Re: CABG Alzhelimer's Study

zee wrote:
> Sbharris[atsign]ix.netcom.com wrote:
> > http://www.geriatrictimes.com/g040618.html
> >
> > Here Dr. B. Golomb suggests that the telephone mental status interview
> > in the HPS might have missed subtle changes in visual spatial
> > functioning. To which I reply: "Maybe so, but we're talking about
> > people crippled with global amnesia, and suffering major significant
> > mental status losses that result in lost jobs and so on." So it's not
> > the same thing.
>
>
> Can you read? "Subtle changes in visual spatial reasoning."

COMMENT:
I can read, thanks. (Though I'm not so sure about you or Dr.
Golomb....) Subtle changes are subtle changes. You might miss them on a
phone interview, but that doesn't get you out of the conclusion that
any changes (if any) are at worst, *subtle.*


> Crippled with global amnesia...did you think we would have an episode
> on the phone to demonstrate for you? It is "transient". Not often
> observed, but let me tell you, misunderstood by our physicians and
> ourselves.


COMMENT:
Umm, it's transient and you don't remember even having HAD it? So can't
*report* it, when asked? That does NOT sound like your descriptions, or
Ms. Hope's, or (for that matter) Dr. Graveline's. Did he write that
book about what other people said he did, that he can't remember doing,
like sleepwalking? No.

Look, episodes of partial amnesia of one kind or another used to be
called "absent mindedness", so long as they didn't badly interfere with
day to day functioning and tasks at hand (like various mental status
tests, including those done by phone). And sometimes, even if they did.
One of the more famous mathematicians of the last century, John Von
Neumann, a man kept busy consulting for the military, Los Alamos, and
many academic institutions, once called up his wife and said "Could you
tell me why I'm in New York, please?" And this man who was at home in
the most abstract of mathematical spaces (Hilbert space) had lived in
the same house for 10 years and still didn't know where the drinking
glasses were kept. But no, he wasn't on statins or anything else. He
was the *** of many jokes.

> Obviously you've not seen statin induced transient global amnesia, or
> recognized it when you did. If you did see it you would probably put it
> down to aging, or some other medical condition.

No, being an expert at evaluation of mental status, it's likely I would
do none of those things. But transient GLOBAL amnesia without trauma,
total brain metabolic deprivation (oxygen, glucose, cerebral pressure
increase) is extremely rare in the absence of the known amnestic drug
(of which statins are not a category), and I don't believe I've ever
seen anything like the odd cases you're describing. But I've never met
a saucer-abduction victim, either. I've had people who swore they'd
seen ghosts (never naked ghosts-- these apparitions are always modest)
and a few people who've had religious visions of one sort or another.
There are a lot of people who have very strange mental experiences too
transient to quantify. Some of them are probably having partial
seizures of some kind. Either that, or Jesus really did appear to Saul
of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, and you and I and the Jews and
Muslims are all in big trouble.

> People cover up, cope,
> isolate themselves, don't speak, get fired, move to jobs done at home
> where they are not observed, are ridiculed when recognized as being
> cognitively impaired, but the reason denied, denigrated and ridiculed,
> as you do here.

COMMENT:

We've now moved on from the topic of transient global amnesia, now,
haven't we? Or did I miss the segue.

I attempt (not without an emotional lapse or two) to save my USENET
ridicule for the willfully stupid. And if you're thinking of asking me
how one can tell if somebody is being willfully stupid on the nets,
you'll just end up being self-referentially illustrative. Ridicule is
the appropriate response for people who advance high convoluted and
abstract arguments for their ideas about reality, and are resistant to
all data to the contrary, either ignoring data entirely, or claiming
giant conspiracy, or (at best) adding even more epicycles to their
arguments (see Copernican astronomy and US Iraq policy).

> You see it in front of you everyday. What do *you* put it down to when
> one who had passed entrance exams for law school just prior to using
> statins now is often "barely comprehensible" (your words for me).

COMMENT:
That's rare. You're usually all too comprehensible. Though willfully
stupid, often enough. :) If you were *never* comprehensible, that
would be something else (there are some psychotics on the nets). Also,
if you were comprehensible but always of ploddingly average
intelligence.

You know the many reasons people of known mental ability deviate from
perfect Vulcan assessment of the world, as well as I do. You're being
willfully stupid. I don't think I really need to list them, except that
there are about a hundred causes that have nothing to do with statin
drugs. The extreme of many of these processes we call "mental illness."
But you don't need to be mentally ill to have a fixed delusion. We all
have a few. You've claimed to see wide variations in the quality of my
own writing, and you're probably right. But I'm not presently taking a
statin, or anything else of consequence. Rather, I'm just another human
being. If I were to be sick and tired and angry and poor and Canadian
(the last straw), I'm sure I'd be even *more* of a human being. But if
so, I wouldn't blame it on Lipitor.

SBH

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