"People with psychosomatic illnesses are unfortunate in the fact that their condition offends western ideas not just about illness but who we are...."

"Our minds are airy, ethereal, separate; our bodies are a sort of machine for which the doctor is a mechanic. But... [s]praying water from your eyes in response to bad news is an example of a psychological state causing a physical one. So is the phenomenon of staving off a bout of illness until after you’ve completed an exam or an important piece of work....[S]ufferers from Parkinson’s disease, a physically manifested illness with an identifiable biological cause, respond dramatically to placebos. This means the psychological experience of a physical illness (in this case whether or not you believe you’re being treated) affects the way that illness manifests itself.... Another challenge to our understanding of functional disorders is our individualism. Though universal in human beings, psychosomatic illnesses are rooted in cultures and societies. Resignation syndrome, a disorder that causes children to fall asleep for years, occurs almost exclusively in asylum-seeking families in Sweden. The illness seems to be spread by reports of its existence. In France, you can buy remedies for a common minor syndrome called 'heavy legs' in most pharmacies. No other country seems to experience 'heavy legs.'.... [A] functional disorder called grisi siknis (crazy sickness), which is common among girls of the Nicaraguan Miskito people and causes hallucinations, tremors and superhuman strength, is successfully treated with rituals and the community 'rallying around.' Secular, atomised western society has no equivalent treatment."

From "Let’s end the stigma of psychosomatic illness/Our culture insists disease must have a biological cause but doctors know it isn’t that simple" by James Marriott (London Times). 

Secular, atomised western society has no equivalent treatment? What about congregations praying for the sick? 

Would it be "western" of me to say let's end the use of "western" to mean obsession with... whatever Marriott is using it to mean. It seems to me that we who live in the western longitudes of planet Earth have plenty of scientific and unscientific notions of the brain, roiling around in our brains. And when I look at a map, I see that Nicaragua is just as western as Tennessee and Ohio.

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

"The police are shooting to kill, the students’ blood is running in the streets, and Ortega and his wife will rot in hell."

From the updated text to the first post of the day, here.

"How can you dialogue with your assassins? This was the biggest rally yet. It was a homage to mothers who lost their sons at rallies in April and May, and they wound up adding 15 more mothers to that list."

Said Gonzalo Carrión, of the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights, quoted in "Nicaragua Protest on Mother’s Day Kills at Least 15" (NYT).

The protest on Wednesday capped six weeks of what has been described as a national rebellion against the government of President Daniel Ortega. The government has denied responsibility for any of the deaths and insists that it is the victim of a vast conspiracy....

“The demonstration was peaceful,” said Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a negotiator on the national dialogue committee. “There were children there. It was a peaceful manifestation that ended up with people shot in the head and killed deliberately by snipers.”

Guillermina Zapata, 63, said protesters had told her that the bullet that hit her son, Francisco Javier Reyes Zapata, 34, came from a sharpshooter perched on the top of the national baseball stadium. Mr. Reyes was struck in the eye and died, she said.

“They have to go,” Ms. Zapata said of the president [Ortega] and his wife, Rosario Murillo, who is also the vice president. “He is a murderer, and a murderer cannot continue to govern Nicaragua. They have to leave. I believe that dialogue is no longer an option. That’s sitting down to talk with the devil, who is killing the people.”

ADDED: I am told by someone I trust that this video is a good summary of what's been going on in Nicaragua for the last 5 weeks:



AND: Let me add this, with permission, from my friend in Nicaragua:

[Wednesday] was Mothers’ Day in Nicaragua and, after 42 days of protests and 80 plus students killed, the citizens held their third march, one of mourning for their lost sons, entitled The Mothers of April and May. Five hundred thousand people, ten percent of the country’s population, showed up.

The National Police and Sandinista Youth attacked the march as it approached the universities and killed 15 student protesters, amongst them the son of the founder of the National Police after the original revolution in 1979. He was shot in the head from long distance by a police sniper. The police are shooting to kill, the students’ blood is running in the streets, and Ortega and his wife will rot in hell.

Today's Freddy Martin tune.

In case yesterday's "Somebody Goofed" (1954) was not enough, here's "Managua, Nicaragua" (1947)(scroll forward to 1:12 if you want to begin at the vocals):



The lyrics are, by present-day standards, politically incorrect — "Managua, Nicaragua is a heavenly place/You ask a señorita for a 'leetle' embrace/She answers you, 'Caramba! scram-ba bambarito'/In Managua, Nicaragua, that's 'No'" — but at least "no" means "no."

Here's the Wikipedia article on Freddy Martin (born 1906, died 1983). Excerpt:

Freddy Martin was nicknamed "Mr. Silvertone"... He has... been idolized by many... saxophonists.... Although his playing has been admired by so many jazz musicians, Freddy Martin never tried to be a jazz musician. Martin always led a sweet styled band. Unlike most sweet bands that just played dull music, Martin's band turned out to be one of the most musical and most melodic of all the typical hotel-room sweet bands. According to George T. Simon, Freddy's band was "one of the most pleasant, most relaxed dance bands that ever flowed across the band scene."

"The Comandante's Canal: Will a grand national project enrich Nicaragua, or only its leader?"

"Last June 15th, Daniel Ortega, the President of Nicaragua, held a ceremony in Managua to announce his newest and most audacious plan to help the country’s poor: a transoceanic canal, stretching from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific, a few hundred miles north of the Panama Canal."

“This is a project,” he promised, “that will bring well-being, prosperity, and happiness to the Nicaraguan people.” The last time Ortega attracted the world’s attention, it was as Ronald Reagan’s great adversary in the Contra war of the eighties: a fighter “against the domination of the capitalists of our country, in collusion with the U.S. government—i.e., imperialism.”...

Ortega’s canal would be the largest civil-engineering and construction project in the world. To lead it, and to bring in money and expertise, he had recruited an obscure Chinese tycoon named Wang Jing, and two days before the ceremony, the National Assembly had approved a concession that put a large swath of the country at Wang’s disposal as a building site....

You'll need a New Yorker subscription to read much further. I have and I highly recommend it. But here's an open article in Scientific American: "Nicaragua Canal Could Wreak Environmental Ruin."

The project threatens multiple autonomous indigenous communities such as the Rama, Garifuna, Mayangna, Miskitu and Ulwa, and some of the most fragile, pristine and scientifically important marine, terrestrial and lacustrine ecosystems in Central America.

"According to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, three of the best options for women seeking greater equality are..."

"... Cuba, Nicaragua, and Burundi."

[W]ith such a wealth of data and intellectual prowess at their disposal, how did the authors [including Laura D’Andrea Tyson, former chair of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Ricardo Hausmann, director of the Center for International Development at Harvard] arrive at the conclusion that the United States ranks 23rd in terms of closing the gender gap, whereas Nicaragua is 10th, Cuba 15th, and Burundi just edges us out, coming in 22nd? I [Weekly Standard writer David Adesnik] contacted both Tyson and Hausmann to inquire about the study’s counterintuitive results. Both of them referred me to Saadia Zahidi, a senior director at the Forum as well as coauthor of the gender gap report. Zahidi committed to providing additional information, although none has yet arrived. Thus, I had to figure out for myself why advanced statistical analysis might indicate that the women of Cuba, Nicaragua and Burundi face less discrimination than those in the United States....