She Thought

Stress and the Confusion Over if it Causes Disease

Sophie Hirschfeld — Thu, 03 May 2012 18:00:45 +0000

Stress is bad.

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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Lessons in Being Young, Female and Vocal

Hayley Stevens — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 20:45:08 +0000

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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Do You Believe in Life After Death? Part Two

Wendy Hughes — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:41:03 +0000

This is the second article in a series. Part 1 is here.

The Big Responsibility
My mom is far older than my father lived to be, but much healthier. Maybe because I know more, and I have more control — I’m sure that’s part of the difference in the sense of responsibility I feel. I ask myself all the time what I would want for myself if my daughter were taking care of me and how much decision making power I would want over my own destiny, and that usually my dad took care of all of us instead of the other way around.

I had promised him that I would take care of her. When she became ill, there was an agreement that several of us driving a great distance to see her every week was inefficient, so she moved closer to us. My skepticism became more and more a part of my identity, and the hobby a part of my life, even as the caregiver role began to grow. Eventually, in an impulsive moment, I asked my mother if she believes in life after death.

What I thought I had to do
My father had grown up in poverty in Chicago, but acquired an education in an expanding economy, so he frequently commented that he’d achieved success beyond his wildest ambitions. My mom is comparatively comfortable, not wealthy, but she doesn’t have to get a McJob to supplement her Social Security.

After my dad died my mom sold our old house and moved to the beach. I was between jobs and had lots of spare time; I went to visit her pretty often. We had fun; she would treat me to lunch and a pedicure, and then together we’d watch the sun set before I’d tackle the 18 mile drive back to the Valley.

On one of those visits, one Spring day, I let myself into her apartment; she had sheets of yellow legal paper spread out on her dining table, and was making lists of the numbers from her check register. I asked what she was doing. She explained that she was getting her taxes ready to take to the accountant. I picked up one of the pages, and compared it to the check register, and realized that there was no distinction such as Medical, or Legal; nothing to describe the list to make it useful to the tax accountant. I realized she was imitating what she had seen my father doing at tax time, but didn’t know how. I offered to take over the project for her, and that was the beginning of her dependence on me, a defining moment that I didn’t realize until much later.

Moving to the Valley
When she was first widowed, she had resources and energy. She had girlfriends to travel with and still looked beautiful and loved to shop and dine out. Then slowly, she began to have increasing disability, back pain that no doctor could diagnose — and I dragged her to at least 15 different doctors. (It was during this time that one of the doctors we visited who was a gerontologist assured me that as long as her memory could be jogged by hints or reminders, that whatever was going on with her was not Alzheimers. With Alzheimers, he told me then, the actual brain cells where the memory processes take place are destroyed. He said that sometimes people are forgetful because of distraction or other reasons. That was my test for a long time. What has been happening lately is different.)

She lived in a luxury apartment in the most expensive real estate in Southern California, but couldn’t take a walk. She perched on the edge of her bed watching TV all day because her back was killing her. Finally she fell, and the emergency room doctor asked to see a list of her medications. This doctor noticed in one glance that there were two medications on the list that by themselves are harmless, but together caused an interaction that was causing her pain and paralysis. Even though she stopped taking one of the drugs, the damage was done. After over five years of inactivity, she’d gained weight, and she has never regained the verve and spark she’d had when she moved to the beach.

We persuaded her to move from Santa Monica to the San Fernando Valley. It wasn’t easy, but it made sense. The drive was horrible, and my mother was being sensible. She wanted to be close to her family, and we were willing to accommodate her if she made the compromise.

My hobby — my friends
By this time, I had established myself firmly as a skeptic. My hobby was grassroots skepticism — I’ve served as an officer of my group, the Independent Investigations Group, IIG, in Hollywood, California. I loved volunteering for the Center for Inquiry there, and it served as my social matrix. I have friends from other parts of my life, and I love them, too; I’d never had a hobby before, except maybe painting ceramics, but not a consuming, enduring hobby that held my whole attention.

My identity as a skeptic, not necessarily as an atheist, started when I was listening to the car radio while waiting for my boyfriend to get off work. I had been listening to Dr. Dean Edell talk about Carl Sagan’s Demon Haunted World. So we bought the book, and in it Carl Sagan had written lovingly about Skeptical Inquirer Magazine. Months later, I received a solicitation for that magazine, and figured if it was good enough for Carl Sagan, it was good enough for me. When I began receiving the magazine, I noticed that advertised on the back cover there was a Center for Inquiry less than five miles from my house. At CFI there is a grassroots skeptics group, the Independent Investigations Group, IIG.

In IIG, I’ve learned to use key words and phrases in search engines to ferret out information not always obvious in cursory research. I have listened to conversations between experienced skeptics and by osmosis picked up handy techniques that I didn’t even realize I’d learned until the opportunity arose to use one of them! And the connections! I know a retired police officer, a lawyer, several film industry and media personnel, physicists, an archaeologist is one of my best friends, and several IT experts. If I want to know something, it’s an email away!

Taking turns
Meanwhile, my sister and daughter and brother and I continued the rotation of visiting our mom/grandmother. We each had “assignments” or specialties. My sister does marketing; I am good at bookkeeping and legal matters; my daughter brings over her children for my mother, their great grandmother to marvel at. There are some variations; but this way she has at least one visit about six days out of seven per week, one evening on her own, and phone calls.

When she was ill in the past, and we’d had nurses care for her, there was an issue of safety. You don’t think about it when you go into a hospital – you hope that it’s going to be safe and you take your possessions with you. You assume that things are secure, that your loved ones are being cared for properly. But even as our discovery in IIG showed that Continuing Education Units for nurses can be awarded for Therapeutic Touch and other non-evidence based practices but also, the state of California can’t guarantee that In Home Support Services workers are not felons.

In my family, our experience when she’d had surgery in the past was not that anyone tried to hurt my mother physically, but there was a little matter of some missing unsigned checks and a very confusing relationship with the nurse and her family that got out of hand. We were just lucky that it wasn’t worse. For that reason, I had been happy we were able to take care of her ourselves as long as possible. It’s not the same for all families; distance, resources, the level of disability — circumstances are all different. My cousins all lived far away from their mom – my aunt; but they found loving, thorough and evidently compassionate professional caregivers who kept my aunt comfortable in her home until her death last year. My cousins’ lives are different from ours, and I think theirs are more the norm. People move away from where they grew up, and there is a reason that in-home caregiver businesses exist.

