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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.
george carlin's been saying this for years.
"Life is great; without it, you'd be dead." -Harmony Korine
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!
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.
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
Please don't have your daily lead/mercury tonic...
Q.
Insert Signature Here
It's sorta off topic, but what Freddie baby actually said is "Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich noch staerker". The important verb "umbringen" means "to kill, to murder, to liquidate" and it's got sort of the sense of "bringing down" that we'd have if we spoke of bringing down a deer with hounds.
So it's really something like "That which can't catch me and kill me makes me even faster and stronger."