We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
The gap dividing psychoanalysts and cognitive-behavioral therapists and researchers is wide and growing.
Different people with different problems and different personalities can benefit from different approaches. Psychoanalytically-informed approaches can be extremely valuable for some people, and useless for others.
People maximize their advantages, because it produces choices. Choices are good. Everybody has some advantages, talents, gifts. Building social capital is what intact, functional families pursue because it makes life better and more fun for everybody.
I read that article in The Atlantic. I disagree with almost all of it. There is no better or cheaper (it's free) approach to substance abuse for the motivated person.
It's notabout "Does it work?" It's about "Does the person work it?"Sanity, like physical health, is not a passive enterprise.
Nothing can be done for the unmotivated person. However, some people on a downward spiral need a little rehab (ie forced abstinence) first to get a little clarity; some people benefit from naltrexone or topamax, and all benefit from treatment of any coexisting problems.
Do we "make our own luck"? Pasteur famously said "Chance favors the prepared observer." From How Luck Works at aeon:
To investigate luck is to take on one of the grandest of all questions: how can we explain what happens to us, and whether we will be winners, losers or somewhere in the middle at love, work, sports, gambling and life overall? As it turns out, new findings suggest that luck is not a phenomenon that appears exclusively in hindsight, like a hail storm on your wedding day. Nor is it an expression of our desire to see patterns where none exist, like a conviction that your yellow sweater is lucky. The concept of luck is not a myth.
Avoidable and preventable are two of the most capacious words in the medical lexicon. They can’t be unproven. They have propped up industries. The public has consented to healthism, implicitly. Because one person’s avoidable is another person’s overdiagnosis.
Hard Feelings: Science’s Struggle to Define Emotions - While it's possible for researchers to study facial expressions, brain patterns, behavior, and more, each of these is only part of a more elusive whole:
Around the mid-18th century or so, Dixon writes, these passions and affections were lumped together under the umbrella of emotion. In the early 19th century, Scottish philosopher Thomas Brown was the first to propose emotion as a theoretical category, opening the door for scientific research. But though he was eager to study it, Brown couldn’t define it.
“The exact meaning of the term emotion, it is difficult to state in any form of words,” Brown said in a lecture. And so it has remained.
“The only thing certain in the emotion field is that no one agrees on how to define emotion,” Alan Fridlund, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote to me.
"Emotion" is sort-of an artificial construct, is it not? It - whatever it is - can rarely be separated from cognition, perception, ideas, and all other mental processes and biological instincts. We easily can identify, in ourselves, lustful desire ("urge to merge"), rage, despair, joy, fear and anxiety - but these extremes are rare and still more expressible by poets and musicians than by scientists.
I recently learned that "HD" - Hoarding Disorder - is now a reimbursable and nameable disease. It has long been considered just an eccentricity.
What drives the disease craze? Big Pharma, and insurance. Normal variants are labeled as diseases and disorders. Think ADD, ED, infertility, fear of dying, and on and on. I term them, smirkingly, "life-style disorders."
We have said here at Maggie's, for years, that a "healthy diet" cannot be defined without evidence, and there has never been any evidence. "Healthy" has just been bias, old-wives tales, and happy-sounding ignorance like "eat your peas and kale and fruit". All nonsense.
It's a big deal that even the slow-witted government finally comes around to what we have all known. America, go easy on the carbs, eat veggies only if you like them, use butter and olive oil, enjoy a fine steak when you can afford it, and do not become food-obsessed.
Sorry, Whole Foods, food quacks, and food faddists. You have been wrong all along. Docs finally now feel free to share the real facts, which they have known for years. I've never known a doc who would refuse a rare ribeye steak or filet mignon. Never known a vegetarian doc either, or a scientist who ate organic food. In fact, the biological scientists I know like to go to fancy French and fancy Italian restaurants as often as possible.
I am not recommending this as something to take. It's just interesting. Would I try it before all studies are done? Perhaps, just for fun. You can always stop.
Doctors have known that dietary fats are harmless, for years. Most were a bit afraid to say so, though, for fear patients would view them as ignorant.
I have been preaching low-carb, high-fat/high protein diets for ten years or more. It just goes to show how behind the government is, in most things. Not to mention the ultimate fate of most "expert opinion."
What other past superstitions disappear with this? The supposed special healthiness of fish and tofu, the evils of bacon, butter, red meat, eggs, cream, and chicken skin - and lots of others. It's about time, but it's tragic to think of all of those wonderful meals so many people passed up over the years because of junk science.
