Overselling hysteria

Overselling hysteria

O n February 4, 2014, The New York Times published an editorial “Overselling testosterone, dangerously”, in which it alleged that the rise in testosterone prescriptions was medically unwarranted, and that scientific studies suggesting an increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) provided “the most compelling evidence yet that many American men have embarked on a perilous course of overtrea...

Hysteria revisited.

Despite the attrition of psychoanalytic explanations for clinical conditions and the disappearance of “hysteria” from diagnostic lexicons, the phenomena first addressed in an orderly manner by Charcot and Freud continue to reassert themselves, as is apparent in the article by Vorhees in this issue of the JABFP. An elderly woman began to have spells of falling, paralysis, paresthesia, and uncont...

The overselling of hormone replacement therapy.

The news that part of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) was stopped early because women treated with combined estrogen-progestin therapy experienced higher rates of breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, and overall harm has rocked women and physicians across the country. But the most important part of this story has received little attention: why did the medical and research community ever b...

Hysteria, belief, and magic.

(a) A courageous OP refers a boy aged eight who has †̃¿ gone off his legs' that morning. The OP says he knows it is hysterical but that he cannot stop it. The boy is brought by car. A kind psychiatrist negotiates through the window the need for the boy to mount the steps to come and talk. The boy comes. He talks about how his estranged father had promised first a trip to the cup final and then...

Suggestibility and Hysteria.