My mom has the illusion of independence; she has a housekeeper who comes weekly who has been cleaning her house for over 20 years. My mother can do all the ADLs, that means Activities of Daily Living: she can stand from a sitting position, toilet herself, dress and undress, move around unassisted, take care of personal hygiene. ADLs used to be a boundary for insurance companies to use to determine when a person was qualified to receive benefits from their long-term care policy. But now, some policies also include a clause that a diagnosis of cognitive impairment will trigger the policy benefits, even if the patient can do all the usual activities of daily living, but can’t remember what they had for lunch yesterday.

Do you believe?
It was on one of my visits that I asked the question about life after death. I had been afraid to ask my dad. I thought about asking our friend Richard who was dying when we were in our fifties; but that, too, seemed pretty uncool, or I just didn’t have the right words. “Say, Richard, since you are dying, when you are done, and on the other side, if you have time, would you please let us know what it’s like?” When he was in the convalescent hospital before he died, he was only allowed a certain amount of liquid daily. I went to a cappuccino shop to buy him a fat free, sugar free iced latte — and happened to fill out a contest form for a pound of Jamaican blue mountain coffee beans, and forgot all about it. The week after Rich died, I got a phone call from the cappuccino shop that I’d won the coffee, and I never win anything, so I was imagining, just for one minute, that Richard was communicating with us from beyond the grave, that he was fine, but that he really wanted another latte.

My ex-father-in-law died the same year as my father. I used to go visit my mother in law, driving about 90 minutes to Ventura every other week, for about a year. We had been very close, even after I was divorced from my ex husband. She is Jewish, and even older than my mother. We used to go for a walk along the beach, have lunch, and talk about Deep Stuff. There were a lot of things I could talk about with her that I thought I could not share with my own mother. During this time that I was asserting my non-belief, we were in her apartment, changing into swimming suits. We were all alone. I said, “You know what, I don’t believe in God.” She looked over her shoulder, both shoulders, and whispered, “Neither do I…” and that started a dialog that went on for months. This was my first encounter with a Jewish skeptic, but not my last.

It has taken, though, twenty plus years for this dialog to take place with my own mother. I’ve had to explain the tattoo of the Darwin fish on my ankle to her two or three times; she forgets in between. But somehow, when I finally was talking about my hobby skepticism group the other evening, she asked, “Are you an atheist?” And I said, yes, and explained that I never deny being Jewish; I still feel a tremendous responsibility to honor the deaths of six million victims of genocide who did nothing wrong except that they were Jewish, but I just can’t believe that there is a supernatural being who answers prayers and runs things. It just popped out of my mouth: “So Mom, do you believe in Life After Death?” and she said, “Well, nobody has come back to tell us one way or the other.”

Tradition!
Wow! After all the stories about her childhood in the tiny Jewish community in St. Paul, and dating only Jewish boys, and forcing me to go to Sunday school and although we didn’t have to go through Bat Mitzvah, we were forced against our will to endure Confirmation Class after which I never went to Temple again except to take my mother to High Holy Days until my father was dying — Oy! What a thunderbolt!

So – does that mean you, too, do not believe in a supernatural being who answers prayers and runs things? What about all the emphasis on Jewish tradition? Wait a minute — there was no Jewish Tradition. My family was so assimilated that we had a Hanukkah Bush. I specifically remember my parents bickering about it. My mother didn’t know the Friday night blessings over the Sabbath candles and challah. I had to explain to her about the Reform movement and the Jewish Renewal movement that I’d learned about in the little congregation of Jewish Mystics (modern Chasidim).

So I am relieved. I am the apple that has not fallen so far from the skepticism tree as I thought. Why this has come as such a surprise I don’t know. She has already paid for her ashes to be scattered at sea. She said that she thinks that when we die it’s like going to sleep. I certainly hope so; and I hope that it is a peaceful, dreamless sleep that comes painlessly after a really nice day. That seemed to be what it was like for my one friend’s mom, even though her circumstances were very different from ours.

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This post, Do You Believe in Life After Death? Part Two, originally appeared on She Thought on April 11, 2012.
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The Curious Case of the Beauty Queen Bias

Sophie Hirschfeld — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 10:04:57 +0000

Just hours ago, a close friend of mine joked that if I were only willing to go on medication for the rest of my life and didn’t care about my health so much, I could have a whole piece of cake instead of just two bites of it at his child’s birthday party. Only an hour ago, I learned that I was dropped from a cabaret show because my hourglass figure, complete with large breasts and very broad hips, was tougher to fit on short notice than the other models and one model had dropped out so a need for even numbers meant someone had to be dropped and I, the most challenging model, was the sacrifice. Sometimes things happen that we tie into our attitudes about beauty and vanity and they seem discriminatory, but they’re completely understandable. Sometimes, what might be normal human behavior is seen negatively because of context. Beauty is a subject included in that weird bias. It is through this kind of a lens that I must view the seemingly giant debate over an article by Samantha Brick.

Samantha Brick is too pretty. Samantha Brick has felt hurt by people’s behavior because she’s pretty. Samantha Brick is now hated by masses on the internet for writing about the experience of being pretty. Shame, the internet cries, on Samantha Brick!

I’m not a beauty queen and I wouldn’t say my appearances are better than average. That being said, part of my very well-being, my work and my success in my work, relies on my appearances. I am not a beauty queen and most people would consider Mrs. Brick a superior beauty, but I think I can see her point, a little.

My friend’s joke was funny to me, earlier. That friend has seen me struggle, now, for over a year in a battle against my own body. His comment is a great acknowledgement of things that have become habit to me; things that are stressful and, sometimes, heartbreaking. The lady who dropped me from the Angry Woman Cabaret was also not being unkind. She was trying to be reasonable about her own presentation. But, their actions are from the perspective of those close to me or directly tied to what is going on. People who don’t know me treat these situations differently. I’ve experienced people witnessing me count calories and obsess over food calling me vain and unreasonable. There are few people who guess that I do it because I’m diabetic and controlling my health through diet and exercise. My renewed interest in exercise is seen as similarly obsessive, vain and unnecessary. While only my closest friends would otherwise have known I was taken out of a show, if it were a topic of conversation outside of my social realm, I can only guess how it would be seen. There’s not a way to explain what happened without sounding vain or maybe pathetic to strangers. I have also experienced people comment on my shape and how I dress. I won’t deny that I am vain, either. I am vain. But, I’m not a beauty stereotype, so it is often allowed, depending on the company I keep.