Photo is a wholesome American breakfast. Grains? No, except for a slice of bread to soak up the egg yolks. A little carbs are ok if you aren't on a diet.
There's an ignorant nut always ready to believe anything: The Food Babe: Enemy of Chemicals - How one woman mobilized an army against food additives, GMOs, and all else not "natural."
The human species should be thanking God for GMOs.
These programs are designed by Child Psychologists. Since when are they experts in this? I'd prefer a panel of grandmas, myself. Some kids, of course, are especially challenging if not impossible. Easy kids make parents look good; tough kids make parents look bad.
A brief history of marriage, by a gal who may have missed the boat: All the Single Ladies
For thousands of years, marriage had been a primarily economic and political contract between two people, negotiated and policed by their families, church, and community. It took more than one person to make a farm or business thrive, and so a potential mate’s skills, resources, thrift, and industriousness were valued as highly as personality and attractiveness. This held true for all classes. In the American colonies, wealthy merchants entrusted business matters to their landlocked wives while off at sea, just as sailors, vulnerable to the unpredictability of seasonal employment, relied on their wives’ steady income as domestics in elite households. Two-income families were the norm.
Not until the 18th century did labor begin to be divided along a sharp line: wage-earning for the men and unpaid maintenance of household and children for the women. Coontz notes that as recently as the late 17th century, women’s contributions to the family economy were openly recognized, and advice books urged husbands and wives to share domestic tasks. But as labor became separated, so did our spheres of experience—the marketplace versus the home—one founded on reason and action, the other on compassion and comfort. Not until the post-war gains of the 1950s, however, were a majority of American families able to actually afford living off a single breadwinner.
A mathematical proof, such as Zhang produced, “should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation,” he wrote, “not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way.” Edward Frenkel, a math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says Zhang’s proof has “a renaissance beauty,” meaning that though it is deeply complex, its outlines are easily apprehended. The pursuit of beauty in pure mathematics is a tenet. Last year, neuroscientists in Great Britain discovered that the same part of the brain that is activated by art and music was activated in the brains of mathematicians when they looked at math they regarded as beautiful.
Heard a good talk from a senior MD/Philosopher Prof yesterday.
His main point was that disease is historically normal and natural, and absence of disease is abnormal. He said we in America live in an abnormal golden age of artificial, unnatural well-being thanks to modern medicine, and have thus tended to be seduced into thinking of health as the normal and natural state. He said we are in a frenzy of labeling things as diseases these days which would have been viewed as expectable misfortunes, the risks of life, the price of aging, the tragedy of existence.
He claimed that roughly half of us in the audience would have been dead already, in 1800. Childhood infectious disease, childbirth complications, cholera, birth defects, tetanus, influenza, pneumonia, TB, polio, diabetes, war, mental illness, mental retardation, accidents, cancers, urinary tract infections, animal bites, bug bites, fractures, heart attacks, - you name it. All normal and natural thanks to a harsh and indifferent Mother Nature who seems to want to disable and kill you - and she will. God may love you, but Nature - no.
He asked us to try to remember how many old folks, and even middle-aged hobbled around on canes, or sat in wheelchairs and rocking chairs, maybe gasping for breath, were half-blind, or had chronic pain or disabling depressions, in our youth when they now would be playing tennis and skiing.
He made the statistical point that life expectancy has changed very little in the past 200 years - if you exclude the childhood and youth infectious deaths, and the trauma injuries which would have resulted in death - which distort the stats and give the mistaken impression that old people are living significantly longer. He said few humans in states of nature lived past age 40.
He also made the point that wild animals always seem healthy. Why? Because the instant they have the slightest problem, something catches and eats them and they are gone. Sooner or later, they all get killed and eaten because something always goes wrong. Animal life is fleeting.
A useful and humbling perspective, I thought, for those of us in the healing professions. Yes, including those in the mental illness and behavioral problem field. Excellent mental health cannot even be defined.
Measles is not particularly dangerous as infectious diseases go. Like Mumps (crazy names, aren't they?), serious sequelae are rare. Most people past 40 had Measles and/or Mumps or were exposed to them. However, these are those unpleasant things which had been eliminated in the Western world.
"It’s good to explore alternatives rather than go with the panic of everyone around you,” she said. “Vaccines don’t feel right for me and my family.”
They don't "feel right"? What?
Not long ago, parents tried to expose their kids to other kids with Mumps, Measles, and Rubella (German Measles) to get it over with during Grade School.
Doctors have known that dietary fats are harmless, for years. Most were a bit afraid to say so, though, for fear patients would view them as ignorant.
A brief history of marriage, by a gal who may have missed the boat: