Medications that change who we are

> It's not some special thing that sits apart from it. It is an integral part of the whole, no different than your kidneys or liver.

Except it is. The brain is a part of your body and the two are tightly integrated. Yet the brain is also not simply another organ. If you lose half of your liver, your personality might change due to the trauma, but you will still be you. If you lose a kidney, you’ll live on as if little happened (assuming modern medicine stops you from dying of infection). If you lose half your brain, you’re probably dead, and if not, you’ll be drastically impaired the rest of your life. You’ll also likely experience drastic personality changes.

The brain is part of the body but it is also special. To my knowledge it’s the only organ with a dedicated blood barrier. It’s also the only organ that modern medicine can’t keep “you” alive without. If your body is on life support but you are “brain dead”, then “you” are gone. Your heart can be replaced with a pump. Your kidneys can be replaced with dialysis. Your stomach can be replaced by a feeding tube. Yes, all of these are pretty poor alternatives but they affect quality of life. They don’t end life. If modern medicine could replace your brain with a computer, no one would consider this a lifesaving intervention.

No one says they’ve lost a parent to kidney failure while the parent is still alive. Many people have said they’ve lost a parent to dementia while the parent is still alive.

Usually doctors still operate by the book. All symptoms and deductions have to make sense in the "context" of the "book," if the book doesn't mention it, the doctor doesn't proceed any further.

For example, I slept on my bed with a heater blasting onto my face. Next day I developed sudden onset dry eye. Literally from eyes that had zero issues to dry eye. I think the heater was the causative agent, but the medical literature is blank on this, so the doctor is clueless as well. In fact the doctor literally ignores the fact that I had a heater blasting my eyes all night. I came in to the eye doctor and he assumed that my dry eye developed over a long time when in actually I "caught" it three days ago.

One perspective of this is that the patient is biased and assigning causative attributes to something that only happens to correlate with an outcome. Therefore all patient descriptions must be cut through and ignored if it's not relevant to the problem. It's largely true but I think doctors bias themselves towards this predisposition a little too much and dismiss many things that are actually important.

Either way though, if it's not in "the book" then treatment for it doesn't exist in any scientific form yet, so the doctor can't help you anyway.

There might be side effects to modern medicine, but there's no reason to assume that traditional beliefs re: health and medicine are more correct; The arguments behind them are usually epistemologically unsound, and they are often out-and-out superstitions.

Very good article! Thanks for the link.

Some quotes;

There’s some imaging research that suggests that social and physical pain could have overlapping biological mechanisms, he tells me, so the parts of the brain that Tylenol affects to make your headache go away are the same parts that are involved in these other feelings as well; the same brain networks that allow us to feel and respond to physical pain may have been co-opted to also feel social pain.

He felt like the effects of Tylenol they were seeing were similar to mind wandering. People cared less about social rejection. They didn’t respond as much to existential anxiety; a similar kind of sensitivity reduction to the outside world.

“I think we should absolutely have a scientific concern to recognize the neurocognitive and neuro-affective consequences of substances that we've heretofore thought of as benign,” Handy says.

Ratner says there’s also the intriguing possibility that acetaminophen might be used therapeutically one day for people dealing with minor cases of depression or social anxiety.

The last point is the one which i had observed in my own behaviour and led me to suspect a correlation between acetaminophen/paracetamol and my "feeling good".

> Some people feel one’s essence is fundamentally different from one’s body, including the brain as part of the body. Not saying I support this notion, but to brush it aside as stupid or unjustified seems a bit hasty in view of the huge literature behind these issues.

I don't think it is.

Consider: someone decides to say something without evidence. It's obviously okay to brush this aside and just say "there's no evidence for that". Then hundreds of thousands of people read what that person said, and then decide to propagate the idea by saying it themselves, still without any evidence. You're claiming that at some point, the bulk of literature means we can't say it's a stupid idea any more? I disagree. Ideas are determined valid by the evidence or lack of evidence, not by how popular they are.

In fact, when a stupid idea is popular, that's when it causes the most damage. So when there's a bulk of literature propagating a stupid idea, that's the time when it's important to say that it's a stupid idea.

> Moreover, doesn’t the notion of reincarnation in some parts of the Eastern world show it’s not restricted to Western culture?

You'll note I didn't say it was restricted to Western culture. I think Plato has a large part in spreading the idea in Western culture, but I'd guess he wasn't the first, and other people probably came up with the same idea independently.