So, as I ponder what I’ve read from Mrs. Brick, I can understand how what she says may not be entirely untrue. And, before people’s thoughts wander back into the question of who is beautiful or not, this isn’t about who you see as attractive. This is about how other people see her. She’s right, when someone is seen as attractive, things do happen. I’ve seen men spend unreasonable amounts of money on women based entirely on their appearance. In one of Richard Wiseman’s books, he talks about a study done that showed women with larger breasts were more likely to be helped if they were hitchhiking. I also think that there are women who become insanely jealous of others based on looks. I don’t, however, think that’s the only thing that powers what Brick was complaining about. I think that another problem is not how others view her appearance. I think it might be how others view her behavior which affects her appearance.

As a culture, both in the United States and, I suspect, most places affected by Western culture, we have a love-hate relationship with vanity. If someone has large breasts, we are mostly fine with it. If someone purchased their large breast implants, though? Many people dislike it. Pretty eyes are a fortunate genetic accident, but pretty eyes surrounded in lots of smokey, powdery make-up is seen as excessive by some harsh critics and stylish by others. Then there is the battle between our concept of beauty and the tipped scales. Big and beautiful is a new, fabulous trend. Confidence in a human form that is often considered unattractive because of some arbitrary line drawn in the sand about what size is attractive is wonderful, to us, at least lately. But if that same big and beautiful person suddenly becomes skinny, what happens? Confidence in herself might be seen differently. We see self-confidence differently if we see it as someone being beautiful and knowing it when they are matched to an ideal than we see it if someone is attractive and atypical.

Interestingly, this debate also reminds me of the awful debate over the Science Cheerleader a year or so ago, when people objected to some sort of objectification rather than accepting and welcoming a different form of science advocacy. The argument was made that we couldn’t have barbie doll science. If we advocated science, we wanted it to be representative of everybody and by “everybody,” we meant the average, eccentric scientist who wasn’t a “barbie.” Many people failed to see the hypocrisy. I’m also reminded of community debates over sexiness in science, activism and general geekery. Are geeks allowed to be sexy or attractive? Aren’t we somehow buying into a culture of objectification if we are? But, as we ask those questions, we’re implying that we want to remain ignorant of the flipside. If we reject these things in our circles, aren’t we then promoting an intolerance to those who fit this stereotype? Aren’t we perpetuating the very bigotry that Samantha Brick is complaining about?

I don’t think that what people are angry about is only that she is beautiful. I think she’s wrong that the backlash is something that proves her point. No, the backlash seems to say that people are angry that she’s beautiful and she knows it. To us, she’s too beautiful to acknowledge that she’s beautiful. She’s too beautiful to be vain. She’s too beautiful because she’s aware. That’s the crime that she shares with the Science Cheerleader and the crime that she shares with countless other women. If you’re too beautiful, we don’t want you to tell us about it and we don’t want you to use it in our social, academic or eccentric social groups. Why? Because we’re too immature to handle it.

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This post, The Curious Case of the Beauty Queen Bias, originally appeared on She Thought on April 4, 2012.
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The Bane of Human Remains

Sophie Hirschfeld — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 13:00:43 +0000

This article is a repost from indieskeptics.com.

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of researching on mummies for a project that I’m working on. This researching has branched off in several directions and

King Tut: An Invasion of Privacy?

resulted in me learning some fascinating things. My research on mummies has a lot to do with hygienic and medical histories of the remains of ancient cultures and, totally coincidentally, io9 recently published this article: Do we have the right to violate King Tut’s privacy?

The article argues that even though mummies come from a time so far removed from our own that current ethical concerns about remains don’t apply, that because we might be looking at medical histories of the long-dead, including King Tut’s, for attention and because we don’t want our own remains treated the way we treat mummies, then we should respect their medical histories as we do modern patients.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen concerns like this expressed. Various groups have raised similar concerns and it is a tough set of questions to address. First, I want to mention a few things about why we study the medical history of mummies and other remains from ancient cultures.

Who Owns History?

Essentially, history is painted for us by the victors of the past, sometimes, and sometimes it is painted for us by what little we find that is left behind. Our history tells us a lot about human behavior and so by looking into the past, we gain knowledge about ourselves. If we ignored history or hid from it, we run the risk of viewing ourselves through a lens that is so distorted, we might repeat past mistakes or ignore the needs that we currently have.

Imagine, for a moment, that we forgot how we think the Black Plague was spread through Europe. We think, currently, that it was spread through the fleas which lived on the rats which were common amongst the people at the time. What would happen if we weren’t aware of not only that, but other cases of how disease has spread in history? How would that affect how we view disease today?

Who Owns Medical History?

Essentially, we gain by knowing about the medical histories of those who died in the past. While we may create headlines by announcing that King Tut had an STD, it is also the case that knowing he had an STD might tell us something about STDs in his time, especially if we learn about other mummies who had them. I know you’re probably aware that we have current medical studies that we also rely on in order to benefit ourselves, but conditions now and conditions in history are different and even the illnesses that we are concerned with now are not always the same as they were in the past; neither are the environmental and social conditions. That doesn’t mean that we have left those elements behind, completely, though, or that we gain nothing by examining events that happened in those different contexts.

In order to approach this matter practically, and to consider it rationally, it may be important to look to the ways that related issues have been addressed in the more recent past. Let me take a detour for a moment and talk a little about the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act.

The Native American Graves and Repatriation Act

Back when the Americas were first being colonized, there were already people here. The colonists, though, didn’t see the people here as being the same as them and they often treated them horribly, denied them rights, stole their land and even made them slaves. Alongside this, the remains of the people who lived in the Americas were also often disturbed. The colonists sometimes saw the remains as novelties, searched them for valuables and even used whatever they found for trade. In order to address the ethical questions surrounding older remains, like those of King Tut, I will compare them to some reasons that NAGPRA was created.

Probably the most important reason for NAGPRA is for the protection of Native American rights equal to the protection of the rights of the other cultures and social groups in the United States. From the onset of colonization until only a few decades ago, the Native American population’s rights that seemed so basic to the invading cultures were not respected. Property rights and inheritance concerns were primary battles for Native Americans who witnessed the graves of their relatives being dug up and looted. NAGPRA was supposed to help change all that by criminalizing the looting of the graves of Native Americans and taking Native remains. This didn’t necessarily put Native Americans under the same legal umbrella as the rest of the country, but it attempted to give them equal footing within cultural settings, history and social situations that were unlike their own.

The First Amendment was also a central point to the creation of NAGPRA. Death itself is viewed, across cultures, as having religious significance. How we deal with the dead within that context varies from one religion to the other and great pains are taken in order to respect the religious wishes of the dead and their remaining relatives. Because of the religious significance of deaths and burials, NAGPRA is considered a protection of Native American religious rights that reinforce the First Amendment, the same law that grants people the right to perform religious ceremonies in prison and to publicly protest.

