Some other patients also correctly told how their future health would go. He did and she continued to function well on it. to resume L-DOPA and she wouldn’t have complications. Miriam H at almost halfway through the book told the Dr. But we have only to tap it’s glossy veneer for it to split wide open, and revealed to us it’s roots and foundations, it’s old dark heart of metaphysics, mysticism, magic, and myth.” (-29 of 408)

“We rationalize, we dissimilate, we pretend: we pretend that modern medicine is a rational science, all facts, no nonsense, and just what it seems. Several patients had a similar response: They tried the medicine that brought back some normalcy, found life still unacceptable, got discouraged and wasted away Even increasing the dose to 5 grams/day did not bring her back. But no, getting the dosage right was a balancing act that tended to get more difficult after the patient had been on L-DOPA for a while. It made me wonder if a smaller dose might have been more effective. One third of the way through the book, in every case so far Oliver Sacks increased the does to 3 grams/day and saw bizarre symptoms (problems were sometimes there before the dose increase). Here are some notes that I jotted down while reading. The greatest value from this book comes from the reminder that we are whole beings with experiences and unmet needs that cannot be met with the addition of a drug or drugs. That illness then gets replace with another coping mechanism, which we call a side effect. L-DOPA removed one illness response to life. Over a decade earlier, he wrote a book about the Awakenings true story, recounting the life stories of the victims of the 1920s encephalitis lethargica epidemic.What I got out of this book is that illness is a coping mechanism. This disorder was the basis for his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, published in 1985. Sacks suffered from prosopagnosia, also known as “face blindness,” a cognitive disorder of face perception that affects the ability to recognize familiar faces including one’s own face. Sayer is based on Oliver Sacks, a British neurologist, naturalist, historian, and writer, who wrote various best-selling books recounting case studies of people with neurological disorders, including himself. As detailed in Sacks' memoir, the drug and experiments shown in the movie are actually real, and despite being a fictional story, Awakenings is a historic medical experiment drama like Them (although not a horror).ĭr.

He runs a trial on patient Leonard Lowe (De Niro), who completely “awakens” and starts to show major improvements, but the experiments soon come across some obstacles that threaten the life quality of the patients who were just starting to deal with a new life in a new time.

Awakenings by oliver sacks