Tag Archives: paranoia

Guns or Cancer, Which is Better?

Cancer, Fear, Politics, Reason, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I don’t normally write about guns, but soon it will be gun violence awareness day, so it seems appropriate to throw my two cents in. After all, I like shooting guns, and I like talking about the law. Plus, you know, I have a terminal cancer diagnosis, so it just kind of makes sense.

I recently read two similar news stories about a pair of women who were killed mere days apart: one was deliberately shot by a stranger after leaving a rural vacation spot, and another was shot in the back when her toddler found a gun in the car while they were driving. Pure coincidence that both of those happened close together in Wisconsin, a state I used to live just over the border from, and happened within a week of each other with two mothers being shot and killed while driving with their children in the car. Otherwise, one was a presumably intentional (if random) murder by a horrible person, the other a very random (and presumably inadvertent) act by an innocent.

I’d love to say that the random shooting of mothers by their small children was a complete outlier, but it isn’t. Sadly, this sort of thing happens far too frequently, even among responsible gun-owners and pro-gun advocates — even while they are driving. Of course, not all toddlers who come across guns shoot their mothers. Sometimes, and I find this part deeply, deeply sad, they simply shoot themselves because a loaded gun was within reach. (For those of you who did not or could not click that last link, it details four cases where toddlers shot and killed themselves during the same week last month, in addition to five non-fatal accidental shootings by minors.)

And that is a clear example of what is wrong with current gun regulation. Continue reading Guns or Cancer, Which is Better? →

Myth of the Wellness Warrior, Part 2: Supplements, Denial and the Birthday Problem

Cancer, Health and Wellness, Reason, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve heard a lot lately about fears that a conspiracy is being perpetrated by the pharmaceutical industry and the government to keep natural cancer cures (and natural or holistic care in general) away from patients. It makes for a dramatic story with lots of Hollywood appeal, but examining the accusations leads down a more insidious path. To get there and understand the full extent of the problem, we need to step back and look at a range of sub-industries within the healthcare umbrella, what they provide and how they intertwine. We also need to understand some basics about statistics and probability that will clarify what some of the facts surrounding this conspiracy really mean. [And when you are done reading this, please continue on with the next chapter in this ongoing series.]

Supplementing the Truth

To begin with, let’s examine the hugely profitable supplements industry (mentioned in Forbes’ SportsMoney column as one of the fastest growing industries in the world). “Natural health” advocates and self-proclaimed gurus often have their own supplement brands which they sell as part of  treatment plans pushed on their web sites, or they have affiliate arrangements with a brand that they offer as being somehow superior to other brands. The supplement industry has grown from the notion that manufactured (or synthetic) vitamins could be used to supplement areas in the diet where a person was not able to consume adequate quantities to be healthy. In an indirect way, it can be traced back hundreds of years to the discovery that citrus fruit — particularly lemons — could prevent sailors from getting scurvy. It turned out that scurvy was a disease caused by a Vitamin C deficiency. By “supplementing” this vitamin, the disease could be avoided. Continue reading Myth of the Wellness Warrior, Part 2: Supplements, Denial and the Birthday Problem →

Negative Comments, Positive Response

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I’ll admit that I was a little perplexed this morning when I received a pair of (presumably) unrelated negative responses on one of my older blog posts, The Myth of the Wellness Warrior. Although I wrote that post about eight months ago, it continues to bring in a fair amount of traffic, including about 150 views today that appear to be mostly sourced off of Facebook and a few Google searches. While I expected that piece to illicit some reactions, I felt that the information I presented spoke for itself fairly well, and irrefutably so. I only criticized claims that are demonstrably false and I included links to vetted sources to support my statements. Still, I am no stranger to quasi-anonymous Internet attacks.

Follow this link to www.justbadforyou.com/blog
Cat pics simply bring people together, creating order out of chaos, joining everyone in blissful unity.

