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You may want to consider the fact that advice is often given for no other reason other than to check a box in the legal liability category.

I'm not sure if you're trolling or if you really believe that the vast majority of doctors actually want their patients to remain fat and unhealthy. If the latter, that's a pretty twisted worldview.

Ethics have become irrelevant in business because of Greed. The Medical Industrial Complex is no exception to this rule. In fact, they are more of an example. The world is twisted, but Capitalistic Greed is downright fucked. Doctors don't have to worry about the majority of their patients being fat and unhealthy. That happens naturally in a society where marketing poisonous food is the norm. Their advice to maintain a healthy weight to avoid ailments like diabetes is heard about as well as a whisper in a jet engine factory. My point is more centered around the fact that doctors are trained to throw a perpetual and profitable treatment at ailments first and foremost. Cures are not profitable in the long term. Treatments are.

Where have these "watershed" studies been hiding all these years?

They haven't been hiding. People who don't live their lives viewing the world through conspiracy goggles have been aware of them for a long time. For example, it took me about 38 seconds to pull up this study from 2008 that surveyed other studies from as far back as 1966. The take-home:

Results of these studies indicated that intentional weight loss reduces the risk of developing diabetes in the long term and those participants with T2DM often have reduced clinical symptoms and mortality risk.

Hard to label this a conspiracy when there's $375 billion a year pouring in as evidence. I also noticed the take-home avoided using the word "cure" at all costs, because that might cause irreparable damage to current and future revenue streams. My previous point stands regarding how our white-coat healers are trained, and why 50-year old studies rife with common sense but lacking in perpetual revenue streams are often ignored.

You may want to consider the fact that advice is often given for no other reason other than to check a box in the legal liability category.

I'm not sure if you're trolling or if you really believe that the vast majority of doctors actually want their patients to remain fat and unhealthy. If the latter, that's a pretty twisted worldview.

Where have these "watershed" studies been hiding all these years?

They haven't been hiding. People who don't live their lives viewing the world through conspiracy goggles have been aware of them for a long time. For example, it took me about 38 seconds to pull up this study from 2008 that surveyed other studies from as far back as 1966. The take-home:

Results of these studies indicated that intentional weight loss reduces the risk of developing diabetes in the long term and those participants with T2DM often have reduced clinical symptoms and mortality risk.

This actually was the case for another patient. They lost a poker bet and had to tattoo DNR on their chest. Discovered during intake for leg amputation, patient clarified "he indicated that he would want resuscitative efforts initiated in the event of a cardiac or respiratory arrest."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Estimates of neuronal numbers -- the product of neuronal thickness times density -- were 13% higher in males than in females, with mean male-to-female ratios of 1.13 in both hemispheres. The data provide morphologic evidence of considerable cerebral cortical dimorphism with the demonstration of significantly higher neuronal densities and neuronal number estimates in males, though with similar mean cortical thickness, implying a reciprocal increase in neuropil/neuronal processes in the female cortex.

I'd take a wild guess that these swabs are passed to someone for molecular studies, as culture based studies fail to grow 99%+ of the microbes on Earth, so that suggests that they've already managed to get something like 16S rRNA sequencing done. That would imply core physiology which is consistent with Terrestrial life.

The ISS skims the Earth's atmosphere and we know that microbes have been isolated from the mesosphere, which Wiki says runs up to ~100 Km high, and the ISS orbits at ~400 Km inside the thermosphere. I'm not going to pretend to know all about the upper atmosphere but I'll take a wild guess that a microbe further down somehow got carried higher. If I've learnt one thing about microbes it's that they get freaking everywhere, especially the places you don't expect.

I've not used a MinION but other machines take less than a day to several days depending on what you're doing. I think the MinION is meant to be at the faster end of things.

The talk these days is about suicide prevention.

So basically trying to figure out how to dial back the behavior you prompted in the first place. I guess that could be considered "innovative" -- but if so, then so would just nuking social media and letting humans get back to being human.

Face recognition seems like a cool thing to do from an average user point of view. Fake news is supposedly fixed or reduced now. Shadow profiles and user tracking may rival some three letter agencies.

Sorry, when I read "do X or you won't see innovation again" I parsed "innovation" as something I might really want and/or need.

Alphabet innovation these days include many changes in YouTube: not paying out to copyright holders, messing with the kids, and infuriating content creators and advertisers at the same time.

I think you may have forgotten a few minor things like providing Internet access to poor/devastated regions, building hyper-efficient wind power generators, and other work of the Moonshot Factory.

You do realize that this makes no sense at all.

Of course it does. I've taken 3,000mg a day of oxycodone. 80mg can be lethal, so a daily dose that left me acting normal would have killed 37 people, and if I had tried to dose recreationally, you could easily triple that.

Take it up with these folks. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

That study has little to do with what I was talking about, it's just saying that tolerance develops. Yeah maybe after a decade you need an actual tolerance break; that's fine.

Depending of course on the person, you can reach your tolerance quickly.

If by quickly you mean years, ok. Talking about actual ceiling tolerance to full agonists though, not reaching the arbitrary limit of the current doctor or hospital.

