Maggie's Farm

A history of a concept: How an autism diagnosis became both a clinical label and an identity; a stigma to be challenged and a status to be embraced.

"Autism" is not a unitary thing. That's part of the issue. 

It remains a mystery why sleep is necessary: Why Do We Need to Sleep? At a shiny new lab in Japan, an international team of scientists is trying to figure out what puts us under.

Your path to destiny? The call for adventure and the courage to be stupid. "You have to be a fool before you can be a master." Prof. Peterson uses Exodus as a metaphor for life change. He rightly emphasizes the difficulties of change, and the wandering in the desert. He also rightly praises taking life risks to develop oneself, risks of abandoning stale and stupid axioms, risks to fail, and risks to start out stupid.

Two quotes from Ace: 

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.

So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it. Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”

― Neil Gaiman

 "The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective."

- G. K. Chesterton

From How Augustine Invented Sex:

Augustine’s tortured recognition that involuntary arousal was an inescapable presence—not only in conjugal lovemaking but also in what he calls the “very movements which it causes, to our sorrow, even in sleep, and even in the bodies of chaste men”—shaped his most influential idea, one that transformed the story of Adam and Eve and weighed down the centuries that followed: originale peccatum, original sin.

This idea became one of the cornerstones of Christian orthodoxy—but not before decades of dispute... 

Again, a Christmas book only for those who wish to continue or to update their secondary or college educations:  Campbell's Biology.  

It is the current basic text, and it guarantees a thorough grounding in the basics. If you shop around on line, you can find it for much less than the list price. 

A magnificent book, clear and easy to read if you recall some basic biochem.  If you took college bio ten years ago, you know almost nothing.

Wherever men and women spend time together, emotional things can happen. Actually, whenever any people spend time together, emotional things happen: attraction, enjoyment, revulsion, admiration, irritation, enchantment, envy, disdain, boredom, indifference, and everything else.

It's a given that the propensity for love/romance/sexual interest, to varying degrees, is a common, normal, and healthy subtext of human interaction. No number of social rules or boundary-construction can get rid of that, so it is common enough for people to fall so heavily that they arrive at "Damn the rules, the heck with everybody. I want this more than anything else".  I see it all the time because things often do not work out well.

This is good:  PROFESSOR-STUDENT SEX—JUST A PROBLEM OF DIRTY OLD MEN?

I don't want to write another one of those routine "How to deal with holiday stress" posts. 

However, I will say this about my profession. When I evaluate a new patient, part of my diagnostic job is to assess their level of functioning in all areas of life, and to make a guess about their potential levels of functioning. What things do we consider?  Social functioning and friendships, home management and organization of personal finances, family relationships, ability to work and at what level, hobbies and avocational interests/activities, conscientiousness, stress tolerance, emotional continence, functional fragility, impulsivity, intelligence, and so forth.

These are personal characteristics which may or may not have anything to do with any DSM diagnosis.

Making a functional life is not easy. While every single day tests those capacities in some ways, I have no doubt that this time of year can require us all to stretch our life-management skills.

Yes, it really does help.

Best study method I ever used:  Read a paragraph, and explain its content back out loud in your own words. That method got me through med school. 

Unless you are deconditioned, geriatric, or have a heart problem, extended (40-60+ minutes) of pure aerobic activity offers minimal fitness gains. For some people, though, a morning 3-mile jog is a pleasurable wake-up, and pleasure is good. That's recreation, not fitness-training.

You will often see people swimming half-miles of laps, on the elliptical for 45 minutes while reading the newspaper or watching TV, jogging on the treadmill for 60 minutes. If viewed as recreation, that's fine and it might feel good but there are minimal fitness gains to it. Why?

- Aerobic cardio doesn't build strength or burn fat with any effectiveness. Anyway, you don't need to get rid of any fat, do you?
- However, extended cardio does release endorphins so you feel good after. That's not fitness, though
- If you can do a vigorous hour of laps, cycling, elliptical, or jogs, you basically have that down and don't need "slow endurance" work more than once a week or every other week. If you can't do an hour of things like that, you are deconditioned and probably ought to work on it as a component of your conditioning program.
- If the purpose of "cardio" is to build or maintain cardiovascular and pulmonary efficiency, then the long slow cardio does nothing for that. The stress on those organs is too minimal to build stamina.

