Diseases And Disorders

"Campbell White, of New York, was the first person to employ refrigerants for medical use. He reported his success in 1899, advocating liquid air for the treatment of a large range of conditions including lupus erythematosus, herpes zoster, chancroid, naevi, warts, varicose leg ulcers, carbuncles and epitheliomas He recognized the efficiency of liquid air in the treatment of carcinoma' and enthusiastically stated `I can truly say today that I believe that epithelioma, treated early in its existence by liquid air, will always be cured'. Whitehouse reviewed the effects of liquid air on normal skin, finding it to be especially useful for epitheliomata, lupus erythematosus and vascular naevi. He stated that liquid air `outranks some of the remedies on which we have placed great reliance'. He treated recurrences of epitheliomata after radiotherapy and found liquid air to be more successful than repeat radiotherapy."

"In the United States, prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed non–skin cancer and the second leading cause of cancer death. The American Cancer Society estimates that 241 740 American men will be diagnosed with the disease and 28 170 men will die of it in 2012. Prostate cancer demographics have changed dramatically over the past 30 years."

"A professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, Rosser has received a $3 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to put together the first comprehensive rehabilitation program specifically for gay and bisexual men with prostate cancer. But he’s not just a researcher — he’s a survivor himself, diagnosed last year at age 59. And he’s keenly aware of how little information is available for men like him. “When my husband was diagnosed and had a radical prostatectomy, we reached out for help," Rosser said. "We were amazed to see how little was out there. I realized there were no studies, no research. It was a neglected area.” But it wasn’t institutionalized homophobia, Rosser stressed. “Our efforts were focused on battling HIV, keeping young men alive. Frankly the older guys were secondary.” When it comes to cancer, urologists and oncologists — even wives — are laser-focused on survival, according to Rosser. But he said when it comes to male patients, "studies show again and again that quality of life is equally important." And, he added, "a big part of quality of life is urinary continence and sexual function.”"

"Writer Perry Brass was diagnosed with prostate cancer in March 2016. Three months later he had a radical prostatectomy, removing his entire prostate. Brass, then 68, was lucky: He lives in New York City, home to top-notch doctors and a medical community more informed about LGBTQ health. “I’ve been a gay activist — and been out — so long that I took it for granted I could talk openly to my doctors,” he told NBC News. But even he was unprepared for the side effects. "Your sex drive can take a nosedive," Brass said, adding that prostate cancer can also lead to erectile dysfunction. "You’re experiencing ED, but that doesn’t mean you’re not experiencing sexual attraction," he said. About 20 percent of patients treated with radiation experience irradiated bowels, which can make receptive anal sex painful or even impossible. Treatment can also affect penis size, ability to ejaculate, experience of orgasm and urinary continence during sex. Brass’ said his sexual function was relatively good, but instead he struggled with incontinence for weeks — using as many as nine “pads” a day and staying within yards of a bathroom at all times."

"The fact that the general incidence of leukemia has doubled in the last two decades may be due, partly, to the increasing use of x-rays for numerous purposes. The incidence of leukemia in doctors, who are likely to be so exposed, is twice that of the general public. In radiologists … the incidence is ten times greater."

"We "need" cancer because, by the very fact of its incurability, it makes all other diseases, however virulent, not cancer."

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

"Following Albert Hoffmann's discovery of LSD's psychoactive properties in 1943, and previous to their scheduling as controlled substances, the psychedelic drugs were widely studied--six international conferences and hundreds of papers discussed their potential therapeutic usefulness. The observation that the frightening experience of delirium tremens sometimes led alcoholics to moderate their alcohol intake suggested to early psychedelic researchers that the "psychotomimetic" experience thought to be produced by LSD could be used to treat alcoholism. A number of hypothesis-generating studies employing a variety of research designs to examine this premise were completed, but relatively few controlled trials attempted hypothesis testing. After twenty-five years of study, a combination of flawed methodology, uneven results and social reprehension led to the abandonment of research on the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs, leaving many avenues of inquiry unexplored and many questions unanswered. Today, after a thirty-year hiatus, this research is gradually being resumed, and there is renewed interest in the findings of previous studies."