Last time I had to take opioids (Broken Ankle) I reached my limit while still in the hospital, to the point where I refused to take any more. I took a lot of crap from the nurses eventually a doctor coming to give me hell because I refused to use that damn machine to self administer. And as soon as I got home, I just took NSAIDS. Sorry, don't care for the nausea and sweats and constipation.

Fantastic! On the other hand, there's people who will never be able to get out of bed without a lot of opiates. (And acute pain like yours and more serious and chronic issues are entirely different things; I have no problem admitting opioids were overused for minor injuries where they weren't needed).

My whole point is that we need to develop something else that doesn't have the issues. Decreased intestinal motility is a real pain in the ass, and the depression in respiration is a real problem with people at or near their limits, and withdrawal is also an issue. I don't have an issue with the short term euphoria, but that's probably half of what gets people addicted in the first place.

There's a lot of development of opiates that don't produce tolerance and dependence, none have worked so far. Discovering a whole new class that's a complete substitute is something to hope for in centuries, not any time soon. Right now it's fundamentally impossible. The decreased intestinal motility is entirely manageable. And dangerous respiratory depression is exclusively a problem of abusing opiates, not taking them as directed. Not to mention that no, it's not a problem for people 'near their limit', since a) there is no limit (medically, policy will limit it for non-medical reasons in all but palliative care for the soon departing), and b) tolerance to respiratory depression increases, not decreases, and after a certain point, it's physically impossible to overdose on opiates alone.

Something that relieves pain without the side effects is what I'm asking for.

You might be able to avoid the tolerance and dependence, but the abuse potential is not going away since fundamentally, we don't know how to stop some pain without just cutting the whole spinal cord (and then theres pain that originates in the brain which is even tougher). But with the former, there's research ongoing. Most has failed; in the mean time, we have to work with what we've got.

You can safely take enough opiates in a day to kill a theater full of people with little ill effect.

You do realize that this makes no sense at all.

It's also factually incorrect to assert they work in only the short term.

Take it up with these folks. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... Depending of course on the person, you can reach your tolerance quickly. Regardless, I reach mine very quickly. Last time I had to take opioids (Broken Ankle) I reached my limit while still in the hospital, to the point where I refused to take any more. I took a lot of crap from the nurses eventually a doctor coming to give me hell because I refused to use that damn machine to self administer. And as soon as I got home, I just took NSAIDS. Sorry, don't care for the nausea and sweats and constipation.

While it's true they don't work for all chronic pain conditions, there are a substantial number of conditions where opioids offer the only prospect of relief.

My whole point is that we need to develop something else that doesn't have the issues. Decreased intestinal motility is a real pain in the ass, and the depression in respiration is a real problem with people at or near their limits, and withdrawal is also an issue. I don't have an issue with the short term euphoria, but that's probably half of what gets people addicted in the first place.

Development of addiction (which is not dependence) is also a medical issue, and in the uncommon case it does develop in a patient, be it by accident or because it's someone predisposed to drugs, is best addressed within the medical system as well. Cutting them off to either painfully detox and live in agony, or turn to black markets, is counterproductive and is responsible for the spike in ODs.

Not certain if you just want to disagree or what. I'm not against effective pain killers. And I'm not at all in favor of how the system is working. I suspect that a lot of people who become addicted turn to the more nasty forms of opioids after being shut off by the medical system. They are either still in pain, or addicted to that euphoric rush.

Something that relieves pain without the side effects is what I'm asking for. Yeah I know it's fashionable to hate on opiates, but please know what you're talking about instead of repeating what the DEA and its mouthpiece the CDC are saying that runs counter to medical knowledge.

> This is the problem with using life expectancy or other statistical summary averages ---- SOME people still die, and nobody wants that person to be themselves or one of their friends or loved ones; that might be 1 death out of 1000, but it STILL MATTERS to that person and to their community.

One person saved by spending the $X relocating them matters, of course.
The two people who COULD have been saved by using that money to clean up the radiation more thoroughly instead also matter.
The 30 people who could have been saved by spending that money on traffic safety matter still more.

We have a certain amount of resources, a budget. If we have $10 billion to spend on making people safer, we then have to decide which safety projects to fund, with how much going to each project. We can't fund everything that seems like it might save some lives. Some we we wouldn't want to fund even if we had unlimited money - taking people away from their homes and communities disrupts their lives, and permanently moving people who weren't all that close to Chernobyl was worse for them than leaving them alone would have been. The strongest radioactive material released had a half-life of only eight days, so while a two-week temporary evacuation probably made sense, permanently uprooting the people in the outer perimeter was bad for them, overall.

Anway, let's consider projects that WOULD be good for people. With research, we find that some safety measures are far more effective than others, and some are far more expensive than others:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m...

To save the most lives in total we want to mostly fund projects which save a lot of lives per resource spent (we measure resources in dollars, for convenience).

The J-value used in the nuclear paper takes it a step further by also considering *quality* of life. At Chernobyl, fourteen years after the accident thousands of people were still awaiting the new homes they were promised. Many people would have been better off staying put rather than being forced to leave their communities and spend a decade or more as refugees.

