Sunday, January 13, 2019

follow the money

the modern world is morphing physicians from being ethical professionals to people who fill in the blanks and follow the guidelines blindly (even though the guidelines often are based on biased or inaccurate data, or worse, based on cost effective ideas of who should live or die or get treatment).

For later reading : BoingBoing discusses.

more here.


Thursday, January 10, 2019

Taking the Red Pill about Marijuana

Soros' "open society" has been pushing drug legalization for at least 30 years, and the cutting edge is legal marijuana: pushing it as if it were needed for cancer pain, glaucoma, etc. when often there were legal drugs that worked just as well.

We docs know about the problems: our psych patients all smoke it, our criminals all smoke it, and of course, a lot of those in car wrecks were high when driving, but never mind.But the real problem is with families: Kids neglected (and often cared for by grandparents) because mom is a druggie, unmarried girls with druggie boyfriends who can't keep a job because they are high all the time, and mainly the drug culture that makes the idea of being high/happy is the most important thing in life.

the problem with marijuana is the long halflife: Take a drink, and in an hour you are sober. Take weed, and you might get a small buzz but it stays in the system so your drug level reaches a steady state of being high if you are a regular user.

and of course, it is a gateway drug.

cigarettes have a bad press, but as I used to point out to my patients: they only kill the body, not the soul (they enhance your ability to think and relax, not get you high). But steady marijuana use is like the lotus eaters: You stop caring about normal life.

As the "marijuana is harmless" meme has convinced a lot of states to legalize social use, a couple of people are finally getting the problems published.

LINK

You don’t expect the New Yorker and Mother Jones to be places where you read anti-marijuana articles, but Tell Your Children, the new book by former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson is knocking some people flat. The book examines what we know scientifically about marijuana use, and it turns out to be pretty damn scary....In his New Yorker piece, Malcolm Gladwell writes straightforwardly about the overwhelming scientific evidence that marijuana is a hell of a lot more problematic than many of us think. ...Read his piece to find out why. Or even better, check out Stephanie Mencimer’s detailed report in Mother Jones, the San Francisco-based left-wing magazine...2002 study in BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) found that people who used cannabis at age 15 were more than four times as likely to develop schizophrenia or a related syndrome...In 2017, the National Academy of Medicine issued a report nearly 500 pages long on the health effects of cannabis and concluded that marijuana use is strongly associated with the development of psychosis and schizophrenia...

and something we knew but was ignored in all the press: That the marijuana of today is many times more powerful/toxic than that which was used in the 1960s.

 But the marijuana sold today is not what we smoked, which at 1 percent to 2 percent THC was the equivalent of smoking oregano. Today’s weed is insanely more potent, as are products like “wax” and “shatter”—forms of butane hash oil designed to be vaped or dabbed that come pretty close to 100 percent THC. And these high-potency products usually contain very little CBD oil, the ingredient in cannabis that’s supposed to account for many of its supposed health benefits.

none of this is in the propaganda pro pot articles in the MSM of course.

call me cynical. Drugging a population to keep them in line is nothing new, from cheap gin in the London slums to the pushing of alcohol on the AmerIndians, it works: Yes, more aggression but less targeted aggression.

and the real problem is the cultural change that doesn't see getting high as a problem. Quick: when was the last time your church gave a sermon on this? It has worked before.

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

incontience computer devices

Digital Trends report on modern computer like devices: and two of them are to help caregivers.

one is a timer to remind you to go to the bathroom:

The Dfree is a device that uses ultrasound to monitor and detect the movement of the bladder, communicating to an attached smart device that it’s time to go to the toilet. While that may seem initially odd, this device is a lifeline for sufferers of incontinence, and a huge aid for their caregivers, reducing the stress caused by such issues, and increasing the ability of sufferers to live independently.

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another is to tell people if the diaper is wet.

We’ve already seen breathing-monitoring baby clothing at CES this year, but Monit takes baby-monitoring to a whole new level with its smart diaper device. Attaching to the outside of a diaper, Monit’s smart device detects when a diaper needs changing and alerts a caregiver a change is required. Monit claims the device can tell the difference between pee and poo, and hopes the device can reduce the instances of urinary tract infections and diaper rash.