"Negative mood states — depressed, anxious, angry, frustrated, etc. — as well as positive mood states (such as happiness) are well-known triggers for alcohol use in alcoholics as well as heavy drinkers or people who don’t have alcohol-related problems. There are plenty of research supporting these associations."

"Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past."

"As an alcoholic, you will violate your standards quicker than you can lower them. You will do shit that even the Devil would go "Dude....""

"One of the principal payoffs of biological research in genetics and neuroscience is the potential for developing medications to treat a variety of alcohol use problems. Neuroscience research already has provided the groundwork for new medications for treating alcoholism. Researchers now are looking for new medications that target the mechanisms of the addiction itself, such as drugs that interfere with the reward properties of alcohol or craving, which are thought to be major factors in relapse. It is likely that no one medication will be effective for everyone nor that there will be the proverbial “silver bullet” of pharmacotherapies for alcoholism. Just as there are different types of medications with different mechanisms of action to treat complex diseases like diabetes, it is likely that there will be a range of medications, coupled with verbal therapies, available to clinicians"

"Perhaps the single greatest influence on the scope and direction of alcohol research has been the finding that a portion of the vulnerability to alcoholism is genetic. This finding, more than any other, helped to establish the biological basis of alcoholism. It also provided the basis—and justification—for much of the progress in genetics, neuroscience, and neurobehavior described in the Tenth Special Report. Today we know that approximately 50 to 60 percent of the risk for developing alcoholism is genetic. Genes direct the synthesis of proteins, and it is the proteins that drive and regulate critical chemical reactions throughout the human body. Genetics, therefore, affects virtually every facet of alcohol research, from neuroscience to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome."

"Alcoholism is the disease of more."

"I got . I had to stop drinking and reorganize my whole life schedule, and that's probably the greatest blessing in my life. I stopped drinking on Aug. 11, 1982, at 20 minutes past 11. I finished two bottles of Chateau Margeaux '54, looked at my watch and said, "That's my last drink," and it was. I'd had enough anyway. I think you could probably float the on the amount I've drunk."

"Habitual intoxication is the epitome of every crime."

"Addictions come from shortages in infancy. People try to compensate this way. Alcoholism is generally produced from a shortage in mother's milk. And heroin addiction is usually due to a lack of being, the absence of recognition; the drug fills the emptiness of not being loved."

"‘Tis not the eating, nor ‘tis not the drinking that is to be blamed, but the excess."

"The use of flesh foods, by the excitation that it exercises on the nervous system, prepares the way for habits of intemperance in everything; and the more flesh is consumed, the more serious is the danger of confirmed alcoholism...The lower part of man’s nature is undoubtedly intensified by the habit of feeding upon corpses. Even after eating a full meal of such horrible material, a man still feels unsatisfied, for he is still conscious of a vague, uncomfortable sense of want, and consequently he suffers greatly from nervous strain. This craving is the hunger of the bodily tissues, which cannot be renewed by the poor stuff offered to them as food. To satisfy this vague craving, or rather to appease these restless nerves so that it will no longer be felt, recourse is often had to stimulants. Sometimes alcoholic beverages are taken; sometimes an attempt is made to allay these feelings with black coffee, and at other times strong tobacco is used in the endeavor to soothe the irritated, exhausted nerves. Here we have the beginning of intemperance, for in the majority of cases intemperance began in the attempt to allay with alcoholic stimulants the vague, uncomfortable sense of want which follows the eating of impoverished food—food that does not feed. There is no doubt that drunkenness, and all the poverty, wretchedness, disease and crime associated with it, may frequently be traced to errors of feeding."

"Who has woe? Who has uneasiness? Who has quarrels? Who has complaints? Who has wounds for no reason? Who has bleary eyes? Those lingering long over wine; those searching out mixed wine. Do not look at the wine’s red color as it sparkles in the cup and goes down smoothly, for in the end it bites like a serpent, and it secretes poison like a viper. Your eyes will see strange things, and your heart will speak perverse things. And you will be like one lying down in the middle of the sea, like one lying at the top of a ship’s mast. You will say: “They have struck me, but I did not feel it. They beat me, but I did not know it. When will I wake up? I need another drink.”"