Liquid brines are not only plausible under Martian conditions, they have been reproduced experimentally.

Given the presence of large amounts of calcium perchlorate (eutectic point -74C), there are almost certainly liquid reservoirs of brine somewhere on Mars, the only question is how big they are and where/when they are exposed to the surface.

Cannabis doesn't cause insanity.

Not entirely accurate. Some people experience a brief disturbance during use, and there are some long-term risks.

There actually is evidence for a causal link between cannabis use and psychotic disorders, although the risk factor is not that high. I.e., much lower than the risk of lung cancer from smoking.

Of course, Anslinger wouldn't have had this evidence when he made his original, outlandish claims. That was legitimate bullshit; at best, the broken clock was right for a second.

Reference https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

I don't know, perhaps you're translating from metric and losing a digit?

Yes. I'm translanting from metric ... On the US Department of Health and Human Services website.

You pay taxes to allow you to educate yourself. You should take advantage of that privilage:
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/heal...

And remember, the healthiest people are in the range from the upper part of normal, to "overweight." The category titles are based on the fashion industry, not the health studies

Okay I get it, you're one of those fat lards on Tumblr who shame healthy people and think "fat is beautiful" and "if I love myself it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks". That's really the only way you can self justify going against every medical professional advice.

By the way, being on the upper end of BMI is only healthy if you're on the lower end of body fat. But I'm sure you have some misguided belief that that is driven entirely by the sports industry.

They adjusted down the range of BMI which qualified you as overweight or obese.

I don't mind that they're doing this to encourage people to stay in a healthy range as they collect new data. I just wish there was a way the could do it without redefining what certain words mean.

Millions more ARE sick.Frankly, pretty much EVERYONE is sick. They might be slender athletes... but look at their Leptin resistance, and you'll see that they are basically "fatasses" too, who are just starving themselves more. Their energy homeostasis is just as much ruined.

But obviously, "solving" it with prescriptions is as stupid as taking painkillers while continuing to run, head-first, into the wall. Especially if the symptoms are only concealed as long as you pay.

This was the most useful piece of info I ever read on the subject.
(Including the article it accompanies.)

Nutrition table overview (Diets of various tribes and their health.)
Assuming honesty... this makes it blatantly obvious what the problem in.

It's not fat. It’s not even carbs per se. But it' definitely something correlating with short acellular carbs.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3402009/
One thing still needs to be clarified though. As e.g. the Kitavans also cook their starchy taro roots for a long time. So they should be no better/worse than our potatoes. Yet the Kitavans are healthy. ... So what's different? Maybe our mass-produced potatoes are merely just bags of mostly starch and water, and the taro roots contain much higher quantities of micronutrients. Maybe some other ingredients.
I wish I could do a simple difference analysis. E.g. with people from Peru, who eat lots of potatoes which still are very rich in micronutrients.

> We used to routinely institutionalize people with mental problems that radically interfere with their ability to function socially.

The fates of the mentally ill have varied throughout time, throughout cultures. I'm not comparing you to a Nazi, so I think I'm not "Godwin-ing" myself. But I will point out that during the Nazi genocides of WW II, Germany was cleared of almost all schizophrenics by murdering them. See the NIH publication at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... . There have been other terrible abuses in many cultures, including some US abuses.

> We have to make psychiatry into enough of a real science that homicidal behavior can be predicted and treated.

I very much agree with your goal. The way to that goal is littered with a dangerous minefield of patient rights, confidentiality, and of false positives. Of those who are depressed, suffer from PTSD, or participate in gang crimes, how many of them commit homicide? Can they be held against their will when the odds of their committing homicide are measurably higher than normal, but not above some arbitrary threshold? Whatever that threshold, how many false positives will be imprisoned, at taxpayer expense? How will incarceration affect their likelihood to commit homicide _in the facility_ that they'd not have committed outside the facility?

Bullshit: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

DNS-and-BIND blathered:

Phonics was discredited decades ago as boring and dull for children. They weren't learning, especially most disadvantaged children in our inner cities. We needed an approach that they could excel at.

Oh, really? Perhaps you should tell that to the National Institute of Health, because their 2000 article on the report of the Congressionally-mandated, independent National Reading Panel concludes exactly the opposite. Or, if you require training wheels, you'll have an easier time of it with PBS's summary of the panel's major findings.

But, since you have such a well-documented contempt for all things USA, you might be more comfortable referring to the Australian state of New South Wales Department of Education and Training's Literacy Teaching Guide: Phonics, instead. Or, given your general dismissal of governments as oppressors, it's possible that a private corporation that has spent decades focusing on primary-level educational materials like Scholastic.com's Parent & Child Magazine could seem more credible to you.

Or, alternatively, you could just read the Wikipedia page on phonics, which not only explains what phonics is and how it works, but goes into the history and controversy of phonics, especially phonics vs. whole language, not only in the USA, but in Australia, Great Britain, and Canada, as well.

There're plenty of other resources available to support the view that phonics (and its sister technique phonemics - you really need to use them in combination with each other for best results), in conjunction with primer material that is actually interesting, is the most effective strategy for teaching new readers.

