Word: westernness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Twenty years ago, no self-respecting M.D. would have dared to propose a double-blind, controlled study of something as intangible as prayer. Western medicine has spent the past 100 years trying to rid itself of remnants of mysticism. Targ's own field, psychiatry, couldn't be more hostile to spirituality: Sigmund Freud dismissed religious mysticism as "infantile helplessness" and "regression to primary narcissism." Today, while Targ's experiment is not exactly mainstream, it does exemplify a shift among doctors toward the view that there may be more to health than blood-cell counts and ekgs and more to healing...
This change in doctors' attitudes reflects a broader yearning among their patients for a more personal, more spiritual approach to health and healing. As the 20th century draws to an end, there is growing disenchantment with one of its greatest achievements: modern, high-tech medicine. Western medicine is at its best in a crisis--battling acute infection, repairing the wounds of war, replacing a broken-down kidney or heart. But increasingly, what ails America and other prosperous societies are chronic illnesses, such as high blood pressure, backaches, cardiovascular disease, arthritis, depression and acute illnesses that become chronic, such as cancer...
TIME, like most Western media, still buys the myth that Yeltsin is a reformer and a democrat. But face it, he was never the initiator of democratic reforms in Russia. On the contrary, he relies heavily on the old apparatus. Yeltsin made a party career under Leonid Brezhnev, attempted a power grab in a military coup and finally was able to establish himself as a semi-dictator. Since then he has started a war with Chechnya and dismissed all its critics. Yeltsin is responsible for the continued killing of thousands of civilians, including children. Is this the democrat the West...
...addition to their many other accomplishments, the Nazis continue to exert a woeful hold on the Western imagination, as anyone who has attended many postwar productions of opera or Shakespeare can attest. The swastika has become a trite symbol of evil; foot soldiers in dramas tend to goose-step. Things are going a little too far, though, when synchronized swimming--also known as water ballet--fixes on death camps as a motif for aquatic drama. Such was the case with the French Olympic team, which, in preparing its effort for Atlanta this summer, crafted a routine featuring swimmers...
...personnel, not to be searched by customs. The sailors turned out to be couriers for Nigerians plying the Golden Crescent heroin trail. That route begins in the opium fields of Afghanistan, runs through refineries in Turkey and then the wholesaling hubs of Italy and terminates in needle parks throughout Western Europe...