Posts by dyan campbell
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Re: Gabor's comment about running being punishing. That's why you train. Your body compensates and you get stronger. I've never seen a scientific study that backed that claim up. One study, quoted here shows that running is associated with less osteoarthritis.
Very true - body's ability to restore itself is really amazing.
I checked the results and I see there's a DNF
That might be the best thing in the short term if there was significant pain from the bursitis. Pain is a good warning sign - bursitis will heal eventually, but even in children it can take months to settle down, and in adults it can take so long you can wind up convinced it's never going to go away. It can take literally years if you keep re-injuring it.
A good accurate diagnosis of the problem, good remedy (orthotics, physio treatment or a combination) as well as really being careful about not thrashing is a good thing. Also if you run with anything sore you wind up running funny, and you get a sore back/neck/knee/hip/foot from running lopsided in some fashion. It's good to build up slowly, but I can sympathise as it can be frustrating to have to slow down just when you don't want to.
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lame with an inflamed bursa in my heel
Do you mean the heel as in under your foot, or do you mean at the back of your foot where your shoe fits? An accurate diagnosis is the best way to a fast recovery. A podiatrist may be your best bet - good orthotics can go a long way to easing the pain immediately.
This link is a pretty good description of the different types of heel pain you might get. Heel Bursitis
Bursitis can take ages to settle down, even if you diagnose and treat is well. Take care if you get a steriod injection or take NSAIDs, as they will make the pain and inflammation magically disappear (good) but trick you into thinking you can thrash (bad) what is still an unhealed injury. Just put ice on it (RICE - rest, ice, compression, elevation) every time you use it, even if if feels awful. Often ice on an injury doesn't feel as nice as you might imagine, but it's worth persisting with ice, (ten minutes or so after a run should do it) as it can help speed up recovery a lot.
I know a few folk in their 50's whose bodies are now suffering from all the running they did in their 30's and 40's (knees, hips etc...).
Hey, wait a minute... I'm 52 and I didn't take up running (distance anyway) until I was in my 30s. You NZers frighten me with how early you put yourselves out to pasture. Good god, I only just grew out of being unable to walk past a rope swing without leaping on it and playing for an hour. I'm pretty sure I have several more decades of running left in me, and I was flattened (literally, like the road runner cartoons) by a car 14 years ago. I wound up with exposed bone in my legs in 3 places - no broken bones though - a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament, messed up the cartilage in both knees. And a brain injury, mild in the scheme of things, but numbers and sequential tasks are much harder for me now and my personality changed dramatically.
I had a brilliant surgeon Barry Teitjens who did the most amazing ACL reconstruction and I have to say my knee is almost as good as new - though I cannot drag a snowboard up a ski hill with one leg - I have to carry it, which is a drag - but other than that my knees are fine. I still run (only about 4 -5 km and sadly at about 20 minutes now) but it's a big myth that running will mess up your joints. It keeps joints healthy actually.
Running shouldn't hammer your body. We're designed to run, but form is everything. Most people have weak abductors, adductors, hip flexors and butt muscles, weak abdominals. If you have engaged in selective sports or activities often you have one set of muscles that is very well developed in isolation - I became a keen runner in middle age and while I was averaging more than 75 km a week I was barely doing anything else - a swim here and there - no upper body work at all. I went to the gym and I had freakishly strong legs like a kangaroo and yet could barely do 2 chin ups in a row. It's very easy to overlook whole muscle groups, and that's a big factor in injuring ourselves - you pull joints out of alignment slightly or develop poor biomechanical movements by being strong somewhere and weak somewhere else. Add to that a badly formed feet, a bad foot strike or bad follow through and you are set up for injury.
That's why disciplines like tai chi, yoga, pilates or barre exercises are so good - they concentrate on each muscle group specifically.
Concentrating on form and not speed is so important. Perfect form and speed will follow. It's worth getting some specific running advice on a treadmill to check everything out. Basically you want to strike on the heel and in a very fluid movement propel your knee precisely over the middle two toes of your foot, and the lift off from the toes should be effortless - mostly from the momentum of the footstrike. If you're pounding the pavement you are wasting valuable energy and you want the strike - roll - lift off to be pretty much silent and effortless and should feel like you weigh nothing. If your knee goes in (knock knees) your abductors and adductors and hip flexors (one or all) are too weak and you are asking for knee trouble. Fix this with practice and all speed, stamina and injury prevention will take care of itself.
