This articles summarizes briefly the needs of medical terminology and highlights the history of medical dictionaries in the international language Esperanto. The pros and cons of the recently published “Eight-language Medical Enyclopaedic Dictionary” (ELMED) by Jozo Marević are discussed. Peculiar about this book is the fact that it stresses the importance of Latin as mainstay of medical terminology, but contains Esperanto-translations of the medical terms as well. In spite of some considerable flaws the ELMED constitutes a value in itself as an example of the European cultural tradition in medicine. By means of international collaboration the editors will definitely make the second edition a great success.
We describe the case of a patient with musical hallucinations after starting pain treatment with diclofenac. A 899 MBq 99m-Tc-Bicisate-SPECT performed on the day after onset of the symptoms showed a markedly reduced perfusion of the left thalamus, whereas the perfusion of the striatum remained unaltered. When diclofenac was stopped, the hallucinations also ceased. Two weeks later, the hypoperfusion of the left thalamus was hardly detectable anymore in a control SPECT with the same technique.
In the phenomenon of synaesthesia, adequate stimuli in one sensory modality are accompanied by perceptions in one to four others. Even if descriptions of synaesthesia are well known in the scientific literature, only scarce empirical research results are available yet. Certain characteristics distinguish synesthesias from eidetic imagery. Idiopathic synaesthesias are more common in females, familial clustering occurs. Electrophysiology usually yields no abnormal results, functional imaging and neuropsychology hint to a reduced inhibition of secondary sensory associative areas by the temporal cortex of the speech dominant hemisphere as a neurobiological basis. Secondary synaesthesias are sometimes symptoms of diseases like epilepsy or migraine. Autoscopy is a rare phenomenon, which consists of the pseudohallucinatory visual perception of the own body. The “Doppelgänger” exhibits characteristic features. Psychiatric comorbidity is common, occasionally the appearance of the double is associated with suicidality. The most common cause of autoscopy is temporal lobe epilepsy, a distinct lateralization, however, has not been demonstrated so far. Autoscopy can also be found in migraine attacks and has to be differentiated from other disturbances of body image.
This article explains and shows some examples of the graphical and sculptural works of the Austrian pathologist Veit Krenn, who uses his detailed knowledge of microscopic and macroscopic anatomy to create derived objects of art, which strikingly transcend the templates to reach an impressive state of abstraction – appealing discoveries of the true contents of the original forms towards their structural essence. By means of analogies the creative approach of the artist is readily used to illuminate similar ways of contemplating the essence of meaning in the philosophy of language in a brief outline
This article, in fact inspired by another example of the graphic work by Veit Krenn, very briefly highlights the psychologic, symbolic value of the EEG as a technical procedure and offers a view on healing as the act of liberating patients from the boundaries that illness sets.
We present the case of a young woman with hyper-IgD syndrome (HIDS) due to heterozygous V377I and I268T mutations, who developped a bilateral optic neuritis. While the CSF was normal and no NMO-antibodies where detected, she showed signs of systemic inflammation with a raised CRP. The bilateral optic neuritis responded to 5 days of high-dosage corticosteroids in due course. To our knowledge this is until now the first case of such complaints described in a patient with HIDS.
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