Human Rights — For the Dead?

NAGPRA was developed in the interest of human rights that were bestowed upon the United States by our adherence to the constitution. While mummies are not privileged enough to have the rights granted by the constitution, it is worth noting that the ethical concerns that grant those protections should be considered when regarding the remains of other cultures. Certainly, due to the laws regarding lineage in NAGPRA, should any of the remains we receive from other countries be remains that can be traced to living family and the family does not grant permission for scientists to examine those remains, the most ethical action to take would be to return the remains. This is because the part of NAGPRA which is concerned with lineage is based on basic principals supported by many bioethicists. In fact, that is where we should look next in order to consider the fate of remains like those of King Tut:

1) Bioethics

Bioethics, naturally, is a complex field of study. Any place where ethical concerns have vast gray areas, where each side has a valid complaint, is going to be a difficult field for someone to not only learn, but to navigate. That being said, bioethics experts have still managed to come up with some basic things to consider whenever they are addressing an issue in the medical or scientific world. In case you want to enrich your knowledge about these matters, I highly encourage you to look up the Belmont Report the following comments are based on it.

2) Justice

While the brief discussion on NAGPRA already touches on this concept, it is a vital concept when it comes to bioethical concerns. Justice is an ambiguous term whose definition swings wildly within each society. In one society, cutting off the hand of a thief may be considered ‘justice,’ while, in another, justice may be only the containment of those who might do harm to others. But justice is not just about punishment, it can also be about the distribution of resources or the way we acquire authoritative positions within a group. So, the question that has to be asked, and that is being asked in the above linked article is, has the treatment of King Tut’s remains and those of other ancient people caused them an injustice?

3) Autonomy

Autonomy, in this case, is the allowance of an individual to make decisions for themselves. If you or I are autonomous individuals, then we are people who are considered capable of making our own decisions. Not everyone considered capable of this task, though, and it is frequently the case that some parts of the population are disallowed to make decisions for themselves. For example, children, the mentally insane and, oftentimes, the dead.

In the case of King Tut, he clearly isn’t capable, in his incapacitated state, to make his own decisions. In his lifetime, the possibility that people would be attempting to examine his medical history a few thousand years into the future, was not really something anyone considered. As such, the King was not even capable of granting his permission or stating his wishes in case something like this were to occur. King Tut was, then, and is, now, incapable of making a decision for himself. When someone in our own time is incapable of making decisions for themselves, those decisions fall to their immediate family. If the family is unavailable, it is then a decision that is turned over to the closest reliable people who are the most informed. This means that the scientists dealing with Tut have to make his decision for him.

This seems like it shouldn’t be such a big deal. We make decisions for the dead all the time. We decide if they should be buried or cremated or if they should be tossed into the ocean or turned into fertilizer. So, what’s so different about King Tut? Well, King Tut is King Tut. The reason we raise concern about King Tut and not the many other corpses that we make decisions for is because King Tut was once someone very important and now he is a gateway of information that lets us look far into the past. But the issues surrounding Tut are not just about decisions regarding his grave. Instead, they’re issues surrounding privacy, to which the same applies. We do very little to respect the privacy of our dead. Instead, the privacy of our dead is one of the first things we violate once they die. We sell their stuff, we investigate their financial and medical issues and, if they’re someone important, we broadcast it across the world, just in case anyone else wanted to know about it.

Autonomy only seems to exist for the dead if the deceased planned far enough ahead.

4) Dignity

The idea that each individual deserves a certain level of respect and ethical treatment is another concept that comes rolling through the debate on how to treat ancient remains. In the case of King Tut and other remains that we allow scientists to evaluate, it seems like their preservation and the effort put into learning their stories is the absolute highest amount of respect that we could possibly give them. Ensuring that they are not smashed about and ground up into some sort of silly compound by some health quack and not leaving them out in the elements to be swallowed back up by the Earth is also, very likely, the best we can do to ensure that the remains are treated in an ethically sound manner.

5) Beneficence and Non-Maleficence

Sometimes, it is important to do something for the good of the individual and sometimes it is important to do no harm. The problem is, sometimes doing no harm means not doing what is best for someone and sometimes doing something for the good of the individual is extremely harmful. The King Tut dilemma seems to boil down to this point. What we gain, overall, from the study and sharing of information of King Tut and other ancient remains stands to benefit our society as a whole. The overall benefit far outweighs the tiny cost that a man that died so long ago may not have liked what we’re doing to his corpse.

I can’t possibly give a completely objective answer to all the questions surrounding human remains and their treatment by science, since there are so many hazy areas to roam through, but I do hope that the added information helps people make some conclusions of their own. My own stance, I think, is a fairly pragmatic one, involving a basic concept of what I think is for the greater good. But first, let me address the main conclusion of the original article that inspired this trail of thoughts.

The author of the io9 article suggests that we use what we know of how we want our remains to be treated in order to make decisions for King Tut. The problem is, there is tremendous variation, even today, in how people want their remains to be treated. Contributions to science does happen to be one of those options. Sure, as living creatures that rely so much on our social links to survive and who have been taught to be embarrassed about things such as STDs (and we happened to have one), we would be horrified if we found out that once we died, billions of people would have access to our medical records. When we’re dead, though, we would hardly have a reason to worry about it.

Doing the Greater Good

It is often said, when someone dies, that the funeral is not for the dead, it is for the sake of the living. It is the living who can measure what they have lost; it is the living who need answers and who seek closure. It seems to me that no matter how long someone has been dead, the most ethical decision to make regarding their corpse is to be as attentive as possible to the needs of the living – to do the greater good. That’s why we have funerals and why NAGPRA exists and why we learn about King Tut and share his story with the world.

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This post, The Bane of Human Remains, originally appeared on She Thought on March 22, 2012.
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Uncivilized Society

Anthropologist Underground — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 18:11:31 +0000

I don’t know how many of you have…..…Gay friends……(laughter)…Black friends…..(laughter)

…Muslims living in your city….(laughter)

…Spanish-speaking laborers….(laughter)

…Wives….(laughter)

…Mothers….(laughter)

…Daughters……(laughter)

But I have one, and s/he’s [negative stereotype]…(laughter)

Funny stuff, this bigotry. There’s so much of it in the everyday noise that we get completely anesthetized to it. It’s very easy to ignore, and it’s really hard to know if speaking out against it is worth the effort. Is it really worth debating racial politics with, say, my mechanic when no matter what I say he won’t ever change his mind? I can always just quietly take my car somewhere else, but silence implies collusion with the bigotry.

