I told you that I'd be writing more about this vast topic with so many different facets that it would take me multiple installments to touch on what I wanted to say within this discussion. This time, I'm actually sitting at a keyboard, rather than trying to type our coherent thoughts fast enough to clearly express my thoughts on a touch screen device. To those of you who read the first installment and offered feedback, thanks for taking the time to read it and join in on the discussion. As I mentioned earlier, I am not a psychologist or doctor. I am a passionate individual with the thirst for greater knowledge and a desire to contribute to the community in a positive manner. As I sit here trying to remember exactly what I said in my last installment on this, I'm inclined to go from memory. I feel like it's important to write each section of this as if it's the first, and keep adding to it from the different perspectives which I think are important to take into account over the exploration of the topic. The introduction was just that; it was an introduction to the subject and some of the players on the stage, offering a few thoughts and some back story. Maybe we'll call that the epilogue instead. It seems more fitting as the idea for the rest is coming into view. Now that the epilogue is over with, it's onto the first chapter, the chapter that inspired this, and that's Jordan Peterson's return to planet Earth. That may seems a bit melodramatic, but after listening to his account of what happened, I don't feel like it's an overstatement. He's battling some real mental health challenges. I'm hopeful he'll come back strong. The mind is a powerful and resilient thing. While there's a great deal of things that I can say about Jordan Peterson, whether you love him or hate him, it has to be awfully difficult not to respect his intelligence and intellect. It is not far superior to all. It is not overwhelmingly righteous or omniscient. In fact, it is just the opposite. His intellect and intelligence are greatly flawed by his compassion, love, empathy and his deep rooted feeling of desire and responsibility to be the best version of himself so that he can help more people. I don's say these things as insults,but as observations based on my limited ability to observe him in various online arenas in a closed one way circuit. There are many people who are set off by Jordan's brand of honesty and his bold assertiveness that leads him to speak his truth through his great depth of knowledge in Psychology. Right now, I'd like to set aside any feelings we have for this individual, hoping that we can agree that he's well studied, well spoken, highly intelligent and highly intellectual. If not, I won't push my views on you, and I'll agree to disagree and I'm open to a conversation on the matter, for I'm certain that it would be most enlightening and a great opportunity to grow. We put these feeling aside to set the stage for a more objective look at the field of psychology, western medicine, prescription medicine and dependencies. This is a rabbit hole I had no intention of going anywhere close to, but this is something that's been close to my heart for a lot of years due to the journey I've had in this life and then I saw Jordan Peterson looks at me as if it was me sitting there and him looking at me through the computer screen and I knew this was something that I had to at least start a conversation on. I'd love to just talk it out Podcast style and maybe I'll get there one day, but I've been focusing on my writing for a while, so for now, all this is going to come out in written word and I'm liking the process and growth that comes along with it. While I may digress and tangent like I just did there, I do the same when I speak, so I'm hoping that writing my thoughts out will help me to streamline what I have to say rather than tangenting constantly. With that being said, here I am writing about the journey rather than the subject. I think it's best to start with what I know, because there's a great deal of research and media to regard in taking on this topic in discussion, so I'll start with my introduction to medicine as I lived it. Writing something so biographical isn't a comfortable thing in the least, but this isn't about my comfort, it's about imparting lived experience so that others don't have to learn the same mistakes. I was a healthy kid. I grew up in the 80's. I played outside. I ate dirt, skinned my knees and rubbed some dirt in it, learned about respect through consequence, tempted fate and came up short and learned how to stand up for myself by popping a kids nose in the public pool when he almost drowned me. When I look back at pictures of my youth, I'm standing there, skinny as a rail, wiry as a transmission line and brown from the forehead down, hair bleached from the countless hours in the sun. The 80's were, for the most part, a pretty damn healthy time to be a kid. Aside from drinking water from a hose that probably had some lead and weird, toxic rubber in it, that is. My first remarkable Dr's visit of memory was a trip to the emergency room because I'd busted my head open riding my bike. I guess the lack of helmets was another hazard, but I more or less learned my lesson after that. As cocky as I was, I