I felt that a blog that focuses on woman’s issues might find some sympathetic editors, even a single new editor would be fantastic. Well I heard from no one. Despite my willingness to train, no one wrote to me.

In the mean time things were still getting done. I wrote to most of the women on the blog explaining the need to improve their pages. Received one negative rude remark from one, silence from most of the rest and one very welcoming conference speaker. I would like to share the improvements to her page, all shiny and fresh in time for the CFI conference.

Sikivu Hutchinson wrote back and supplied me will current citations and suggestions for the page. One friend, Wendy Hughes supplied me with more information about Sikivu, and the rest of the help came from the people who are already editors on the We Got Your Wiki Back! project. Brian Engler rose to the occasion with some photos he had taken from past conferences, and suggestions and corrections from other current editors allowed me to upload this new page.

Here is the before page

Here is the after page

One thing I learned on this project was that apparently there was a Billboard project that links current Black non-believers with Black non-believers from the past. Sikivu’s picture was linked up with Zora Neale Hurston. This allowed me to place the street-view image on both women’s Wikipedia pages. Zora receives about 35K hits each month, because Sikivu’s Wikipedia page is hyperlinked to that photo, it exposes Sikivu’s page to an extra 35K people as well.

We can see if there has been additional exposure to Sikivu’s Wikipedia page by using this tool. We can’t compare numbers to last year because the page hasn’t been around that long. We can see April 2012 vs Feb 2012 the page is receiving about 22% more hits. Nothing close to the 35K hits Zora received Feb 2012, but then we can only do what we can do. Watch this stat tool in late May. There should be a surge in hits to her page the day before the conference and climb during the next few days. (note: this tool might be off by 24 hours)

LOVE IT?

Here is one more make-over

Living in Salinas, CA, I always attend SkeptiCal which is held nearby in Berkeley. In preparation for that conference I looked around and wrote to Alison Gopnik who would be speaking on “The Philosophical Baby; What children’s minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life”. I wrote to Alison who quickly responded that she would gladly help with citations and anything we needed. I did another call-out for help. This time on my blog Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipeida. Guess what? Again no response. Finally another one of the We Got Your Wiki Back! editors said he would take on the task. And what a job Dustin Phillips did. Only took him a couple weeks and again was launched in time for SkeptiCal (see this blog for more info about conferences) I managed to get a nice picture of her lecturing at the conference and had it uploaded to her Wikipedia page before she was finished lecturing.

Alison Gopnik before

Alison Gopnik after

Lets see what kind of hits Alison Gopnik is receiving. This stat tool shows a 100% spike in her numbers the day of the conference April 21, 2012.

So now what? I’m not sure what to think? I’m told female Wikipedia editors only make up 9% of total editors. Does that concern you? The majority of the information the world is accessing (and Yes, they are accessing it) is written by men. For some people this is an appalling number. I’m sure that is true. But for the purposes of improving skeptical content on Wikipedia, and having the backs of our skeptical spokespeople I’m not concerned. An editor is an editor. I judge by dedication to the task. I only have a handful right now, but they are awesome. Surely there are more of you out there? Please join us. Female and Male, the skeptical movement needs you.

For more information about me and this project please visit SkepticBlog.

Contact me at susangerbic@yahoo.com

P.S. since writing this blog, I’ve heard from one other speaker. Stay tuned for another page make-over.

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This post, More Wikipedia Goodness!, originally appeared on She Thought on June 14, 2012.
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Defecation is the great equalizer. Everyone drops trou from time to time. Seriously, everyone. Members of the kingdom animalia, which includes the popular girls in high school, dictators, presidents, attorneys, doctors, supermodels, and Michael Stipe, all need to download some brownware evacuate our bowels occasionally. Even me! It’s the result of metabolism. Speaking only for myself, I tend not to think about this metabolic process much unless I’m sick. However, there are people, at least in Western societies, who fetishize the functioning of their colons and perform all sorts of fascinating rituals to rid themselves of evil feces. Which is exactly why I became an anthropologist. Other people are weird.