The unfortunate reality is that speaking up puts you at risk. When personal ethics threaten your in-group status, or even your physical safety, deciding what to do about a bigot can be very difficult. Marginalizing people who are physically and culturally different than you in order to maintain in-group status is an ancient strategy. It is probably evolutionarily adaptive to quickly identify someone who looks or behaves differently as Other. In today’s global human society, where cultural and economic systems are interlaced, tolerating bigotry has stopped working for the betterment of our species. It’s unfortunate that the instinct to turn Other into Enemy still holds such strong sway in modern human thinking.

…Teh Gay….
Bigotry is certainly a distasteful feature of American politics. Witness presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s rhetoric against gay people. I can’t believe that in 2012 someone who is so profoundly ignorant and hateful is considered a credible candidate for the presidency of the United States. His type of foolishness hurts real people. I was an ethnographic intern with the Laramie police department when University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was tortured and killed because he was gay. The one thing that still haunts me from that crime scene is the shovel bites of blood-soaked soil missing from the embankment at the crime scene.

…Blacks…
A noisy minority of Americans hate-hate brown-skinned people, and President Barack Obama in particular. (See here, here, here, and use Google for about ten-fucktillion more depressingly idiotic and racist examples.) Some political lunatics even publicly pray for the death of our president. This violent rhetoric resonates strongly with the authoritarian Republican base, but it’s appallingly, dangerously, inappropriate in my opinion.

…Swarthy people who are Muslim….
Bigotry against Muslims, another group stereotyped as swarthy, abounds, and often manifests itself in violence:

Growing anti-Muslim bias in America is no secret. Over the past few years, numerous reports have exposed concerted anti-Muslim campaigns that mobilize people to hate their Muslim compatriots. For example, the Center for American Progress meticulously documents seven foundations spending over $40 million to fund anti-Muslim propaganda that has been widely repeated by political leaders, grassroots groups and the media. The Southern Poverty Law Center, an expert on hate groups in America, also reports the apparent surge in anti-Muslim sentiment in America is driven by a small, closely knit cadre of activists. The hate generated by these professional anti-Muslim bigots often leads to violence.

As with bullies everywhere, the victims are often vulnerable women and children. 9/11 bred the fiction that all Muslims are terrorists. This is simply not true. Dangerous lunatics are not limited to any one religion, unfortunately. They come from everywhere.

…More brown-skinned people….
Extreme anti-immigration rhetoric is becoming more mainstream with an attendant increase in violence.

The increase in violence against Hispanics correlates closely with the increasingly heated debate over Comprehensive Immigration Reform and an escalation in the level of anti-immigrant vitriol on radio, television, and the Internet. While reasonable people can and will disagree about the parameters of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, in some instances, the commentary about immigration reform has not been reasonable; it has been inflammatory. Warned an April 2009 assessment from the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), “in some cases, anti-Immigration or strident pro-enforcement fervor has been directed against specific groups and has the potential to turn violent.”

Of course, the actual indigenous Americans have dark skin. It’s the Northern Europeans who are the infiltrators. Oh, the humanity!

If you wonder if something is actually racist, check it on this source. The answers are hilarious, and the questions are appalling. You can search for your question or submit it to the author. Spoiler: If you have to ask, the answer is almost always yes.

…People who don’t have penises*….

Men are privileged, and a depressing number of people think that’s as it should be. Below are just a few ways in which sexism undermines social cohesion, productivity, and culture.

My former hometown newspaper printed an article about the state’s appalling wage gap. It is the worst in the nation. From the comments: “Love the cat-fighting going on here with the typical crybabying from the fairer sex.” Yes. “Crybabying” about a fundamental injustice which keeps many women and children in poverty.

According to this source, one out of every six American women has been the victim of a sexual assault. One in six. You know victims. We all do. You just might not know exactly who has been a victim because women don’t talk openly about it. We’re supposed to feel ashamed for being attacked. Some men even believe that girls and women who are impregnated during rape have received a gift from god. I would prefer that god not let any of us, especially children, be raped in the first place.

One in four women has experienced domestic violence. You know victims. We all do. You just might not know exactly who has been a victim because women don’t talk openly about it. We’re supposed to feel ashamed for being attacked.

My own mom died from sexism. In September of 1988 she went to the emergency room with dizziness and a terrible, debilitating headache. The doctor told her she was weak. He accused her of whining and exaggerating the pain. She was terribly embarrassed. The doctor sent her home. Where she died of a ruptured brain aneurysm a few hours later. I would like to think this is an unlikely scenario today, but I’m not so sure it couldn’t happen again.

Even now, in the developed world, circa 2012, bigotry against women thrives. It’s inherent in advertising (link warning: trigger alert and probably NSFW). It’s in the way that society undervalues work in childcare, education, and nursing. It’s in the way people default to male pronouns when talking about CEOs, doctors, justices, soldiers, or world leaders. It’s in the way we automatically assume that teachers, nurses, and waitstaff are women. It’s in the perpetual myth that girls just aren’t as smart as boys. In the fact that standards of beauty are typically about women being fuckable by men. Of course casual sexism just blends into the noise in this environment.

…From externalized hostility to internalized equality…
By marginalizing large swaths of our human capital, we vastly reduce our capacity for technological and intellectual innovation. Tomorrow’s brilliant thinkers may well be women, and/or gay, and/or brown-skinned, or any other variation of our diverse humanity. We need everyone, all of us, working together to solve issues like global warming, to improve our health and extend our lifespans, and to feed, educate, and nurture the children of our species.

It is no longer evolutionarily adaptive to turn Other into Enemy. We can choose to maximize our ability to adapt and evolve, or we can remain mired in our primordial cognitive habits, hastening our own extinction.

Which is why I spoke out last week when I heard a doctor tell a sexist joke in a public lecture hall. This instance seemed like a rare moment when speaking up privately in a non-confrontational way might possibly make a small difference. If nothing else, maybe I saved someone else’s mom.

* I realize that there are myriad variations of gender identity. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m thinking of people whom society labels and treats as “women,” whether or not they have penises.

x-posted at DTMS and Open Salon

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This post, Uncivilized Society, originally appeared on She Thought on March 12, 2012.
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College of Curiosity

Kitty Mervine — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 17:54:46 +0000

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 venue reminds me of a giant playground for adults. The speakers are going to talk on things we all are curious about. There will also be interactive workshops, with a focus on fun. Children have Disney world, the curious have the College of Curiosity.