And I'm sure you don't care, but my own, anecdotal experience is all the evidence I require. You see, when I was expelled from first grade for being disruptive (due to not having been diagnosed as being nearsighted to the point that I was legally blind), my mother undertook to teach me to read at home. In less than a month, I went from not even knowing the alphabet to reading at an eighth-grade level. Much of that was due to her using the phonics+phonemics approach, a roughly equal part can be credited to her choice of Dr. Suess, rather than the achingly-dull Dick and Jane books, as my primer. (When we exhausted his catalogue, she introduced me to the Reader's Digest, instead.) Within 30 days, from a standing start, I had read my first Tom Swift, Jr. novel, and embarked on a lifelong love affair with reading - especially science fiction, but also history, biographies, science and technology, and, as Robert A. Heinlein put it, "words in a line" in general.

So, please, by all means, pray continue to explain how phonics has been "discredited" for decades. You ignorance of the subject is simply fascinating.

Wait, what's the antonym for "fascinating" ... ?

I just picked the first link in my search results. If you had bothered to look at the data you'd have seen the research is solid and peer reviewed. As someone who has greatly benefited from this research I'll take my own results over your snark.

Please explain exactly how you catch a ball.

Much the same way my dog catches a ball, and yet we're aren't terrified of our prospective canine overlords.

Please explain how you managed to survive long enough to have the ability to post that remark without being able to think your way out of a wet paper bag.

No, on second thought, don't bother. We all know the answer already. You've become trapped in a shallow, knee-jerk dopamine loop of petty social one-upsmanship, where the key to obtaining your small, regular dopamine hit is to never write any remark beyond Twitter scale (the scale of Twitter as presented to its user base, as opposed to its engineers).

With your head bowed toward your phone, you just wandered out onto an eight-lane autobahn where sharp-tongued assholes such as myself are gathering to debate whether mathematical wunderkind Stephen Hawking is full of shit. And there you are, in the middle of a hostile expressway you barely noticed, armed with a short little dagger made of entirelymissingthepointium.

At present, the intelligence that terrifies humans is uniquely our own, especially once amplified to the next level.

Vonnegut spent the last half of his writing career explicitly advancing the hypothesis that the human brain was already far too big for our own good (his sentiment about this is probably brewing in his earlier works, as well).

Correlation is not causation, but the human cognitive fixation on narrative (aka story), which is largely congruent to explanation, seems to function as some kind of potent social steroid, making the human species qualitatively different than any species that's come before. Turns out, explanation has a shocking range of scale, from milliseconds of flighty dopamine, all the way to a decade of steady serotonin.

It's starts at "face your palm toward the ball at a position where the ball will soon arrive, with your fingers outstretched, and then contract your fingers when the ball arrives", but doesn't end here:

Catching fly balls: a simulation study of the Chapman strategy

Catching a baseball. American Journal of Physics, 36, 868-870] showed that a catcher may be guided to the landing spot of a fly ball by zeroing out its optical acceleration. Subsequently, various studies have provided evidence for what is now known as the Chapman strategy. However, in those studies the catcher's own acceleration and the visuo-motor delay were ignored.

This raises the question whether the Chapman strategy still provides an accurate description if those factors are taken into account.

To address this question, we implemented the Chapman strategy in a forward dynamical model of the catcher's locomotion in relation to the ball's actual trajectory.

Numerical simulations of the model revealed that catching performance was still successful under a broad range of ball trajectories. Furthermore, the model simulations largely reproduced the real running paths reported by McLeod and Dienes [McLeod, P., & Dienes, Z. (1996).

Do fielders know where to go to catch the ball or only how to get there?

Paradoxical pop-ups: Why are they difficult to catch?

For extra credit, explain explanation.

Concern over where we're headed in the near term is far from fear mongering.

Twitter and Facebook have already managed to accelerate our political discourse, until it's a full time job just to keep up.

I didn't completely get this until just this weekend, and I had the Asia trip (pretty please, don't nuke the planet!), stacked on top of the Texas shooting (and the "good man with a gun" fairy spin, who was nevertheless—by my count—about twenty deaths late to the party), stacked on top of the Paradise Papers (a mere 13.4 million documents), stacked on top of the V

Children tend to have a hard time distinguishing fantasy from reality. Usually they mistake unreal things for real but occasionally they mistake real things for unreal. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

However, that isn't the only problem here. There is also the problem of being exposed to and having to deal with the very idea of violence and physical harm. To you or me, we are probably desensitized to such an idea. People die every day and we know it. A child hasn't processed this kind of reality and the first time they do process it, it will be hard even if they know it is unreal. This is because, they still have to address in their minds that it can happen in reality.

It's funny how when you disagree with him, you try to say that he's sexist, but not that he's wrong. So many people have this mental shortcut that leaps from from X is _ist to X is wrong and there appears to be no attempt to consult with reality to see what is or isn't the case. This may surprise you, but there's nothing that prevents reality from being uncomfortable.

