Essay on medicine

[...]
“Purportedly as a result of pervasive reliance on repression, the cognitive style of the hysteric is a dramatically nonintellectual one characterized by a lack of concern with intellectual achievement, productivity, and mastery (Shapiro 1965; Schafer 1948). There is little investment in abstract and complex ideas, a flippant disregard for factual and technical information, and an inability to perform effectively on tasks demanding these skills. Independent and critical thinking is impaired, and the general mode of cognition is fuzzy, global, and undifferentiated. Hunch and intuition may replace active, effortful thought and concentration. Because intellectual activity and mastery are continuously avoided, the hysteric's thinking has been described as naive, egocentric, unreflective, affect-laden, and cliché-ridden.”
[...]

[...]
“Hypertension is especially harmful to the delicate blood vessels in the brain. With each beat of the heart, the brain receives a major portion of the cardiac output. By virtue of its proximity, the brain is extremely susceptible to elevated pressures. According to the National Stroke Association, persons with high blood pressure are 4 to 6 times more likely to have a stroke (medically called a cerebral vascular accident or CVA) than are persons with normal blood pressure. Indeed, 57% of all CVA among Americans are related to high blood pressure.”
[...]

[...]
“By March 1995, some 106 cases of Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome had been identified in twenty states and more than half of those afflicted died. Generally symptoms were fever, muscle pain, cough, nausea, vomiting, and headache lasting about four but up to fifteen days and eventually requiring hospitalization. At admission, most patients were feverish with low blood pressure, and low platelet counts (the cells required for clotting of blood), and had abnormalities (specifically, infiltrates) of the lungs visible in chest X-rays. Thereafter, the patients developed pulmonary edemas, where the lungs progressively fill with fluid. To this day, exactly how the virus causes disease is unknown; no treatment other than supportive therapy and prevention are available. As in Zaire and other sites of epidemics, the southwestern United States suffered a decline in tourism once the outbreak of Hantavirus became public knowledge, causing economic hardship. Consequently, the original name of the virus, Four Corners virus, was changed because of political and economic considerations so that the virus is now called Sin Nombre virus, Spanish for "no named virus".”
[...]

Term paper on medicine