Book: Neuroanalysis, bridging the gap between neuroscience, psychoanalysis and psychiatry
Author: Avi Peled MD
Comments: The author tried a new way of organizing the diagnosis standards of psychiatric diseases compared DSM used in clinic. It’s called clinical brain profiling (CBP), which integrates all descriptive signs/symptoms seen in all psychiatric diseases into 3 categories: neural complexity disorder (NCD), neural resilience insufficiency (NRI), context sensitive processing decline (CPD). NCD includes connectivity imbalance (segregation vs integration) and hierarchy imbalance (bottom up insufficiency vs top down shift), NRI includes optimization imbalance (de-optimization vs hyper-optimization) and constrain frustration imbalance), CPD includes contexts biases and organization level. He gave a weight to each signs and made a system map with input and output model. With this new mapping, he gave some case analysis of patients to prove that it helps to better diagnose and treat patients than the DSM bible.
In fact, it’s a way of observing the patient in a systematic way, and not novel idea since it’s been used for thousands of years before the modern medicine. For example his considering the diseases situations where connectivity or order disrupted is quite close to “Jing Luo” and “Qi” theory, the Yin/Yang balance theory in Chinese medicine. On the other hand, it tries to integrate the new knowledge of neuroscience research and psychology into the clinic practice, may help physicians to have a better idea of the patient, and help neuroscientists to clarify the signs and symptoms described by physicians.
The mechanic system is accurately designed and run and brain is a complicated mechanic system with plasticity. In the future, we may detect the weak point of each psychiatric patient, and fix it with correlate medicine. While the diagnosis is based on more objective observations like MRI, and the computation of the system input/output networks than subjective descriptions now used in DSM. The author would also agree that Mathematicians have the keys to the mysteries of brain, which is part of his interest declared in the book.
Is schizophrenia a disease? just like people have argued, is Alzheimer’s disease a disease? The medicine need new definitions…