Even weird people are complex, and the lines of colonic fetishism for health vs. sexual reasons sometimes overlap. People who enjoy insertive anal stimulation may seek out colonic therapies to achieve orgasm. Klismaphiliacs in particular receive “…arousal from introducing liquids into the rectum and colon via the anus.”  Google “enemarotica” for more on this. Of course not all of colonic health fetishization is explicitly sexual.

Alternative colonic health practices all look like purification rituals to me. Proponents imagine a discredited concept called auto-intoxication in which feces stagnate in a closed system continually leaching poisonous substances into the bloodstream. The basic premise is that feces are inherently evil toxic and performing extreme colon cleansing rituals will get rid of the devil toxic stuff, ushering in “true” health and purity. And lower BMI. And cure asthma. And cure halitosis. And improve body odor. And really, who doesn’t want to smell like honey?

On one end of the colonic health spectrum is eating fiber and self-administering laxatives and enemas to assist or achieve ease of elimination. Near the other end is commercial colon hydrotherapy. Here’s a description of that process:

“…a colonic irrigation [also called hydrotherapy] is a procedure where a jet of water is inserted into the colon through the rectum and the whole colon is physically washed for hours with warm streams of water. The procedure takes two to four hours…”

The very latest fad is a bit of an outlier, fecal microbial transplantation, which I’ll get into in a minute.

Click to embiggen.

There are medically valid reasons for some practices like colon cleansing enema, such as prior to a colonoscopy under the direction of a medical doctor. There is a great deal of potential for harm from the rogue practice of commercial colonic hydrotherapy. People have died from this from a wide variety of fatal practitioner errors including improper sterilisation of equipment. The most common complication seems to be bowel perforation, where there is improper insertion or the pressure from the hydrotherapy ruptures the colon, flooding the abdominal cavity with fecal slurry. This is often fatal. Shooting water, or herbal water, or coffee water into your colon under pressure is not a benign undertaking.

The new holy grail of alternative colonic ritual is fecal microbial transplantation (FMT), for which PubMed lists a number of studies supporting its use for a very specific bacterium which causes severe diarrhea. Dr. Mark Crislip describes the process as it occurs under close medical supervision:

The best therapy, best being the highest cure rate, for C. difficile is the stool transplant [...] The stool of a spouse (although it should be parents or children) is pureed and given either down a nasogastric tube or as an enema. Efficacy is almost 100%. There are worries about disease transfer, as some infections are spread by the fecal-oral route [...] most spouses, unlike other relatives, probably share most infections anyway.

As Crislip said in his lovely Quackcast episode 86 on the subject, most spouses have fecal-oralled, intentionally or otherwise, and are therefore unlikely to introduce a novel infection. In other words, the donor in this scenario is a close relative who is likely to be microbially compatible with the recipient.

Contrast that with a naturopath (not an actual medical doctor) in Portland who has taken FMT well beyond the evidence of safety and efficacy for C. difficile. From Willamette Week:

Portland naturopath Mark G. Davis, who opened the Bright Medicine Clinic four months ago, is using fecal microbial transplantation for other health problems, including autoimmune disease, eczema, asthma, multiple sclerosis and depression.
“What makes me unique,” Davis says, “is that I’m doing it for other ailments.”
[...]
Davis needs “clean” excrement from a donor who hasn’t taken antibiotics or been sick recently. He dilutes the sample in saline, filters the slurry and injects the liquid into the patient via enema.

Note the stress on purity. The donor is a thirteen-year-old boy whose fecal microbial population has never been tainted eradicated by oral antibiotics. He is “pristine.” And his pristine fecal slurry is harvested and inserted into unrelated adults. It’s not clear from the article whether or not this boy has been tested for bloodborne pathogens like HIV or what-have-you that might infect his sample if there is any rectal tearing during elimination. It’s also not clear to me whether he’s been vaccinated against vaccine-preventable diseases, although if his parents refused antibiotics, it’s highly probable that they also refused routine childhood vaccinations. Purity might not mean what this particular naturopath thinks it means.

I recently attended a lecture about human microbial ecology. Oral antibiotics are like rototilling and turning over the soil of intestinal flora. They wipe out the good with the bad. Individual microbial populations are astonishingly diverse, even among relatives. However, our personal microbial ecology evolves over time regardless, and our microbial populations are closely compatible with those who live with us in the same house. There is a great deal of pseudoscience centered around colonic health. I asked about the portland naturopath, and there is cause for concern about introducing novel infections and introducing microbes that are incompatible with an individual’s body chemistry.

