16 August 2003. Saturday, 4:00PM:
After much thought and investigation, I decided to link this journal to my home pages. Too much indecision in my life! I am not sure what prompted me to decide that a journal was in order, but there are often thoughts that have no other place to go- some more private than others. Should I get into a really good riff on something that I want to share with a larger audience (one new visitor a day to my pages and a lot of repeat visitors based on the IP tracking stuff), I will upload a short essay page or something along those lines. The one here will be the expanded one, I think.
The main focus of today has been my paper on neurotransmitters and addiction. I am not any further along in narrowing the focus. There are just too many things floating around in my head about this. I have some of the research that I am thinking about using, but I can't find many sources for the mind/body neurotransmitter connections that I was originally thinking about. I can turn out a dynamite paper that isn't simply an undergrad document, but will take a lot more time than I have, or I can turn out an "A" grade, but less than useful document that satisfies the requirement for this class. It is enough to get the "A", so I will save the research and my growing collection of thoughts about how this knowledge isn't being fully used to help folks out of addiction. Maybe it will make a good paper in the future. The problem is of course, that the studies are out there, but the information hasn't been correlated in a "new" way to improve recovery programs, or at least not that I have yet found.
All of these thoughts about the mind/body and neurotransmitter connections were prompted by the Candice Pert Ph.D. book, "Molecules of Emotion", along with the Psych/Emotions/Motivations class taught by Dr. Lewis (and the textbook used in that class which is rich in new sources of neuro/bio/psych studies). Since the Pert book was written, there hasn't been much progress in the medical/scientific community's acceptance that they are not separate entities in the disease process- only within the psychologist community has there been a noticable amount of movement. That an organism always attempts to return to homeostasis, is an accepted belief in medical/bio studies, but the field still suffers under the philosophical compromise of the 16th? century, that mind and body are connected, but separate. Our emotions seem to be in large part the result of neurotransmitters and receptors that exist and are produced everywhere in the body. Add some learned responses to events, our differing methods unique to each human in our ways of dealing with different situations, throw in a few genetic predispositions and one has an emotional human being. Our emotions are directly linked to the disease process and vice versa. It is ALL connected!
The addiction process may be *in part* be rooted in the human organism trying to self medicate an imbalance of neurotransmitters in a whole human being- mind and body-- that attempt by all organisms to find homeostasis.
TOO much to think about to write a coherent paper just yet.
(Originally posted at Corner of Babble; "posted by Stormwind @ 8/17/2003 11:07:58 AM Comment (0)"; transferred to Personal Tangents 3/26/2005)
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