To improve cardio effectiveness and endurance (except for those in the deconditioned, geritatric, or heart-disease categories) you need to up the intensity and reduce the time spent. That means sprints and other HIIT-style efforts which are anaerobic stressors. Another cardio thing you can do is to vary your cardio work-outs. Doing the same thing repeatedly (eg jogging) becomes useless as your body adapts to that one thing and it becomes too easy.

I say that if you can breathe or talk, it isn't exertion: it's recreation.

My preference for cardio/endurance fitness is to combine it in high-intensity calisthenics classes or high-stress machines like Jacob's Ladder or Stairmaster. I'll do rowing or running sprints too sometimes, but I like those things that address full-body muscular conditioning along with difficult cardio. It's time- efficient to combine the conditioning with the cardio.

"Treating" sex addiction has become a profitable industry.  But is there really such a thing?

I would answer No. The sex drive is strong in most people. Bill Clinton did not have a "stronger more manly sex drive" than other people; he was just a predator and exploiter. Manly men don't do that even if they want to because the key to "manly" is self-mastery, not self-indulgence or mastery of others - especially women. 

Are there badly-behaved people, criminal people, boorish people, and people with poor self-control out there?  Of course, as in all areas of life besides sex. 

Related,  THE PURGE OF THE DEVIANTS MAY GO TOO FAR. Regarding that piece, I'd remove the terms "deviants" and "pervs" that I keep hearing. Historically, rich and powerful men were free to use women as they wished to fulfill their fantasies without consequence. The Kennedys were famous for that, as were British royalty.  I'd prefer to talk about decent and indecent behavior except in the cases of assault or rape, in which cases I would discuss criminality.

This is the best, easy, at-home calisthenics routine I have found for beginners, male or female.  After a month of this routine daily, anybody would be ready to advance to a more intense calisthenic routine or, preferably, a more intense general fitness program. Still, this is not as easy as it looks. Gals, get your guy to join you in this every morning, and keep up with the gals on the video even if parts of it seem silly.

I am a believer in calisthenics for flexibility, athleticism, cardio, agility, vigor, sexuality, and mental health. A great way to roll out of bed and begin the day by getting the blood moving and to wake up the brain. (Their virtual jump rope is good but real would be better.)

Life has its vales of tears, but also its hills of delights and, very rarely, its mountaintops of joy. Sometimes I wonder whether the mandarins of my profession seek to pathologize all negative emotions.

Nobody promised you a rose garden. That was Eden. Learning to bear emotional pain, like bearing some physical pain, is part of life. It never hurts, of course, to have somebody or something accompanying you with that. 

An essay:  Bad chemistry. It’s impossible to love life when sorrow is treated as little more than garbage that needs to be disposed of by way of a ‘happiness pill’

Happiness pills are everywhere. Alcohol. Cocaine. Heroin. Meth. Fentanyl. Marijuana. They are widely used. 

It's not a rant, but the Prof sure does unload a lot of info and insight in this short clip. "Of course you can just compare yourself to the few people who are richer than you and feel sorry for yourself, but that's pretty pathetic in my estimation" 

Alzheimer's is such a common occurrence in ageing that it might be considered a normal variant like hypertension. It used to be called plain "senility."

What factors are associated with increased risk?

- Age (obviously) 
- Family history, mainly maternal history, of dementia. The genetic components may be necessary but insufficient predispositions. 
- Overweight
- Being female
- Lack of daily exercise
- A wrong diet: The researchers generally recommend a diet which includes daily wine, berries, olive oil, and leafy greens but is low in sweets, dairy, non-berry fruit, and other carbs.

nb:  Correlation does not mean causation. These things just represent the current knowledge. Also, medical researchers never include "Bad luck" as a disease risk factor, but it is usually a major one in most ailments. 

Human joints in general are delicate structures.  Part of the reason is because we were not entirely designed to walk upright, but part of the reason is because we were not designed to live as long as we do or to be as heavy as many of us are. You can argue that our bodies were designed to live around 40 years - long enough to breed asap and raise some little ones like the other great apes.

