The suicide cult

For many years, those in preventive medicine knew that when the press reported a suicide, that other suicides would follow> That is why they alway recommended to newspapers to minimize the story and NOT to be sympathetic to the person or to his/her action.

Well, in recent years, the pro suicide movement has been glamourizing suicide for those unhappy with life. My cynical take is that this is a forerunner to the idea that the old/handicapped/brain injured should be offed by their docs, with or without the consent of their families or themselves. And the reason behind it is not compassion but to save money.

So ScienceDaily reports on why the suicide rate of white men is so high.

Particularly pernicious for this group may be the belief that suicide is a masculine response to "the indignities of aging." This is a script that implicitly justifies, and even glorifies, suicide among men.
 As illustrations, in her article Canetto examines two famous cases. Eastman Kodak founder George Eastman died of suicide in 1932, at age 77. His biographer said Eastman was "unprepared and unwilling to face the indignities of old age." Writer Hunter S. Thompson, who killed himself in 2005 at age 67, was described by friends as having triumphed over "the indignities of aging."
Both suicides were explained in the press through scripts of conventional "white" masculinity, Canetto asserts.
"The dominant story was that their suicide was a rational, courageous, powerful choice."
 Canetto's research challenges the notion that high suicide rates are inevitable among white older men. As additional evidence that suicide in this population is culturally determined, and thus preventable, Canetto points out that older men are not the most suicide-prone group everywhere in the world. For example, in China, women of reproductive age are the demographic group with the highest suicide mortality.
 Among the implications of Canetto's research is that attention to cultural scripts of suicide offers new ways of understanding and preventing suicide. As cultural stories, the "indignities of aging" suicide script as well as the belief that suicide is a white man's powerful response to aging can and should be challenged, and changed, she says.

Lives matter?

BBC has a story of a "Christmas miracle", of a child who lived after her life support was turned off.

then we have the Texas man who kept them from turning off the life support for his "brain dead" son, by holding them off with a gun.

He was drunk, so ended up in jail and not shot by the SWAT team who negotiated hoping he'd sober up, but the really strange part of the story is that his son lived.

then there is the Jahi McMath case... and if you don't think minority patients will start getting suspicious, you are naive.

We had one of our nursing home patients who was alert but with frontal lobe brain damage. She couldn't swallow very well, so had a feeding tube. But frontal lobe damabe meant she cried with tears as if sad when she saw her family, and she could be quite loud. So we sent her to a neurologist to see if there was a medicine that could help her without sedating her.

The neurologist didn't examine her, but spent the whole time advising the family to remove the feeding tube.

The parents and siblings, traditional Indians, kept their silence, but on leaving, the cousin, an LPN who had accompanied her to the doc, turned and told him off saying: That's the difference between you white people and us: We care for our sick and elderly.

E Coli and Shigella: Fly, fingers, feces germs

Article on toxic EColi at Chipote restaurants.

If it is from fresh salads, then why not start nuking the lettuce?

 This article is from the wapo 2008:

Food producers can now use radiation to kill bacteria on fresh spinach and iceberg lettuce because of a new Food and Drug Administration ruling meant to help head off outbreaks of foodborne illness.
 This is the first time the agency has allowed produce to be irradiated as a health precaution. Tiny doses of radiation already are used to kill pests on some fruits and vegetables. But the process is most often used on meat -- especially E. coli susceptible ground beef -- and some spices.
The food is exposed to just enough radiation to kill off most, though not necessarily all, harmful germs. For instance, the process won't rid the produce of foodborne viruses.

when we sell our organic salads, we grow the lettuce etc inside greenhouses (to stop bugs) and then clean them off by putting them into a water bath with chlorox type bleach, and then washing them off and air drying them before we make the salad.

And if it is from undercooked meat, then make folks wash hands and counters, and check the meat is cooked properly. Often there is cross contamination from "fresh" meat that dripped on counters and gets onto hands or onto plates or cooked food.

_________________________

Related item:

Shigella outbreak in Texas schools and daycares.

again, local health officials are checking hand washing and washing down the place with chlorox.

But since kids are not tidy, they might be spreading it to families.

Ordinarily I would blame the failure to screen food workers for being carriers, or blame the failure of checking that hands are properly washed.

But the epidemic is in so many places one wonders if food is the source.

