The Worst People in the World

American Psychological Association Bolstered C.I.A. Torture Program, Report Says

Plausible deniability is the refuge of Sociopaths.

This is sociopaths all the way down.

It's Everywhere

Bankers Are Taking ADHD Medicine to Get Ahead

This is an indication their brains are waning, not some clever voluntary enhancement.
And it makes them more impulsive.  
And they have your money.

Heh

Ladies, you might want to swap the bourbon for a bong 

Alcohol increases intestinal permeability.
Weed reduces it.

So yeah, you might...

Yo Doctors

You might want to think about the consequences of dealing with infected people all day.
And all those powerful aromatic molecules that permeate your environment.
And your frakking low fat diets.


Doctors Throwing Fits

One of the hardest parts of being a nurse is dealing with bullying doctors.

Yo Psychs

How to avoid committing suicide

I was a good college student obsessed with ending my life. What to do when your own brain is out to destroy you?

This is the state of your "science".
The same state it was in in 1937.
You fuckin suck.

A few for you

Madness and Meaning
Andrew Scull shares some pictures from his new history of insanity book.  
I like the images, but after reading his other books, mostly I think his research and conclusions are a result of his own vigorous pathology.

Fat signals control energy levels in the brain

The hypothalamus is a part of the brain known to have important roles in maintaining the body's physiology, including regulating body temperature, sleep cycles, heart rate, blood pressure, thirst and appetite. Mice with low NAMPT in fat tissue had low fuel levels in the hypothalamus. These mice also showed lower measures of physical activity than mice without this defect.

 Sugar and carbs, not physical inactivity, behind surge in obesity, say experts

"Celebrity endorsements of sugary drinks and the association of junk food and sport must end," they declare, adding that health clubs and gyms need to set an example by removing the sale of these products from their premises. "The 'health halo' legitimisation of nutritionally deficient products is misleading and unscientific," they write.Public health messaging has unhelpfully focused on maintaining a 'healthy weight' through calorie counting, but it's the source of the calories that matters, they point out. "Sugar calories promote fat storage and hunger. Fat calories induce fullness or satiation," they write.

Sugary drinks boost risk factors for heart disease, study shows

Beverages sweetened with low, medium and high amounts of high-fructose corn syrup significantly increase risk factors for cardiovascular disease, even when consumed for just two weeks by young, healthy men and women.

Regular consumption of yogurt does not improve health

Coffee protects against breast cancer recurrence, detailed findings confirm
My aunt was specifically told to eliminate it from her diet after treatment.
And eat more frakkin fruits and vegetables.

PTSD common in ICU Survivors
That's expected, because it's not post traumatic stress disorder, it's post sepsis endotoxemia.

Dietary supplements shown to increase cancer risk if taken in excess

One trial exploring the effects of beta-keratin supplements showed that taking more than the recommended dosage increased the risk for developing both lung cancer and heart disease by 20 percent. Folic acid, which was thought to help reduce the number of polyps in a colon, actually increased the number in another trial.

Drinking just 1 or 2 alcoholic drinks a day linked to liver disease
Yes that's because it increases intestinal permeability and allows endotoxin into your bloodstream that poisons your liver trying to filter it out.     And then your fat metabolism goes haywire.

Sorry I've been slacking off on the blog.
I hope what's coming will be worth the wait.

SSDD

Slippery Slope: $ in, Diet Drugs Out, How Five Drugs Came to Market

Makers of diet drugs spent more than $60 million on payments to doctors, organized medicine, and lobbyists to get their drugs approved.

Drive By

Sorry, was super busy last week.   Got that last yard project done though (cutting up a downed saguaro-  those things are massive!).    I will be pulling out my notes and starting writing soon.

Here's a few things that caught my eye-

Difficult to break the soda habit? Sugar-sweetened beverages suppress body's stress response

Drinking sugar-sweetened beverages can suppress the hormone cortisol and stress responses in the brain, but diet beverages sweetened with aspartame do not have the same effect, according to a new study.

People less focused on recurrent bad feelings when taking probiotics


'Plaque Bank' launches a new model for noninvasive disease prediction, treatment

 Scraped from the gums, teeth and tongue in the form of plaque, the researchers behind Canada's first plaque bank are betting that the bacterial content of plaque will open up a new frontier of medicine. By collecting and analyzing plaque samples gathered from the fecund bacterial environment of the mouth, researchers at the newly formed Oral Microbiome and Metagenomics Research Lab (OMMR) at the Faculty of Dentistry argue that plaque can be used can be used to predict, identify and even treat disease.

