Okay, an environmental group based in San Francisco says that 17% of our species are threatened by rising sea levels.
Yeah, I saw “An Inconvenient Truth” when it came out. Al Gore did the best he could but he is not my choice for a scientific spokesman on global warming.
This being said, he had plenty of enthusiasm and seemed to be real. My immediate reaction when I saw the film was “Yeah. This looks like real science.” I mean, when I was in prep school I actually thought Scientific American was more “fun” than “Seventeen”– which my mother of blessed memory actually encouraged me to read, thinking it would somehow make me more socially acceptable or maybe even more “normal.” Read more on Global Warming Is Science Not Politics And It Is Affecting Humans…
Filed under Government, News, politics by on Feb 5th, 2014. Comment. 
Every year, back comes the Super Bowl. It is the closest Americans get to throwing Christians to the lions in a Coliseum.
Of course, since Christians are a majority in our delightful money-worshipping theocracy, we can expurgate the violent tendencies of a beer soaked, unhealthy snack-stuffed populace by throwing two teams of highly paid professional athletes at each other.
The only alternative programming known to me in the media is the Puppy Bowl of the Animal Planet Channel. This is sufficiently important to be covered by Variety, the bible of the entertainment industry. I have an unusually high “cutesy” tolerance, but this canine phenomenon, with its attendant spin-offs and franchises (and extended parodying of professional football) is enough to generate nausea even in me. Read more on Superbowl Every Year…
Filed under Brain Damage, News, Sports by on Feb 3rd, 2014. Comment.
I talk to a great many people in a great many areas and fields. In California, a lot of the mental health treatment programs are having “Obamacare-it is.”
While consumers who tried to use the official website to get enrolled for insurance had their “challenges” – to put it politely – the facilities expected to treat patients are having to do some major adjustments.
If you aren’t aware (especially you, Rip Van Winkle), “Obamacare” is what people lovingly call The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).
I use the term “Lovingly Call” in the same manner people called homeless camps during the Great Depression “Hoovervilles” – blaming President Herbert Hoover for ruining the US economy and leading to the stock market crash. Many feel Pres. Obama has done something similar to health care. Read more on Dual Diagnosis Should Not Be A Reason To Refuse Treatment…
Filed under Alternative Medicine, Government, News, politics by on Jan 31st, 2014. 2 Comments.
Huffing
Whatever job I take, my husband says I basically function as a teacher. There probably is some truth in this, and I seem to be forever reminding people that the verb “doceo,” the Latin verb “to teach,” is the word that the English language word “doctor” comes from.
Most of us doctors have little time for the teaching function. This is not exactly what insurance pays for. The internet is an explosion of information that absolutely dwarfs the ancient library at Alexandria. Although I wish more people would be more aggressive about finding and using that information, I understand there is so much information that people don’t know who to believe.
That is the place where people should bombard their doctors with information they want clarified. Read more on Huffing…
Filed under Addictions, Doctors, News, Substance Abuse by on Jan 28th, 2014. Comment.
It gets pretty evident pretty fast, to any psychiatrist who deals with the general public, that depression is daily bread. I mean, with current estimates at 19 million patients per year coming down with a depression — even with less than one half of them seeking treatment — it is a pretty sure bet that depressed people are common.
This in no way diminishes the anguish I have seen in patients having that disease. The anguish is real and dramatic.
I remember one of my earlier newspaper columns written for the Wichita Eagle-Beacon — the largest daily newspaper in Kansas — asking this simple question:
Why — when someone broke their leg — a salt-of-the-earth next-door neighbor would never fail to bake a pie. But when someone had a depression, nobody would bake anything.
The depressed person was basically treated like someone with a contagious disease. Read more on Why Some Get Depressed And Some Do Not…
Filed under depression, Mental Illness, Psychiatrists by on Jan 24th, 2014. Comment.
Some rumors are bouncing around and I’ve already made announcements to my inner circle of newsletter subscribers, but now it’s time to make it public –
I’ve moved and changed. This is nothing new. Those who have known me for years and those who have read my CV (that’s a fancy academic word for resume’) know that I’m always seeking new things and especially trying to pin down the truth. Read more on Don’t Be Surprised…
Filed under News by on Jan 24th, 2014. Comment.
Polystyrene foam has been around for a long time; I mean, it is part of my early educational life and memories. The most popular brand-name for this material is Styrofoam ™.
I cannot say for sure whether it was officially my first science fair, although it might have been. My parents, ever since they actually purchased retail a book entitled “1001 things you can get free,” got me free samples from some representative of the oil industry of, well, oil in various stages of refinement.
They usually tried to write or rewrite my school projects to make them “better,” and wrenching things away from them was virtually impossible, and they did “help” with my descriptions and diagrams of the “cracking” process. Of course, I had memorized articles from every encyclopedia I could get my hands on. This was my standard modus operandi for pretty much everything in those days. Read more on Save Us From Styrofoam Already…
Filed under Government, News by on Jan 23rd, 2014. Comment.
I was in college when I convinced my parents to let me spend a hunk of my Christmas vacation with my girlfriend Susan and her family in Bucks County, PA. I assured my folks that we would do a lot of cultural and intellectual kinds of things. We would go to the symphony, where I could see Eugene Ormandy conduct some Tchaikovsky. We would do the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall — great because I loved the Founding fathers so.
I bought a little gold plated Liberty Bell, which I so loved that I wore it around my neck for many years when the gold plating had long worn off.
Her father, a design engineer, loved making toy soldier models which My-Father-Of-Blessed-Memory loved collecting. Susan’s father had told her to tell me I would bring home a new soldier for my father — that clinched the deal for sure. Read more on Don’t Eat The Blue Stuff — Or Yellow Either!…
Filed under News, Nutrition by on Nov 21st, 2013. Comment.
The Tower Hill School in Delaware is considered top of the rank of independent schools in Delaware. Maybe, some say, the best private college prep in the United States.
Their website looks a lot like the website for my old prep school — Beaver Country Day School For Young Ladies, Chestnut Hill, MA.
Yes, in the days of the class of 1969, it was girls only, and was almost a relic of bygone days, with mixers (with boys’ prep schools) where an effort was still made to keep couples a certain distance apart. I was one of the early token Jews in a system where all visible human skin was the color of a bleached aspirin tablet. Read more on School Sex Scandals Among The Rich And Powerful…
Filed under Education, Family, News by on Nov 21st, 2013. Comment.
I was wearing my best pastel multicolor weave suit as I walked up the stairs of a drab gray Victorian mansion converted into a medical office on the outskirts of large mid-western city. It was a bit cool, early spring, and I had been through all of the other principal personalities in a fairly large and well respected neurosurgery department. The emeritus chief of the department — older, semi-retired, wrote hunks of textbooks about 20 years before; was the last one I had to see. Although nobody seemed wildly excited, I had “passed” the interviews to make it this far.
The Victorian mansion was the office building of the neurosurgical group that was the residency faculty. I was ushered into a richly furnished Victorian style office with antimacassars and gigantic velvet wing-backed chairs.
The father-to-us-all type neurosurgeon spent over five minutes asking me about France and my passion for the brain before asking me if my period gave me any problems. Read more on Women In Science Sore And Soar…
Filed under Education, Government, medicine, News by on Nov 20th, 2013. Comment.