Healing of gastric ulcers after one,two, and three months of ranitidine.

Ranitidine (150 mg twice daily) was compared with placebo in 42 patients with gastric ulcer. The study was conducted as a double-blind trial for one month, followed by an open assessment of one, two, and three months of ranitidine in the patients with persistent ulceration. Thirty-eight patients completed the double-blind trial. Repeat endoscopy confirmed complete healing in 16 of the 21 who had received ranitidine and five of the 17 who had received placebo (p less than 0.01). The remaining 17 patients with persistent ulceration participated in the open assessment. The combined cumulative healing rates of ranitidine at four, eight, and 12 weeks were 73%, 88%, and 97%. There were no adverse effects or unusual reasons for withdrawal from the study (four patients). Ranitidine appears to be a safe and highly effective treatment of gastric ulceration, with about 90% of ulcers healed after eight weeks.     

Spinoza,Styron, and the Ethics of Healing

In this essay I discuss a passage from William Styron’s memoir of his long struggle with chronic severe depression, from the standpoint of a Spinozian understanding of agency and self-worth. In this passage Styron relates how in hearing a piece of music he was abruptly struck by a recollection of “all the joys [his] house had known” and how this brought a realization that it would be wrong for him to kill himself: wrong because it would be an abandonment of those who had shared in those joys and a “desecration” of himself. He tells how this realization led him to admit himself to hospital for treatment and thereby to a slow and difficult recovery. This, I propose, illustrates the Spinozian idea that the value of an individual life is properly understood in terms of that individual’s participation in the actualization of a shared value and that individual agency is empowered by the knowledge of such value.     

Healing Powers and Modernity: Traditional Medicine, Shamanism, and Science in Asian Societies.

Healing Powers and Modernity: Traditional Medicine, Shamanism, and Science in Asian Societies. Linda H. Connor and Geoffrey Samuel. eds. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2001. 296 pp.