Tip - when truly exhausted at the .75 mark of the run, let your arms go floppy for a few moments while running, you can harvest a bit of energy from not tensing your shoulders and elbows for a few metres. You would be surprised how little tricks like that can give you energy when you think you're exhausted.
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Where did that come from, Dylan?
It's a weblog of some US academic... Erin O'Connor - not to be confused with the catwalk model who looks like a very young Helen Clark. I was really using it for the link to Harriet Beecher's Stowe's quote. I have also read it used by Booker T. Washington (in his book Up From Slavery) and the context in both cases that sprang to mind was that it was a pejorative term used by blacks against ignorant whites.
"Without schools or churches, these miserable families grow up heathen on a Christian soil, in idleness, vice, dirt, and discomfort of all sorts. They are the pest of the neighborhood, the scoff and contempt or pity even of the slaves. The expressive phrase, so common in the mouths of the negroes, of 'poor white trash,' says all for this luckless race of beings that can be said."
I'm not sure if that's the case because I'm unsure of the source, but I have read a bit about the history of the 'N' word. Before it was positively re-appropriated (and some people dispute that that re-appropriation is a positive thing) by some black artists, it was often used by black people who felt they had risen to a better place in society to describe black people who had not.
The word "nigger" was appropriated waaay back by black people as shorthand for "uppity nigger" which was once a pejorative term for someone who had ideas above their colour, but quickly became a term proudly used to describe someone who did not take shit from whitey.
And given that you missed out this rather key point from your link: 'while white trash is likely to have originated in African American slang, it was middle-class and elite whites who found the term most compelling and useful and they who, ultimately, made it part of popular American speech', it's pretty clear that there's a race-based subtext to the term in the USA, at least.
Yes, I quite agree... I was just saying the origins of the term are much older and come from a different source than assumed.
The idea that poor whites in the 20th century carved out a place for themselves by being extra racist to the black people slightly lower on the totem pole is basically a truism at this point, however.
Poor whites didn't so much carve out a place for themselves by being extra racist as wind up just as disenfranchised as the black slaves themselves, as great tracts of land - and the means to generate wealth - slaves - were tied up in the hands of a very few wealthy plantation owners.
Speaking of origins of slang or phrases - Craig was absolutely right when he said William F. Buckley was an unlikely person to use the term "panty waist". He is from an ivy league background and if he were looking for a pejorative term for a weakling it wouldn't be "panty waist" as that would be a term used by someone from a rougher, more working class background.
The panty waist was a garment used by toddlers in one form (Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird is wearing shorts that button at the waist to his shirt when Scout meets him - that's a panty waist) and in older boys it's a short undershirt that was worn under their shirt and buttoned to their knickerbockers. It denotes the wearer is very young and inexperienced - and it also implies the wearer is not working class, as these were garments that were more likely to be worn by wealthy (or at least not impoverished) boys. Actually William F. Buckley is almost certain to have worn a panty waist in his youth.
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IIRC, the US etymology of 'white trash' is pretty racist, because it implies that all black people are *already trash*, but the white folks need to be demarcated into trashy/not trashy.
I can see how you would think that Danielle, but no, not at all.
The term white trash dates back not to the 1950s but to the 1820s. It arises not in Mississippi or Alabama, but in and around Baltimore, Maryland. And best guess is that it was invented not by whites, but by African Americans. As a term of abuse, white trash was used by blacks--both free and enslaved--to disparage local poor whites.
In 1854 white trash appeared in Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestselling Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin--her defense of the abolitionist play [sic] that had garnered her international fame. Stowe devoted an entire chapter to “Poor White Trash,” explaining that the slave system produced "not only heathenish, degraded, miserable slaves, but it produces a class of white people who are, by universal admission, more heathenish, degraded, and miserable." The degradation was due, Stowe argued, in part because plantation slavery locked up productive soil in the hands of a few large planters, leaving ordinary whites to struggle for subsistence. But there were other factors as well: "Without schools or churches, these miserable families grow up heathen on a Christian soil, in idleness, vice, dirt, and discomfort of all sorts. They are the pest of the neighborhood, the scoff and contempt or pity even of the slaves. The expressive phrase, so common in the mouths of the negroes, of 'poor white trash,' says all for this luckless race of beings that can be said."