knew my limits. A sizable rock just kicked out my front tire and I bit it. Aside from a concussion, I don't even know if I would have been cut if not for my glasses. The slit my face open, just a couple inches shy of getting my temple. That was the first time I remember getting a needle. The cold steel of the syringe slowly crept behind my eyeball, which felt really weird and then one hell of a pinch and a howl as the cold steel punctured the nerves and skin behind the brow bone. A bunch of stitches to follow. After that, I definitely had some trust for doctors. Watching a doctor suture a wound right in front of your eyeball garners a lot of trust. Through my life, I've had all sorts of crazy stuff happen. I'm not exactly a sickly person, but I joke sometimes about being a medical marvel, because so may weird things have happened to me. Some may have just been genetic, some environmental and the rest might just be a God that has one hell of a sense of humor about how lessons are to be learned. If that was the case, I wouldn't see it as a cruelty, but rather as an honesty and humble nobility, for anything worth pursuing is usually earned, somehow. Instead of getting into some kind of overly personal medical biography, which would probably be a bit boring and awkward, I'm going to highlight a few key points that I believe play into this discussion that we're embarking on together. My first localized anesthetic and stitches set the stage of trust for many doctors for a while, until I learned that they're just human like all of us. When I was 14 years old, I nearly died of renal failure. I was that close to death after countless visits to doctors, being toted from one Dr to the next and the next until my mother finally lost it and demanded- yes- demanded that the doctor get to the root of what was going on. Why was I gaining weight, my hands bleeding from dry skin, white, clammy complexion, lose all my hair, talk like a walkman that has low batteries and have almost zero energy? Why was I following every conversation in the classroom and the teacher, doodling in my book and theorizing a myriad of crazy things all at once? It wasn't until years later through a great deal of life lived and introspection that I finally realized why I think the way I do and am who I am. One simple batch of blood tests revealed that I had an under active thyroid. By the time we had those results, my brain must have been in protection mode and my existence was more inside than outside my body. Two years of doctor's visits finally came to a halt and I was put on medication which I still take to this day. When I started this course of treatment, there was little known about hypothyroidism in children. Maybe that's one of the reasons it took so long to get diagnosed and treated. Had I not had such a vigilant mother, had I not lived in a place where we have public health care, had the technology not existed... I would not be alive. This is where things get strange for me, because I know there's a lot of people who would say to count yourself lucky and move on, and that's just what i did. I had more energy than I'd ever had in my life, I was happy, healthy, vibrant and horny. Life was great. I can't help but wonder now that I'm looking back on it, why I was never referred to an endocrinologist at the age of 14 though. This isn't a judgement on my parents. They're not doctors. They both saved my life. It was a team effort. I have to wonder, though, why a medical doctor never asked more questions about the situation to consider that they weren't the expert and if things seemed strangely out of the ordinary, maybe there was another avenue to peruse to treat a young person with an under active thyroid condition. Medical science has changed a lot over the last 20 years, so I can't say for certain, but I believe there was cause to explore the use of supplemental HGH over the initial interval of thyroid medicine. I personally believe that it may play the role, in the future, of avoiding the joint problems that can come along with adolescents with under active thyroid conditions as they age. I'm sure I'm not the only one. I can remember, vividly, walking down the road and my hip popping out of place as I was talking to this cute girl and popping it back in without breaking stride. Out of pride, probably and she heard it. It was excruciating, but I figured that was just growing pains and I didn't want to be a pussy about it, so life went on. That's another lesson I took from growing up in the 80's. That's probably not even an "appropriate term" anymore, but that's not a topic for this discussion. Yes, I think there's cause for research on HGH trials in adolescent cases of hypothyroidism. I think there's some insanely smart scientists that should look into that,rather than a community college acting major who took up the trades as a safe way to pursue his art, even if he could research and postulate his own theories and write papers on it. There are scientists for a reason. I'll stick to the mad science and hypothesize for the time being. Fast forward a couple years from the life changing realization that life was more than slowly observing your own death while being encompassed by a world where time speeds past you without restraint, devouring your