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Nietzsche's Toxicology
CETS writes "If it doesn't kill ya' it makes you stronger, so a little bit of a bad thing might be alright, according to Scientific American which has this article. " If dioxin and ionizing radiation cause cancer, then it stands to reason that less exposure to them should improve public health. If mercury, lead and PCBs impair intellectual development, then less should be more. But a growing body of data suggests that environmental contaminants may not always be poisonous--they may actually be good for you at low levels.""
This report on toxic chemicals brought to you by the Presidential Council on Industrial Development.
Practically everything is poisonous in sufficient amounts.
homeopathy
george carlin's been saying this for years.
"Life is great; without it, you'd be dead." -Harmony Korine
Bush League, definitely.
Another B.L. finding: It is healthier for you to be poor. However, families that have been very rich for a long time develop an antidote, so it is okay for BLers to be rich.
Why all those old rich people keep moving to places like Palm Springs:
Prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures is also harmful, but Rattan has found that heating up human skin cells to 41 degrees Celsius (106 degrees Fahrenheit) twice a week for an hour slows aging in the cells.
Seriously, if you've never been though Palm Springs, CA, you aren't missing much. Its a couple of golf courses in the hottest damn place, its not quite the middle of nowhere, but its in the same zipcode. Though, I might just be bitter about it, because the first job I ever held involved delivering medicines to people, in home, and I had to drive to Palm Springs every other week in a truck with no A/C. Nice enough drive, little to no traffic, and the desert can be kinda pretty at the right times, but if its summer take a lot of water with you.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
I ask.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I've done tests myself that prove my tap water contains Dihydrogen Monoxide, but the government won't do anything about it. They say it's naturally occuring. Never mind that it kills 350 children under the age of six every year, and countless others who frequent beaches and lakes where industrial plants dump the stuff.
I'm no scientist, but it's obvious to me that we need stricter envrionmental controls to regulate this kind of thing. Multinationals are going to destroy the planet unless we do something.
...because homeopathy explicitly includes the idea that things get more powerful as the dilution decreases, even past the point that the original substance no longer has even a molecule in the final product. A homeopathy practictioner would thus claim that these exposures are at far too high a level to work, and still need to be diluted by a factor of, oh, at least 10^10 to be more useful, probably more. (That number is not a typo. Yes, Homeopathy shoots right past Advogadro's Number and never looks back.) Homeopathy explicitly claims to be many times more beneficial then these low-level exposures. As they are completely wrong, they still don't win any points. (Nor is this as big a surprise as the article writer thinks it is, it merely establishes some examples of a long-known general principle.)
For those wishing to learn more about homeopathy, please see Homeowatch, and in particular this page which provides an overview of homeopathy.
Ban DHMO! Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) is a colorless and odorless chemical compound. Each year, Dihydrogen Monoxide is a known causative component in many thousands of deaths and is a major contributor to millions upon millions of dollars in damage to property and the environment.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
This isn't really news -- except to the majority of people who listen to the ecological ideologues rather than checking out the actual data. It's been known for thirty or forty years that places with high background radiation (like Colorado, especially Pueblo and Grand Junction) have suspiciously low cancer rates, and that these cancer rates absolutely contradicted the EPA's most common assumption, of a completely linear dose-response rate. (That is, what is called the "conservative assumption" is that the response to low doses of radiation is linear because at doses above about 30 roentgen the response is linear.)
One interesting thing about this is that, if hormesis is true, as it appeaers, then all those people who have spent a small fortune clearing radon out of their basemants may have actually increased their chances of cancer.
Here's another link, this from Discover magazine.
At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It is know as adaptive response. The acticle is slightly misleading though. What is actually observed is that organisms which are exposed to small quantities of a toxin (lets say radiation) before being given a larger dose will experience less damage than those who were exposed to the larger dose without the small "priming" dose.
For example, cells in group A are exposed to a small dose, of raidation, given a few hours to sit around and then are exposed to a large dose of radiation. Group B is exposed to the large dose or radiatoin only. It can then be observed that group A suffers less damage (we quantified it by looking at the damage to the chromosomes, translocations, ect.) than those in group B.
Some caveates to this are...
-If the large dose of radiation is too large, you will not see this adaptive response.
