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.
It seems, as a limit, five is the maximum for closest friends, and 100-150 about the max for solid pals plus solid acquaintances. That seems about right to me, depending on how pals and good acquaintances are defined (in this case, by frequency of contact). (h/t, Insty)
It's not really new news, but getting fat at some point in life does seem to alter some physiologic processes for the long term. It seems to retrain the body for a high-caloric life, for a fat life; resets some homeostatic buttons including altering or almost eliminating satiety signals for some period of time.
Despite the interesting physiology, I feel the article overstates the thesis and minimizes the role of human agency, human choice. Resisting temptation, calculating consequences, etc. is what makes us different from other animals. For those who have been heavy at some point in life, though, that is more challenging. Mind over matter.
Moral of the story: Don't "let yourself go" because you may live to regret it.
I think of it as physician-eased dying, and I see no important moral issues in the topic at all. Anesthesia and analgesia are among the handful of categories of mercies which modern medicine has to offer and to deny the comfort these tools can offer terminal patients seems sadistic and immoral to me.
I read this short piece, Death and the Psychiatrist, and do not feel that it was worth publishing (or linking, except as an example of a weak essay). Of course, I saw plenty of dying during my medical training. There are many ways to die, but the worst one is to die in agony and terror. Nobody needs that.
It seems common enough these days to see terminally-ill patients tortured by heroic medical efforts. I hate to hear about this. Physicians, of all people, should know when to let go even if families do not. Hope is not a plan.
When your 104-lb body is packed with cancer and wracked with pain, would you chose one more round of chemotherapy, or hospice care where you would be gently eased out of it all, floating on a sea of morphine?
It's not just the terror that Johnny might break his arm in the playground. It's not a "sticks and stones" country any more, at least among the coastal elites.
When we give up our healthy skepticism about what we read and hear, we begin to enter the realm of faith.
Much has been written about faith, especially religious faith. In a post-enlightenment world, faith has been, supposedly, relegated to the religion category but, as in ancient times, faith, superstition, and imagination continue to effect non-religious attitudes and thinking. Human nature.
Much of what we all believe is not Truth. Maybe most of it. Thus healthy skepticism. Not paranoia but cheerful skepticism.
Regarding Science and Scientism, few if any scientists are Scientism-ists. Those in the hard sciences can be hard-nosed, but even they need grants and jobs and need to feed their families.
Freud waxed creative on the topic of cultural taboos, identifying them as unconsciously or consciously interesting, but forbidden, fruits. He never, to my knowledge advocated violating cultural rules and taboos.
Homosexual temptation has been around forever, but sometimes illegal and sometimes it has been impolite to mention the topic so the taboo in that case had more to do with conversation than with behavior. In many cultures, adultery, fratricide, patricide, and matricide are basic taboos. Judaism and Christianity have abundant taboos.
Psychiatric organizations are challenged by the gradual cultural acceptance - to some extent, anyway - of behaviors once considered taboo or debauched by the culture, and perversions by Psychiatry. Despite media attention, most people still regard much behavior with revulsion. To turn the tables, often those with discomfort or revulsion are now labeled neurotic "phobics." Thus a gradual normalization of fantasy translated into real behavior.
I suppose parts of our culture have arrived there, even without Communism.
Here is a run-down of some of the outlandish things going on these days, often reminiscent of Nero and the Roman Empire. As the narrator says, nothing "sweet and innocent" here. Or loving, either. The entire "I identify as..." trend is a curious turn of phrase. I think it means "I like to pretend...". The unbound human imagination at work:
No, I don't think so. I think people fully accept the partial roles that good and bad luck play in their lives. Still, the old cliches apply: "Make your own luck," "Turn lemons into lemonade," "Make the most of the cards you're dealt."
I like to view life as a passing conveyor belt loaded with good and bad choices, good opportunities and terrible ideas, nasty surprises and pleasant surprises. But if I come down with cancer, it's bad luck.
As of now, it is mainly used with patients who do not respond to other means, but that may change. One wonders whether, like ECT, it might flick some sort of switch, or push a reset button.
The meaning of your special snowflake life. Your mission. It hearkens back to the time when America's colleges were basically Congregational seminaries with sciences and liberal arts to help produce well-lettered and knowledgeable preachers and professors.
The assumption now, of course, is that the most privileged kids in the world are helpless infants and idiots. The infantilization of college students continues unabated. Meanwhile those who do not attend colleges grow up right away.
I do not know how to account for this trend. "Extended adolescence"? There was a time when college students considered themselves fully-fledged adults, and were viewed that way too. Age 16, or 18 depending on your background, was it.
Regardless of how long the kids and the higher ed administrators conspire to delay it, everybody confronts reality and is forced to grow up eventually. Sippican's sewer line is a good metaphor.
AKAUnstable Personality Disorder. Many in the mental health field prefer to avoid those with overly-intense reactions, unpredictability and volatility of behavior and emotion, especially anger, and frequent depression and unhappiness.
However, oftentimes that doesn't matter because these patients commonly turn on doctors and therapists in transference-like rages, and are gone. Thus the instability of some of their relationships in general.
Some or many such people may have Bipolar spectrum problems - or both.
Over the past six months or so, in our posts about physical fitness, we have always made a distinction between strength training and the other useful activities which build strength minimally or not at all but are more maintenance-oriented and endurance-oriented such as cardio intervals, calisthenics, heavy calisthenics, high-rep weights, isometrics, pliometrics, recreational sports, or mucking out the barn. In other words, activities which use your muscles - or "tone" your muscles, but do not build them.
The latter activities so not require any more protein than one's usual diet.
Strength training is ideally part of any fitness program, but most people don't do much of it because it hurts. I am not talking about "body-building" in the extreme sense, just strength-building. Strength-building entails moving heavy things in order to break down, damage, muscle tissue. Generally-speaking, if you can do more than 12 reps you are doing a warm-up or working on endurance, not so much muscle-building so it's time to raise the weight. The strength-building part occurs during several days afterwards, the recovery phase. As with bone fractures, your body's repair leaves it stronger than it was before you broke it down.
Muscle repair and building requires more protein than the average diet, but probably not a whole lot more. There is a lot of wacky advice out there, but for those who move heavy weight two or three times/week, I think this article is reasonable: Are You Eating Enough Protein To Build Muscle?
The article claims that, for a male, a serious muscle-building program with heavy weight, 2-3 times/week, needs up to 1 gm protein/lb body weight daily. (On average, non-pregnant women have about half the dietary needs of men). It's all approximate, of course. And who knows how many grams of protein there are in my particular hamburger anyway? With a whey powder, you know what you're getting if you like that sort of thing.
(FYI, an average burger has around 20-30 gms, an egg 6 gms, a glass of whole milk about 8 gms. You can Google all food numbers. Whey powder is labeled by gms per scoop.)
Anatomy Tutorial. This is the same as a medical school gross anatomy course, minus the cadaver dissection.
You can see one of their Youtube courses on any part of the body you might be curious about. In the process, you will get the idea of why medical students need to be expert and efficient memorizers. For an example of a med school exam question, "What is the origin and insertion, function, and innervation of the Sartorius muscle?"
It is a sad story, but it is often true that "once the needle goes in, it never comes out." The facts that many succeed in "recovery" is remarkable. Mr. Williamson does not understand the whole of it, though.
For one thing, in every country there is a strong market for opiates. For another, in every country there are illicit entrepreneurs eager to supply it. Demand will never go away. For another, pain meds like Oxy are one of the blessings of modern medicine. Relief of intractable pain whether from metastatic cancer or otherwise, is a gift to patients so there is the good with the bad, as always with everything in life. People using Oxy can be fully functional in work and life.
I have come to believe that "the war on drugs" is pointless. All it does is to drive up prices, and thus drive up crime. That is what prohibition does, every time. Rehab and detox are available everywhere in the US for those who decide to give it a try. I am in favor of some form of medically-monitored drug legalization as exists in England. There will always be addicts in this world, people addicted to all sorts of things besides "substances." People often habitually do what they feel like, even if it is unwise immediate gratification. That is one reason many are disappointed in life. Human nature at its least admirable. There is no fix for that, so it has to be accepted. There are no psycho-utopias other than drugs, romantic/sexual passion, or through God. Just my professional opinion.
However, that is more of a medical view than a moral view.
Some of the article sounds loony (eg Paleo diet, and 1 gallon of milk/day), but much of his advice is good. If you are a scrawny person, or lack adequate muscle development, you might be interested in his advice.
I was a scrawny but able athlete when I began college. The college coaches gave us 60 minutes of weight training 2 days/wk for both of my sports, a half-hour of calisthenics on the off days - not to mention 2 hrs of team practice each weekday. That was usually an hour of drills and an hour of match play. Coach prescribed diets for us to go along with this, very caloric diets high in protein but also high in everything else including ice cream. The results in good weight gain, energy, wholesome appearance, and overall fitness were remarkable. We were young, of course, and adjusted quickly.
