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The Changing Role of the Psychiatrist in Managing Depression with Medical Illness
This post is mainly a reminiscence about my days as a consultation-liaison psychiatrist. I often evaluated patients who had chronic hepatitis C. The liver disease itself and the treatment (interferon alfa) often led to patients struggling with depression. The impetus for this came from noticing a couple of items. One is the recent l blog…
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Closing the Loop on All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office Search for Extraterrestrials?
Just in case you haven’t already heard, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) revealed the lack of evidence proving the existence of extraterrestrials from the reports about what we used to call UFOs. And NASA has said basically the same thing. So, is there anything left to say about this? Probably not from the official…
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We Put on the Ritz for the Solar Eclipse!
We’re putting on the Ritz for the solar eclipse next month! We got our crazy T-shirts and the eclipse glasses and solar filter. We didn’t know we’d be blind after donning the glasses. You don’t want to go for a walk wearing them because you’re likely to trip over something, mainly other eclipse observers. We’ve…
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Thoughts on the FDA Settling Lawsuit Over Social Media Post on Ivermectin
I just saw the news item about the FDA settling a lawsuit brought by three Texas doctors who opposed the FDA’s social media posts as well as an FDA website page entitled “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent Covid-19.” I have highlighted a link to that article which is cited by…
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Will Iowans Get the Whole Enchilada with The Upcoming Total Solar Eclipse?
So, are Iowans going to get “the whole enchilada” when it comes to seeing the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024? No, but we’ll see a partial eclipse. The T-shirt Sena got for me says “Total Eclipse” on it—but it also has extraterrestrials on it, which I really like. The paths of these total…
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Getting Ready for the Solar Eclipse!
Sena has placed the order for our eclipse glasses and eclipse T-shirts. They should get here in plenty of time for the solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. And if the weather is really crappy that day—we have 30 days to return them. There is an interesting history of eclipses on the NASA website. It…
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Solar Eclipse in April!
We just found out there’s going to be a total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. We hope to get some solar eclipse glasses before then if they don’t run out of stock everywhere. They’re selling fast. We’ve seen a couple of lunar eclipses and those were fun. The most recent one was during cold…
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The FDA Announcement on Kratom
Just in case you missed it, the FDA posted an announcement about Kratom in February this year. According to the FDA: “Kratom is a tropical tree (Mitragyna speciosa) that is native to Southeast Asia. Products prepared from kratom leaves are available in the U.S. through sales on the Internet and at brick-and-mortar stores. Kratom is…
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Svengoolie and The Comedy of Terrors
Last Saturday on Svengoolie, I watched for the second time the 1963 movie “Comedy of Terrors,” a slapstick horror spinoff of Shakespeare’s farce, “Comedy of Errors”—which I’ve never seen. I didn’t see the whole movie the first time around, and I can’t remember exactly where I saw it. Most likely it was on Svengoolie. The…
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Remember The Calling
I recommend Dr. George Dawson’s recent posts on seeing the practice of medicine as a calling and his passing a big milestone with 2 million reads on his blog. I wrote a post entitled “Remembering Our Calling: MLK Day 2015.” It was republished in a local newspaper, the Iowa City Press-Citizen on January 19, 2015.…
Go Retire Psychiatrist 