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Antibiotics are required to get over sinus infections (without waiting over a month in misery), which I get almost every time I get a cold.

Thank you for so aptly proving my point. Sinus infections are one of the classic overuse scenarios, since in most cases they're viral and thus antibiotics are utterly useless. (Oh, and by the way, you generally can't tell for sure whether you have one of the fairly rare bacterially-driven sinus infections until about 10 days in, at which point most cases are on the verge of clearing up on their own.)

Again, this is something you want instead of something you're against, so you basically just shrug it off, justify your own overuse, deny the well-understood and common-sense notion that antibiotic resistance in humans is driven by antibiotic overconsumption by humans, and ignore the mass of literature that quantifies exactly how serious the problem is getting:

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is recognized as one of the greatest threats to human health worldwide. Just one organism, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), kills more Americans every year than emphysema, HIV/AIDS, Parkinson’s disease and homicide combined.

So -- are we ready to take "one of the greatest threats to human health worldwide" head on, classify antibiotics as a controlled substance, criminalize misuse, and go door to door making sure people aren't taking them on the sly? Yeah, didn't think so. Once again, the current flap over vaccination is an astoundingly hypocritical, transparent excuse for exercising what would otherwise be considered an unacceptable degree of power and control over currently disfavored groups/mindsets.

Haha actually anti vaxxers are left wingers who don't watch Faux News

The anti-vax movement is not politically polarized. Instead, it attracts kooks from both the right and left. It is associated with political extremism regardless of direction. Left-wingnuts see vaccines as a corporate conspiracy. Right-wingnuts see vaccines as a government conspiracy. Moderates on both the left and right vaccinate their kids.

Who would have guessed that the anti-vaxx movement would stand alone as the last bastion of bipartisanship in America? Even pizza has become politicised since the full horror of the pizza-gate scandal was finally exposed by that brave AR-15 wielding citizen.

The anti-vax movement is not politically polarized. Instead, it attracts kooks from both the right and left.

This is the kind of thing that above all must be fought. Conspiracy theories live and thrive because it benefits someone or some group and they are supporting it. It is a method of using lies and manipulation for gaining something, power, money, influence, etc.

Hell in some cases it could be as simple as driving up web traffic. The group or organization doing it may know it will end with many deaths and misery, but they don't honestly care if it accomplishes whatever the goal was.

In short, there are no doubt many people getting rich from an action that will, in time, cause the death of innocent children, while at the same time possibly spawning some kind of cult that carries on with this nonsense.

Haha actually anti vaxxers are left wingers who don't watch Faux News

The anti-vax movement is not politically polarized. Instead, it attracts kooks from both the right and left. It is associated with political extremism regardless of direction. Left-wingnuts see vaccines as a corporate conspiracy. Right-wingnuts see vaccines as a government conspiracy. Moderates on both the left and right vaccinate their kids.

... That is more keeping your synapses free of utterly useless and demented crap.

Only if have enough synapses

You have mental issues "Schizophrenia is a mental disorder where patients have distorted thinking, perception" https://medicalxpress.com/news...

It is fairly trivial to locate studies comparing cancer rates in developed countries with those of people living in more natural environments. one example

It took a while, digging through a few websites, but I finally found something that describes what "mindfulness" actually means. The OP's summary doesn't describe what the main subject matter actully means, which is a signifcant deficiency in any cited article or /. topic.

https://medicalxpress.com/news...

Short answer: it basically means meditation, whether structured or just self-evolved (ie you do it "naturally" as part of your personality or learned behaviour).

It is trivial to find articles and peer reviewed studies that show that the VA is of equivalent quality to hospitals that are not under a single payer system. Single payer systems exist all over the world and consistently cost less and provide better care on average than the current US system.

https://medicalxpress.com/news...
https://link.springer.com/arti...

A quick google brings up https://medicalxpress.com/news... which says neurons transform into stem cells to become cancerous.

Yes, and it's some really neat stuff - research talked about in these articles is fascinating:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
https://medicalxpress.com/news...

