Ooohs and Aaahs

Wow.  No movie I could ever work on would be as exciting or as emotional as watching this.  The Atlantis rocket boosters blasting off the sides of the shuttle and falling back to earth. The sound is amazing.

Large Hadron Rap

The scientists at the LHC getting their message out.  Sweet!

Homeocrappy and the Bad Science Blogger

I don't want to bag on the NHS really, not while the US is in the midst of utterly misleading its population about exactly what state funded health care would really do for them. But I have to say, if I was living in Britain I would be a tad cheesed off to know that my taxes were being used for something like .... homeopathy.

I actually tried it out once. Gagan wanted me to give it a go in India when I was so sick (there's news!), and the options were very limited. He felt it had worked for him once when he was young, for a skin problem, so he wanted me to try it for migraines. I didn't know anything about it, had had great success with acupuncture in LA (which I couldn't get in Bombay) and was a bit desperate, so sure, I guess so. I wasn't enthusiastic, but I went. The doctor was awful and the experience very uninspiring, and at the end .... they gave me a small, unassuming bottle with round white balls in it. Little round balls the size you might decorate a cake with. When I asked what herbs or drugs were in it, I was told that was secret, proprietary, Colonel's 11-herbs and spices type stuff. Nope - no information forthcoming. So, fork over a considerable amount of money and take these sugary little pills. Um.... yeah.

That night I read up online about homeopathy.

I'm not sure I have the oomph to really get it all down. Perhaps a summary?

"Like cures like"  - in other words - if I can give you something that makes you feel like you have the symptoms of malaria, then I can use it to cure you. Um... wtf kind of science is that? No kidding - if you now are having the aches, pains and fevers of the illness then we're onto a cure!

These 'remedies' (that cause the symptoms, mind you) are made of over 3,000 different animal, plant, mineral, and synthetic substances. Anything from diseased fecal matter, snake venom, table salt, snot or rainwater.  If this seems at all rational, please let me know.

Not finished yet, the juju, I mean remedies, are diluted. And when I say diluted - I mean seriously diluted!  Not every one has exactly the same level of dilution, but here is where we need some comparisons.   For example, the acceptable level of arsenic in US drinking water is 8X (or 1 part per 100,000,000).  For most of the homeopathic remedies, the recommended dilution is.... wait for it.... 60X.   That is 1 part in 1 with 60 zero's after it!!  I think wikipedia has the best way to describe that:  on average, this would require giving two billion doses per second to six billion people for 4 billion years to deliver a single molecule of the original material to any patient.  As one physicist put it, even a 30X solution would need a container more than 30,000,000,000 times the size of the Earth just to contain one single molecule.  So bearing this in mind, the science behind homeopathy is - well.... balony, and a lot of people are getting very rich.

One caveat, I am entirely intrigued by the placebo effect. I think it should be studied, explored and is a secret door to all sorts of new discoveries about how our minds and bodies work in tandem. I'm not saying that some people don't actually get better when they take this stuff, but it's just not for the reasons they think.

So, as the NHS goes ahead with its feasability studies, lets hope someone with sense can wave their hand and remind people to think with their brains.

Refresh

Discussion at its very best.  (12 parts and all worth watching even if the synch is way off...grrr!)

Tears

It's been a rough few days. Not sure if harder than normal but I just don't seem to have coped very well. Perhaps when the pain is intense for many days, and the migraine drugs don't work, it all gets too much. Or maybe it's just the withdrawal from weaning off this bloody awful Lorazepam.  Things are worse at night. In the past it was migraines that were the main source of pain, but for the last year or so I have chronic neck and facial pain that rivals the worst my head can dish up. At night it feels like the pillow turns to rock and the weight of my head crushes the muscle and skin in a vice. The muscles in my neck hurt so intensely it makes me want to tear them out, and the migraines that come every morning leave me in despair. Two nights ago I realised I felt scared to even go to bed, knowing it was all waiting for me.

I made the mistake of going to work yesterday and thinking I could push through it when it was much worse than I thought. Live and learn I suppose. I couldn't do anything - sat and watched YouTube all day and tried not to think what a terrible employee I was. Every muscle hurt and every sense was painful.  I saw Gagan combing websites trying to learn as much as he could about how to help me. How helpless I felt - he is all that keeps me going and it feels so sad that he has to spend his life like this.

So today, there was a moment of discovery. Reading things that put a piece into the puzzle of this illness. It started from a blog Gagan found.  So much research to digest - but something struck a chord. The cervical myofascial pain syndrome. I searched more and found the Mayo Clinic site.

Fibromyalgia
Some research suggests that myofascial pain syndrome may develop into fibromyalgia in some people. Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition that causes widespread pain. It's believed that the brains of people with fibromyalgia become more sensitive to pain signals over time. Some doctors believe myofascial pain syndrome may play a role in starting this process.

As I read that, I admit I was crying at my desk. I don't even know why - like a frustrated penny had dropped.  It made sense. I had so much neck pain as a teenager, and doctors and physical therapists couldn't do anything. So many headaches, fatigue, and I was very sick even then. I feel like I can almost see the beginning of the whole thing (though who knows what actually caused it)... that if only we had known, we might have had a chance to stop this from happening.  Hindsight.  No point in that sort of thinking though. Depression lies in that direction.

I don't know if I can get any treatment for this, even though I can clearly see this is a major part of the problem. Not until we are in some other country with doctors who understand it.  Just hold on.

[Not the usual post.... but sometimes fibro yells louder than everything else.]

Can't Buy Me Love

Research by the University of Warwick and the University of Manchester finds that psychological therapy could be 32 times more cost effective at making you happy than simply obtaining more money.

Read more

Amazing Things I Didn't Know (and will forget tomorrow)

I kinda thought we knew a fair amount about the living things on our planet - but it turns out that as many as 97% of the plant and animal species are still undiscovered. That's describing them loosely, since we can't lump them into the two kingdoms ('plant' and 'animal') that we all grew up with, anymore. For example, there are worms and lichens that don't want to happily fit into those groups - but that's another story.

Estimates range at there being anywhere from 1.5 to 1.8 million known species but noone really knows at all. Lots of species are listed more than once and it seems impossible to figure that out, especially for the large groups like the 50,000 molluscs or 400,000 beetles.

I suppose most of the undiscovered creatures are on the smallish side, but I still find it one of the more exciting and encouraging things to think we've only found about 3% of life on Earth.

(thanks once again to Bill Bryson for all the info)