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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Pants on Fire

Sophie Hirschfeld — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 22:04:10 +0000

I have frequently run into conversations, lately, about a controversial topic that I think people need to reassess. Interestingly, encouraging others to rethink their stance on this seems to make me a bad person. Obviously, I’m a bad person, but this is probably not why I’m a bad person. In the last few weeks, I’ve:

told a group of students that lying about your illegal employment opportunities to your family …
told a friend that lying to a guy because he’s a jerk …
told another friend that lying to get a job and lying to the government about how you make money …

… can all be ethical and reasonable actions. That’s right, I’ve told people that lying is good.

We just assume, in our culture, that lying is bad. When we’re children, part of our developmental progress might be measured by when we figure out how to lie and our parents celebrate our progress and then quickly take our dessert from us because someone tried to feed their broccoli to the dog. Lying, to us, is what people do when they have to get away with murdering their rich relatives in order to inherit a fortune or keep from getting arrested for a bank robbery. Lying is what lawyers and courtrooms are for if you can’t have an insanity plea at your court appearance where you’re trying to squirm your way out of

This spider's babies are 10% gentic code and 90% lies. Male Pisaura Mirabilis sometimes gives gifts in order to get the chance to mate. In some cases, the gift is not actually a nutritional foodly item, as the lady expects. Instead, it may be a faked item and the male might get sex, anyway. It is akin to someone offering chocolates to a date, getting sex and then the date later learning the chocolates box was filled with Weight Watchers coupons.

public indecency charges. Lying is for criminals.

I don’t actually think that is the case. In fact, I’m not the only one who disagrees. In Sam Harris’ book, “Lying,” he makes a case for lying as an action that is sometimes good and sometimes bad, mmkay?. I haven’t read his book (though, I just bought it so I could do so, someday, when I have time, which might be never), but I suspect his reasoning is not far off from my own. Lying should be measured based on the merits of its intention and consequences. This is a very novel idea in our culture which has been so intimately bound to certain religious ideas. Lying is bad, to many (if not most) people because some supernatural authority has told them that it is.

While considering deception to be unethical, many people see it as a trait unique to humans; as some sort of maladaptive-adaptive behavior. We think it is bad, but it makes us special. The reality is, that isn’t the case. Deception is an adaptive behavior that is probably rooted deep in our ancestry and it comes in many forms. From how an animal appears to others as a way to discourage predators to a lower status male ape uttering a predator-warning call in order to have some private time with a certain apelady as the others all scurry up a tree to hide. I’m not saying that males of any species *should* lie – at this point, I’m just saying that lying isn’t a special, awesome, ugly trait that only humans have. In fact, some of humanity’s cleverest lies and most popular reasons for them have often already been done by other animals. Want to hide food to keep people from eating it? Want play a prank on someone?

Heini Hediger (1968), a past director of the Zurich Zoological Gardens, knew that apes and monkeys sometimes held drinking water in their mouths to squirt at people who came near them. He was cautious when, after taking pictures nearby, he had to walk past the cage of an old chimpanzee. Hediger noticed that the animals was sitting listlessly with his back to the walkway, apparently playing with his toes and taking no notice of him. He looked at the chimp’s cheeks, but decided that they did not bulge with water. However, when he was opposite the cage, the chimp swung around in a flash, leapt to the front of the cage, and drenched Hediger with warm water from nearly 3.5 m(12 ft) away. The trickster must have collected water just in case Hediger should pass his cage. As an animal psychologist, Hediger was embarrassed to be so caught out, but pleased that the ape’s joke was successful. His dousing also underlined the chimp’s intelligence in thinking up such a prank, as well as the need that captive animals in general have for toys they can use to amuse themselves.

In fact, we may not even be the only creature capable of recognizing deception:

A visitor recently stopped by to see Koko. On greeting the 180-pound gorilla, the visitor pointed to her and then made a small circle with her open hand in the air in front of her own face, signing You’re pretty. Koko digested this comment for a moment and then stroked her finger across her nose; her reply meant false or fake.

Koko the gorilla is obviously aware of her robust jawline, or something, or maybe she was allowed to play with barbies too much.

Of course, something being normal or natural doesn’t necessarily make it a saintly action or necessarily useful in the long run. A girl spider may be following nature by eating her mate, and it is certainly useful to her, but that male spider’s sperm is a product line that is no longer in circulation. The same goes for the praying mantis:

That male should have taken a page from the spider book and brought her a gift of chocolates before spending hours romping with her. Maybe, then, he’d still be alive. That’s really the root of the question regarding ethic and lying, though.

It may make a spider seem like a jerk to fake a gift to a female in order to have sex with her, but if his odd of dying are significantly greater if he doesn’t offer food, maybe his act of deception is not so unethical after all. I know, mot readers of this don’t consider spiders examples of ethics, so let’s bring this to the human side, now.

If a human’s life is on the line, i lying a rational thing to do? I it more ethical? Our problem with the question of ethics and lying is that we are placing a value on a description of an action instead of the action, itself. We examine deception as if all deception has the same value or as if all deception is the same action. We do the same with the concept of honesty. Yet, honesty is harmful, sometimes, too. You don’t see police officers negotiating with a particularly unstable gunman by being honest, like this: “yeah, I’m hiding over here, if you just tip your gun to the left, a bit, you can shoot me.” No, they will hide, lie and even imply false promises in order to remove the risk of danger.

In most of the examples I gave at the start of this article, lying was suggested as an ethical choice. A person at risk of being abandoned may do harm to themselves and others if they are honest about a past involvement with a crime that was of a certain nature. People in abusive relationships who are trying to leave will often lie in order to protect themselves and escape. Finally, people who work contracted jobs, work for out-of-pocket cash or use bartering in order to survive may have to lie about income (or income sources) in order to get insurance, state help or have their children put into Head Start programs. Sometimes these lies mean the difference between life and death, getting food or starving or protecting an innocent person.

Lying is clearly not something we can look at through the cultural lens that we so frequently use. We shouldn’t be evaluating it based on religious creed. In fact, I’m certain that if we had to see deception through the numerous eyes of a horny male spider (lie or die), we would accept lying far more easily as an ethical decision, designed to protect ourselves, instead of as a universally malicious act.

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This post, Pants on Fire, originally appeared on She Thought on March 3, 2012.
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Puscast Podcast: A Non-Expert Review

Anthropologist Underground — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 21:44:43 +0000

I speak a little Spanish, but just barely. Not even well enough to know the curse words, unfortunately. Basically I’m able to order food and chat about the weather. If I don’t panic when I miss a word or two, I usually understand enough to follow the broad themes of a conversation. I just try to relax and enjoy the experience of immersion.