The use of a non-relative child donor in the case of the Portland naturopathic FMT protocol skates a bit close to the line between purported health vs. possible sexual reasons for seeking FMT for me. Paying a “pure” child for his feces, liquefying them, and then introducing the slurry into the rectum and colon via the anus seems awfully dubious to me. It reminds me of the myth, prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, that raping a child will cure HIV. Just like the unrelated child-donor FMT, it’s all pre-scientific ideology about using purity as a sword against evil.

Cultural Relativism Disclaimer:
I am comfortable discussing sex in the abstract, but I won’t publicly discuss my own quirks. As long as all participants are adult, consenting, and safe, I say go for whatever it is that makes you feel amazing. Even though I think your kinks are beyond the pale, I will try not to judge. Except when what you are doing is actually dangerous and/or exploitive.

I am not a medical doctor and this article is not intended as medical advice beyond encouraging the reader to seek the advice of an actual medical professional.

*special thanks to my Trophy Husband for help with the graph.

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This post, Fecal Mythology, originally appeared on She Thought on May 28, 2012.
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Curnir and I became close friends on a chat room many of the JREF forum members frequent. Any time I came onto chat I knew I would be greeted with a “KITTY!” It was like a welcoming hug. Curnir greeted all the regulars with their names, or his own nickname for them, whenever they would log on. You could always count on Curnir letting you know he was so happy you were there. It didn’t matter how bad a day you had or how down you felt, that all cap greeting always made you feel better.

Curnir battled many things in his life. He had a disability which made mobility for him difficult. He didn’t complain about it. You knew about it, but he didn’t whine or moan. He sometimes wished he could travel more easily to see his friends at The Amazing Meeting, or some other event, but that was about all you heard. He never pitied himself, he never wanted pity. He also battled his weight. Curnir was so proud of how he lost an amazing amount of weight. I remember he wrote in chat that he was on a waiting list for weight loss gastric bypass surgery. He said one day he just thought “well maybe I’ll try losing the weight while I’m waiting”. He was very careful about what he ate. This must have been especially hard for him as he loved to cook. He would often share his recipes with his friends online. Still, Curnir persevered and would post before and after photographs as he progressed with his weight loss. Soon, he was a slim handsome young man, and an inspiration to the rest of us. I once asked him how he could cook such delicious meals, and yet not put the weight back on. He would tell me that “just one taste” was enough.

Curnir often cooked meals for his mother and step father. He worried that they “weren’t eating right”. He liked to go over and make a “real meal” for them. Chat friends would get all the details, and sometimes a photograph. I now make some of those some recipes for my family that Curnir cooked for his parents.

Curnir died at age 34, and that is far too young. However, I feel Curnir was a very lucky young man. That is because Curnir appreciated so much about his life. He loved Sweden where he lived. There was not a better country in the world than Sweden in his opinion. The culture, the history, the government, the natural beauty, and the people of Sweden made him feel he was living in the best place on Earth. He never put down other countries, well not too much. Other countries couldn’t help it they weren’t Sweden! While most of us whine or complain about our city, state, or country, Curnir just was appreciative being Swedish.

Curnir also appreciated his family. He loved to go over and visit his mother and step father. He posted photographs of his mothers beading work. She is quite talented. He would happily make them dinner. A visit to his parent’s home was never complete however without a mention of his brother, Zigge. Now Curnir had 2 human brothers. Zigge was his dog “brother”. Curnir had a special love of all animals. Whenever I would come onto chat, Curnir would usually have a “Zigge” story to tell me. He would usually say he had a “Zigge and Lisa” story for me. Zigge has a special friend, a cat named Lisa. Lisa does not belong to Curnir’s parents. She is simply a cat from a few houses away that one day decided to join Zigge in his walk. Then Lisa decided it would be fun to visit Zigge where he lived. At first Curnir’s parents tried to put Lisa out of the house. However, they soon realized that Zigge and Lisa were best friends. Zigge and Lisa still spend most of their day together, with Lisa going home to her real home at night. The two animals had some rather fun adventures together, which Curnir would share.