-The time that the cells must wait after teh priming dose is about 6 hours, to short or too long a time and the adaptive response is not observed
-The priming dose also must be within a range of certain values for adaptive response to take place
-In some cases, you see a synergisti response in the radiation. That is the cells exposed to the priming and large dose experience MORE radiation than is expected from just the sum of the radiation that they were exposed too
All the research we did pointed to the fact that there is probably some kind of repair mechanism that is turned on when chromosomes are damaged. By exposing cells to a small priming dose of radiation, you have turned on this mechanism. Thus, when you expose the cells to the larger dose of radiation this repair mechanism is already turned on and the cell can more readily deal with the damage than other cells that have not recived this priming dose.
THis is pretty cool research when you think about it. I mean it affeects alot of stuff, esp in the medical feild. Think about chemotherapy. The idea is to kill cancer by exposing it to a dose or posion. However, the dose that is given is just caculated by body mass. This research alludes to the fact, however, that not all peope will respond the same to long term exposure to posoins. THe long term exposer acts almost like many many priming doses, and, in those people that exhibit greater adaptive response, the therapy will then be less effective. INtersting, no?
Also, there have been several different studies concerning geographical location in the US vs cancer frequecies (melenoma, to be exact). It was found that peope who lived in higher elevations (and thus recieved contiually doses of radiation that were higher than those at low elevations) had less occurance of skin cancer, than those of us at lower elevations. It is definatly hard to prove any connection, but hte thought was that this higher dose of radiation acted like a priming dose and then the higher doses of radiation that people are exposed to durring the summer had less of an effect.
Anyways, i just wanted to vouch for the article and say that the stuff the are talking about (however, misrepresented) does exist. THe practicalitly of it, and how much you should let it affect your behavior (still wear sunscreen!) is up to you. IT is not a very well understood phenomenon, but it is still cool.
SWEET!
Of course, this was obvious enough even without scientific data. Haven't you ever had a flu shot? Let's listen to Lewis Black: "Whatever you do, don't get a flu shot. I got one. Every year they're scaring you into getting one, 'You know what people are doing? They're shitting out their mouths!' I don't like to brush that much, give me the shot! All a flu shot does is give you a cold for 365 days. You never get the flu, because you always have a cold!" Lewis Black is one of those presentation comedians, who really have to do it themselves.
And now, for a sig that's a complete copout.
Mithridatism, the practice of ingesting small quantities of poison to develop a resistance has been practiced since ancient times. The name comes from Mithridates, king of ancient Pontus, who fearful of being poisoned, ingested small quanties at regular intervals develop a resistance. Dashiell Hammett descibes the use of Mithridatism to develop a resistance to arsenic in the Continental Op story "Fly Paper" (1929) which in turn references the practice as per Dumas in "The Count of Monte Cristo". Thus it is relatively well known that trace doses of some poisons can result in relative imunity to the specific toxin. This does not imply that the paractice is particularly healthy or desirable.
Wow, what a crappy news...
Whatever doesn't kill you might make you stronger - If dioxin and ionizing radiation cause cancer, then it stands to reason that less exposure to them should improve public health
So, if i cut my leg and I don't die of it, it'll make me stronger ? Can I slap you once or twice ? I mean... it won't kill you so it "stands to reason" that it'll make you stronger...
Whatever the article later says, the introductory text does NOT stand to reason, because 1) nietzsche wasn't speaking literally, and 2) even if he had, you'd still have to prove the truth of the genericity of the argument before drawing more conclusions from it.
so, allow me a "whatever..."
thanks.
This article has been spouting the truth I've known for a while.
I've been building up my resistance to the effects of Iocaine Powder. Never know when you're death is going to be on the line with a Sicilian opponnent.
Every time this comes up I am amazed that it isn't completely obvious to almost everyone. After all, every substance known to man has the Goldilocks Property (too much is bad, too little is bad, so just right is best). It seems like everyone wants to pretend that they live in a world where things are either good or bad in-and-of themselves, when in fact nothing they have ever encountered works the way they are trying to pretend that everything does.
The only explanation I can think of is that it would be great for people who don't want to think, except that in a would like that people never would have evolved in the first place.
-- MarkusQ
...of me getting any work done.
Yet another one of life's lessons that can be learned from nethack.
If the poison does not kill you, it will probably drop your strength, thus making you weaker.
Please don't have your daily lead/mercury tonic...
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Note that the reason why those repair mechanisms aren't turned on all the time is because that would waste energy, i.e., food. Throughout evolution, starvation has been a problem, so organisms have become quite efficient.