And pet turtles have caused epidemics in the past.

the bad news: Usually you don't treat with antibiotics since the disease clears itself and giving antibiotics only increases the chance of resistant germs

But the disease is now becoming resistant to common antibiotics.

a lot of cases are imported but then spread. CDC report here 

they also add:

Shigella causes an estimated 500,000 cases of diarrhea in the United States annually (1) and is transmitted easily from person to person and through contaminated food and recreational water. Outbreaks of shigellosis frequently are large and protracted. Although diarrhea caused by S. sonnei typically resolves without treatment, patients with mild illness often are treated with antimicrobial medications because they can reduce the duration of symptoms and shedding of shigellae in feces (2)

and

Reserving antimicrobial treatment for immunocompromised patients and patients with severe shigellosis and using antimicrobial susceptibility data strategically to guide therapy might help preserve the utility of such medications. 

an article that summarizes the treatment of diarrhea type illnesses can be found HERE. 

but with all the resistance, the use of "probiotics" and other things are being looked into.

Heh. Lactulose, the artificial sugar used to treat constipation and as a low cal sweetener, has been investigated and seems to help (but not cure) the carrier state. (but doesn't help acute cases).

Genes for antibiotic resistance?

gizmodo story for later reading

discusses how the bacteria evolve and even exchange genes to help survive antibiotics.

Then it notes:

New drugs are in development, such as teixobactin, which might delay the apocalypse, but are not yet ready for medical use.

Teixobactin, if you haven’t heard of it, is a new class of antibiotics discovered in soil bacteria earlier this year. When teixobactin was first published, it waslauded as a “game-changer” in the fight against antibiotic resistance. Here’s an excerpt from an article I wrote back in March explaining why:
It’s the first new class of antibiotics we’ve discovered in nearly thirty years, and so far, it’s killed every pathogen we’ve thrown at it, including several highly drug-resistant strains of staph. Unlike most antibiotics, which target critical bacterial proteins, this drug attacks the lipid molecules bacteria use to build new cell walls. Vanomycin, another antibiotic that targets cell wall precursors, worked for over 40 yearsbefore bugs started to develop resistance.

Plastic surgery in World War II

Gizmodo has an article on the pilots who had severe facial burns from crashing during WWII.

One of those pilots, Richard Hillary, wrote a book about his time there: The Last Enemy (or sometimes published as Falling Through Space).

Project Gutenberg Australia has it on line.

Shortly after my arrival at the Masonic the Air Force plastic surgeon, A.
H. McIndoe, had come up to see me, but as I had been blind at the time I
could recollect his visit but vaguely, remembering only that he had
ordered the gentian violet to be removed from my eyes and saline
compresses to be applied instead, with the result that shortly afterwards
I had been able to see.

He was expected this time at about eleven o'clock, but I was ready a good
hour before, bathed and shaved and dressings elaborately correct. The
charge nurse ushered him in fussily. Of medium height, he was thick-set
and the line of his jaw was square. Behind his horn-rimmed spectacles a
pair of tired friendly eyes regarded me speculatively.

'Well,' he said, 'you certainly made a thorough job of it, didn't you?'

He started to undo the dressings on my hands and I noticed his
fingers--blunt, capable, incisive. By now all the tannic had been removed
from my face and hands. He took a scalpel and tapped lightly on something
white showing through the red granulating knuckle of my right forefinger.

'Bone,' he remarked laconically.

He looked at the badly contracted eyelids and the rapidly forming
keloids, and pursed his lips.

'Four new eyelids, I'm afraid, but you're not ready for them yet. I want
all this skin to soften up a lot first. How would you like to go to the
south coast for a bit?'

He mentioned the official R.A.F. convalescent hospital on the south
coast, generously supplied with golf courses, tennis and squash courts.
But as I could not use my hands, and abhorred seaside resorts in winter,
I wasn't very enthusiastic. I asked instead whether I could go down to a
convalescent home a couple of miles from his hospital. He raised no
objection and said that he would fix it with the Commandant.

'And I'll be able to keep an eye on you there,' he added. He had got up
to go when I asked him how long it would be before I should fly again. I
had asked the same question on his previous visit, and when he had said
'Six months' I had been desperately depressed for days. Now when he said,
'Next war for you: those hands are going to be something of a problem,' I
wasn't even surprised. I suppose I had known it for some time. I felt no
emotion at all.

He took his leave and I went off to have lunch with my mother.

Two days later, after the disentangling of a few crossed wires in
official circles, Air Ministry permission came through and I was driven
down to Sussex.

-----

The next day McIndoe took down the dressing from my eyes and I saw again.