"Mrs. Morse had been drinking all the afternoon; while she dressed to go out, she felt herself rising pleasurably from drowsiness to high spirits. But as she came out into the street the effects of the whisky deserted her completely, and she was filled with a slow, grinding wretchedness so horrible that she stood swaying on the pavement, unable for a moment to move forward."

"Drink is in itself a good creature of God, but the abuse of drink is from Satan."

"Suddenly he saw them, the bottles of aguardiente, of anís, of jerez, of Highland Queen, the glasses, a babel of glasses—towering, like the smoke from the train that day—built to the sky, then falling, the glasses toppling and crashing, falling downhill from the Generalife Gardens, the bottles breaking, bottles of Oporto, tinto, blanco, bottles of Pernod, Oxygènée, absinthe, bottles smashing, bottles cast aside, falling with a thud on the ground in parks, under benches, beds, cinema seats, hidden in drawers at Consulates, bottles of Calvados dropped and broken, or bursting into smithereens, tossed into garbage heaps, flung into the sea, the Mediterranean, the Caspian, the Caribbean, bottles floating in the ocean, dead Scotchmen on the Atlantic highlands—and now he saw them, smelt them, all, from the very beginning—bottles, bottles, bottles, and glasses, glasses, glasses, of bitter, of Dubonnet, of Falstaff, Rye, Johnny Walker, Vieux Whiskey blanc Canadien, the apéritifs, the digestifs, the demis, the dobles, the noch ein Herr Obers, the et glas Araks, the tusen taks, the bottles, the bottles, the beautiful bottles of tequila, and the gourds, gourds, gourds, the millions of gourds of beautiful mescal . . ."

"Jack London, |location=New York|publisher=The Century Company|year=1913|pages=286–287}} illustrated by ; text at archive.org"

"Think about the great thinkers of our time and those times before and in antiquity. Think about Aristotle, Plato and Socrates and Maimonides and Pythagoras, Heraclitus and Rodin and George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Edison and Oprah Winfrey and those liberation thinkers like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and Marcus Garvey and Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela. Think about it my brothers and sisters, Cesar Chavez and George Washington Carver and Booker T Washington, Adam Clayton Powell ectera. Think about them! They were [thinkers]. Pitful our generation and our people today. Here it is 2008, and we're worse off now than we've ever been because our young people do not have the ability to — Think about it! How pitiful we are, here they are on drugs, on heroin, on cocaine, alcoholics. Here they are at the disposal of these kingpins and ectera, because they can't. Here they are making gangs families because they can't."

"From the I sailed with sufficient in ballast to last me to Tahiti, where I outfitted with Scotch and American whisky, and thereafter there were no dry stretches between ports. But please do not misunderstand. There was no drunkenness, as drunkenness is ordinarily understood — no staggering and rolling around, no befuddlement of the senses. The skilled and seasoned drinker, with a strong constitution, never descends to anything like that. He drinks to feel good, to get a pleasant jingle, and no more than that. The things he carefully avoids are the nausea of over-drinking, the after-effect of over-drinking, the helplessness and loss of pride of over-drinking. What the skilled and seasoned drinker achieves is a discreet and canny semi-intoxication. And he does it by the twelve-month around without any apparent penalty. There are hundreds of thousands of men of this sort in the United States to-day, in clubs, hotels, and in their own homes — men who are never drunk, and who, though most of them will indignantly deny it, are rarely sober. And all of them fondly believe, as I fondly believed, that they are beating the game."

"Alcohol abuse and alcoholism have a different physiologic effect on women than on men. Societal attitudes about women and alcohol and internal (self-perception) and external (environmental) factors can create barriers to the detection and treatment of female alcohol abusers."

"Morpheus' gifts used to come to me in bottles, Beam and black Jack Daniel's, straight up with a frosted schooner of Jax on the side, while the rain poor down in the neon glow outside the window of an all-night bar not far from the Huey Long Bridge. In a half hour I could kick open a furnace door and fling into the flames all the snakes and squeaking bats that lived inside me. Except the next morning they would writhe with new life in the ashes and come back home, stinking and hungry.""