And here's a site that lets you experience just one of the ways the brain manufactures some of the detail you perceive: http://www.uniformillusion.com...

A common theme in all of these is that "sight" isn't entirely achieved with our eyes, but our brains get involved very early in the signal processing stage and even make up a lot of info based on what it expects.

Who knows how much of this can be practically applied to things like video compression, but we've already been doing it to a limited degree for years (e.g. x264's psychovisual enhancement setting, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...).

And yet if you weren't around, they wouldn't have been speaking English, would they? It's quite common for a group of people whose native language is $PICK_A_LANGUAGE to switch to English as soon as a single English-speaking person shows up. They aren't doing it to communicate with each other better - they're doing it because a hell of a lot of people whose first language is English simply cannot be arsed to learn a second language, or simply have passed the stage where they CAN learn a second language with any sort of proficiency.

It's a shame, because being able to communicate in two or more languages helps protect against the ravages of Alzheimers

Bilingual people with Alzheimer's outperformed single-language speakers in short- and long-term memory tasks, even though scans showed more severe deterioration in brain metabolism among the bilingual participants, the scientists said.

The ability to speak two languages appears to provide the brain with more resilience to withstand damage from Alzheimer's, said lead researcher Dr. Daniela Perani, a professor of psychology at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan.

The more often a person swapped between two languages during their lifetime, the more capable their brains became of switching to alternate pathways that maintained thinking skills even as Alzheimer's damage accumulated, the researchers found.

Previous studies have shown that lifelong bilingualism can delay the onset of dementia by as much as five years, Perani said. However, no one has yet examined what causes that effect in the brain.

The bilingual people dramatically outscored monolingual speakers on memory tests, scoring three to eight times higher, on average.

Bilingual people achieved these scores even though scans of their brains revealed more signs of cerebral hypometabolism—a characteristic of Alzheimer's in which the brain becomes less efficient at converting glucose into energy.

The brain scans also provided a clue why this might be. People who were bilingual appeared to have better functional connectivity in frontal brain regions, which allowed them to maintain better thinking despite their Alzheimer's, Perani said.

Constantly using two languages appears to make the brain work harder. During a lifetime this causes structural changes to the brain, creating a "neural reserve" that renders the bilingual brain more resistant against aging, Perani said.

Bilingualism also sets up a person for better "neural compensation," in which the brain copes with its own degeneration and loss of neurons by finding alternative pathways through which to function, she said.

Maybe the decreased brain capabilities of unilingual people is a factor contributing to both Brexit and Trumpism? Certainly when people can communicate outside their local linguistic community they have more opportunities to be exposed to new ideas. Plus imagine the money that can be saved by delaying Alzheimers, if you need a financial incentive?

Like taking kids to cancer wards to discourage their smoking, maybe we can take them to old age homes to show the benefits of a second language. Old age homes are depressing enough - we should be doing what we can to delay entry just out of kindness.

Maybe it's time to bring back foreign language training as part of the core curriculum in both countries?

Note that the term Schizophrenic is often wrongly applied to people who merely investigate corruption and have distrust in the powers that be.

Take, for example, this declassified document which lists details of "non-lethal" directed energy weaponry, including the ability to transmit a voice into the head of another individual (V2K, voice to skull).
It uses the microwave auditory effect:

This Heat wave crowd control is maturation of tech listed in document above.

Here we see the weapon fitted for use in LA County Jail.

MEDUSA would apply microwave auditory effect instead of the heat wave.
wiki link

It's difficult to tell the difference between a schizophrenic and someone who is being targeted by government agents for uncovering misappropriation of funds, or evidence of a conspiracy. To dismiss individuals concerns and medicate them for such claims without hearing them out is heinous, yet that is what psychiatrists do. I mean, here's a patent for mind influencing device. Is it really that far fetched? Even when the citizenry has trans-cranial tech that can keep people from speaking? It's safe to assume the government has more advanced tech than this... right?