I had always wanted to write a skeptic (or critical thinking) children’s book. One day I asked Curnir if he would mind if I wrote down some of the “Zigge and Lisa” stories. The two of us worked together to come up with “Zigge and Lisa, Skeptic Friends”. In the first adventure, Zigge teaches Lisa that trolls really do not live under the bridge. (Zigge and Lisa live in the real Swedish town of Trollhatten). Each step of the writing process, Curnir made sure I “got it right”. Zigge is a Cairn terrier, so I had to correct that he got a “hair cut”. Cairn Terriers like Zigge have their hair “pulled” when they are groomed. If he thought Zigge or Lisa acted out of character, he would correct me. He even helped to make sure the illustrations I did were correct. He sent me many photographs of the animals together. Curnir, with his encouragement, his help, and his enthusiasm, made my dream of writing a skeptic book for young children come true. We were both so proud when the CSI children’s camp requested 50 copies to give out to the young campers. We gave out many more copies (thanks to a friend that helped pay for us to self publish) and sold many copies also. I have letters and emails from parents and children that love the story of the real life dog and cat that live in Sweden. It should be noted that I put a lot of Curnir’s personality into the dog Zigge. Zigge is also very appreciative of being Swedish and loves his family.

Curnir had made me promise to come visit him in Sweden next year. My husband travels a lot for business, and my husband was helping me save up frequent flyer miles. I was so excited not only to meet Curnir, but also to meet Zigge and Lisa. Curnir and I were also going to work on writing “Zigge and Lisa 2” soon. He had already sent me many stories of their newest adventures. (Lisa becoming stuck in a pipe in the basement is just one example). I feel sad as I was “Oh write that down, and remember to send it to me when we really get started this summer.” Now I have to try to recall all the stories he mentioned. His mother has kindly asked if she can continue to email me stories about Zigge and Lisa, and I have happily agreed. That’s the kind of family Curnir came from. She knew that I would feel comforted hearing about Zigge and Lisa, and I hope she also feels some comfort from sharing stories about the animals that were so dear to her son.

If anyone would like a copy of “Zigge and Lisa, Skeptic Friends” please get in touch with Sophie via Shethought. It would make me, his friends, and I hope his family, happy to share a book that he inspired and worked so hard with me to make a reality. I’ll be more than happy to send one on.

Curnir sings:

CurnirSings

Editor’s note: For a copy of Zigge and Lisa, you can contact Sophie using her Yahoo email. She will do her best to help Kitty get copies to everyone who requests them.

Special thanks to Noel Dilks for sharing Curnir’s voice with us.

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This post, Curnir leaves us, but also leaves us a part of him., originally appeared on She Thought on May 20, 2012.
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But trying to figure out why it is bad is pretty difficult. Part of the problem is, some people experience stress differently than others. Some people seem to slide right through life’s issues and come out the other side as if nothing happened. Other people, it seems, can have a major crisis if they so much as get a hangnail that week. To further complicate things, the difference in how people experience stress seems to also play a role in disease and, as they say, stress leads to disease.

The problem is, that’s not entirely true. You see, the medical community has been playing badminton with this issue for quite some time. They have found a lot of correlational studies, like the link between cardiovascular disease and stress and the link between obesity and depression. There’s also a correlation between diabetes and obesity and one between diabetes and depression. These are correlations, but correlation, as they say, is not causation. BUT that doesn’t mean that correlation is not important. Correlation is very important. It just isn’t a cause.

This means that stress probably doesn’t cause disease, but it is possibly related to the progression of some diseases.

What we know:

Stress can decrease some immune system functions while increasing others. Because of how medical science is reported in the media, people’s understanding of the immune system is limited. Thus, when it was announced that some researchers had seen changes in the immune systems of people under stress, the media interpreted it as a kind of universal reaction.

Instead, stress-response by the body is pretty complicated. What we’ve found is that stress does change our immune system, but that, alone, doesn’t lead to disease. In fact, some types of immune response during stress are improved while other types of immune response may leave part of your body vulnerable and what happens during your stress-response depends on the type of stressor and the duration of stress. Thus, stresses like exercise are an overall benefit to the immune system. That doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be a little more sickly during an exam.