"In my lowest moments, the only reason I didn't commit suicide was that I knew I wouldn't be able to drink any more if I was dead."

"Wine in; truth out."

"In a few hours it would be midnight and I would have gone a full day on my own without a drink. And one day could mean two. If I stayed off the booze, I knew I'd be able to write again. I started the Dart and headed north up the Coast Highway. There was a blueness to the ocean I had never noticed before."

"It's not like anything you can beat—no matter how hard you try. … It's just that you can't really help them and it's so discouraging—it's all for nothing."

"Jesus," he said to himself. "Drunk for ten years."

"...and another little drink wouldn't do us any harm."

"Minamata disease is a disease of the central nervous system, a poisoning caused by long-term consumption, in large amounts, of fish and shellfish from Minamata Bay. The causative agent is methyl mercury. Methyl mercury produced in the acetaldehyde acetic acid facility of Shin Nihon Chisso's Minamata factory was discharged in factory wastewater, contaminating fish and shellfish in Minamata Bay. It is recognised that the disease occurred when residents of the area consumed fish and shellfish containing methyl mercury that had concentrated in their bodies. Minamata disease patients last appeared in 1960, and the outbreak has ended. This is presumed to be due to the fact that consumption of fish and shellfish from Minamata Bay was banned in the fall of 1957, and the fact that the factory had waste-treatment facilities in place from January 1960."

"The word ‘citizens’ used in the call for the meeting is significant. From the time Minamata disease first became an issue, up to the present, in such contexts it has meant not all residents of the city but only those who are not directly involved. In other words, in excludes Minamata disease victims, fishing families, and company employees..."

"It is the pain of the still-necessity humility and obsequiousness toward authorities who have done nothing to help them, added to the suffering caused by the pollution, that makes the protesters heroes..."

"The importance of the court victory for the patients in the Trial Group went beyond financial compensation. To them, the court victory meant recognition that their complaints were just and that they were owed restitution by a system that had no right to exclude them."

"[f]irst, direct negotiations with the company would be attempted; if they failed, the society would seek mediation. Only as a last resort, if mediation failed, would they sue."

"an official of the Minamata Chamber of Commerce wrote to the editor of the Kumamoto nichinichi shinbun: The truth of this frightful disease is know throughout the world through reports on the miserable situation of the patients, but no concrete measures have been taken to elimination the cause… The fishers, utterly dependent on compensation from Nitchitisu, have no rice for today, much less tomorrow. If bad sludge still remains why have the authorities and Nitchitsu made no serious attempts to remove it? At this state one action is more important than 10,000 words denying responsibility."

"In sum, then, despite the formal legal and institutional infrastructure, 'postwar democracy' as defined and practiced by Japanese citizens and exemplified by responses to Minamata disease incident has remained quite ad hoc: it is creative, exciting, and full of tools for citizens to use but always dependent on continual definition and redefinition in practice. Minamata has left a legacy not of regularized procedures and institutions for expanded pluralism but of possibilities."

"Minamata disease is a poisoning disease that affects mainly the central nervous system and is caused by the consumption of large quantities of fish and shellfish living in Minamata Bay and its surroundings, the major causative agent being some sort of organic mercury compound."

"The defendant's factory was a leading chemical plant with the most advanced technology and facilities. As such, the defendant should have diligently researched the relevant literature and should have assured the safety of its wastewater... Also the defendant should have cast a watchful eye on the environmental conditions of the area... Defendants should have made sure that no harm whatsoever came to the residents in the area... It would have been possible to foresee the risk from the discharged water... The defendant could have prevented the occurrence of Minamata disease or at least have kept it at a minimum. We cannot find that the defendant took any of the precautionary measures called for in this situation whatsoever... We cannot find even one measure taken by the defendant that was either adequate or satisfactory... The presumption that the defendant had been negligent from beginning to end in discharging wastewater from its acetaldehyde plant is amply supported. Even if the quality of wastewater was within legal and administrative standards and the facilities and methods of treatment... were superior to those of other factories in the same industry, it is not enough to overcome this presumption... The defendant cannot escape liability for negligence..."