Follow Ben '09

Thursday 6th May.

There is a girl called Jessica staying in the apartment - a friend of James' fiancee, Shanti. She's a chef but has has more recently been studying alternative therapies, with an interest in going to school for psychology. She knows what I'm doing here. We talk about her ex. She says he had these pains in his throat. Terrible stabbing pains in his neck and head. He was diagnosed with Bi-polar Disorder and Schizotypal Personality Structure and a bunch of things. He was taking Klonopin, she says, for the pains. Big doses, like seven tablets a day. 'My dad takes that sometimes, when his wife gets out of hand, but he'd take like a quarter of a pill.' She says he did everything he could to get off the medication. He ate really healthily, he studied meditation, he learned everything he could to figure out how to cure himself but nothing worked. The moment he stopped taking the pills the unbearable pain would come back. I look up Klonopin on Google. It's a trade name for Clonazepam, a benzodiazapine derivative, an anticonvulsant and muscle relaxant used for treating epilepsy and anxiety and, among other things, Restless Leg Syndrome. I ask Jessica if her ex had epilepsy. She says not as far as she's aware. I tell her may be the pains were unrelated to his psychiatric diagnoses, may be he was suffering form some kind of muscle spasms, may be related to epilepsy or some other neurological problem. I said if that was what was going on it might be very hard for him to cure himself of the pains. She mentioned a system she'd heard based on something called Gut and Psychology Syndrome, how she'd heard about people being cured of autism and schizophrenia and all kinds of things. I look this up too. On the first site I come to (www.gutandpsychologysyndrome.com) there's a picture of a book and a DVD and a plastic tub of pills called BioKult, a 'probiotic supplement', reduced from $59:95 to $49:95. It has 120 capsules in it. On another site there's a quote from Hippocrates: "All diseases begin in the gut". I say I'm not sure gut flora are really the main issue in autism, that the people with autism that I've met aren't really the kind that need curing, that I don't really buy the idea that autism has a 'cure' as such, at least not one you can get in pill form. It's brain damage, I say, probably diffuse, but definitely physical damage to the nervous system. Jessica mentions something about the connection between autism and vaccines. 'That's what you hear about every time,' she says. I say yes. But that was a big scandal. There's no link. The Andrew Wakefield paper that kicked it all off showed nothing of the kind. It was misinterpreted by the media. I say that it makes sense that people latch on to that kind of thing - if you're a parent and your child has autism you're looking for an explanation. If someone says it's caused by a single thing that you can choose to avoid, of course you're going to get upset, of course that's going to be a powerful idea. Jessica is interested in nutrition. I get the sense from her that may be she has an idea that people might get better from a lot of things through diet, which is fair enough in a sense. I say the human race isn't getting better, more perfect. I say we're getting killed by fewer things, at least some of us. Medicine and technology have helped us avoid things like cholera, sepsis, smallpox. But it's also made us capable of keeping very damaged people alive - people with brain injury, the elderly, people in comas. In prior times people died quickly, lived shorter lives. Now we live long lives but it's not clear that we suffer any less, on average. We're still at the mercy of the chaotic physical environment. Our bodies are still vulnerable. Jessica nods. 'It's like we've swapped quick nasty death for extended suffering,' she says. My Uncle Tom mentioned something similar at the weekend. He's a doctor at the University hospital. He said hospitals are increasingly full of people on life support systems, people being kept alive because the technology is there despite the vanishingly slim prospects of their recovering. He talked about premature babies. He talked about his eldest son, my cousin Tim, who has just had his first child. He said Tim is a very capable person, as is his wife Arin. He said they're doing fine. Good parents. They can make money to live on and be happy. 'And I have no desire to see any of their funerals,' he said. 'When you're time comes,' he said 'you can't make a fuss. You have to move on.' My Uncle had a triple heart bypass a couple of years ago. The pale scar is visible down the centre of his chest. People are'nt perfect. They never have been. We're all going to die, one way or another.