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Biomedical subjects

W Hunt

Publications and source records attributed to W Hunt.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

A clinical clerkship in psychiatry.

A clinical clerkship was organized around the goal of teaching information and skills that would be needed by the nonpsychiatrist physician. In most clinical clerkships the students work on an inpatient service. In the clerkship described here the setting is an outpatient clinic, which provides a more relevant experience. Videotaped psychiatric interviews are used extensively and have been found to provide a valuable teaching format. They are effective in holding student interest, in avoiding the practical difficulties of live interviews, and in teaching active listening and interviewing technique, as well as in demonstrating a variety of psychopathology. Field trips to state psychiatric hospitals, institutions for mental defectives, clinics for treating alcoholics or addicts, and other mental health facilities have been used but have not been found to be a very valuable part of the program.

Education, Medical, Undergraduate

History and analysis of a leaderless group of professional therapists.

The authors describe the experiences of a group of 11 psychiatrists and psychologists who met for 3 years with the initial purpose of providing peer supervision in group therapy. The group became a basic assumption dependency group in which all members had both realistic and magical expectations for help with their personal lives, and a resulting attempted transformation into a leaderless therapy group was a failure. The authors indicate that the experiences of this group illustrate some of the functions of group-leader interaction in allowing group and individual growth.

Adult

The effects of harmaline on sodium transport in human erythrocytes: evidence in favor of action at interior sodium-sensitive sites.

The effects of the hallucinogen, harmaline (HME), and its congeners on human red blood cell (RBC) transport were studied. HME reduced sodium efflux by 70% at maximum inhibitory concentrations (6-8 mM). It acted upon the ouabain-sensitive component of sodium efflux since it exerted no inhibitory actions in the presence of ouabain. Several lines of evidence suggested that HME exerted its inhibitory effect at intracellular sodium-sensitive sites. The percent inhibition of Na efflux by 0.1 mM HME was unaffected by increasing extracellular potassium from 10 to 100 mM. When HME was incorporated into RBC ghosts by reversible hemolysis, the degree of inhibition of sodium efflux was comparable to that found with ouabain outside the red cells and was always greater than the inhibition produced with HME outside cells. HME increased membrane permeability to sodium, as shown by enhanced sodium influx into RBC and at concentrations of 10 mM caused rapid increments of intracellular sodium and decrements of intracellular potassium. We conclude that the harmala alkaloids inhibit the active Na-K transport system in human RBCs through their effects on sodium-sensitive transport sites on the interior membrane surface.

Alkaloids