This is analogous to how I listen to the Puscast podcast, a bimonthly review (in English) of the infectious disease medical literature. I speak Medical Literature about as well as I speak Spanish. Fortunately, I do know how to use Google for clarification.

Puscast host Mark Crislip is an infectious disease doctor practising in Oregon. He is a writer and editor for the Science Based Medicine blog, and heads up his own multimedia empire, where he houses archives and links to his several podcasts, blogs, and book.

The target Puscast audience is physicians. I may be out of my depth for parts of it, but I’m curious and interested in the subject. I try to just listen without worrying too much about, say, the details of how different antibiotics target various bacterial cell receptors. I can always look that up later.

The discussion is surprisingly diverse. Dr. Crislip brings snarky humor to bear on all manner of medical pseudoscience and on mistakes and misguided studies published in established journals as well. What I find especially interesting are Dr. Crislip’s thoughts about how the studies translate to real-world situations and clinical practice. I enjoy learning about how the new data gets applied in medicine. It’s reassuring to note that, for the most part, science-based medicine increases in efficacy over time.

Puscast includes this Black Box Warning:

The following podcasts may include sarcastic comments, snide asides, and rants off the topic of infectious diseases and may cover political, societal, and popular culture concerns. I think it is part of the charm of the podcasts, but if you do not like smartass, then these podcasts may not be your cup of tea and you should go elsewhere. But you can’t say you were not warned.

Some broad thematic trends that I’ve noted include:

Antibiotic overuse is very, very bad. This comes up frequently in discussions about newly resistant diseases.
Tropical diseases like dengue fever and disease vectors like rabid vampire bats appear to be moving north with global climate change.
Previously rare vaccine-preventable diseases are becoming more common in correlation with declining vaccination rates.
Dr. Crislip doesn’t like tattoos.
HIV therapies are amazing. I’m embarrassed to admit that two recent Puscast episodes have exposed my own myopia. One study looked at serodiscordant couples where one partner is HIV+. I live in such a bubble of ignorance that it didn’t occur to me that such couples exist. I assumed that everyone is either + or – or that the relationships dissolved once one of the partners was diagnosed. I had to pause and wrap my mind around this new-to-me but obvious paradigm.

Crislip discussed a couple of interesting HIV studies:

This first study looked at drug therapies which can prevent the spread of HIV to the non-infected partner. Which is awesome, but the regimen is not without risks. If the positive partner’s HIV is suppressed, then maybe the risks outweigh the benefits. Take home: use a condom. Which is generally a good idea anyway regardless of HIV status.

The second study looked at couples where both partners are HIV+. Doctors generally still recommend condom use to prevent the spread of other diseases and also because the partners may have different variations of the HIV virus. In this case, I had assumed that condoms were moot. I had no idea there are various types of HIV, and the other diseases in addition to HIV simply weren’t on my radar.

Again, in hindsight this should have been obvious to me. I like to think I’m so tolerant and enlightened, but clearly I need to bring more humility and humanity to how I think about HIV and its victims.

Dr. Crislip’s Puscast is endlessly interesting and entertaining. It’s challenging in a good way and fairly accessible to most audiences. It’s especially enlightening when it spotlights uncomfortable truths about myself.

Images from wikimedia commons

An earlier version of this article appeared at Does This Make Sense.

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This post, Puscast Podcast: A Non-Expert Review, originally appeared on She Thought on February 20, 2012.
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Do You Believe in Life After Death? A Caregiver’s story

Wendy Hughes — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 18:00:57 +0000

This is the first part of a mini-series. The other parts will be posted at a future date.

My mom as a paper doll cut out. It must have been fashionable to have hand tinted photos cut out, applied to a wooden background carved to the outline shape of the picture, to place in a stand with a slot for the image. My mom must have been about five in this image, c 1926. I've never seen another picture displayed like this.

Disclaimer:

My parents made the average, garden-variety mistakes: interfering with my privacy and insulting my self-esteem; but they generally meant well.

My nuclear family was intact. My parents stayed married until my father died at age 74 in 1988; I am the eldest of their three children.

By accidents of timing and geography, I have not had to overcome the resentment bred by child abuse, poverty, ignorance, nor divorce (even though divorce is a very good idea sometimes; I’ve had two of my own), not even harsh discipline.

I can’t address how those conditions would affect the persistence it takes to follow through sometimes required of a caregiver for an elderly parent. I suspect that a memory of having been beaten by one’s parent with a coat hanger may mitigate the will to persevere. My role as a caregiver is also affected by geography because my sister, daughter and I live within a few miles of our parent. I know when distance is an issue, it changes the strategy.

This is my experience as a woman skeptic who is in a caregiver role with a widowed mother who lives nearby. I can compare the experience I had when my father died over twenty years ago with the experience I am having during my mother’s decline that is taking place now. They are very different.

Do you believe in Life After Death?

Part One

When Daddy died….
My father was only 74 when he died of congestive heart failure. In 1988 a lot less was known about how to treat the condition, and there was a years-long process of treatment and recovery and then gradual relapse, repeated in shorter and shorter intervals, that was hard on the patient and on the family. It was during this time that I got religion, and after my father finally died, I reasserted myself as an atheist and skeptic. I didn’t need a god to see me through my father’s mortality; what I’d needed was a community, and I had not realized that there are communities of skeptics. I have that now, and fortunately the community of skeptics who are my friends have come through for me, during crises and for the long haul, sometimes just listening, offering their own experiences for me to consider, and assuring me that I am not too weird when I need to hear it.

In the mid 1980s
My sister in law suggested that I join a synagogue of Jewish mystics that held Friday evening services every other week, and Torah study on Saturday mornings, a hop, skip and a jump from my house. As a lone atheist, I had no support system, no network of friends to tell me what to do in the stressful, prolonged pain of my dad’s illness. She promised she would attend the first time with me, and have a cup of tea… how much could go wrong? It was wonderful! The candlelight, the familiar music! The language, unintelligible, but also familiar… the people, so glad to see a new face of a youngish woman, welcoming me, not to mention that it was geographically desirable, was all very seductive.

A friend once told me that church is not just for worship. Churchgoing, synagogue, mosque attendance is also for networking, socializing, experiencing life’s milestones such as weddings, births, holidays and deaths. This is what many atheists miss. The attempt to replace it is often by attendance at low-observance churches such as the Unitarians or Secular Humanist Jewish congregations. ** I knew about the UU congregations, but I thought of them as political organizations, and didn’t think that I would find the comfort I needed for this particular crisis.