If you live in a stable or slowly-changing environment year round, then the level at which the repair mechanisms are active is probably well-adapted to your environment. But if you are an office worker and take a one week vacation in the mountains or at the beach, your repair mechanisms are turned off yet you will receive a high dose of UV (or other radiation).
In the long term, we will probably be able to turn on those repair mechanisms constantly using drugs (which might perhaps help you keep some weight off as well). Until then, however, limiting exposure to UV, radiation, and toxins is probably still the best policy.
facit venenum. not really a groundbreaking thought. by the way, nicotine enhances concentration. bored...
whoo hoo... this means i'm healthier after smoking a pack a day since the age of 11. yaaaaaayyyy...*coughs up a lung*...
I've noticed my marijuana tolerance is much higher now. I'm sure Snoop Dog and I could serve as good indicators of the effects.
I agree with this (hell, how can't I? It's been proven) to some degree. It always drives me nuts when I see parents sheilding their kids from every sort of germ and such and fill them full of motrin at the slightest hint of a cold. Let them get sick. Let them build up their immunities. Let the body build resistance to it. It's only gonna happen by playing in the dirt, being outside, experiencing the world. Stop disinfecting the entire house. And as we've seen throughout history (and by some posts here), it's been a common practice to ingest small amounts of poison to build up the tolerance so if you were to ingest a "lethal" dosage for a "normal" person, you'd survive.
However...you are NOT going to catch me smoking cigarettes to "build up" my lungs, or drink gasoline, or take in any other number of highly toxic (and those weren't even "highly toxic") compounds to "get stronger". Yet...scarily enough, some people in society don't bother to use common sense and they'll just be a bunch of lemmings and do stupid shit and start drinking anti-freeze thinking it'll help them in some way.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Every morning I watch the weather - a left over habit from when I lived on the east coast. The average daily temp in Palm Springs Ca, must be abt 105 F or so
..........FULL STOP.
I wouldn't be too fast in saying the agenda is "pro-pollution". The specifically note that endocrine disruptors may have effects at very low doses, contradicting (in this case) the principle of hormesis. Since some ingredients in common plastics are cited as possible endocrine disruptors, the plastics industry is not at all happy about the prospect of regulation.
I think you need to read the references.
Frankly, the notion that the linear no-threshold model would hold is, biologically, the more extrodinary claim: it's tantamount to suggesting that there is no biological mechanism that deals with radiation damage in naturally-occuring dose rates. Non-radiological toxins that don't occur in nature are another thing, but it's damned hard to find one that doesn't have a close biological analogue.
article, and the microwave plasmoids, doesn't it? /. seems to have this thing for promoting geek sterility. Are you sure you folks aren't actually a secret society made up of the jocks who used to make our lives a living hell in high school? I always suspected there was something more sinister going on ...
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
so .. let me get this right... less of a dangerous substance is godo for you... well boys and girls.. lets all move to major cities and leave the windows open for a few hours per a day..
remember this article: "Could tobacco save your life?"?
-- L
Thats good news so in mexico city the 4 million cars should improve public health, wont they?
Sorry if this is slightly off topic here, but before anyone jumps to conclusions. . .
When tested on lab rats, an ldl 1 level of lead, by definition, is the amount needed to kill 1% of the rats. ldl 1 level of mercury, is what will kill 1% of the rats. Add ldl 1 of mercury and ldl 1 of lead and feed them to rats. They all die (100%) due to synergistic toxcicity.
Mercury by itself, however, is bad enough.
The deeds of the ADA (american dental association) and the FDA when it comes to the welfare of the common people with regards to mercury poisoning, much of it comming from "silver amalgams" (50% mercury) which leak mercury at the rate of 43 micrograms/cm2 per day in water without abrasion, electrolysis or other contributing factors, is shamefull.
If you select the blue pill then read on, preferably about another topic. Don't feel bad; most Americans have chosen the blue pill.
If you choose the red pill then see the below site:
http://testfoundation.org
Truly amazing, the things that are allowed and mandated by law in this country (such as a dental license program controlled by the ADA (American Dental Association).
my response would have been different. Penn & Teller's joke played on the way people are willing to take a stand on something and publicly display a righteous opinion despite ignorance. Do you really thing it's reasonable to consider yourself informed after a three minute conversation with a stranger who has a stake in getting your signature? Just because the activist isn't out for cash it doesn't mean the transaction is any more noble than what one would get from a used car salesman. Ask me about water and I'll say I need it to live. Ask me about "dihydrogen monoxide" and I (would) have said, "What the fuck is that?".