There's a couple good new scientific articles too...

Sex differences in feeding behavior in rats: the relationship with neuronal activation in the hypothalamus.
Apparently fasting increases orexin activity in female but not male rats.


Orexin receptor 1 signaling contributes to ethanol binge-like drinking: Pharmacological and molecular evidence
This one shows that unlike sugar, ingesting alcohol does not lower orexin levels.
Yeah, that explains a whole lot of things now doesn't it...

Geez Louise

Worker who fell asleep in Alaska Air flight’s cargo hold forces emergency landing

Good Articles

On topic-

The FDA’s phony nutrition science: How Big Food and Agriculture trumps real science — and why the government allows it 

Off topic-

In-flight mystery: Keesler airmen discover source of illness aboard C-130

Read more here: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2015/04/12/4236868/in-flight-mystery-keesler-airmen.html#storylink=cpy

Same as it ever was

The sugar lobby’s sour tactics

 The head of the Sugar Association wrote to the advisory committee to say there was no “proof of cause and effect” linking “ ‘added sugars’ intake with serious disease,” nor any “significant scientific agreement” to justify telling the American public sugar is “a causal factor in a serious disease outcome.” Added Briscoe: “There is not a preponderance of scientific evidence for conclusion statements that link ‘added sugars’ intake to serious disease or negative health outcomes or for a recommendation to limit ‘added sugars’ intake to less than 10% of energy.”

Yes, well that's all about to change.   And then  this sociopath will no longer have that plausible deniability to hide behind. 

 I feel the sugar lobby’s toothache. It seems all kinds of dietary villains are getting off the hook these days. This week came a report in The Post that salt may not be as bad as previously thought. The British Medical Journal reports that saturated fat isn’t really a problem. It’s as if we’ll soon discover, as Woody Allen did in “Sleeper,” that cigarettes are actually good for us.

Heh.   I actually have found quite a few beneficial properties of nicotine.  Especially for infection and sepsis control.

My kind of Gal

The Godmother of American Medicine

In the late 19th century, Mary Putnam Jacobi proved women could be great scientists—after a Harvard professor's discriminatory book claimed otherwise.

Yeah, after a lifetime of observation I have noticed...   Men in positions of authority are really good at forming conclusions about subjects that they haven't actually studied or measured.    Especially on the topic of women.

Let's change that, ladies.

I Cheated

For the Record:

Jack in the Box Tacos are exactly as perfect as I remember.
Nothing else I shouldn't eat ever has been.   It's always disappointing.

But-
After 45 minutes I went into a fist and jaw clenching, fetal position coma for seven hours.
With severe sleep drunkeness afterwards.

Go figure.

Microbial Whak-a-Mole

A Virus In Your Mouth Helps Fight The Flu

Young people infected with a type of herpes virus have a better immune response to the flu vaccine than those not infected, scientists at Stanford University report Wednesday. In mice, the virus directly stops influenza itself.
The findings, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, add to growing evidence that some viruses may help calibrate the immune system. They tell immune cells which pathogens to assault and which ones to leave alone.
Now, we're not talking about a rare virus that only a few people harbor. We're talking about a ubiquitous critter, called cytomegalovirus. About half of all Americans carry it. And so do nearly 100 percent of people in developing countries.

I read Martin Blaser's book Missing Microbes today. (Thanks Jamie!)
He worked on the research for Helicobacter pylori and ulcers.   He's now convinced that HP also modulates immunity and eradicating it via antibiotics is causing all kinds of problems like obesity and asthma.   I'm not sure he's right about a direct link to a lack of HP in modern western society, it's a more general effect of antibiotics, but it's a really good book, he actually covers the history and explains the basics very well.

Fun with Medical History

1,000-year-old onion and garlic eye remedy kills MRSA

The remedy was found in Bald's Leechbook - an old English manuscript containing instructions on various treatments held in the British Library.

Experts from the university's microbiology team recreated the remedy and then tested it on large cultures of MRSA.
In each case, they tested the individual ingredients against the bacteria, as well as the remedy and a control solution. They found the remedy killed up to 90% of MRSA bacteria and believe it is the effect of the recipe rather than one single ingredient.

Dr Freya Harrison said the team thought the eye salve might show a "small amount of antibiotic activity".
"But we were absolutely blown away by just how effective the combination of ingredients was," she said.

Dr Lee said there are many similar medieval books with treatments for what appear to be bacterial infections.
She said this could suggest people were carrying out detailed scientific studies centuries before bacteria were discovered.