I not only began to attend services, in exchange for typesetting a little newsletter for the congregation, but I also began to take Jewish Studies classes at the local community college. I had been taking anthropology, communications, and sociology classes in night school, too, so adding Jewish studies that semester was my way of learning how to be Jewish. I wanted to rush this process of figuring out how to get comfort out of my ethnic identity.

I was embarrassed that I didn’t know anything about how to be Jewish. The rabbi’s wife taught me how to say the Friday night blessings over the Sabbath candles and the challah (bread). She explained that it was not unusual for American Jews not to know these things – and I learned the history of the Reform Jewish movement and assimilation. I knew that my grandfather had belonged to two congregations, an old Conservative one, and a newer Reform one that had a nicer cemetery — and it was a good thing, because he had died young.

Every Saturday, the Rabbi asked if there was anyone who had a friend or relative for whom they would like to have a prayer for health. I always raised my hand. I asked for prayers for my dad. Now, I would think of it as intercessory prayer. But at the time, it just seemed like a loving, sweet musical thing, and if it wasn’t going from our lips to God’s ear, at least these nice people were one with me in their concern for my dad.

One day, Mr. Goldstein, one of the members of the congregation, was walking the same way I was toward our cars, and asked me if I thought I was losing my mind. I said yes, as a matter of fact, and why do you ask? He said it was because of congestive heart failure. His uncle had just died of the same disease, and his family had just been going through the same thing: his uncle seeming almost to die, then miraculous recovery, and slowly dying again; treatment that restored him to health, ever shorter intervals… and the family repeatedly on the brink of grief and bouncing back and forth between joy and sorrow and guilt. Nobody else, not the cardiologist, not any nurse, no one at all, had offered anyone in our family this explanation. The relief I felt was like cool water on a redhot sunburn.

The book review
It was during this time, though, that I happened to read a book review of The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. The review was extremely well written; if that was true, I thought, then how could THIS be true? The things I discuss and argue every Saturday for a couple of years, with these people, a few of whom are Holocaust survivors, and who love and accept me, and who have been seeing me through this educational process, this transition, how can I ask them about whether there is a supernatural being who answers prayers and runs things? So I folded up the review, and tucked it into the back of my Tenach, a modern translation of the Old Testament, a gift from Mr. Goldstein and his wife, and decided to think about it later. I have met Dr. Dawkins a few times, and I forgot to tell him this story.

What a rabbi is good for
Before my father died, the hospital Social Worker told us that even though we were in a great deal of pain, that when he finally died, the pain would increase. When my father died at the hospital, I happened to be there alone, and I called the rabbi on the pay phone. I said I don’t feel anything, what’s wrong with me? He explained: “Wendy, you are in shock. This is giving you time to take care of the business you have to take care of, to help your mom. Grief comes in waves. If all the pain came at once, you wouldn’t be able to handle it. It will finally reach a crescendo, and begin to recede. Then you will be able to remember the pain, but it won’t hurt anymore.” That’s what rabbis are good for.

I had learned enough to know that when I accompanied my mother to the Jewish mortuary, I think it was the next day, I could tell her that Jewish custom required only a simple wooden casket, no matter what the salesman was showing us.

The difference now, over 20 years later, with my mom
After my father’s death, I realized I had made it through without any guilt. My daughter had married one of the men in the congregation, and I think they barely noticed when I slipped away. I didn’t need the network to deal with my father’s mortality any longer, and I was free to resume my identity as an atheist.

The network of friends is still important, but the ritual of talking to God or intercessory prayer certainly isn’t part of the picture. Instead, when I was Instant Messaging with a friend about preparing to come to TAM8 in Spring of 2010, I was mentioning my mother’s declining health, and cognitive impairment. He immediately emailed me a link to a memorial brochure about his grandmother, and wrote about her decline and how difficult it had been for him and his family. He urged me to get a diagnosis for my mother, to go to a specialist and not to dawdle around. He said it was important for her safety and for my peace of mind.

Also, not to single out a specific source, because there are many, but I rely on Quackwatch. Science Based Medicine is another source for information about what works and what is questionable. Of course these didn’t exist in 1988, but as a skeptic, in the 21st Century, I take advantage of resources that don’t have a profit motive. The path of least resistance is to subscribe and get a weekly email.

When I feel as though I can’t go out at night to Drinking Skeptically or my former favorite, the CFI-LA Book Club for Skeptics, because I am away from home just too many nights a week, sometimes I want to break free. I want to be young again with no responsibilities to anyone but myself, and shrug off the reins of too much to do. So there is a paradox; the very thing that gives me stimulation and respite, the fun thing to do, is also a little frustrating because I don’t have enough time right now to go enjoy it.

Meanwhile, I did know not to rely on gingko biloba to restore her memory. When the internist was going to prescribe a prescription for a strong medication over the phone, because he knew my mother didn’t like to go to doctor’s appointments, both my daughter and a skeptic friend suggested that was probably not a good idea. I called the internist back and asked for a referral to a specialist.

The internist offered us a referral to a clinic in my mother’s neighborhood that specializes in diagnosis and treatment of geriatric patients. The first time I ever heard anyone talking about that as a possible specialty was in the early 1970s. My neighbor at the time was studying gerontology because he understood that the baby boom generation was going to be a giant cohort requiring specialized care forty or so years in the future. He was quite a visionary.

My mom’s memory lapses are sometimes funny, sometimes alarming. She is trusting and sweet, and I know that is better than the nightmare stories I’ve heard of the parents of others who are paranoid and combative. Comparing what I learned from the experience of my father’s illness and death, and this experience with my mom so far, on balance, this is easier.

How much of that is because I have found an evidence-based community on which to rely for companionship, instead of a faith-based one, in my case, is a little hard to quantify, because of the specific examples I cited. I’ve remembered the hits, and forgotten the misses. I had a lot of relief from the information about congestive heart failure, and about the process of grief that came from that particular congregation. But knowing that I have a community at all is incredibly important, and participating in one, whether it is volunteering, chatting on a bulletin board, or instant messages, I’ve learned a lot. I can’t separate my skeptic/atheist/Jewish self from my caregiver self. So one evening, I asked her, “Mom, do you believe in Life After Death?”

** A recent article in the LA Times Health section quotes an analysis by researchers at Brigham Young University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, compiled data from 148 studies indicating that people live longer who are involved in communities — an effect comparable to that of quitting smoking.
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-friends-health-20100913,0,5533677.story

Science Based Medicine: http://networkedblogs.com/7ACwW
Quackwatch: http://www.quackwatch.org

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This post, Do You Believe in Life After Death? A Caregiver’s story, originally appeared on She Thought on February 13, 2012.
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