Compassion for the sick

We Americans have always been at the cutting edge of compassion for the ill. We have compassion for those with cancer, stroke, mental retardation, and heart disease, to name but a few. We also have compassion for whiplash syndrome, fibromyalgia, and sexual addiction syndrome. These are all diseases, from which the victim is the patient.

It is time to spread our wings of compassion to two new medical conditions.

TRS (Tax Revulsion Syndrome, also known as Money Addiction Disease)

• Sufferers of this syndrome have extremely negative reactions to the normally painless task of paying taxes. They get upset at tax time. They tend to make financial errors, fail to report income, fail to pay their taxes or even fail to file their returns. Often they use typical psychological defenses to describe their actions (the government will just waste the money on a $10,000 toilet seat; I don't support the war; I can better stimulate the economy by spending or investing the money; etc). Sometimes, this can lead to conflicts with the IRS. It can even lead to possible job related issues. Who can forget Al Capone, Wesley Snipes and Tim Geitner, to name but a few.
• Those who suffer from this disease should not be punished! It is a disease and we need to treat this seriously. Fining and imprisonment is criminalization of a disease and we are above that! These people need our sympathy. We need to understand why they act as they do and to allow for their differences. First of all, they have a different cultural belief system and who are we to judge them? If we want to change them, then we need to pay for their counseling, rehabilitation, and perhaps their taxes until they feel confident enough to pay it themselves.

Bribomania

• Sufferers from this condition are addicted to easy money. They are willing to sell just about anything for money. We most often see this in the political sphere, selling votes for money, but also see it in those who enforce building codes and throughout society as a whole. There seems to be some attraction to those who suffer from this disease into the public sector.
• Like malaria and leprosy, this condition is more common in poorer, undeveloped nations.
• Like drug addition, these people are addicted to an external substance
• Treatment, as with drug addicition, is the use of counseling in addition to a substitute to ease them off their addiction. As with drug addition, a long acting, slow release substitute is used. Those subject to bribomania should be given, at our expense of course, an amount of money each day to keep them from asking for and taking bribes. As each person is different, the daily amount of maintenance money should be individualized.

Remember, DocBrain IS A DOCTOR, board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Unless you are a physician, you cannot say these diseases do not exist. Nor, can you deny the need for treatment of medical disorders. And as a proud citizen of the USA, you cannot deny now that it is YOUR responsibility to pay for everyone and anyone's illnesses. We may not be able to cure TRS or Bribomania, but we can certainly help pay for the care of those who suffer from these conditions.

Yes we can!