The most difficult issue for adults is scrawny, but with a gut. Rx for that is protein and fat, and just enough carbs to function. The human physiology was not developed for our luxurious world of protein and caloric abundance.
Most of the article is of general application for gals or guys, although there is no need for any guy to look as buff and tough as the author. That's more vanity-oriented than functionality, I think, but he says he grew up as a skinny wimp so it's understandable. The critique of cardio is well-taken, because the way most people do it is a waste of time. At the end there is a part specific to women. (Interesting to note that exercising women need half the amount of food that men do.)
Photo from the article of the author's friend Staci before and after putting on 25 good lbs. That is a fit young lady, but she could easily benefit from another 5 or 10 lbs, especially if she wants to bear kids sometime:
The advice obviously does not apply to those who are overweight. That's another matter.
Addictions and other habits were defined as official "disorders" or "diseases" for one main reason: insurance coverage. Today, we see an expansion of behavioral issues labeled as diseases for the same reason. Secondarily, having a disease eliminates moral responsibility, and nobody enjoys taking responsibility for bad behavior. It feels morally, if not heroically, better to be a "survivor" or a "victim."
Interestingly, I do not think I have ever met an addict or ex-addict who considered themselves to be a "victim" of a disease. Basically, the term "disease" is a flexible one to the point that almost everybody can be labeled with one or another, so I do not know whether it matters.
Children need good, strong, reliable, honest, dutiful, demanding parents. It's that simple, and everybody in the world knows that. After that, it's just luck.
How Oliver Sacks put a human face on the science of the mind - The world’s most famous neurologist believed that every patient had a story worth hearing.
Norman Doidge explores the legacy of Oliver Sacks, whose work and life remind us that humanity belongs at the heart of medicine.
A quote:
Oliver Sacks’s legacy was to restore a vision of a humane medicine that drew its power not from technological breakthroughs alone, but through the healing power of the doctor-patient relationship. It had roots in a more old-fashioned view that came in part from his general-practitioner father, who had close relationships with his patients and did frequent house calls. It was a form of care that required an almost unheard-of immersion in the lives of his patients by Dr. Sacks, which allowed him to draw portraits of human beings of an incomparable subtlety and sensitivity, while shedding new light on the mysteries of the brain. He also rejuvenated for us the rich tradition of the case history.
Yet Dr. Sacks’s triumph did not come immediately or without opposition.
“[W]ith little encouragement from my colleagues,” he wrote, “… I became a storyteller at a time when medical narrative was almost extinct. … It was a lonely but deeply satisfying, almost monkish existence that I was to lead for many years.”
It may sound a strange claim, but the detailed case history – which in the 19th century produced some of the finest descriptions of patients ever written – had all but disappeared from the neurology journals when Dr. Sacks started writing, and, even today, it is rare. The great 19th-century neurologists, lacking scans, EEGs, and statistics, perfected their observational skills and the art of talking to patients so as to help them describe how those patients’ mental experiences were altered by their brain problems.
With the advent of modern lab and scanning techniques, these observational and communicative skills atrophied. The journals changed, too. Detailed accounts of individual patients increasingly disappeared, replaced by group studies of “subjects,” described in more abstract, statistical terms, based on their scans and scores on tests. Instead of reporting what was unique about a patient, studies reported what was average about a population. And averages smear out what is unique about individuals.
Full-blown sociopaths are different from you and me, but there is a grey zone of grifters, con artists, manipulators, users, habitual liars, cheaters, hucksters, tricksters, and politicians who can seem to be people who aspire to live lives of integrity, but do not.
Yes, it is fine. Although it looks and can taste carby, it is not. It's a close relative of the tomato but more fibrous. Thus, like tomato and no many vegetables, basically carb-free and nutrition-free, but tasty and fun to eat.
It's a pretty good substitute for carbs, in fact. I like it grilled, sauteed in olive oil, or steamed or sauteed with tomato and summer squash. I can do without eggplant parmesan.
Doesn't it depend on what the meaning of love is? We all have standards and expectations for relationships. Somebody said that romance is chemistry but love is a decision.
It's not really new news, but getting fat at some point in life does seem to alter some physiologic processes for the long term. It seems to retrain the body for a high-caloric life, for a fat life; resets some homeostatic buttons including altering or almost eliminating satiety signals for some period of time.
Yes, it is fine. Although it looks and can taste carby, it is not. It's a close relative of the tomato but more fibrous. Thus, like tomato and no many vegetables, basically carb-free and nutrition-free, but tasty and fun to eat.