Thursday, October 19, 2006
Type I and Type II - Bipolar disorder
Bipolar disorder is a disease of extremes - specifically, extreme mood swings. When you're high, you're very, very high without benefit of chemicals, and when you're down, you're in the 23rd subbasement. That may sound like a very poor attempt at humor, but believe me, having "been there, done...
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Wednesday, October 4, 2006
The sandman never cometh - Fatal familial insomnia
I first heard of this disease during a long-forgotten television show hosted by the late Robert Urich. During this TV special, the case history of a schoolteacher with the disorder was profiled. The only place that could even have a hope of treating this teacher was the University of Chicago, and...
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Friday, September 15, 2006
Hyperemesis gravidarum
Hyperemesis gravidarum is a very rare extreme form of morning sickness, severe enough to warrant hospitalizing a pregnant woman afflicted with this disorder. The National Organization for Rare Disorders estimates that 0.5% to 2% of pregnant women develop this problem each year; for those of you...
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Sunday, September 10, 2006
IgA Nephropathy
This is a disease I'm intimately familiar with - it's the cause of my original kidney failure. IgAN (the common Internet abbreviation for the disease) used to be called Berger's disease (pronounced bearzhay). However, when I told people that I had Berger's disease, they generally asked me about...
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Thursday, September 7, 2006
Sybil Syndrome - dissociative identity disorder
Sybil, the memoir of a woman's experience in therapy as a patient with dissociative identity disorder (what used to be called multiple personality disorder), has become something of a cult classic. It's still available on Amazon.com, and it looks like it's still in print in the mass-market paperback...
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Wednesday, September 6, 2006
Faking it till you make it: Factitious disorder
Factitious disorder used to be called Munchhausen syndrome, or Munchhausen's by proxy if a mom has the disorder and is faking illness in a child. That is, in fact, the hallmark of the disorder: the sufferer is discovered either to be inducing symptoms in him- or herself, or causing symptoms in a...
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Tuesday, September 5, 2006
Remember all those old made-for-TV movies?
This blog is named after a popular form of made-for-television movie - the disease-of-the-week movie. This particular genre tended to be very syrupy, and the movies almost always featured the hero's (or heroine's) brave struggle against the disease which provided the subject of the movie. The...
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