What the Changes to the DSM Mean

The attempt to catalog all the ways that Americans can go crazy dates at least to 1840, when the Census included a question on “idiocy/insanity.” From those two simple categories, we now have more than 300 separate disorders; they are listed in a 943-page book called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM for short.

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Medicine: Patients’ Progress

TRANSPLANTS Four little girls, bright-eyed and decked out in their best dresses, met the press last week at Colorado General Hospital in Denver. Ranging in age from 16 months to two years, all four were gravely ill, and the University of Colorado doctors who described their cases were guarded in discussing the children's prospects for recovery

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Chronic Abdominal Pain and the Radiation Risk of CT Scans

Last week, the Medical Insider column explained why doctors have so much trouble managing patients with abdominal pain in the emergency department . Not least among the challenges: the multiplicity of causes of belly pain, the lack of clarity on which tests and treatments are best for which patients, and high cost

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