If you're going to dispute him, you should actually argue against his sources. I find it weird that you left the sources out of your quotes, almost as if they were invisible to you, though I will give you credit for linking to his Twitter. Here they are the same quotes, with sources, in context -

"Canâ(TM)t we all just agree that women having more sexual capital than men has its positives and negatives?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_capital

"Feminist women are more masculine than average, which may explain why most women don't identify as feminists:"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4158978/

And here's the quote you left off of that image:

"One dimensional models of group âoeoppressionâ are only useful for twisting reality to fit political agendas, not for understanding/improving."

Did you not realize that he's criticizing that image for being one-dimensional, rather than supporting its message?

ackshually there are a host of negative effects of light pollution.

HPV causes a lot of things (various isotypes are responsible for warts, most head and neck cancer, penile cancer); it is also the (99.7% of the time) cause of cervical cancer. HPV vaccination has been shown to prevent cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) and carcinoma in situ, the precursor lesions to invasive cervical cancer, in large randomized trials. The current 9-valent HPV vaccine is 97% effective in preventing CIN 2 (moderate) and more severe disease (CIN 3, carcinoma in situ). It also prevents the vaginal equivalent (VIN2/3) - 100% effective, in fact, among HPV naive populations, and 62% among the overall population.

Current cervical cancer prevention strategy involves Pap smears and then biopsies and surgical intervention when we find abnormalities. It's not cheap, and involves women (best case) getting an exam they don't like every 3 years from 21-29 years of age, and every 5 years from age 30-65 years of age. In the worst case, in areas and among populations that don't get Pap screening, people either can try to get to "screen and treat" centers (where we use liquid nitrogen to spots that show up on a cervix swabbed with vinegar), or, more often, simply consign a percentage of women to a miserable death. Cervical cancer is common (17.8 per 100k in countries without screening, with 9.8 of those dying), which amounts to about 266,000 deaths per year. In developed countries, cervical cancer is the eleventh most common type of cancer and ninth most common cause of cancer mortality (3.3 per 100k). In the US, that amounts of 13,000 cases per year, and 4100 deaths.

It stands to reason that HPV vaccine, since it prevents in HPV infection, and advanced pre-cancerous lesions, will likely be shown to prevent incident cancer as well when the vaccine has been around long enough. (The vaccine was first licenses in June 2006; most women get colonized with HPV around sexual debut but the cancer doesn't show up until age 35-55, a 20-40 year delay.) The tragedy of the vaccine, if any, is that it is largely available only in developed countries, where most people can get treatment rather than dying from the disease. That's not nothing: ask any woman who has to have repeated colposcopies and LEEP surgery if she would have preferred to have gotten 2 shots around age 11 and skipped all of the attended pain, expense, and risk of later preterm labor.

In fact, with the introduction of widespread HPV vaccination in the United States proposals are already afloat to change Pap screening—one proposal suggests every 10 year screening for vaccinated persons. Despite the expense of the vaccine ($240 for the two shot series) it's likely to be cheaper and less cruel than the current state of the art.

You are free to consider Gardasil to be a "scare tactic." As a family physician who gets to follow up on plenty of abnormal Paps, and not a particular fan of the pharmaceutical companies, my kids are getting vaccinated

HPV causes a lot of things (various isotypes are responsible for warts, most head and neck cancer, penile cancer); it is also the (99.7% of the time) cause of cervical cancer. HPV vaccination has been shown to prevent cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) and carcinoma in situ, the precursor lesions to invasive cervical cancer, in large randomized trials. The current 9-valent HPV vaccine is 97% effective in preventing CIN 2 (moderate) and more severe disease (CIN 3, carcinoma in situ). It also prevents the vaginal equivalent (VIN2/3) - 100% effective, in fact, among HPV naive populations, and 62% among the overall population.

Current cervical cancer prevention strategy involves Pap smears and then biopsies and surgical intervention when we find abnormalities. It's not cheap, and involves women (best case) getting an exam they don't like every 3 years from 21-29 years of age, and every 5 years from age 30-65 years of age. In the worst case, in areas and among populations that don't get Pap screening, people either can try to get to "screen and treat" centers (where we use liquid nitrogen to spots that show up on a cervix swabbed with vinegar), or, more often, simply consign a percentage of women to a miserable death. Cervical cancer is common (17.8 per 100k in countries without screening, with 9.8 of those dying), which amounts to about 266,000 deaths per year. In developed countries, cervical cancer is the eleventh most common type of cancer and ninth most common cause of cancer mortality (3.3 per 100k). In the US, that amounts of 13,000 cases per year, and 4100 deaths.

It stands to reason that HPV vaccine, since it prevents in HPV infection, and advanced pre-cancerous lesions, will likely be shown to prevent incident cancer as well when the vaccine has been around long enough. (The vaccine was first licenses in June 2006; most women get colonized with HPV around sexual debut but the cancer doesn't show up until age 35-55, a 20-40 year delay.) The tragedy of the vaccine, if any, is that it is largely available only in developed countries, where most people can get treatment rather than dying from the disease. That's not nothing: ask any woman who has to have repeated colposcopies and LEEP surgery if she would have preferred to have gotten 2 shots around age 11 and skipped all of the attended pain, expense, and risk of later preterm labor.