For a long time, I moderated a political forum that had civility as one of its prime directives. My job, in no small part, was to ensure that conversations stayed focused and did not degenerate into name calling or worse. One way that we ensured this possibility was to remove anonymity as much as we could through a registration process. The other way was through constant moderation and guidance. Because of that experience, I had initially required specific site registration here in order for anyone to comment. The system in place, however, was not entirely functional and several people let me know that they could not log in to leave comments. At the behest of a friend, I relaxed the comment restrictions and readied myself for an onslaught of SPAM and Internet Trolls. Continue reading Negative Comments, Positive Response →

Truth, Peace and Holiday Values

Fear, Politics, Reason, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The holiday season is upon us. Traditionally this is a time for reflection on our values, both our personal values and those shared by society at large. We are also in the midst of a heated political campaign season, made divisive largely through a fearful shift throughout our culture. Because these holidays, pretty universally across religious boundaries, are focused on peace, it seems like a good time to consider some of the foundational concepts that have created the divisiveness we are experiencing. By addressing some of these, perhaps the peace we aspire to will be easier to grasp for all of us.

The topics of gun control, national security and terrorism, taxes, healthcare and climate change are issues we all agree are important to our society. Ideological divides often prevent productive conversations on these issues, largely because we, as a society, are quite uninformed about the facts underlying each issue. And our politicians frequently do not help this situation, preferring to fan the fires of discontent rather than address issues in an open and honest fashion. We, however, as cognizant and inquisitive humans, have the ability to sidestep the easy rhetoric and parroting of sound bytes in order to debate issues in a civil manner not currently reflected by many high-profile politicians and certainly not reflected by most pundits in the media. Continue reading Truth, Peace and Holiday Values →

The Chemo Diaries: More Summer Fun

Cancer, Fear, Health and Wellness, Politics, Reason, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aside from my ever diminishing veins, the infusions during maintenance continue to be easy and relaxing. I guess I am lucky in that way — I know people who have different cocktails that they have various reactions to, from rash to fever to nausea on one end and flat out groggy sleep on the other. During these Alimta cycles, I am in and out fairly quickly and my biggest complaint is not having enough time here with the heated massage chair and my morning coffee to, uh, get any real work done…

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finally time for my cup of morning joe

 

Two infusions ago this chemo drug appeared to really mess with my digestive system, but it cleared up just in time for my scheduled CT scan and did not recur with the following round. The assumption now is that I simply caught a stomach bug that lingered for a couple weeks. The whole repressed immunity thing has been on my mind lately, and not just because what probably should have been a 24 hour virus took me 14 times longer to purge from my system.

Although the ensuing three weeks were relatively symptom-free (steroids make me irritable, mess up my sleep for three or four days and make me an emotional raw nerve; the chemotherapy wreaks havoc with my joyous time travel into the land of teenage acne, but even these things seemed to lessen somewhat), the issue of immunity and, more specifically herd immunity, was thrust back front and center when we brought a new kitten home from the pound. Continue reading The Chemo Diaries: More Summer Fun →

The Myth of the Wellness Warrior

Cancer, Health and Wellness, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Please note, this is Part One of a series. Click here to jump to Part Two or follow the link at the end of this post. Part Two contains some very important information that greatly expands upon some of what is raised here.

Somehow I managed to miss the name Candice-Marie Fox when I was going through earlier research on foods that are claimed to cure cancer, of which her pineapple diet ranks as one of the more ludicrous. Through the grapevine, I learned of this diet yesterday and immediately I wanted to find out if there was anything plausible about it. Certainly, pineapple is healthy to eat and it is often used for digestive issues due to its enzymatic activity, so I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt. Of course, I did not expect that there would be an actual cure in there, but maybe I could ascertain some actual benefits to the diet that transcended my initial skepticism. I was excited about this possibility; less so about discovering one more person preparing to cash in on a faux cure.

Pineapple is good for you.

A quick Google search brought up hundreds of articles online about how this woman, Candice-Marie Fox, a former model (always in the lead of the story), beat “Stage 3” or “Stage 4” (depending on the article) thyroid cancer by “ditching her husband” and eating a diet dominated by pineapple and other fruits. As is often the case in this sort of story, even as it is translated into multiple languages, the text is almost identical from web site to web site. And most of those articles can be traced back to a source in that British rag called the Daily Mail — not exactly a solid, investigative news source.

A few other “news” outlets picked the story up. It makes great click bait, after all. But fascinatingly, these actual news stories manage to get a whole bunch of facts wrong. Which is not surprising, as the former model herself seems to trip over her own facts many times, even in interviews on other web sites after her celebrity began to grow.

Continue reading The Myth of the Wellness Warrior →

Let’s Talk Nutrition!

