How Medicine Works and When It Doesn’t: Learning Who to Trust to Get and Stay Healthy Hardcover – 24 Jan. 2023 
by  F Perry Wilson  (Author)
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Blending personal anecdotes with hard science, an accomplished physician, researcher, and science communicator gives you the tools to avoid medical misinformation and take control of your health​ “A brilliant step toward patients and physicians alike reclaiming a sense of confidence in a system that often feels overwhelming and mismanaged” (Gabby Bernstein, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Universe Has Your Back).

We live in an age of medical miracles. Never in the history of humankind has so much talent and energy been harnessed to cure disease. So why does it feel like it’s getting harder to live our healthiest lives? Why does it seem like “experts” can’t agree on anything, and why do our interactions with medical professionals feel less personal, less honest, and less impactful than ever? 

Through stories from his own practice and historical case studies, Dr. F. Perry Wilson, a physician and researcher from the Yale School of Medicine, explains how and why the doctor-patient relationship has eroded in recent years and illuminates how profit-driven companies–from big Pharma to healthcare corporations–have corrupted what should have been medicine’s golden age. By clarifying the realities of the medical field today, Dr. Wilson gives readers the tools they need to make informed decisions, from evaluating the validity of medical information online to helping caregivers advocate for their loved ones, in the doctor’s office and with the insurance company. 

Dr. Wilson wants readers to understand medicine and medical science the way he does: as an imperfect and often frustrating field, but still the best option for getting well. To restore trust between patients, doctors, medicine, and science, we need to be honest, we need to know how to spot misinformation, and we need to avoid letting skepticism ferment into cynicism. For it is only by redefining what “good.

Maria Cristina Patru1 and David H. Reser 2*
1Department of Psychiatry, Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève, Geneve Switzerland, 2 Department of Physiology, Monash
University, Melbourne, Australia
Edited by:
Bernat Kocsis,
Harvard Medical School, USA
Reviewed by:
Sabina Berretta,
McLean Hospital, USA
Ami Citri,
The Hebrew University, Israel
*Correspondence:
David Reser
david.reser@monash.edu
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Schizophrenia,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychiatry
Received: 23 July 2015
Accepted: 26 October 2015
Published: 09 November 2015
Citation:
Patru MC and Reser DH (2015)
A New Perspective on Delusional
States – Evidence for
Claustrum Involvement.
Front. Psychiatry 6:158.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2015.00158

“Delusions are a hallmark positive symptom of schizophrenia, although they are also
associated with a wide variety of other psychiatric and neurological disorders.

The heterogeneity of clinical presentation and underlying disease, along with a lack of experimental
animal models, make delusions exceptionally difficult to study in isolation, either in
schizophrenia or other diseases. To date, no detailed studies have focused specifically on
the neural mechanisms of delusion, although some studies have reported characteristic
activation of specific brain areas or networks associated with them. Here, we present a
novel hypothesis and extant supporting evidence implicating the claustrum, a relatively
poorly understood forebrain nucleus, as a potential common center for delusional states.”

Elizabeth’s scan shows a lesion in precisely that area of the brain (marked in blue with red arrow) which needs to be properly identified.  See also page three of the PDF paper.

This is directly in the meso-limbic pathway and is associated with delusional behaviour in what some people are still calling schizophrenia.   

If you look at page 3 of this paper you will see the brain pictured in coronal, sagittal and horizontal view and the arrows triangulate to where the image/lesion appears in the right hemisphere of her brain on the scan at position 7/24 of the coronal image from the MRI.   

This urgently needs looking at by a neurologist and reference needs to be made to this paper.

Whilst commencing to write this blog Elizabeth has just called. She said yesterday that she spent six hours in seclusion whilst being rapidly tranquilised on Xmas Day.

Despite this, Elizabeth did not sound too bad during her supervised phone call. She spoke of escape. By this she clearly said that she escapes in her mind ie dissociation - this is a sign of PTSD for which Elizabeth has never had any treatment for under NHS. Also she has never had underlying pathological tests until I have had to point out the results of the private scan and observations by independent specialists and experts.

With an appointment on the 3 January with a Neurologist that had previously been flatly refused I really do hope that once and for all her whole treatment will be reviewed based upon the findings which clearly indicate the above.

It has been a nightmare to even try to get certain doctors to acknowledge let alone look into something that has been clearly stated in the files going back to 2009. This could all indicate why the treatment has not worked for so many years.

I am very unhappy at the current punishment of having the phone taken away for a trial period. This has already been tried before. I see this as bullying aimed directly at me because I am the one being blamed for the ‘episodes’ that look like fits never seen before even though many of these take place when I am not around. The necessity the MDT believes to be right is completely wrong and has not achieved anything before at Ash Villa except mistrust and upset and nothing is being done in line with the law and correct procedures and now these same restrictions incorporating Xmas is yet again being “tried”.

I hope to put an end to this bullying once and for all as that is how we see it. I am not going to sit back and do nothing whilst this punishment continues for years and years on end as I believe the whole environment of a noisy acute ward to be completely wrong and the whole approach of punishment also.

This is punishment not care. Punishment to stop my daughter from going out to the shop in the hospital grounds, punishment from stopping her listening to her music on her phone by keeping it locked away. What is this achieving?  NOTHING but resentment an mistrust and this has been ongoing for one month now with no end in sight.  

“Treat people as individuals and uphold their dignity and to do this you must treat people with kindness, respect and compassion and respect and uphold people’s human rights, challenge poor practice and discriminatory attitudes and behaviour relating to their care.

“Act with honesty and integrity at all times, treating people fairly without discrimination, bullying or harassment.  Keep to the laws of the country in which you are practising. Never allow someone’s complaint to affect the care that is provided to them.”