In fact, with the introduction of widespread HPV vaccination in the United States proposals are already afloat to change Pap screening—one proposal suggests every 10 year screening for vaccinated persons. Despite the expense of the vaccine ($240 for the two shot series) it's likely to be cheaper and less cruel than the current state of the art.

You are free to consider Gardasil to be a "scare tactic." As a family physician who gets to follow up on plenty of abnormal Paps, and not a particular fan of the pharmaceutical companies, my kids are getting vaccinated

Before population studies on smoking, we had 'samples of one'. Many, many samples. For many centuries.

Then came the studies -- a bit like we have here and now. Then rebuttals. Cries for more research. And so forth. All the while, exposure grew, until the sheer mass of statistics made the problem undeniable.

Now, of course we 'know' smoking causes some cancer. Did it cause Joe Sixpack's individual case of lung cancer? Joe may say so. No one can prove it with absolute certainty. It's an educated guess. But it's probable.

And so it is with this guy's friend. Like Joe, the farmer is probably right that his cancer was triggered by farm chemicals. The research is there. It may not yet have the same amount of community acceptance Joe's assertions do. Just give it time.

Before population studies on smoking, we had 'samples of one'. Many, many samples. For many centuries.

Then came the studies -- a bit like we have here and now. Then rebuttals. Cries for more research. And so forth. All the while, exposure grew, until the sheer mass of statistics made the problem undeniable.

Now, of course we 'know' smoking causes some cancer. Did it cause Joe Sixpack's individual case of lung cancer? Joe may say so. No one can prove it with absolute certainty. It's an educated guess. But it's probable.

And so it is with this guy's friend. Like Joe, the farmer is probably right that his cancer was triggered by farm chemicals. The research is there. It may not yet have the same amount of community acceptance Joe's assertions do. Just give it time.

"Wikipedia is NOT a good place to cite "evidence" relating to scientific health studies"

You're quite right. But it's a start, and better than the post I was referring to, which only stated that "Except the evidence shows that it doesn't." without attempting to provide some backup.

Is this a bit more reliable:
https://tools.niehs.nih.gov/sr...

I'm not going to go chapter and verse on the literature, I believe that the precautionary principle should apply - organophosphates can cause serious problems in humans in certain studied doses, but the effects of micro-doses are un-tested and therefore unknown. The post I was referring to claimed that micro-exposure wasn't a problem. "Taking small amounts of most types of poison won't poison you a little bit. Usually it does nothing."

I disagree.

Is there something special about vaping that might change these chemicals' normal effects on the human body? Going through the list in the blurb...

Benzene, for example, is a gloves-and-hood substance in chem labs, ditto toulene. Cadmium is toxic metal which has turned places into hazmat sites, do I need to say more about it? Formaldehyde is also pretty nasty, and is generally recognized as a poison for a reason; breathing it is highly inadvisable what with it being a poisonous gas, but it's healthier to breathe than the rest of the list... We already know the safety of all of these in other contexts, and you can get the data with just a bit of basic searching...which I've done for you.

The thing that I find interesting is that it ought to be possible to build vapes to not have these problems. We know how to safely produce aerosols, we know pretty damn well how to predict what alterations will happen with heating, and analytical chemistry exists. Instead we just get complaining.

Is there something special about vaping that might change these chemicals' normal effects on the human body? Going through the list in the blurb...

Benzene, for example, is a gloves-and-hood substance in chem labs, ditto toulene. Cadmium is toxic metal which has turned places into hazmat sites, do I need to say more about it? Formaldehyde is also pretty nasty, and is generally recognized as a poison for a reason; breathing it is highly inadvisable what with it being a poisonous gas, but it's healthier to breathe than the rest of the list... We already know the safety of all of these in other contexts, and you can get the data with just a bit of basic searching...which I've done for you.

The thing that I find interesting is that it ought to be possible to build vapes to not have these problems. We know how to safely produce aerosols, we know pretty damn well how to predict what alterations will happen with heating, and analytical chemistry exists. Instead we just get complaining.

Is there something special about vaping that might change these chemicals' normal effects on the human body? Going through the list in the blurb...

Benzene, for example, is a gloves-and-hood substance in chem labs, ditto toulene. Cadmium is toxic metal which has turned places into hazmat sites, do I need to say more about it? Formaldehyde is also pretty nasty, and is generally recognized as a poison for a reason; breathing it is highly inadvisable what with it being a poisonous gas, but it's healthier to breathe than the rest of the list... We already know the safety of all of these in other contexts, and you can get the data with just a bit of basic searching...which I've done for you.

The thing that I find interesting is that it ought to be possible to build vapes to not have these problems. We know how to safely produce aerosols, we know pretty damn well how to predict what alterations will happen with heating, and analytical chemistry exists. Instead we just get complaining.

Is there something special about vaping that might change these chemicals' normal effects on the human body? Going through the list in the blurb...

Benzene, for example, is a gloves-and-hood substance in chem labs, ditto toulene. Cadmium is toxic metal which has turned places into hazmat sites, do I need to say more about it? Formaldehyde is also pretty nasty, and is generally recognized as a poison for a reason; breathing it is highly inadvisable what with it being a poisonous gas, but it's healthier to breathe than the rest of the list... We already know the safety of all of these in other contexts, and you can get the data with just a bit of basic searching...which I've done for you.