Sure, there are probably more schizophrenic people than those targeted by their own governments, but I put it to you that it is no longer correct to assume by default that a person hearing voices, having strange sensations, and emotions, etc. is insane. At least LOOK for evidence of manipulation. Often these individuals attempt to present a video of a sweeping AM radio tuned to static which can detect EM interference signals along the nonlethal energy weapon beams (just as you get when you put the radio near a microwave). However, such evidence it is summarily dismissed out of hand and not sought in the least by our medical "professionals" despite the growing complaints and demonstrations of such technology's use. A massive disinformation campaign has been ongoing since the mid 70's to keep the use of such tech against the citizens under wraps, and it is now a widely used tool in anti-extremist / anti-protester response forces.

Just like they were right about the government spying on everyone and even seeing through walls the conspiracy theorists were right about tinfoil hats. Yet, the average person still dismisses even the possibility that some people wearing them aren't crazy.

Who's the one that's brainwashed by media? It just might be the psychiatrists.

From the article: "tumours cannot form in nerve cells". This, of course, is BS that was discredited a couple of years ago: http://m.medicalxpress.com/new... Perhaps we should have a Slashdot discussion on lazy scientists failing to keep up with developments in their own field. If you write without bothering to read, you end up with... well, something like Slashdot...

I can't speak for most people, but from my own perspective I don't see a conflict between "dualism" and objective empirical explanations for all human behavior. :)

From the outside, there is no verifiable reason to believe in anything beyond the (philosophical) atoms that make everything up, but Consciousness isn't about externally verifiable phenomenon. It is about subjective experience..., and while a sufficiently complex network of switches could in theory behave in an externally, verifiably, identical way to a person (i.e. essentially a biological robot), I personally have an "internal" perception of experiencing things consciously.

That seems to leave me with three options:
1) Due to unexplainable and unverifiable mystical-magical emergent properties of the organization of matter, I have a bone fide subjective experience from complex combinations of consciousness-free matter.
2) All matter has inherent consciousness properties and thus everything has a spirit (animism)
3) People are special and have a "soul"

Which of these options you choose to believe is your own business. I hope you can speak about it respectfully with others, not try to compel them to comply with your own opinion, and stand up for your beliefs in the presence of someone else trying to compel you of theirs. Cheers!

+1 for the AC
And since I already posted, 2 questions:

It has been well known for a very long time that unexpected temporal relationships between our actions and sensory impressions do weird things to our perception. Like if you turn off the light and by coincidence a sound goes off outside in the exact same moment. How is this new research so unexpected then?

How does the temporal action-result distortion in this experiment explain anything about "ghost" experiences as they are more commonly described, where the situation created in the experiment does not exist at all? Like the Reinhold Messner story in in another article about the experiment?. Other than there being other ways to induce a similar experience - but I don't believe in ghosts in the first place, so there was never a doubt that this experience can somehow be induced.

So this begs the question - Are we winning the war on drugs yet?

Well, let's see. Looking at the past few decades, the supply of illegal drugs is up, prices are significantly lower, and quality/potency is up, in some cases way up. Source link:

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-09-international-war-illegal-drugs-curb.html

On the other hand, many millions of people have been jailed or otherwise had their lives ruined.

I don't know, even granting that it depends on how you define "winning," it's still kinda hard to see any win here whatsoever.

There is a more in-depth article, titled "Experiencing existential dread? Tylenol may do the trick" and dated April 16, on the medicalexpress website. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-04-experiencing-existential-dread-tylenol.html

"The research, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, found in a series of experiments that participants processed images of men and women in very different ways. When presented with images of men, perceivers tended to rely more on "global" cognitive processing, the mental method in which a person is perceived as a whole. Meanwhile, images of women were more often the subject of "local" cognitive processing, or the objectifying perception of something as an assemblage of its various parts." This was happening with both male and female survey subjects.

As the actual article is behind a paywall, I can't speak with certainty, but from what I can glean from here - it seems like another case of a badly done study.