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So people who watch Days of Our Lives should be watching something more 'edifying' instead of something that they enjoy. Well, I don't accept that argument for my own tasteless (if slightly different genre-wise) TV-watching, and I don't accept it on their behalf either.
Thank you Danielle, and all you other champions of us soap addicts. I don't watch Days of Our Lives, but I do watch (tape) The Young and the Listless... Restless... and have done for about 25 years. It's like watching a glacier. I love how slowly it moves, and how it repeats itself. I love how everything always goes wrong. And I love how insane it is.
Best moments of all time:
Once a mafia Don's daughter was being investigated by the police, and the detective (who was black) married her which was probably the best way to obtain first hand information. Problem was, he was undercover as a white guy, complete with white-face and ginger wig. I will always treasure the memory of his bride's horror on their wedding night when he took off his shirt and his red hair and white face was in stark contrast to his black torso. Oh, how she flattened herself against a wall, widened her eyes and screamed.
Another time Jill Abbot's male secretary went mad and became a deranged killer. After a particularly gruesome spree, he kidnapped a plastic surgeon and tried to force him to give him a new face. Unfortunately for the male secretary the plastic surgeon seized the opportunity to carve the word KILLER across the guy's forehead with a scalpel when he was under anesthetic. As it goes in soap world, the plastic surgeon was unable to have the guy arrested while he was unconscious, so the killer woke up and continued his killing spree with the unfortunate new carving on his head. After being shot and winding up in a coma - or rather pretending to be - his boss Jill (the archetypal ball-buster) suspected it was all a ruse and reached under the hospital blanket to seize something and squeeze very hard to test if it was a real coma. The secretary just lay there, sweating profusely through his KILLER carving, not making a sound, while screaming ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH inside his head.
Once the beautiful Sharon Newman killed her rapist, more or less by accident. In a gorgeous blue cocktail dress and towering 5" heels, she dragged the body out of a hotel room, down the fire escape and buried him in the snow behind a dumpster. Month later, as the Genoa city spring loomed and she feared his corpse would be discovered, she went and dug out his frozen corpse and put it in the back of her car. She parked at a nearby bar - I forget way, and a family friend passing by - who had been her young husband's cell-mate in prison (and had disturbingly nick-named him "Sweet-Cheeks") instantly deduced her predicament. So unbeknownst to her, he gallantly dragged the body out of Sharon's car and disposed of it in the sewer. Of course Sharon had no idea what happened to the body, and was understandably puzzled. The ghostly apparition of the murdered rapist haunted her after that, even after the family friend explained what he'd done with the body, so she, her mother in law and the ex-con all went down the sewer together to see the rotting corpse together, to make sure the guy was dead. Sure, there was a rotting corpse, but it was a a DIFFERENT DEAD GUY. Imagine Sharon's terror.
The mother in law, Nikki Newman was very put out about the whole thing, and had to throw away her entire outfit because of the sewer/corpse smell.
So you see these soaps are not as pointless and easily replaceable as you all assume.
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how Labtests could be given a five hundred and sixty million dollar contract to be the sole provider of essential lab services, when it seems nobody carried out due diligence on their ability to deliver?
That is an excellent question Craig.
Meanwhile, where the hell is the public outrage about the $4.4 million (at least -- the patch was initially 'cost neutral' ) DHBs are going to have to stump up with?
Oh wait! I think it's all taken care of...
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Greg Johnson had to physically helped to the podium for his Best Single award (and bought the house down with his short speech).
I love Greg Johnson's music. I remember him telling me "I wasn't drunk Dyan, I was exactly as fucked up as you'd want to be at one of those things.
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And that's sort of the crux of the argument. It doesn't matter how old something is or what the Tibetans thought about it or whether it's from the Amazon or baked up in a lab. That's mostly a sidetrack. The question is: if alternative treatments are so great, why is it that despite fairly massive amounts of money being poured into testing by places like the NIH, there has never been clear-cut evidence of a direct, better-than-placebo effect?
