The Politics of Medicine: Anxiety or Cost
The medical journal, Nature, has reported on a study conducted with mice that appears to have significant impact on the center of the brain that is activated while under the condition of fear.
The mice who were treated by shining different wave lengths of light into specific areas of the brain previously identified with anxiety. The journal reports: we observed that temporally precise optogenetic stimulation of basolateral amygdala (BLA) terminals in the central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA)—achieved by viral transduction of the BLA with a codon-optimized channelrhodopsin followed by restricted illumination in the downstream CeA—exerted an acute, reversible anxiolytic effect.
Essentially this translates to a form of electro and photo synthesis introduced to the organism with algae and bacteria. The politics of medicine have in recent years preferred oral medicine in place of talk therapies, because both the cost to insurance companies and the cost to patients were prohibitive. It is a delightful synchronicity that would have the introduction of Light be a answer to a very old condition that has undergone many name changes, but little effectiveness in remedy.
Anxiety and depression are perhaps the best known of the mental disorders because essentially other well know disorders like O C D, fall under the general category of anxiety.
In Bi-Polar disease formerly referred to as mania and depression the host organism is most easily regulated by the addition of strong drugs that were said to take the edge off of both the up swings, mania, and the down swings, depression. Frequently patients were found to pretend to be taking the drug but would store them of flush them because they so hated the numbing side effect. Some patients reporting not feeling themselves.
The metaphor is perhaps over stated, but in the very beginning of identifying these mental disorders, the patients were removed from society and locked in jail like cells allegedly to protect them from themselves. The old mental institutions and even the mental institutions that were full up until the 1970's were often locations of mistreatment, rather than opportunities to ameliorate the condition. Many 1940 and 1950 movies ran this theme. One of the most famous being, Francis, where a woman is restrained essentially because both the family and the doctor or in disagreement with her morals.
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