While muscles respond well to stress, joints do not.  The worst thing you can do to your hips and knees is to be overweight.  That is why, in the UK and many other European nations, if you are overweight they will leave you a cripple and tell you it's your own fault. Government medicine will buy you a 12-Euro cane. In Euroland today you see people with canes, walkers, and wheelchairs who would be playing tennis and hiking in the US.

How Overweight Causes Knee Problems

 Study links obesity to rise in knee dislocations

Similar issues apply to hips and lower back. Nothing but trouble. Shoulders can wear out too, but that's a separate topic with different causes.

It's dominating the news these days, and rightly so.

With humans, for whom it is natural to live within cultural/religious contexts, questions about "natural" are always fraught. However, I will claim that sexual abuse by women and men, but more by men because of dominance hierarchies, is part of the animal side of human nature like violence, etc. Human nature contains much unpleasantness.

There are errors in Freud's Civilization and It's Discontents,  but he got the big picture right. Living a bourgeois civilized life is challenging for humanoid animals and, depending on the culture, demands some sorts of instinctual restraints or constraints, at least on regular folks. The elites get away with more, and the poor folks often end up in jail.

Claiming that something is "natural" does not claim any moral valence.  However, even in a Christian culture like medieval Europe the knights and nobles pretty much had access to any female who took his fancy (and vice versa, in the fancy courts of Europe - if a princess summons you to her boudoir, No is not an answer). Today in American, females teachers are routinely called on the carpet for seducing their high school students (which is not very difficult to do). For many women, "star-f-ing" is a diverting hobby, so it works both ways.

One of the perquisites of wealth, power, dominance, or celebrity is access to sexual adventure without consequences. In our culture, we consider some of it immoral and some of it illegal. Other cultures have very different rules about sexual behavior.

My point is simply that, in our society, there is and has been far more sexual libertinism, rape, and abuse at all levels of society (but perhaps most at the lowest and highest) than people like to admit or confess. Until they are caught. The unleashed sex drive is a powerful force and in people who don't care much, power, money, lust, and indifference to law or societal codes can let animal spirits loose. Attila the Hun is said to have fathered 10,000 children, which is why most Europeans claim him as an ancestor. 10,000 were not consensual, I am certain. But I wasn't there.

A friend emailed this photo of his foot this week. Ouch. It's the classic presentation. Fortunately, Gout is easily treated these days.

Gout occurs more commonly in those who eat a lot of meat, drink a lot of beer, or are overweight. Diagnosis of gout may be confirmed by seeing the crystals in joint fluid or tophus. Blood uric acid levels may be normal during an attack.

It's high school bio, but it's easy to forget even these big ones. When I took Gross Anatomy, they injected the arteries with red plastic and the veins with blue. That was a big help because arteries and veins in cadavers collapse and turn brown otherwise.

Everybody ought to know the major muscle groups too, but that's easy.

Is consumer access to genetic testing, without a doctor's involvement, beneficial or harmful for patients? 

Crazy question.  Of course people should have that info if they want to pay for it. Facts are facts.

There are several reasons why calories- in and calories- burned equations are too simple for the complexity of animal physiology. For one thing, the calories in protein are handled differently from those in fat or in  carbohydrates. Another reason is that our metabolism adapts to our nutritional intake as best it is able to.

Other than hibernating animals, few animals are adapted to handle the sort of abundance that humans have remarkably produced with brains capable of entirely changing the planet's surface and modifying nutritional sources for its own purposes. Humans are nutritional outliers, and it is not "natural." In a sense, humans are not natural animals because of the extent to which they remake nature for their convenience.

One example:  What Does It Mean to Be Fat-Adapted?

It means you have trained your body to adapt to a plentiful flow of fresh carbs and sugars (sugar is carbs and vice-versa) so it takes the burden off using fat as a fuel. Intake trains the body that way. Thus what we term the "False Hunger" of overweight people. Human physiology will never adapt to modern abundance of food because fatness tends to kill or disable people after child-bearing years.

Among other reasons, Fat Adaptation is one of the reasons heavy people feel more hunger and end up consuming food more avidly and in higher volume than trim people.  In fact, overweight people have zero dietary energy requirements and minimal nutritional requirements despite subjective hunger.

Fleeing Obamacare: How Doctors Are Insuring Their Own Families

 Majority of American Doctors want to work as Salaried Employees

That is part of the women in medicine effect, as I have said in the past