Lucy, you will have to be specific as to which field you mean by "alternative". I grew up in a country where therapies such acupuncture and marijuana are used in mainstream allopathic medicine. They are not touted as cures, but are considered a useful part of integrative medicine. If you live in France, aromatherapy is part of mainstream, allopathic medicine. "Alternative" is a pretty broad term.
Much of what has been found by ethnobotanists does indeed have valuable pharmaceutical properties. I have been searching the internet for the ethnobotanists Keir mentioned (Hobsbaum and Ranger) but could not find any reference to them, let alone anything they have published.
The ethnobotanists I've read have written in great detail by the complexity and specificity of the plants used by various indigenous tribes in the Amazon Basin. And many pharmaceutical companies are following the ethnobotanists footsteps, trying to find plants with useful applications that can be developed into drugs.
Canada's medical system is much less divided into "western" and "alternative" and quite a few resources are devoted to what is called "integrative" medicine. One of my friends who used to be a paediatric oncologist trained again as a psychotherapist and has for many years done "guided imagery" with paediatric cancer patients. They imagine their immune cells as warriors fighting the bad guys... and she works in BC's biggest, most established cancer treatment centre. She is neither laughed at nor dismissed, though I can't imagine her work would be much respected here.
The irony of my involvement in this argument is that I would be soundly in the western scientific camp for most discussions. I'm not really a fan of "alternative" medicine at all. I wouldn't consider homeopathy, have never been to a chiropractor or osteopath, don't know much about herbalists. I am interested in the history of science and medicine, and I'm interested in other cultures. I have been quite surprised at how dismissive NZers are of Chinese orthodoxy - as Canada is very Chinese this is not common in my country.
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@Dyan
Actually, Feynman would have been in his mid-20s (not his teens) when he wrote that to his first wife. He worked on the Manhattan project after he finished his PhD.Richard, you're right, I stand corrected. Feynman was 24 when he went to Los Alamos, and Arlene was around that age when she died. I should have known this, as a friend of Feynman's told me that I reminded him of Feynman very much. I was delighted, as this was the nicest compliment anyone ever gave me, so I've read everything I could find about the guy.
However, if you want to quote Feynman you should also see what he has to say about "cargo cult science" - especially before you use cute little phrases like "Occam's broom" to dismiss an entirely serious statistical argument.
I haven't dismissed any entirely serious statistical arguments. I was quoting Sydney Brenner's famous phrase that describes the reaction to anything that contradicts a particular point of view.
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and there's no sensible reason to correlate age with correctness
Keir, You misunderstood the preceding posts. I wasn't correlating age with correctness, I was pointing out to Lucy that Darwin's understanding of heritable traits came long before any knowledge of genes, and went on to say that Chinese medical knowledge was preceded by the even older Tibetan medicine tantras. I didn't mean to imply that their antiquity made them any more correct, or that the age of a discipline correlates to its accuracy, just that it is astonishing when extremely old texts are correct.
The grasp of principles made by anyone before there is any method of collecting empirical data impresses me. There are many, many example in modern (and ancient) science. If you read Lewis Wolpert's A Passion for Science , Melvyn Bragg's On the Shoulders of Giants or Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield's Frontiers of Complexity you will see how many discoveries were based on hunches. BenWilson was absolutely right when he wrote
I think the way in which scientific discoveries are made is incredibly mysterious, rather than organized and scientific. What scientific methodology provides is a way in which to verify these discoveries.
and if you read Wolpert's, Bragg's or Coveney and Highfield's books you will see this astonishing prescience repeated many times in the history of scientific discoveries. Are the Chinese so stupid that it's impossible to believe their scholars could not have achieved this as well as white scholars?
Richard Feynman wrote about his late wife Arlene who asked him, when he was working with Oppeheimer, if radiation could penetrate solid matter, wouldn't it damage living cells and make him sick? Both Feyman and his wife were in their teens at the time, and back then Feynman laughed indulgently and reassured his young bride that radiation passed through the body quite harmlessly. Years later, after seeing many of his colleagues die of cancer, he marveled at her remarkable insight. Feynman also succumbed to cancer in his 60s. Arlene died while still in her teens, of a textbook case of TB that was missed by her doctors. But Feynman's point was the same as mine: sometimes a brilliant insight precedes empirical data.
in fact if you start saying that humours beat the germ theory based on age you will get laughed at.
