Question

Imagine that you are a physician today. You slip through a wormhole and end up in a parallel dimension at a dinner table with Benjamin Rush, Egas Moniz, and, oddly enough, Doctor Oz. In at least 200 words use your perspective as a modern physician (and one who understands the historical context of these respective doctors) to tell them what you think they got right and got wrong about their approaches to health and medicine. In your response, be sure to discuss the role of evidence in your perspective.

Answer 1

As a physisyst , one would have certain doubts regardin being able to complete the arduous journey through a worm hole, but assuming that the journey is made posible somehow and its not scientifically important so as to know
how. So once as a physician I reach the dinner table with the renowned personalities Dr. Rush, Dr. Moniz, and Dr. Oz. I would be really happy to tell the three regarding the current progress of science of medicine
and the importance of their contributions to it.

Dr Benjamin Rush was a proponent of blood letting, which is the practive of removing blood to cure / remove an illness. The practice is harmful and does not help to cure diseases as has been found, checked and reverified
multiple times over the lest few decades. Dr. benjamin was also a proponent of heroic medicine which uses blood letting, toxic substance used for purging and sweating profusely to shock the body to come back to good healt. Such
a system has been proven to be futile and harmful for the body instead and does not cure people of illness. During the yello fevel epidemic even Dr rush admitted the unusually high number of people who died after his treatment
goes on to show some of his treatment methods might not have been the best way to treat an illness.

Rush published one of the first descriptions and treatments for psychiatric disorders in American medicine, Medical Inquiries and Observations, Upon the Diseases of the Mind (1812).
He undertook to classify different forms of mental illness and to theorize as to their causes and possible cures. Such an approach was revolutionary in its time and has been developed over time into modern mental health.
Furthermore, Rush was one of the first people to describe Savant Syndrome. In 1789, he described the abilities of Thomas Fuller, an enslaved African who was a lightning calculator. His observation would later be described in
other individuals by notable scientists like John Langdon Down. He pinoeered in therapeutic removal of addiction, which is still used today

António Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz (29 November 1874 – 13 December 1955), known as Egas Moniz (Portuguese: [ˈɛɣɐʒ muˈniʃ]), was a Portuguese neurologist and the developer of cerebral angiography.
He is regarded as one of the founders of modern psychosurgery, having developed the surgical procedure leucotomy—​known better today as lobotomy—​for which he became the first Portuguese national to receive a Nobel
Prize in 1949 (shared with Walter Rudolf Hess)
In 1926, at age 51, Moniz retired from politics and returned to medicine full-time. He hypothesized that visualizing blood vessels in the brain with radiographic means would allow for more precise localization
of brain tumors. During his experiments, Moniz injected radiopaque dyes into brain arteries and took X-rays to visualize abnormalities. In his initial tests, Moniz used strontium and lithium bromide in three
patients with a suspected tumor, epilepsy, and Parkinsonism, but the experiment failed and one patient died. In the next set of trials, he achieved success using 25% sodium iodide solution on three patients,
developing the first cerebral angiogram

Moniz thought that mental illness originated from abnormal neural connections in the frontal lobe. He described a “fixation of synapses,” which in mental illness, was expressed as “predominant, obsessive ideas.”
Moniz also referenced the experiments of Yale physiologists John Fulton and C.F. Jacobsen, who found that removing the frontal lobes of a chimpanzee made it calmer and more cooperative. In addition, Moniz observed
“changes in character and personality” among soldiers who had suffered from injuries to their frontal lobes.

Moniz hypothesized that surgically removing white matter fibers from the frontal lobe would improve a patient’s mental illness. He enlisted his long-time staff member and neurosurgeon Almeida Lima to test the
procedure on a group of 20 patients, mainly with schizophrenia, anxiety, and depression. The surgeries took place under general anesthesia. The first psychosurgery was performed in 1935 on a 63-year-old woman
with depression, anxiety, paranoia, hallucinations, and insomnia. The patient experienced a rapid physical recovery, and two months later, a psychiatrist noted that she was calmer, less paranoid, and well oriented.
In the first set of surgeries, Moniz reported a total of seven cures, seven improvements, and six unchanged cases.

Moniz never performed a surgery himself, partially because of his lack of neurosurgical training but also because he suffered from severe gout that left his hands crippled. Instructed by Moniz, Lima performed ten of
the first twenty surgeries by injecting absolute alcohol to destroy the frontal lobe. Later on, Moniz and Lima developed a new technique using a leucotome, a needle-like instrument with a retractable wire loop. By
rotating the wire loop, they were able to surgically separate white matter fibres.

Moniz judged the results acceptable in the first 40 or so patients he treated, claiming, "Prefrontal leukotomy is a simple operation, always safe, which may prove to be an effective surgical treatment in certain
cases of mental disorder." He also claimed that any behavioral and personality deterioration that may occur was outweighed by reduction in the debilitating effects of the illness. He conceded that patients who had
already deteriorated from the mental illness did not benefit much. The procedure enjoyed a brief vogue, and in 1949 he received the Nobel Prize "for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy
in certain psychoses." Critics accused Moniz of understating complications, providing inadequate documentation, and not following up with patients. After his initial procedures, other physicians, such as Walter
Jackson Freeman II and James W. Watts, adopted a modified technique in the United States and renamed it “lobotomy.”

Since falling almost completely from use in the 1960s, leucotomy has been deplored by many as brutally arrogant, and collateral derision has been directed at Moniz as its inventor. Others suggest judging the
inventor separately from the invention, characterizing Moniz' work as a "great and desperate" attempt to find effective treatment for severe forms of mental illness for which there was at the time no effective
treatment. Some claim it was aggressive promotion of lobotomy by other doctors (such as Walter Freeman) which led to its being performed in large numbers of cases now considered inappropriate. Thorotrast, which
Moniz helped develop for use in cerebral angiography is radioactive and was eventually found to be highly carcinogenic, affecting many patients who were treated with it before its use ceased in the 1950s.

In 1957 Moniz's study centre, now known as the Egas Moniz Museum, was transferred to Santa Maria Hospital, and integrated into the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon, where there is also a
statue of him. His art collection is on display at his country house in Avanca.

Dr. Oz. is a phenomenon with little scientific credibility, i would just spend time with Dr. Oz. and try to find out if he is a fraud or not.