'A couple of real horse blinkers you've got there,' he said; and indeed
for a day or so that is what they felt like. In order to see in front of
me I had to turn my face up to the ceiling. They moulded in very rapidly,
and soon I could raise and lower them at will. It was a remarkable piece
of surgery, and an operation in which McIndoe had yet to score a failure.

Shortly afterwards I was allowed to have a bath and soak the bandage off
my arm from where the graft had been taken. This laborious and painful
process had already taken me half an hour when Sister Hall came in. I was
down to the last layer, which I was pulling at gingerly, hurting myself
considerably in the process.

'Well, really, Mister Hillary!' she said; and taking hold of it she gave
a quick pull and ripped the whole thing off cleanly and painlessly.

'Christ!' I started involuntarily, but stopped myself and glanced
apprehensively at Sister's face. She was smiling. Yes, there was no doubt
about it, she was smiling. We said nothing, but from that moment we
understood each other.

Tony's graft had been a success, and within a few days we were allowed
out for a fortnight's convalescence before coming in again for further
operations.

As I was getting ready to go, Sister took me on one side and slipped a
small package into my hand.

'You'll be wanting to look your best for the girls, Mr. Hillary, and I've
put in some brown make-up powder that should help you.'

I started to protest but she cut me short.

'You'll be in again in a couple of weeks,' she said. 'Time enough for us
to start quarrelling then.'

We returned after a short but very pleasant convalescence--Tony for his
last operation, one top lid, and I for two lower ones.

This time when the dressings were taken down I looked exactly like an
orang-outang. McIndoe had pinched out two semicircular ledges of skin
under my eyes to allow for contraction of the new lids. What was not
absorbed was to be sliced off when I came in for my next operation, a new
upper lip. The relief, however, was enormous, for now I could close my
eyes almost completely and did not sleep with them rolled up and the
whites showing like a frightened negro.

Once again we retired to our convalescent home, where our hostess did
everything possible to relieve the monotony of our existence. She gave a
large party on Christmas night, and every few weeks brought down stage or
screen people to cheer up the patients.

there is more at the link.

Much of the story is about flying, and later the recovery from wounds of both the body and the soul. It is a classic on many levels.

I lent my hard copy of the book to my son in law, a helicopter pilot, when he was visiting (and bored). He loved it and asked if he could take it home with him.

Getting rid of polio: The nasty mutation problem

Although oral polio (3 viruses) can stop Polio, the problem is that in one of a million cases, the weakened virus mutates back to the real thing.

Not a big problem in countries where most people have gotten the vaccine (in the USA, about 7 cases a year) but a big problem in countries where Mullahs read the UKGuardian and similar anti vaccine screeds and told their people that vaccines were a western plot to destroy them and their kids. Result? Lots of unvaccinated kids to play with the kids who do get the vaccine, and secondary epidemics

So the WHO and others are changing the way vaccines are given, including giving kids one shot of the old fashioned shot (killed virus) vaccine.

LINK

for my later reading.

Medical Cannabis doesn't work

This one is from the UK Mail but you can find similar stories in the MSM.

There is very little evidence to suggest cannabis can help ease the symptoms of a raft of illnesses, scientists have said.

Medicinal cannabis has been legalised in 23 US states as a therapy to treat disease or alleviate symptoms, and a further seven states have legislation pending.

But despite the drug's legal status in many parts of the world, the debate rages as to whether it is effective.

A new study, in which scientists assessed the findings of 79 randomised trials including around 6,500 volunteers, found the evidence supporting the use of medical cannabis is weak.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3137621/Medicinal-cannabis-DOESN-T-ease-pain-nausea-vomiting-MS-muscle-contractions-sleep-disorders-Tourette-s-study-finds.html#ixzz3e1PMJ9UQ
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It doesn't work statistically....I suspect most of the "benefits" were placebo effect, in former druggies.

However, I suspect, on the other hand, like using anti depressents for pain, it makes you not care that you hurt.

Two things: One: You notice a lot of those who use it for "glaucoma" ignore that to work it needs quite a dose, making them high all the time? Ah but better than using eyedrops that don't do this?

The other problem: The medical marijuana organizations are funded by millionaires (Including Soros' Open Society program). That last organization has a larger agenda, including legalizing all drugs, and medical marijuana is the nose of the camel entering the tent.

Oh yes: They also support legalized euthanasia, which is why they are funding "end of life" type organizations, and slowly subverting those who run them.