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The last psychiatrist you'll ever need :-)

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com...

There are plenty of substantial reasons to partake. http://thelastpsychiatrist.com...

The "luddite" attitude is not "you're wearing that thing to take pictures of me" it's "I came here to relax so put your fucking camera down and stop breaking the social contract you narcissistic asshole". You can get around all the objections simply by taking the damned thing off, but if the Glass wearer is so socially inept they don't understand why they should have taken it off already, don't expect them to fold quickly on that. So they get thrown out of restaurants and bars, and then they react with classic narcissistic rage, venting on the internet and in some cases cyberbullying the staff or businesses that dared them ask to remove the fucking things. People have tried to destroy entire livelihoods on the back of being told to remove their Glass. Glass and narcissism go hand in hand to such an extent that they may as well have called it Google Echo.

(BTW, given your attitude I suppose you have no problem with the NSA reading your emails, by the way. Objecting to that would be narcissistic, right?)

Yet this is the wrong calculation to consider because that probability—the probability that someone has the same birthday as you—is not what the question asked. It asked about the probability that any two people in the same room have the same birthday as each other. This includes the probability that one of the others has the same birthday as you, which is what I calculated above, but it also includes the probability that two or more of the other people share the same birthday, different from yours.

is very similar to the mental error(s) discussed by The Last Psychiatrist in his post "The Nanny State Didn't Show Up, You Hired It", and it's not a lack of mathematical skill or analysis:

It is this kind of example that trips up the "public" when judging things like Buckyballs because we don't think in large numbers and apply to one (statistics), we think in terms of ourselves and multiply by 6 billion (narcissism).

He's not implying "extreme materialism and utilitarianism" in his post. He's complaining about this shit.

PHD hipsters on food stamps. link

Here is something scary I experienced...

My ex GF was kicked off medicaid because her son turned 18 or 19.(Can't remember exactly which) About 3 months into dating her. She is still now trying to get on SSI, which will automatically get her back on medicaid, because she says she can't work ever again. But for now she is employed under the table sometimes and in and out of mental institutions. So she just goes to the emergency room a lot and throws away the bills. Her teeth are rotting out. No insurance. Its sad that the state won't help her (N.C) but I also wasn't going to stick around for her decent into crazyness. I gave this woman thousands of dollars paying her rent and buying her food. In return she attacked me one day and lost out on my support system after that. Her Mom does help her some with work. I only dated this woman for like a year. Its not like we were married or something... When I first met her she had a job / seemed normal. But then she got fired. I guess shes been having mental problems long before I met her. Through all this the state pays for therapy and meds for her Psychiatric care. To you know, keep her out of the underfunded mental hospitals. But not for like, say cancer or an infection in her mouth. Um.. Why? In some states like North Carolina you are fucked if you need the safety net though... I think shes been denied 3 times for SSI. I NEVER knew it was this bad...

On the other hand... Check this page out:

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/11/the_terrible_awful_truth_about_1.html

I've seen some people in that same apt. complex totally game the system. But I guess they had no choice.

Most of the world media to be dupes of the CIA

Well, not dupes of the CIA, but nowadays media pretty much regurgitate whatever somebody else said in order to keep controversy. Read this article, especially the point about the mosque, which illustrates the problem with media and how the CIA could easily manipulate them.

Amen. The chart is dead, long live the chart is a great article outlining the slow transformation of charts from cognitive support to billing artifact.

The internet is probably the last place you'd want to use to teach someone the importance of good writing. The amount of people who think it's cool to type in text speak, deliberately spell certain words incorrectly and various forms of leet speak mean that kids will think that a good writing style doesn't matter.

Then teach them how to distinguish between websites with good writing and websites with slashdot.com. Of course, the second example may be a little extreme.

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/02/autism_and_the_mmr_vaccine.html A psychiatrist explains why the original link between autism and the MMR vaccine was absolute junk science of the worst sort. It was a career jump for someone who made a fake link, and had already fudged the underlying data to boot. The fact that the guy isn't in jail is kind of amazing.

Bingo. You nailed it. Electronic medical records are visible to all sorts of people who aren't working to help patients get better. Medical staff realize the potential for lawsuits, etc. and are responding by using unofficial paper medical records to record the real juicy information that helps them do their jobs.

Now this isn't necessarily bad, your penicillin allergy won't be 'off-the-record' on a post-it note, but the parallel 'shadow medical records' are a real phenomenon that EMR designers will have to contend with. A more complicated hospital visit will likely leave two sets of records, a dry sanitized version for the accountants and lawyers, and the one that really documents all the ugly, embarrassing, CONFIDENTIAL stuff that went into making you better.

