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Quote by Gabriel García Márquez

“In the past few years he had become conscious of the burden of his own body. He recognized the symptoms. He had read about them in textbooks, he had seen them confirmed in real life, in older patients with no history of serious ailments who suddenly began to describe perfect syndromes that seemed to come straight from medical texts and yet turned out to be imaginary. His professor of children’s clinical medicine at La Salpêtrière had recommended pediatrics as the most honest specialization, because children become sick only when in fact they are sick, and they cannot communicate with the physician using conventional words but only with concrete symptoms of real diseases.”

Quote by Gabriel García Márquez

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Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel Arcadio Márquez's classic novel weaves a tale of passion, loyalty, and the passage of time. The story follows the tumultuous relationship between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, spanning over half a century and several love affairs. Set against the backdrop of the Cholera epidemic in Latin America during the 19th century, the novel delves into themes of love, loss, and the human condition. more

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Gabriel García Márquez

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“Patriarchy believes emotion is weak and has no place in business or governance. It means leaving pieces of you behind when you sit at the table. It means that if you want to be part of the winning side, you have to comply and be ready to be part of the team without holding them back. Matriarchal and egalitarian systems promote love-based decision-making and space for people to share their emotions.”

“In my experience, structural abnormalities of the spine rarely cause back pain. That ought not surprise us, for this epidemic of back pain is very new. Somehow the human race managed to get through the first million years or so of its evolution without a problem, but if the structural diagnoses are correct, something happened to the spine during the last evolutionary eyeblink, and it has begun to fall apart. This idea is untenable. One suspects that these spine abnormalities have always been there but were never blamed for pain, because there was no pain to blame them for. Fifty years ago, back pain was not very common, but, more importantly, nobody took it seriously. The epidemic of back pain is due to the enormous increase in the incidence of TMS during the past thirty years, and, ironically, the failure of medicine recognize and diagnose it has been a major factor in that increase. Instead of TMS, the pain has been attributed primarily to a variety of structural defects of the spine. It's essential to know that almost all of the structural abnormalities of the spine are harmless. (page 117)”

“Though the back sufferer isn't aware of it, it is generally known by students of the spine that the last intervertebral disc, between the fifth lumbar vertebra and the sacrum, is more or less degenerated in most people by the age of twenty. Discs are structures located between the bodies of spinal bones to take up the shock. They are firmly attached to the vertebral bodies above and below, and in no way can they "slip." Enclosed by a tough, fibrous outer shell, there is a thick fluid inside, which is what absorbs the shock. The discs at the lower end and in the neck, because of all the activity in those locations, begin to wear out at an early age, some by the age of twenty, as stated. (page 118)”

“For example, the diagnostic study (CT scan or MRI) might show a herniated disc at the interspace L4-L5, one of the possible consequences of which might be weakness in the muscles that elevate the foot and the toes. The examination, however, revealed that not only those muscles were weak but so were the ones in the back of the leg, muscles that are not energized by the spinal nerve passing by interspace L4-L5. Then when I found on examination that the buttock muscles in the vicinity of the sciatic nerve were painful to pressure, it was apparent that the nerve disturbance was not coming from the region of the herniated disc but from the sciatic nerve that serves both sets of muscles. (page 120)”

“It may be tempting but is inadvisable to attribute symptoms to normal aging phenomena. In my experience, disc degeneration is no more pathological than graying hair or wrinkling skin. In recent years, there have been numerous reports the medical literature of herniated discs in patients with no history of back pain. They were discovered inadvertently on CT or MRI studies done to investigate other parts of the body. (page 122)”