youth without hesitation. Within a month of my 16th birthday, I took my first ride on an air plane. It was a medivac. Unbeknownst to any of us, I had a bleed on my brain that could let go at any time. That 45 minute flight was the most memorable of my life. Another doctor has saved my life and many more were going to have their hand in doing it as well. The paramedics were absolute rocks stars and the most beautiful souls in the world. I would love to meet them again some day and thank them. I didn't ever get the chance to properly thank them, because I had no idea how rare they were as humans, that early on in life. I guess I must have been blessed with an abundance of amazing humans, for that to be the case. Before that flight, my family doctor told me that either I had leukemia or some long name that I swore I'd remember if it wasn't leukemia. I remember the acronym and I'll take that as a win in following through on my promise to myself. Through all their many efforts, as I lay in a bed on the children's oncology ward, being prodded by needles every hour on the hour and having vitals checked at the same intervals, they ruled out leukemia and ordered more tests. This is when they found the bleed on the brain that could cause an aneurysm. A bleed on the brain is actually "normal" (ish), or so they said, but it could have caused me to bleed out into my brain causing some pretty nasty circumstances. So they did all that they could to turn it around without surgery. All the while, I couldn't complain. I wasn't in bad shape. All in all, I had just gotten there and the way I figured it, even if I died, I wouldn't suffer the same way as so many of the kids there had to. In my one week stay, I had two terminal room mates. I don't know what happened to the first guy, but I was pretty out of it. As I waited for my fate to be determined by the many amazing individuals who spent their lives pursuing the path of healing through their best science, I met Paul as well. Paul was on his second or third round of chemo. Through the fear and pain, he had the best sense of humor. I could learn a lot from that today. I hope he made it. I will forever remember the sound of a child calling our for oxygen through the night and day. It was hard to hear, but it was real. I had no complaints. I was not in a place where they were warranted. My struggle was brief and to complain would be selfish. I had been given an explanation from the doctors and nurses of what my situation was. Before we had that talk, I'd accepted that I was either living my last moments in that hospital and that I'd been gifted extra time to live, or my time on this Earth was going to be over and there was greater need of me somewhere else. They opted for a surgery that they were hopeful would stop my body from attacking itself and allowing me to begin heal. They opted for a splenectomy; You can live a healthy and normal life without a spleen. Through the good graces of God, the universe, the many amazing individuals who put their heart and souls into helping others and luck... I live and breathe and I am beyond grateful. If any of my doctors ever read this, I hope they hear how much I appreciate and love them from the bottom of my heart, even if they did steal one of my organs! I almost wish I had that thing in a jar. I wonder if it would prove my theory that a pesticide caused the illness that prompted the removal. That's a whole other topic though, kind of. Even though I really didn't want to get into all this personal medical stuff, there's a reason for all of this. I've had many experiences with the medical system that give me a unique perspective to share and I feel it necessary to give you context for the depth of the conversation that we're embarking on here. I know this is one concept in a world of billions, so I hope that if you're still reading this, you'll continue to be patient with the journey we're embarking on, because it's not a puddle, a pond or a lake, but the ocean that we're diving into and it's a long way to paddle. There is a reason that this experience will give context to the what comes next. The discussion to follow is not to scrutinize doctors for grievances, because I am so grateful that they did what they could with what they knew and what they had at the time. This is about moving the discussion forward. It's been on my mind for a good while now and I think it's time to get into it. Before the age of 16, I'd faced the real and undeniable possibility of death twice, made peace with my mortality and been granted another lease on life. After the second time it's easy to trust what they tell you is best. So, why would you question when you're prescribed an ongoing dosage of penicillin, indefinitely to combat bacterial infections while you're in school? That's somewhere around 2, 190 doses of penicillin for you math types. When it comes to prescriptions, this is where the real discussion begins. We'll start pulling at that thread in the next chapter of this topic, for those of you who got this far. Until next time, much love and stay well.
Originally posted here: https://hive.blog/mentalhealthawareness/@soulbasis/the-return-of-jordan-peterson-pharmaceuticals-and-modern-medicine-part-2
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