But, the immune system doesn’t protect against all types of disease. Many diseases are not germ-based and some of those diseases are also correlated with stress. When you look at studies on heart disease and stress, you’ll find an endless list and much of the information is confusing. Because medical science is still trying to work out the details, what you find may seem inconsistent. Again, what we do learn is context-specific. Marital stress seems to make heart disease more dangerous for women.

That advertisement just got a million times creepier.

While medical science is still trying to tease out how stress relates to heart disease, in most respects, there’s significant evidence that if risk is there, stress can trigger heart attacks. The sad side of this information is that it comes from natural ways to find a direct correlation: tragedy. Of course, triggering the worst consequence of a disease is not, itself, causing the disease. Individual heart attacks are caused by a blockage in an artery that prevents blood from flowing to the heart. We already know that stress does lead to an increase in blood pressure and an increased heart rate. Thus, with the pre-existing condition of plaque-filled arteries, loose plaque or blood clots, we can easily see how a little stress can trigger a heart attack, while the cause of the heart attack was a blood clot and clogged arteries.

Cancer is also correlated with stress, but we don’t know exactly why or how. In fact, we know so little about stress’ correlation to cancer, I hesitate to even expound, because I don’t want to say something without more confidence in the data.

But, even with cancer, there seems to be confusion by the public that cancer is caused by stress, but that’s not what the evidence seems to say. Instead (see the above link) most studies on cancer and stress show cancer growth increasing when the individual is under stress. This doesn’t mean cancer starts with stress, it just means cancer is likely more harmful in those who are stressed, already.

But, even this article isn’t so simple as it seems. Remember where I mentioned that exercise seems to benefit the immune system (with some sort of implication that exercise decreases stress)? Well, as it turns out, even that is a conditional thing. While there are health benefits to exercise, including it possibly reducing your stress levels overall, if you’re stressed before your exercise, those effects may not be quite as beneficial, since your risk of heart attack seems to increase.

So, going for a run on a normal day might not be a big deal, but running from this:

Don't worry, I think that's his burping face.

That could be the added stress needed before a run to end your life early from a heart attack. If it happens daily and you don’t end up meeting the bear for lunch, I mean.

Of course, this completely ignores our problem over most correlation health studies. Does the stress come before the illness or does the illness come before the stress? Most of the time, we can see links between things, but there are too many variables to pin one thing down as being a cause. Sure, stress may lead to a person doing this:

But that is not an immediate risk. We also know that obesity correlates with depression in such a way that the more obese a person is, the more likely they are to suffer from depression and the more weight a person loses, the less depressed they seem to become. So, where stress and depression are linked, we can’t really say that stress is the causation of various risks associated with obesity, including heart disease, diabetes or cancer.

So, you may wonder, why is this important? It is important because people make decisions about their health based on information they get from the general media. The media seems to advocate this idea that stress causes disease and that idea feeds into various types of bad science.

Some examples:

Herbs to reduce stress, making odd claims about toxins, stress attacking you and even an apparent misunderstanding of evolution.

Accupuncture to treat stress, with dangerous symptoms that might require immediate medical care.

Even a recognizable network like TLC has information worth questioning when they make claims about stress-caused illness and then suggest aroma therapy.

I want to be clear about something. It isn’t that we shouldn’t try to reduce our stress levels. Seeing a correlation between stress and health should be something that makes us pro-active and even somewhat concerned about our stress levels. At the same time, the outright claims made about stress causing certain health problems (when they confuse correlation with causation) can lead to people ignoring the very real causes that we are aware of. It can also lead to people making poor decisions about their health. The benefits of abstaining from a greasy burger is not the same set of benefits that someone might gain from an hour of meditation or dropping out of an especially challenging project or class. When it comes to changing something like eating habits or exercise, we at least have more solid data on how that benefits us than we do over how to deal with stress.

Of course, since stress really can be a trigger for life-threatening conditions, it is reasonable to reduce stress if you are at risk for a heart attack. At the same time, be aware of what is actually causing that, so that you can change other parts of your lifestyle as well. Stress doesn’t appear to be the cause of disease. Rather, stress seems to trigger disease-related problems and can increase your predisposition for certain health problems and diseases because of how it affects your immune system, cardiovascular system and even your cellular chemistry. Since enabling a disease is not causing the disease, take care of yourself in ways that are practical, first.

