Health and Psychology

A friend of mine confessed that he had difficulty deleting text messages.  I have a 90% full voice mail that I deleted down to 25% full, while I was texting him.  Yes, it's possible to hoard technology snippets.

Hoarding is the excessive collection of items and the inability to discard them.  Information hoarders hoard technology and paper.  In some cases it may be a symptom of obcessive compulsive disorder.  But in some cases, people that hoard don'...

Many people who know me have met my fish DFW and my cat, Tatum, or at least have seen pictures.  In the past they knew me as the owner of Dalmatians-Zoey, Archie, Baxter, and Cinnamon.  Some people know that my last two Dalmations, Baxter and Cinnamon, died as a result of complications of methacillin resistent Staphlococcous aureous (MRSA) infections they acquired after my husband had a hip transplant that caused a hospital acquired infection in him that was transmitted to the dogs....

A call comes in.  "I want my child tested for accommodations.  I want them to get extra time on tests."

Testing for accommodations is a complex process.  Getting extra time on tests needs to be able to be documented to show that the person has a functional impairment that extra time on a test will assist.  There are some tests that allow for that to be documented.  But what about all the other possible accommodations?

Jamani has a p...

In the past week a colleague of mine and I have seen about 6 children that appear to have been misdiagnosed with attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.  The children had a few things in common.  They were all reportedly diagnosed by their elementary or preschool teachers and referred to their primary care physicians for medication.  They all live in an underserved community and were all boys.

The hallmark of Attention Deficit D...

The New England Journal of Medicine just published an article on the need to develop guidelines on treating patients with multiple illnesses also known as co-morbidities.  No kidding.  The average person starts getting multiple medical conditions around age 50-65.  Some people start much earlier.  The difficulty is that the current system of medical treatment is disease specific and specialty specific.  

Here's the problem with treatment by disease. ...

There are 400 different types of anemia.  All of them contribute to depression and are often not diagnosed or treated adequately.  It's the first medical condition that needs to be ruled out in cases where depression hasn't responded to psychotherapy prior to initiating medication.  (The second condition is undiagnosed infection).

Anemia is a condition that develops when your blood lacks enough healthy red blood cells or hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is a main part o...

People use aspirin for a lot of things without really understanding what it does.  Aspirin is chemically known as acetylsalicylic acid.  It is used as an analgesic to relieve minor aches and pains, as an anti-inflammatory agent to reduce swelling, as an anti-pyretic agent to reduce fevers, and as a anti-coagulant to thin the blood.

It's this last use as a blood thinner that has come under question.  Many physicians have suggested that patients at risk of ...

A medical psychologist is a psychologist that has post-doctoral training in the field of medicine to be able to work in consultation with a physician on the treatment of illnesses. While psychologists in California cannot prescribe medicines, most medical psychologists understand how medications work and can explain them to patients. A health psychologist has specialty training at a post-doctoral level to work with promoting health. The field of health and medical psychology works with pat...

I work with a couple of start up companies.  This is volunteer work that pays itself back to me a zillion times over. Over the years I've seen a lot of companies struggle with problems that were avoidable and will take a lot of time to correct.  It's much easier to start off on the right foot and do it right from the beginning than to have to figure out how to fix things later.  This is especially true in the field of mental health.  

My employment life s...

Psychiatric terms get changed when they get caught up in the mainstream.  So people start reporting normal mood fluctuations as "bipolar disorder,"  normal concerns about germs or a desire for order as "OCD", concerns about finances as "Posttraumatic Stress Disorder or panic disorder."  No.  Not remotely.

I sat down with a client reporting serious concerns about finances, worrying dreams about money, and being afraid every time he opens a bill.  "I'm...