In a new study that examined our cognitive process in how we perceive men and women, participants saw a fully clothed person from head to knee. After a brief pause, they then saw two new images on their screen: One that was unmodified and contained the original image, the other a slightly modified version of the original image with a sexual body part changed. Participants then quickly indicated which of the two images they had previously seen. They made decisions about entire bodies in some trials and body parts in other trials.

Looking at the photos in the link, the change in the edited photo is rather obvious. Which makes the following part of the results, rather a no-brainer.

Women's sexual body parts were more easily recognized when presented in isolation than when they were presented in the context of their entire bodies.

Zoomed in details more recognizable for deliberate errors, claim scientists.

As for why it wasn't the case with men...
Besides the fact that all we get to work with is "But men's sexual body parts were recognized better when presented in the context of their entire bodies than they were in isolation."
No actual numbers of results so that we can see if any of it is statistically significant OR correctly measured.
I have a nagging feeling that "a sexual body part" on a man's body may be quite... well... flat and unremarkable.
While that same body part on a woman's body is rather... curved and filled out. More detailed.

Which leaves us with a bit of an imbalance regarding the perceptibility of the changes in the details - namely, they may not be enough details to be noticed in the photos of the male upper torso.
How did they control for that?

Now... That's only ONE theory going against the "women are a sum of objects, men are whole persons" hypothesis.
How about the possibility that the humans (male and female) as a species have evolved a stronger reaction to female than to male breasts? As it tends to be our primary source of food very early in life.
No need to pull the "objectification" card to explain that, but it could very likely skew the results of the study.
How did they control for that too?

Where exactly did the "women are a sum of objects, men are whole persons" hypothesis come from?
All I can see them measure is "Do people notice details more on male or on female body?"
The leap from "we notice more details on women than on men" to "we all objectify women" seems to be made entirely out of confirmation bias.

As for them trying to "condition" the subjects to "perceive globally" (explained here, near the end of the article), again, we don't know if that training reduced the perception of details OR increased the recognizability of women "in the context of their whole bodies".
All we know is that now "Women were more easily recognizable in the context of their whole bodies instead of their various sexual body parts."

Were there changes in results with men, too? If the training works there should be SOME change.
Could

I disagree with the grandparent's stance that aesthetic genetic engineering is morally wrong, but he is correct about bringing the rich into this. When a new feature for cars comes out (like anti-lock brakes), the high-end cars get them first. It takes a couple of years for the improvement to trickle down to the rest of us (about 10 years for ABS). Don't be mistaken, it will be the same for designer babies. In fact, I think it has already started. Substitute the word test for the word feature and you can already see the similarity between car features and babies. New tests for fetuses are being developed all the time to find defects and correct issues. There are "experiments" being done right now to "correct" babies with intersex issues.

Economic stratification is becoming an issue in the United States. The paranoid, pessimistic predictions (paranoia and pessimism doesn't automatically make a prediction improbable) see that stratification becoming more pronounced, with a deep divide between the rich and the poor. With fetal engineering, rather than talking about whether or not to get a car with a sunroof, we are talking about how many IQ points we can afford. So the wealthy will not only be richer, but they will be born far beyond what the average person could ever be. The basis of the American Dream is that anyone can make it. Fetal engineering is the death of that dream.

how will the presence of caffeine in our oceans affect human health

Apparently quite positively:
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-07-coffee-consumption-inversely-common-skin.html
What's more disturbing is the presence of all the other chemicals - antibiotics, illegal drugs, mood stabilizers and sex hormones.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-memories-encoded-brains.html

Q&A with the researcher. Bit more detail than GizMag.

http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002421

The paper (gizmag links to it too)

It's interesting that this story appeared on the same day I read an article on brain hyper-connectivity being linked to depression.

It also helps underscore how much basic hygiene and sanitation help in reducing disease.

Roger that, for confirmation see http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-10-mobile-uk-contaminated-fecal-bacteria.html