Hospital diagnosis is a messy, hugely complex problem, and the communication and documentation reflects this. Trying to tidy medical records can destroy what makes them useful.

Go read various articles at The Last Psychiatrist for a different (and to me, more reasonable) perspective on the problem.

You should really be reading this:

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/

As this guy:
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/04/nature_says_scientists_use_per.html

Points out
1) These are drugs that millions of well-meaning, loving, parents cheerfully give to their 9-year old for ADHD

2) If anyone can tell me why it is more logical, medical, ethical, efficacious, or safe to force it on a kid who scores high on a reliable but totally invalid ADHD checklist; but less so for a "scientist" with considerably more insight into his own condition-- and, by the way, the autonomy to decide for himself-- I'm listening.

3)why not encourage the use of the drugs? Beyond safety issues, is it just that we're worried about unfair advantage in science? That's the debate in sports, that it doesn't allow for a level playing field. You want a fair competition. But why would you care about that in science? I mean, if it takes 800mg of Provigil a day to find the cure to cancer a month earlier, well...?

You are aware that taste isn't just determined by the contents of the glass, right?

A study in the Wednesday edition of the Journal of the American Socialist Party reports that 31% of antidepressant trials were not published, and almost all of the unpublished basically showed negative results.

This is bad, obviously, which is why we need a website for all raw data. But let's be clear: this was a review of studies found in the FDA registry. The FDA had this data, and used it to evaluate the meds. No one hid the data-- they gave the data to the FDA, all of it. What didn't happen was publication.

So the real question is why didn't they get published.

Certainly, Pharma doesn't want negative studies published. But these are Phase 2 and 3 clincial trials. They're not done down at Lilly HQ-- these are done at universities. Pharma didn't block their publication-- they were blocked by the academics who did them, and the journals themselves.

It's the exact same data they had 10 years ago, the exact same data. This isn't a discovery, this isn't Woodward and Bernstein, this is a bunch of academics who are no longer on Pharma payrolls who have now decided that they have nothing further to gain from pushing antidepressants.

Now they can pretend to be on the side of science. We reviewed the data, and found some of it was not published.

You knew that already. You were the ones who didn't publish it -- it's your journal. Turner worked for 3 years as an NIH reviewer. He just notices this now?

Is no one wondering how it is that this study comes out now, when all antidepressants but two are generic?

As suspicious of Pharma as everyone is, no one seems to see that they are no longer getting Pharma money, they are now getting government money-- NIH-- so they're going to push the government line. No one finds it at all suspicious that the two biggest NIH studies in the past two years both found the generic to be the best?

You think that in 2000 those studies would have been published? But now-- 2007, 2008, if they'd found Cymbalta to be the best on the NIH's dime, you think that they'd get re-funded? What's the difference? Same authors, same studies, same data. All that's changed is the climate.

People want a direct financial link to show bias, not realizing that bias is much more prevalent and more powerful elsewhere.

It's the exact same data they had 10 years ago, the exact same data. This isn't a discovery, this isn't Woodward and Bernstein, this is a bunch of academics who are no longer on Pharma payrolls who have now decided that they have nothing further to gain from pushing antidepressants.

Now they can pretend to be on the side of science. We reviewed the data, and found some of it was not published.

You knew that already. You were the ones who didn't publish it -- it's your journal. Turner worked for 3 years as an NIH reviewer. He just notices this now?

Is no one wondering how it is that this study comes out now, when all antidepressants but two are generic?

As suspicious of Pharma as everyone is, no one seems to see that they are no longer getting Pharma money, they are now getting government money-- NIH-- so they're going to push the government line. No one finds it at all suspicious that the two biggest NIH studies in the past two years both found the generic to be the best?

You think that in 2000 those studies would have been published? But now-- 2007, 2008, if they'd found Cymbalta to be the best on the NIH's dime, you think that they'd get re-funded? What's the difference? Same authors, same studies, same data. All that's changed is the climate.

People want a direct financial link to show bias, not realizing that bias is much more prevalent and more powerful elsewhere.

Why is this story appearing now?

This vaccine, TA-CD, has been in the works since at least 1999. It's owned by Celtic Pharma-- after changing hands three previous times.

There are two other vaccines by other groups (one uses a different bug, and the other is a lattice of cocaine molecules big enough to generate an immune response.) Observe that neither of these two others was mentioned in the article.

There isn't anything new about this story, i.e. nothing to merit a sudden flurry of news articles, EXCEPT that the group just submitted a huge grant to the FDA in December and "is awaiting a response."

In other words, this isn't a news story, it's a press release.

Not that there's anything wrong with this.

AO
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/