’s becoming a problem in nursing homes and hospitals and it’s extremely hard to treat with antibiotics. And as my Doctor told me yesterday it’s due to over use of antibiotics in this country!
And yes I work with about 80 women in an office setting, and I said most of them are on an antidepressant. As far as Loratabs and Xanax I was just saying I hear a lot of news hype about them and doctors getting in trouble for prescribing them. Which could be quack doctors, who knows.
And you would know that they’re on anti-depressants how, exactly? Did they tell you about their prescriptions, or are you just making another assumption?
It is true that some unscrupulous doctors will prescribe controlled substances to whoever asks. Which is why they’re in trouble for prescribing them, and why they seem to be in the news for that. (It’s also true that at least some states monitor doctors and punish those who appear to be overprescribing controlled substances when they’re really not, but that’s a separate discussion for another thread.)
Is cancer caused by processed food and sugar? No. Over indulgence, however, does lead to obesity which puts one at risk for heart attacks, diabetes, strokes, etc. So it’s good to eat a lot of fruit, veggies, not smoke, etc. Smoking does indeed put you at a huge risk for lung cancer, oral cancer, heart attacks, stroke, etc) Just, well, don’t smoke.
But some people who are completely healthy get cancer, and some who live a completely shitty lifestyle don’t. Sometimes cancer risks are genetic. There’s a LOT of factors that go into it.
BTW, another problem with antiotics isn’t so much that doctors over prescribe them but that people hoard them. Instead of following directions and taking the entire dosage, they stop taking them when they feel better (not realizing that the infection isn’t necessarily gone, just the symptoms are), and keep the pills around. Then, sometime later on they’ll use them when they have a cold or whatever, even though they don’t need them.
I myself am on paxil to treat OCD. The side effects aren’t really a big deal anymore as they were when I first started it. My main side effects are from my anti-convulsants. I’m an epileptic, and I’m on two different drugs to treat that. I’ve finally got my seizures under control, and I’m probably going to be on them until I die. The side effects suck (extreme drowsiness, weird dreams, dry mouth, slight memory problems, etc), but it definitely beats the fuck out of the alternative! I’m not willing to risk some quack’s words.
(Any doctor who tries to take you off of anti-depressants should ween you off, not just have you quit cold-turkey)
Bereavement is supposed to be an exclusionary criterion for a diagnosis of depression, until it lasts longer than would typically be expected.
Yoga is not a reliable treatment for depression.
Jmiller15, you believe a hell of a lot of nonsensical woo. Please adopt a more rational perspective on the evaluation of evidence. I also frankly doubt that 40 of the women at your workplace have revealed to you that they are taking an antidepressant, unless you work for an organization that does ddpression advocacy or something.
For the record, it is not our bidies that are develooping resistance to antibiotics. Good antibiotics should have no effect on our bodies at all, as they should be targeting the disease-causing bacteria.
It is the bacteria who are evolving resisistant populations. And MRSA is not difficult to treat. It is resistant to common antibiotics of the methicillin group (as its name tells us) but it is vulnerable to other types of antibiotics.
Quibble: CA-MRSA (community acquired) is not difficult to treat. It’s generally susceptible to sulfa drugs, or the tetracycline, or clindamycin. Usually all 3. And if those fail, vancomycin and linezolid can be used.
HA-MRSA (hospital acquired) can be tough. It’s susceptible to vancomycin, which can only be given IV (though resistance to this has been seen; fortunately the resistant strains aren’t real hardy or virulent.) And oral linezolid is still pretty effective too. But HA-MRSA can be pretty hard to root out of the body, since usually the patient is pretty compromised immunologically in the first place.
Good antibiotics have no effect on our bodies at all??? Seriously? We also have good bacteria in our bodies that the antibiotics kills off! How many doctors tell you to take probiotics to help when taking antibiotics? Once again fruits and veggies also help put the good bacteria into our systems! Antibiotics can be harmfully to our digestive system when it kills the good bacterias we need!
Kills the bacteria. Does not affect you. There also is a word in that sentence “should,” which indicates absolute compliance in best-case scenarios only.
However, as you say, it is trivial to replenish symbiotic gut flora.
Can you even read what you write for comprehension?
The “doctors don’t tell you to eat right and exercise when you see them!” statement is a pretty common woo community belief. And it doesn’t fit my experiences or the experiences of most of my friends, either. When I had my major surgery last year, my doctor met with me before and after to talk about diet and exercise that would be most beneficial to me during my recovery, as well as the pain medications and other meds that were needed. Pretty much every time I go in for a visit, my doctor asks me about my exercise levels (not enough) and my diet (okay, semi-vegetarian). Any failure to incorporate good eating and exercise habits into my life are mine, not my physician’s failure to ask about and recommend them.
And I am always amused by statements regarding the healthy lifestyles that increase longevity and health, given that the people who propose them forget that there was never a magical time where we were all eating organic, home-grown produce and locally butchered meats and not taking any medications and living as long as we are now. Average life expectancies have increased dramatically in the past hundred years, along with the improvements in medical technology such as medications.
I have to call attention to this statement because it attempts to frame a correlation as a cause. Studies in this area (reasons for increased life expectancy) have indicated that the major reasons for increased life expectancy are things like better sanitation (such as clean drinking water, modern septic systems) and refrigeration (eating less spoiled foods). They found that developments in medicine were not major contributors. The following list, ranked by order of importance, comes from Answers.com, but I’ve seen similar information in other places:
Clean drinking water
Universal sanitation
Significantly improved nutrition, particularly during infancy and childhood
Vaccination against most common epidemic diseases
Access to high-quality trauma (accident and emergency) care