- Where are they now? J. S. Boggs, profiled by Lawrence Wechsler in The New Yorker. Boggs made small paintings closely resembling money (e.g., a $100 bill) that he offered in place of real money. He sold surrounding details (e.g., the receipt) to a collector who would try to get the bill Boggs had drawn from the merchant in order to “complete” the work of art.
- A SLDer (Shangri-La Dieter) loses 80 pounds in 18 months. That’s 1.0 pounds/week.
- More medicine does not equal better medicine. I agree with every word of this critique by a Glasgow general practitioner named Des Spence. For example, “The prescribing of powerful antipsychotic and potentially addictive stimulant drugs to children is a societal norm. . . . A quarter of US women are taking mental health drugs.” As Spence says, these are signs of a healthcare system biased toward those who make money from it and against everyone else (including children). One way to sum up why this is a mistake: Your health is too important to be left to those who only make money if you are sick.
- Japan: from rice to wheat to rice.
Thanks to Bryan Castañeda.
I’d love to read that BMJ piece, but THIRTY BUCKS for one article?
Part of your quote from the Des Spence article,”A quarter of US women are taking mental health drugs,” does not appear to be supported by the actual facts.
I believe it is true that psychiatric drug usage is high and growing, the statement that “over 25% of US women are taking them” overstates the case a great deal.
The source of that assertion apparently traces to the study described here:
https://blogs.wsj.com/health/2012/03/19/womens-use-of-psych-medications-rises-other-health-regimens-lag-men-studies/
Although the study examined records of 2 million patients, those patients were hardly a representative cross-section of the US population.
The study was carried out by Medco, a large mail-order pharmaceutical company which caters to patients covered by prescription drug coverage plans. The only patient records to which Medco has access are those of its own customers, that is, a pool consistently entirely of people with prescription drug coverage who have actually filled a prescription for a long-term prescription drug of some sort.
Patients who do not have prescription drug coverage or those who do have it, but who do not use it for long-term medications, will not be in the Medco database.
So, women who do not take any prescription meds of any sort, or those who take only take the occasional short term course of antibiotics for an acute infection (of the sort they would fill at a local pharmacy rather than through the mail order drug company) were not included in the study.