Zombie Shopping

Sleeping Beauty

Put some in your head please

Recommendation for vitamin D intake was miscalculated, is far too low, experts say

Researchers are challenging the intake of vitamin D recommended by the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine saying their Recommended Dietary Allowance for vitamin D underestimates the need by a factor of ten.

...
The recommended intake of vitamin D specified by the IOM is 600 IU/day through age 70 years, and 800 IU/day for older ages. "Calculations by us and other researchers have shown that these doses are only about one-tenth those needed to cut incidence of diseases related to vitamin D deficiency," Garland explained.
Robert Heaney, M.D., of Creighton University wrote: "We call for the NAS-IOM and all public health authorities concerned with transmitting accurate nutritional information to the public to designate, as the RDA, a value of approximately 7,000 IU/day from all sources."

Things that make my head screech

I really need to take my own advice and stay off the damn computer.

Crashed Plane’s Co-Pilot “Hid” an “Illness” From Lufthansa, German Prosecutors Say

German prosecutors say that pilot Andreas Lubitz, suspected of intentionally crashing Germanwings Flight 4U 9525, may have hid an "illness" from his "employer and colleagues," while multiple German publications report that he had issues with depression.
Per the BBC, the German tabloid Bild says Lubitz had a "severe depressive episode" in 2009. The paper Der Tagesspiegel reports via a source that Lubitz was being treated for depression at a university clinic in Dusseldorf, and both Bild and another outlet say that a note in his "aviation authority file" recommended regular psychological treatment.

Ummm, I don't think that's the illness that was overlooked...

Could Better Psychological Testing Prevent a Tragedy Like the Germanwings Crash?
No. No. NO. NO. NO.    They caused this, dammit.

Mercy Mercy Mercy

Co-pilot appears to have crashed Germanwings plane on purpose 

Oh oh oh oh oh.    Tic tic tic tic tic.
I will have to stay off the internet and news for a while.

Uh Huh

Repeated use of antibiotics linked to diabetes risk

They found that patients prescribed at least two courses of penicillins, cephalosporines, quinolones and macrolides were at higher risk of being diagnosed with type-2 diabetes. The risk increased with the number of antibiotic courses prescribed.
Patients prescribed 2-5 courses of penicillins increased their risk of diabetes by 8%, while for those with more than five penicillin courses this risk increased by 23%. For quinolones, diabetes risk increased by 15% among patients that were prescribed with 2-5 courses and by 37% for those with more than five courses. The risk was calculated after adjusting for other risk factors such as obesity, smoking history, heart disease and history of infections.

Oh yeah, that is going to come in handy.

They think it's gut bacteria, but that's peripheral to the endotoxemia that alters glucose metabolism and really fuels this cycle.

I've got it figured out.   I do.
There's a couple more weeks until it's too hot to work in the yard, then I will come inside and write it all down in a human understandable format for you guys.

Good Effort

Good article on history of weight loss treatments and how most of them make it worse. 

It’s time to stop telling fat people to become thin. 

It’s hard to think of any other disease where treatment rarely works and most people are blamed for not “recovering.”.

Follow her thesis to it's conclusion:
It's this simple, fat people are sick.

Unfortunately-
Dieting does not address the underlying infection.
But not dieting doesn't either.

SSDD.

Everything Bad is Good Again

Damn I am tired of living in this mirror.

Popular artificial sweetener could lead to new treatments for aggressive cancers

Saccharin, the artificial sweetener that is the main ingredient in Sweet 'N Low, Sweet Twin and Necta, could do far more than just keep our waistlines trim. According to new research, this popular sugar substitute could potentially lead to the development of drugs capable of combating aggressive, difficult-to-treat cancers with fewer side effects.

 The last ten years of my life have been spent unlearning everything I was taught in the first forty.

Sounds Familiar

Profound, debiliating fatigue found to be a major issue for autoimmune disease patients in new national survey

Major findings include:
● Almost all (98 percent) AD patients surveyed report they suffer from fatigue.
● Nine-in-10 (89 percent) say it is a "major issue" for them and six-in-10 (59 percent) say it is "probably the most debilitating symptom of having an AD."
● More than two-thirds (68 percent) say their "fatigue is anything but normal. It is profound and prevents [them] from doing the simplest everyday tasks."
● While nearly nine-in-10 (87 percent) report they have discussed their fatigue with their doctor, six-in 10 (59 percent) say they have not been prescribed or suggested treatment by their doctors.
● Seven-in-10 (70 percent) believe others judge them negatively because of their fatigue.

