The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
In the DSM concerning criteria for Substance-Induced Disorders: "The disturbance is not better accounted for by a disorder that is not substance induced. Evidence that the symptoms are better accounted for by a disorder that is not substance induced might include the following: the symptoms persist for a substantial period of time (e.g., about a month) after the cessation of acute withdrawal or severe intoxication, or are substantially in excess of what would be expected given the type, duration, or amount of the substance used; or there is other evidence that suggests the existence of an independent not-substance-induced disorder (e.g., a history of recurrent non-substance-related episodes)."
There are many cases where doctor-prescribed medications have worsened the condition of patients when the nature of the neurology of the patient was misunderstood (and because the understanding of the mechanisms behind the pharmaceuticals is always misunderstood). Doctors make bad diagnoses often. Drug treatments can sometimes bring on permanent symptoms that never existed before any treatments. Sometimes doctors will try several different medications on a patient (rediagnosing the patient each time a medication fails to get the hoped-for response) and each failed experiment (remember - the doctor is "practicing") brings on a new symptom or even a new constellation of symptoms. Doctors use the terminology in this passage from the DSM as well as other catch phrases such as that the newly developed disorder was unmasked by the medication implying that the disorder was always there without showing symptoms until the medication that caused the symptoms somehow unmasked the invisible disorder instead of actually causing it. (The legal out from doctor responsibility in this excerpt from the DSM is that the disorder is not substance-induced if it persists for longer than a month after the cessation of taking the medication.)
Sometimes another technique is used to hide the fact that the prescribed drugs caused the new disorder, the new symptoms, is when the doctor rediagnoses the original constellation of symptoms that existed before the medication degraded the health of the patient. For instance, treatments for ADD/ADHD can sometimes cause new symptoms that look more like Tourette's Disorder or more like schizophrenia. The earlier constellation of ADD symptoms could then be re-labeled as disposition to Tourette's or as pre-schizophrenia.
This sort of freedom with diagnostic labels serves to cover the evidence of doctor error and also skews the statistical evidence of harm to protect doctors and pharmaceutical companies.
A doctor can diagnose you with ten different disorders in succession, and each diagnosis is legally supported because a doctor made the diagnosis even though at least nine of the discarded diagnoses are wrong and possibly all ten diagnoses are wrong.
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Many of the problems of medicine, biology, psychology and philosophy require an understanding of the basic mathematical principles behind how the nervous system does what it does to achieve function and experience, and that mathematics is not explained using narrowly-focused statistics. Understanding how this math works will be the tool for the discovery of many answers of great importance to humanity. The case for this concept and the offering of an explanation of this kind of math is made in the many essays of this website.
On these pages you will find ideas that should haunt you. Included are new concepts in science, medicine, sociology, evolutionary psychology, philosophy and more...
This website and the podcasts of Everyone's Revolution explain how the brain creates the mind, but many side issues must be resolved in order to teach this material. Once you realize that the "hard problems" are really the first problems to be answered, you then have a tool for changing all of science and medicine by explaining a massive number of discoveries that will fall into line in order to unify the evidence. All of the evidence is good. The interpretations of the evidence are mistaken in many cases. For ten years now there have been new discoveries of evidence that all move in the direction of supporting this theory (or this school of many theories) and its predictions. Quite a few people have started to pay attention to this theory as well.
