Friday, August 20, 2010

Was looking at the Spiegel website the other day; it had various links to continuing issues from WWII. It had a more spiffy than usual picture of a young Adolf in a brown shirt and brown tie. We usually look at WWII as the Germans had too high a debt load and were crushed too much etc. This might have been true in some emotional sense. The war aim of Germany during what became WWI was to gain some strategic depth from Russia. The German generals were afraid that Russian railroads could deliver troops to the eastern frontier of Germany too quickly. With the defeat of Russia and the creation of Poland that war aim seems to have been achieved however.

8 comments:

Mark said...

In your comment on "Why I don't prescribe on maois" on Shrink Rap, you mention taking vitamin c for hypertensive crisis.

Can you expand a little on this?

a psychiatrist who learned from veterans said...

There is a hospital review organization called the 'Joint Commission.' Some 30 years ago the reviewer who came to the VA where I was said that chewing 2 vitamin C 500 mg tablets would abolish an MAOI hypertensive crisis, and we should have them in our medicine locker.

Mark said...

I haven't been able to find any supporting literature. Have you this to be true?

Mark said...

I meant to write, have you (or any colleague) found this to be true?

a psychiatrist who learned from veterans said...

See the following:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4396911

Mark said...

I finally got a copy of the article; very interesting. However, one question: Do you know if that dosage (1000mg)of ascorbic acid actually works in practice, to stop a tyramine reaction in someone on an MAOI?

Many thanks for your help.

a psychiatrist who learned from veterans said...

I don't. I had a patient with hypertension of unclear origin. He responded to 1 dose of Norvasc 5 mg a day years ago (Norvasc is a published MAOI counter treatment as I recall). Recently he has been in a physical rehab and his BP was 120/79. I was talking over dietary restrictions, mentioned sauerkraut recently and he said 'Sauerkraut (which he eats) is one of my favorite foods!'

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