The thing that I find interesting is that it ought to be possible to build vapes to not have these problems. We know how to safely produce aerosols, we know pretty damn well how to predict what alterations will happen with heating, and analytical chemistry exists. Instead we just get complaining.

Perform an autopsy on a group of 65+ year olds and you can pretty much be sure to find some sort of cancer in most of them, with people over the age of 65 accounting for 60% of newly diagnosed malignant cancers and 70% of cancer related deaths in the US.

While it might have been his time in space which caused his cancer, the odds are vastly against him anyway with age being an extreme risk factor in terms of cancer.

suggest that "second hint" is mostly wrong:

https://www.quora.com/Does-the-body-burn-fat-before-it-burns-muscle-for-energy

---- From the referenced article on Quora:
Liang-Hai Sie, Retired general internist, former intensive care physician.

Answered 72w ago

We prefer not to burn our muscle proteins, since this we need to function well, so mostly fat first, although we all know that when losing weight we also lose muscle mass, which can be partially prevented by exercising see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2650077/

and having more protein 25 - 30 gram three times a day ( 1 - 1.2 gram/kg/day) instead of the normal RDA of 0.8 gram/kg/day - if possible within 30 minutes after resistance training - see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3276215/. we think because this prevents muscle breakdown to acquire the needed essential amino acids instead of acquiring that from breaking down you own muscles.
----End of Quora quote

suggest that "second hint" is mostly wrong:

https://www.quora.com/Does-the-body-burn-fat-before-it-burns-muscle-for-energy

---- From the referenced article on Quora:
Liang-Hai Sie, Retired general internist, former intensive care physician.

Answered 72w ago

We prefer not to burn our muscle proteins, since this we need to function well, so mostly fat first, although we all know that when losing weight we also lose muscle mass, which can be partially prevented by exercising see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2650077/

and having more protein 25 - 30 gram three times a day ( 1 - 1.2 gram/kg/day) instead of the normal RDA of 0.8 gram/kg/day - if possible within 30 minutes after resistance training - see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3276215/. we think because this prevents muscle breakdown to acquire the needed essential amino acids instead of acquiring that from breaking down you own muscles.
----End of Quora quote

It's elective surgery, not car crash surgery.

The reasoning is sound. The cost of the procedure goes way up if you're overweight, and since surgery is one of the most stressful things yor body will ever experience, you're more liskely t push an overwight body to failure when you're under the knife.

https://health.usnews.com/heal...

What art of "costs more, and is more likely to kill the pateint" don't you understand?

Smoking increases risk of complication, but not as extreme as weight.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

There was talk about putting in a recessive gene that made males sterile. The speculation was that over time certain species would fade out. Why that hasn't been applied to mosquitoes and flies immediately I'll never know. Talk about making the world a better place.

Mass Production of Genetically Modified Aedes aegypti for Field Releases in Brazil

Aisle filling is dominated by women.... https://www.niddk.nih.gov/heal...

It's a six percent difference ya clad. And women are much more likely to have body issues. Guess what happens when you feel pressure to be stick thin and you're not that body type. Your diet fails and you feel like a failure and things get out of hand.

Aisle filling is dominated by women....
https://www.niddk.nih.gov/heal...

This. Distracted driving laws make driving significantly less safe. They're exactly backwards, and those of us with common sense have been saying this since the first distracted driving laws were first proposed. But states keep passing them anyway, and they keep proving us right by producing statistically significant increases in accident rates despite the appearance of a reduction in use (Trempel et al). And it isn't just the anti-handheld talking laws. Anti-texting laws had the same effect.

You want a cell phone law that will reduce accidents? Make it legal to use a cell phone, but only if you hold it in a way that you can use your peripheral vision to see the road. Make it illegal to use it in your lap and legal to hold it up in front of your face for brief interactions. Encourage app developers to add low-distraction modes for their mobile apps so that you can interact with the basic controls at a glance.

Of course, the problem is compounded by car companies that keep switching to non-tactile touchscreen interfaces on their high-end cars, thus guaranteeing that drivers get used to taking their eyes off the road for extended periods of time. And make it illegal for new cars to be sold with touchscreens on the front of the dashboard while you're at it. Require the screens to pop up from the top of the dashboard instead.

BTW, KAOS, you are the one who refused to accept the studies done on Fukushima, where they have determined actual health impacts are much lower than predicted.

Yes, I remember them, however it was about Chernobyl, you were trying to disprove LNT and, in a classic Mr D moment, the data you provided disproved your own argument. I pointed that out and you didn't respond. The irony was hilarious that you say I didn't accept it when I embraced it. It's appropriate here because it shows how you continue to spread ignorance about LNT even when you provided the evidence that found a significant linear dose response for all leukemia two years ago.

That's shows a deliberate, calculated deception you are conducting with your posts here today, trying to twist circumstance so to falsify your own perceptions. That's why your lies are so convincing, you believe them. You know what your saying is wrong, you provided that data to show you are wrong, yet you refuse to accept data you provided because it doesn't fit the narrative of your nuclear idealism that you try to transpose onto reality.

repeating the same shit over and over again doesn't make it true.

