Placebos and stuff

While I guess I always sort of believed that the placebo effect existed in sort of vague and flimsy way, I was given a pretty convincing demonstration of it on a flight we had the other day. The patient was a young man who was being transported because of apparently undiagnosed severe stomach pain. Either the paramedics or the doctor in Kasane, I’m not sure which, gave the preliminary diagnosis that the patient was experiencing symptoms of opiate withdrawal. Right from the get-go, the patient was continually asking for morphine or other pain-killers, and at points throughout the flight I could hear Brandan, our usual flight paramedic, explaining to him why he couldn’t give him the painkillers he wanted. The patient was very restless for most of the flight, getting up and down, hanging over seat backs, and continually asking for painkillers. All of a sudden, near the end of the flight, he became very quiet and lay down on the stretcher underneath a blanket. As I was wondering what brought about this change, Brandan passed up a note saying that he had told the patient that he was injecting him with morphine and actually just gave him a harmless anti-nausea drug. The patient apparently thought he was high and immediately relaxed and passed out on the stretcher. It was a pretty impressive demonstration of how much of a mental thing addiction is and how strong the placebo effect can be at times.

It has been quite a busy week, and we’ve had at least one flight every day the past week from Monday to Saturday except one, and several days we’ve had multiple flights. In fact, on Thursday we had four calls for flights in one day. Two of them got cancelled, so we only ended up doing two flights, but it was still a pretty long day. So I’ve been keeping busy and not doing very well at keeping up on emailing and all the other little things that crop up outside of work. I’m also advertising my vehicle to sell now, and have been spending some time getting it ready for sale and dealing with the advertising companies and all of that jazz. Anyway, that’s a quick update on what’s going on here…more to come someday later, with a few pictures even. Til then.