After that:

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This post, Stress and the Confusion Over if it Causes Disease, originally appeared on She Thought on May 3, 2012.
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If you are less than Thirty years of age then you must accept that you are generally unable to contribute to a discussion or debate because your young age means you do not have the necessary life experience that would make such a contribution worthwhile.

Dismissing people and their contribution to a topic or debate will certainly have a positive influence on the next generation whom so many older skeptics agree are those that educational outreach must focus on to pass on the importance of critical thinking. By simply dismissing young people when they try to voice their opinions is a sure way to encourage them to openly question things for the rest of their lives.

If you also happen to be female then you must show an interest in the male skeptics around you or people shall start to suspect that there is something terribly wrong with you – like that you might like ladies instead. If you are not publicly interested in the array of men around you then you are a gay, a ‘frigid bitch’, or a ‘cock tease’. If you do not feel comfortable, or show an interest in discussing crude sex things around people that you hardly know then you are obviously a gay or frigid bitch and people have every right to discuss this about you. This is just how it is. You must accept this.

If you should ever receive abuse from other people and a male comes to your defense in the conversation it is because he wants to get nuddy with you and make hay. It is not possible that he is a friend who is coming to your defense, for he is a man and you are a woman and therefor he wants to do the dirty with you. There are no two ways about it.

When you share your critical thoughts with others, when you voice your opinion and speak your mind do not be under the assumption that it is okay to do this because this is attention seeking behavior and others will see through your wicked attempt at gaining an ego boost for yourself. By even contemplating writing your thoughts on your blog you are clearly attempting to make a name for yourself and make subjects all about you. Any negative reaction you receive as a result of sharing your thoughts is only deserved and you only have yourself to blame for being young, female and daring to be vocal.

The first important lesson you can learn about being a young, female, vocal skeptic (as outlined above) is that you must simply accept from the start that you are an attention seeker whose input cannot be valued because of the few years you have been alive, and any attention you receive as a result of all that you do is your own doing and simply a result of the other person having a penis.

The second important lesson for you to learn is that you must never listen to anybody who tells you these things because they’re lying and what they’re telling you is offensive and cruel and not worth the time it takes to read the words involved.

Blog if you are young, old or middle aged. Be vocal no matter what gender you are, and learn to accept that sometimes your work gets attention because people value your opinion – not because they want to fuck you. I used to fall for these lies and felt that I had to just accept such treatment. Never again.If these few words I have written can help another person avoid falling into that trap of self-doubt, then I’ll die happy.

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This post, Lessons in Being Young, Female and Vocal, originally appeared on She Thought on April 25, 2012.
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I think we are all used to skeptic meetings of some sort. There are the big mega meetings like TAM (The Amazing Meeting). You and 1000 of your close friends in a huge venue. Big name speakers and all the glitz of Vegas are featured. Then there are the local SIP (Skeptics in the Pub). Drinking and skeptics in an intimate pub atmosphere, just the locals. However, on May 26 in St. Louis there is going to be a new kind of skeptic get together. The focus, in fact, won’t be on skepticism. The focus will be on fun! A chance for skeptics and critical thinkers, or perhaps it’s better to just say the curious, to get together. The ve

I’m going to be speaking on alien abductions. The focus will be on how I interact with alien abductees, and to dispel the sad media driven image of the average abductee.

There will be also a fun workshop about aliens! I’ve spoken over the years at various events on French superstitions, ghost hunting in New Hampshire and my skeptic books for preschoolers. The most popular topic, by far, though is when I speak about alien abductions. Everyone probably knows someone that has had the abduction experience, but most abductees have learned not to talk about it. Learn what their world is like, and how often it’s more exciting and interesting than the everyday world most people inhabit. Plus aliens are just plain fun.

I’m sure there will be plenty of time to hang out with all the speakers, and part of the fun for me is answering questions one on one. This will be a very different kind of get together, and I hope it becomes a yearly event!

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This post, College of Curiosity, originally appeared on She Thought on March 6, 2012.
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