You're right - *repeating it* doesn't make it true. It's the science backing up my repeated claims that makes them true.

https://www.nih.gov/news-event...

Enjoy reading, you fat turd.

Your research budget numbers are a bit off (though it doesn't detract from your larger point). NIH gets the largest research budget (on the order of $30 billion dollars). https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/... In fairness, that money is basically all spent on applied bio-medical research (anything "basic science" in biology/medicine needs to go to NSF to get funding -- too applied, too basic is a common sticking point for research on the boundary). Also, some amount of the military budgets are used to fund the army, navy, and air force research labs (AFRL, NRL, ARL) and research under DARPA and (at least up to a certain time) the NSA. Again, it doesn't take away from your main point. Best, Mark

you can argue that you still agree with the message and that we're better off now than we would have been under British rule (I woulda like the NHS),

Bismarck healthcare systems outperform Beveridge ones

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

SSH systems perform slightly better on overall mortality rates and life expectancy (after 1980). For infant mortality the rates converged between the two types of systems and since 1980 no differences ceased to exist.

SSH systems are more expensive and NHS systems have a better cost containment. Inhabitants of countries with SSH-systems are on average substantially more satisfied than those in NHS countries.

It is a difficult battle. The publishers see revenues drop as globally libraries start to scale down on purchasing expensive journals. On the other hand, having no access to an article because the libraries don't have them any more locally hurts research. One of the outcomes of this battle is that scientists in the western world will have less access to information.

Not a problem. Who goes to the library? It's all available on-line. Increasingly research papers are free to all via PubMed. Either because the journal they're published in is open access or because the funding body (e.g. the Wellcome Trust) mandates that all articles produced from research it funds must be open access regardless of where they are published (an extra fee is paid). For example, this randomly chosen paper is published in Nature Neuroscience (which isn't open access) but can be read by anyone. If none of that works, you generally have good odds of finding a full paper via Google just by searching for the title plus "PDF". If even that doesn't work, you can e-mail the author and they will send you the PDF.

It is a difficult battle. The publishers see revenues drop as globally libraries start to scale down on purchasing expensive journals. On the other hand, having no access to an article because the libraries don't have them any more locally hurts research. One of the outcomes of this battle is that scientists in the western world will have less access to information.

Not a problem. Who goes to the library? It's all available on-line. Increasingly research papers are free to all via PubMed. Either because the journal they're published in is open access or because the funding body (e.g. the Wellcome Trust) mandates that all articles produced from research it funds must be open access regardless of where they are published (an extra fee is paid). For example, this randomly chosen paper is published in Nature Neuroscience (which isn't open access) but can be read by anyone. If none of that works, you generally have good odds of finding a full paper via Google just by searching for the title plus "PDF". If even that doesn't work, you can e-mail the author and they will send you the PDF.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Cobalt is not "100% carcinogenic". First off, "100% carcinogenic" isn't even a meaningful term. Secondly, cobalt is an essential nutrient in small quantities; the "cobal-" in "cobalamin" (aka, vitamin B12) is cobalt. In higher quantities it's poisonous, although not to the extent of normal "toxic" metals like cadmium and lead; in particular, cobalt is mostly inert when not as a dust or soluble salt. And if it's carcinogenic at all, it's at a level that's so low that it's tough to make out among the effects of other metals. Nor is "toxicity" a reason for avoiding cobalt-alloy drill bits (stainless steel is much worse due to its chromium content). Nor have cobalt-alloy drill bits "gone away"; google them, you can get them all over the bloody place.

And you're also wrong about tungsten. It is indeed toxic, but not as much as DU.

Cobalt is not "100% carcinogenic". First off, "100% carcinogenic" isn't even a meaningful term. Secondly, cobalt is an essential nutrient in small quantities; the "cobal-" in "cobalamin" (aka, vitamin B12) is cobalt. In higher quantities it's poisonous, although not to the extent of normal "toxic" metals like cadmium and lead; in particular, cobalt is mostly inert when not as a dust or soluble salt. And if it's carcinogenic at all, it's at a level that's so low that it's tough to make out among the effects of other metals. Nor is "toxicity" a reason for avoiding cobalt-alloy drill bits (stainless steel is much worse due to its chromium content). Nor have cobalt-alloy drill bits "gone away"; google them, you can get them all over the bloody place.

And you're also wrong about tungsten. It is indeed toxic, but not as much as DU.

The cure is worse than the disease in America's case. There are three possible treatments:

1. Stronger controls on guns
2. Free, high quality mental healthcare

Sorry but a swift (and rather basic) Google search can point you to a trove of articles that dispel the myth that mental illness is strongly associated with gun crime

For example:

Yet surprisingly little population-level evidence supports the notion that individuals diagnosed with mental illness are more likely than anyone else to commit gun crimes. According to Appelbaum, less than 3% to 5% of US crimes involve people with mental illness, and the percentages of crimes that involve guns are lower than the national average for persons not diagnosed with mental illness. Databases that track gun homicides, such as the National Center for Health Statistics, similarly show that fewer than 5% of the 120 000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness.

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