Cancer, Health and Wellness, Reason, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Doing research on Cancer, you cannot help but stumble across about a million web sites (not to mention books, those old things) ready to inform about all the ways that food and supplements can either prevent or cure the myriad of cancers out there. So I thought I would do everyone a solid and break down the Truth About Nutrition and Cancer right here. I’m not a doctor, nor a nutritionist, but I am a human being who eats, takes his vitamins AND has cancer! Kind of makes me an expert, just don’t look at this as medical advice. (The info here is good for people without cancer, too, because everyone wants to be healthy!)

About the time that a patient receives a diagnosis of CanCeR, or any other crazy disease/condition/illness/mutation that sets the mind into panic mode, someone is going to be hot after a diet to improve things or search out a cause in the previous diet for where things went terribly wrong, or otherwise look to Nutrition for answers. And, just as inevitably as Nutrition will be sought out for those answers, the InterWebs will provide volumes about why whatever the patient had been eating was the cause of his or her maladies, or perhaps what the patient had not been eating, but whichever the case is there will most certainly be a solution/cure for whatever ails said patient in the form of an ingestible, potentially (or at least allegedly) natural substance. And, by gum, this is in spite of the fact that Big Pharma and the Medical Industrial Complex have conspired to keep the valuable information a secret (which is why it is available on thousands of non-academic, ready to sell you something web pages).

And this is when I point out something obvious, which many individuals fail entirely to pay attention to while distracted by the conspiracy theories being thrown at them: even when the information is being “given away for free,” the site you are visiting is almost certainly selling something. Continue reading Let’s Talk Nutrition! →

Clip Show: Cancer Edition 2

Cancer, Health and Wellness, Reason, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Welcome to another Clip Show! Here are some things that were lingering in open tabs for a while that I intended to use or share, but haven’t found a proper post within which to do so. I encourage you to click the links and explore, watch the videos here and enjoy. Hopefully there is something for everyone.

I don’t normally reference Fox News as a source of reason, but here is a great interview with actress Maura Tierney discussing her experience with chemotherapy:

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/09/26/er-star-maura-tierney-debunks-chemo-myths-after-breast-cancer/

Continue reading Clip Show: Cancer Edition 2 →

Not Dead Yet, No Matter What You May Have Read

Cancer, Health and Wellness, Reason, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A person I know quite well — and with whom I recently have had several lengthy conversations about my current state of affairs — offered an interesting appraisal of her understanding of my health and well-being to my wife. She said, rather unceremoniously, that she had expected me to be dying. In fact, she seemed quite surprised (and possibly a bit put off) by how healthy I appeared. Turns out, I have news for her:

I’m not dead yet.

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In fact, here I am, looking quite well (and dare I say “dashing”) in my new progressive lenses picked up today to aid my aging eyes. True, after over 15 years of having a stable prescription, the chemotherapy seems to have begun affecting my vision ever so slightly, at least in the first couple of feet. So this minor side effect has required me to jump straight into trifocal territory. Aside from the minor “swimmy” effect of turning my head side to side while looking through the “mid-range” section, these are actually quite amazing. But that isn’t really what this entry is about, so I’m going to move along.

The thing that most startled me, and which I actually took some offense at, was the notion that a person who is not stupid managed to ignore virtually everything that she had been told about my condition, the state of cancer research and, perhaps most importantly, why statistics do not tell a whole story, or often even a remotely correct one. And what did this person rely upon to make up her mind about what I was going through and my prognosis for continuing life?

Continue reading Not Dead Yet, No Matter What You May Have Read →

Cancer: What You Think It Is May Be Just Bad For You

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Cancer Is Not Intelligent, Cancer Has No Will

Discussing cancer in general terms often leads to insinuations that Cancer has a motivation. It “overcomes” the immune system. It “figures out” how to defeat a drug. It “is surprisingly good at mutating” into something that can continue to grow in spite of whatever is attacking it. It is “nefarious.” All of these descriptions, and there are hundreds more, imply that Cancer wants something, that it is making an effort, that it has an agenda or goal; the implication is that Cancer has a mind. This is a fallacy of thought that not only makes general discussion more difficult, but it actually can impede treatment and healing. Continue reading Cancer: What You Think It Is May Be Just Bad For You →