Science and Suffering: My Two Months Battling the Aliens
By Ronald Pies, MD, professor of psychiatry and lecturer on bioethics and humanities, SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, New York; clinical professor of psychiatry, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston; editor-in-chief emeritus of Psychiatric Times. Dr. Pies is also the author, most recently of, The Three-Petaled Rose, an exploration of the synthesis of Judaism, Buddhism, and Stoicism (iUniverse).
Doyle Alphabet by fdecomite, via Flickr
It all started suddenly: weird, creeping sensations in my forehead and between my eyes, especially when I lay on my back or bent my head forward. The expression “my skin is crawling” quickly came to mind. Over the next few days, I began to experience intense pressure in my forehead and a weird sensation on the bridge of my nose—as if a large clothespin had been clipped onto it. Within a few days, it felt like someone had poured a sack of concrete into my head.
My self-diagnosis was sinusitis—a term that covers many etiologies. But most cases of sinusitis begin with head or facial pain and nasal discharge—not the strange sensations my wife and I soon started calling “the aliens.”
Nevertheless, I began an aggressive self-treatment program: decongestants, aspirin, and something called a Neti pot—an ancient form of nasal irrigation using a […]
