“When the Itch is inside the boot, scratching outside provides little consolation” Chinese Proverb
This article starts with a woman who had an itch so bad she scratched through her skull into her brain. But that’s just the beginning. Read about phantom limbs being amputed using mirrors and how your reality is just your brain’s best guess of what’s happening. Which is one of the reasons this picture may actually cause you to itch.
THE ITCH
Its mysterious power may be a clue to a new theory about brains and bodies.
by Atul Gawande
t was still shocking to M. how much a few wrong turns could change your life. She had graduated from Boston College with a degree in psychology, married at twenty-five, and had two children, a son and a daughter. She and her family settled in a town on Massachusetts’ southern shore. She worked for thirteen years in health care, becoming the director of a residence program for men who’d suffered severe head injuries. But she and her husband began fighting. There were betrayals. By the time she was thirty-two, her marriage had disintegrated. In the divorce, she lost possession of their home, and, amid her financial and psychological struggles, she saw that she was losing her children, too. Within a few years, she was drinking. She began dating someone, and they drank together. After a while, he brought some drugs home, and she tried them. The drugs got harder. Eventually, they were doing heroin, which turned out to be readily available from a street dealer a block away from her apartment. Read the rest….
