What happens when a virus that injures the brain runs amok?
Fatalities hidden behind hospital doors and inside homes don’t faze politicians or reporters. The pandemic scurries along unchecked even as the World Health Organization decided today to continue the international emergency.
While we’re all focused on politicians and complicit public health, I’m glaring at a medical system that refuses to diagnose and treat brain injury effectively. I mean, even in the face of unknown long COVID rates and puzzling heart problems, they won’t shift themselves to leave the 20th century and learn about all the cool medical technology and exciting brain discoveries. Regulatory agencies can slam down rules about continuing medical education credits (CMEs), but students are students no matter their age. If they wanna take the pharmaceutical equivalent of basket weaving courses to earn those CMEs, then who’s to stop them?
Not the politicians and cops who’ve huffed on the airwaves and streamed onto Toronto’s transit in an attempt to quell the sudden wave of violence infecting city streets and transit.
Huh? What’s one got to do with the other?
Brain injury anger.
Emotional lability.
Sensory overload.
The discombobulating thing about brain injury anger is it rises out of nowhere and sinks out of sight just as suddenly. Sensory overload can trigger it. Emotions rocketing on under circumstances that don’t faze people with healthy brains, can create aggressive defensive reactions. You can find all sorts of research showing how prevalent brain injury is in the prison population, the homeless, and vulnerable. I bet many psychiatric illnesses are really undiagnosed, untreated concussion where brain injury anger may be quiet enough to not lead to run-ins with the law. Certain medical specialists know that many viruses cause brain damage; although doctors are perplexed by long COVID, they have figured out it damages neurons.
What happens when you allow COVID to run rampant, leading to more and more people with long COVID-caused brain injury, undiagnosed and unhealed? What happens when you allow brain injury to fester, looking only at symptoms as indicators of healing?
Assaults, stabbings, murder on city streets.
What happens when public health doctors allow a pandemic to run unchecked, giving the public mixed messages, not warning people that the virus is killing and disabling them in the thousands (millions?); when infectious disease doctors argue over whether to mask or not to mask; when doctors condescend to the engineers who know how to clean the air; when doctors refuse to learn about brain injury; when medicine as a whole treats long COVID like they do concussion?
What happens? This: Lots and lots of people with brain-damaged cardiac function, lessened intellectual capacity, endless fatigue, a brain that can’t run their body properly anymore, emotions on or off like a demented light switch, uncontrollable anger arising from neuronal damage that can’t be fixed through behaviour modification but only treatments that heal neurons.
Politicians and media won’t understand this. Well, perhaps the smarter politicians would. But with them all going whole hog into the pandemic is over, they’re not going to admit, that through their silence or overt action, they’re complicit in the death and disabling of millions. They’re not going to admit that their declaration through policies of “we gotta live like we did pre-pandemic when we ostracized the disabled,” is driving us towards a mostly disabled and angry and traumatized population.
But none of this would be so horrendous if doctors had done their job and learned about how to recognize brain injury, diagnose concussion properly, and treat neurons effectively. The minimizing people so complain about with respect to the pandemic is what doctors do with concussion. Doctors deny the havoc brain injury causes in people. If they didn’t, they’d never have stuck like super glue to the strategies, rest, and med check mantras that fail thousands every day.
And one more thing: eons ago when I learnt about psychiatric drugs as part of my psychology degree, I thought profs and psychiatrists were a bit disingenuous to call them a cure. Anything you have to take daily is not a cure.
A cure is a course of treatment with an end date that effects permanent improvement.
What kind of self-fooling results in highly educated doctors believing daily medication is equivalent to a cure? And what kind of self-lying leads to releasing people with medically controlled severe psychoses on the streets? Are they unaware that when humans feel better, they have a propensity to stop taking that inconvenient pill? I mean, almost everyone bitches about wearing a mask and tosses them to the side the moment they can. A pill that has side effects like weight gain, sluggish thought, addiction, that leads to more pills to control the side effects, is going to seem unnecessary as the bad days diminish into faded memory and the crappy inconvenience of taking pills and enduring side effects grow and grow and grow.
That so-called cure results in my neurdoc cautioning me not to walk down Jarvis between Dundas and Queen because people can get randomly stabbed — that was before the pandemic. With hospitals overrun, long COVID increasing the ill and disabled populations, community health care cut, disability support incomes kept at desperation levels, politicians ratcheting up tension, health care workers vanishing due to COVID and burnout — why is anyone surprised that stabbings, assaults, random stranger murder has erupted into the mainstream?
Sooooo…can more cops resurrect dead health care workers who provided psychiatric and brain injury patients with support that stabilized them? Can more cops teach doctors about diagnosing brain injury with objective diagnostics? Can more cops force doctors to learn how to restore damaged neurons and reboot microglia into healthy operation? Can cops expand hospital and community access? Will cops provide livable income to the desperate and disabled? Will Mayor John Tory and Premier Doug Ford send budgets into the stratosphere to hire enough cops to guard every block and transit vehicle?
And one more thing: even the man on the street knows cops don’t dissuade stranger assaults. The violent aren’t thinking about the consequences at all. They’re fully and only in the moment. Just like what brain injury does to you.
Resources
What is brain injury? https://concussionisbraininjury.com/education/what-is-brain-injury/
Evidence-based medicine fails: https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/concussion-is-brain-injury/202107/evidence-based-medicine-can-fail-people-brain-injury
Brain injury anger: https://concussionisbraininjury.com/education/anger-and-perception/
Fatigue: https://concussionisbraininjury.com/education/fatigue/
Learned Helplessness: https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/concussion-is-brain-injury/202201/learned-helplessness-brain-injury-and-the-pandemic
Get your brain injury education here: https://concussionisbraininjury.com/education/
Diagnosis: https://concussionisbraininjury.com/diagnosis/
Treatments that work! https://concussionisbraininjury.com/treatments/
COVID Hazard Index: https://covid19resources.ca/covid-hazard-index/
Toronto CityNews, man on street: https://toronto.citynews.ca/video/2023/01/28/ttc-violence-continues-despite-increased-police-presence/