The Tibetan medicine tantras describe "organisms that are invisible to the eye" that can correlate to intestinal parasites, bacteria, viruses and... a couple more agents that can not be correlated to anything we recognise in the West.
The Tibetan medicine tantras are really quite remarkable. I am keen to read this paper once it's published, as it is explained by someone who understands both the fields of Tibetan and Western medicine much better than I do. Tibetan Medical Interpretation of Myelin and Multiple Sclerosis.
also, isn't it interesting there's lots of popular interest in the medicine of yer eastern courtly cultures, but comparatively little interest** in how people in the Amazon deal with illness, despite the fact that the Amazon is proverbially fruitful in terms of drugs?
Well, the Tibetan medicine tantras are conveniently written down and are found in one single culture, one language while the indigenous people in the Amazon are estimated to have been more than 2,000 (approximately 500 still existing) completely different tribes, each with their own separate and distinct culture, customs and language. Perhaps the greatest barrier of all to collecting that information about traditional medicine from the tribes of the Amazon basin would be the absence of any written texts in any of the (many) languages. But you are wrong when you say there is no interest though there are relatively few ethnobotanists prepared to make the journey and do the research, as it requires many years of travel and living with various tribes.
* Hobsbaum and Ranger are I think the authorities here but in particular if you look at British hedgewitchery, the traditional medicinal system I am most familiar with, you will find that it is mostly made up as people go along and things are traditional if they go back 20 years or so.
Keir, do you mean Eric Hobsbawm the historian? If so I have read his book "The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century" but I am not sure if he is who you mean. I have read just about every ethnobotanist I could find who has written about the Amazon, but have not heard of Hobsbaum. Are the Hobsbaum and Ranger different people than the historians Hobsbawm and Ranger? If they are ethnobotanists I would love to read their work.
Richard Evan Schultes and Wade Davis are probably the best known ethnobotanists with respect to the tribes in the Amazon basin, and I have read quite a bit of what they have published.
the traditional medicinal system I am most familiar with, you will find that it is mostly made up as people go along and things are traditional if they go back 20 years or so.
It's interesting you say that. Ethnobotanist Wade Davis writes about the vast differences in medicinal uses of plants between, for instance the Waorati and the Chuichaua.
The Waorati had comparatively good health - no internal parasites, virtually no secondary bacterial infections, no evidence of ever having been exposed to smallpox, chickenpox, polio, typhoid, syphillis, gonorrhea or tuberculois. In short, they had been exposed to very few diseases brought by the Europeans. They did, however, suffer from the hemorrhagic virus that causes yellow fever and the resulting hepatitis was virtually endemic. They also suffered from herpes simplex A, fungal infections and a host of external parasites such as scabies and lice. They also suffered from wounds from injuries, and various snake and insect bites. They also used a variety of chili pepper to bring people down from hallucinogenic intoxication.
Shultes and Davis catalogued 35 plants the Waorati used to treat these ailments, each specific to their purpose - pain from broken bones, pain from spear or puncture wounds, pain from childbirth. They employed many different plants to use for each of their complaints - hepatitis, parasites, herpes simplex A etc, but they used comparatively limited number of plants; the plants used were employed for their highly selective uses, especially when compared to the Canelios Chuichaua.
The Chuichaua in contrast to the Waorati had been exposed to and ravaged by European diseases. and had selected many hundreds of plants used for dozens of conditions. This forced ethnobotanist Wade Davis to ask himself if the Waorati's - and the Yanomamo's - another recently contacted tribe - if their relatively selective and limited use of medicinal plants was perhaps typical of pre-european contact? If so, then the vast collection of medicinal plants used by the Chuichaua and other far more acculturated tribes was the direct result of accelerated experimentation that had been in response to the arrival of European diseases. Wade Davis writes "this idea, while challenging to the notion that indigenous knowledge of medicinal developed slowly over hundreds of years in no way denigrates native healing practices. On the contrary, it revealed native healers, including the Waorati as active medical experimenters whose work reflects the social and medical needs and whose laboratory happens to be the rainforest."