 I am no longer convinced these are "autoimmune" illnesses.   They are just regular old-fashioned immune responses to infections that aren't being detected.   But nonetheless, fatigue is the primary expected symptom, not some side effect or figment of our imaginations.

According to one AD patient, "It's difficult for other people to understand our ongoing fatigue when it can't be seen by them. It's so hard just trying to get others to really, really understand how very tired you are sometimes -- even our own doctors don't understand. One wonders if even our doctors may think we are for the most part just mental cases and/or whiners."

Uh huh.
98% of patients report this symptom and we're the ones with cognitive problems.
See the matrix.

Problematic Solutions

Really long article on the history of alcoholism treatment.   It's pretty good, but I have chosen a few excerpts that tweaked my brain.

The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous

Nowhere in the field of medicine is treatment less grounded in modern science. A 2012 report by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University compared the current state of addiction medicine to general medicine in the early 1900s, when quacks worked alongside graduates of leading medical schools. The American Medical Association estimates that out of nearly 1 million doctors in the United States, only 582 identify themselves as addiction specialists. (The Columbia report notes that there may be additional doctors who have a subspecialty in addiction.) Most treatment providers carry the credential of addiction counselor or substance-abuse counselor, for which many states require little more than a high-school diploma or a GED. Many counselors are in recovery themselves. The report stated: “The vast majority of people in need of addiction treatment do not receive anything that approximates evidence-based care.”

And yet "Rehab" is subsidized by insurance.   Thus it has proliferated like an invasive weed.

Finland’s treatment model is based in large part on the work of an American neuroscientist named John David Sinclair. I met with Sinclair in Helsinki in early July. He was battling late-stage prostate cancer, and his thick white hair was cropped short in preparation for chemotherapy. Sinclair has researched alcohol’s effects on the brain since his days as an undergraduate at the University of Cincinnati, where he experimented with rats that had been given alcohol for an extended period. Sinclair expected that after several weeks without booze, the rats would lose their desire for it. Instead, when he gave them alcohol again, they went on week-long benders, drinking far more than they ever had before—more, he says, than any rat had ever been shown to drink.

And abstinence the standard protocol.  Welcome to the Hotel California.

Sinclair came to believe that people develop drinking problems through a chemical process: each time they drink, the endorphins released in the brain strengthen certain synapses. The stronger these synapses grow, the more likely the person is to think about, and eventually crave, alcohol—until almost anything can trigger a thirst for booze, and drinking becomes compulsive.

This is absolutely not how it works.  This is not a reward system problem.  Drinking affects your glucose metabolism, and chronic hypoglycemia causes binge intake behavior.

Just notice that, once again, for all the talk about "illness", nobody ever mentions actual disease processes.
There's a reason we drink-  we are chronically infected, and the gastrointestinal effects of alcohol lessen the likelihood and severity of an acute septic episode.  The medium term benefits have historically exceeded the long term consequences...
Alcohol is the reason most of us are alive.

I will have a lot more to say about the causes and effects and costs and benefits of alcoholism in a future rant.   

Brain Eating Zombie of the Day

Hadley Freeman

I had anorexia – but not because I wanted to look like a fashion model

A French plan to ban skinny women from the catwalk ignores the fact that anorexia is an illness. We need to look at the causes not outcomes of self-loathing.

Yes, yes we do.

Eating disorders are the only mental illness that people still assume is caused by something identifiable and external. No sensible person would ask anyone why they became schizophrenic, why they suffer from clinical depression. But eating disorders are different, and this is partly because of the behaviour of those who suffer from them. In the grip of the disorder, your world shrinks to the size of a pinhole: your brain fixates entirely on weight, calories; and, if you’re underweight, being so cold it feels like you have icicles for bones.

Yes, that's called hypothermia.  It's an indication of Endotoxemia- an intensely studied effect of infection and sepsis.
But you don't know that because crazy psychs have convinced the world otherwise.

So why did I stop eating? Because I was unhappy. Because I didn’t know how to express it vocally. Because I didn’t understand I was allowed to respond to my own needs. Because I was scared of growing up. The specific causes of eating disorders are varied, but those factors are pretty common.

They told you that bullshit.   And you believed it.  

Anorexia is a primary symptom of systemic infection.   You were sick.  And insulin resistant. To the point of nausea.
And every doctor and "medical professional" you consulted failed to notice that fact.   
That's why.

You're lucky you got better, not worse.
You are clearly aware of what happens when it gets worse.
Now stop validating the lie and perpetuating the cycle.