Comics Reviews, ETC

Flying cars have been a staple of science fiction since the dawn of SF. Along with jetpacks and moonbases, saying "where's my flying car" has become a shorthand for how the promises of a certain kind of future - made by admen, futurists, and SF writers in the heyday of techno optimism - have have failed to materialize.

The other day, I learned that back in 2000, Larry Niven, who despite being a right wing shithead, writes well researched hard SF, once said in response to an interview question at space com about what things he and other SF authors got wrong, "the wealth (as in flying cars) predicted by Heinlein and his followers (including myself) was another matter. It all went to welfare programs."

Niven's presumption seems to be that the only thing keeping flying cars from becoming reality was sufficient middle class wealth, which did not come to pass due to government policies which diverted that wealth into welfare programs (as a right wing poophead, Niven is fundamentally incapable of admitting that the wealth was in fact siphoned off to the billionaires, who proceeded to buy themselves learjets and yachts and sixth homes and generally act like complete sociopaths).

It so happens that I have been thinking about flying cars off and on for a while. Niven being an ass inspired me to actually write something down. So, have a post. ( Read more... )

The problem with the way the medical establishment refuses to take some diseases seriously? Or worse, tells patients that their problem is all in their head, see a shrink? Is that people with those very real conditions seek help from alternative medicine, where the practitioners give them woowoo "treatments" that may or may not be helpful, and regardless of efficacy, aren't covered by insurance.

I mean, a lot of those not taken seriously chronic illnesses have no cure and no effective treatment, so it's not like the wooist practitioners are doing any harm for those patients beyond fleecing them financially. The real harm is that by refusing to even listen to people with diseases like chronic fatigue or chemical sensitivities (to name just two), the medical profession has been feeding the woo ecosystem, which has delusions of grandeur about its ability to cure other diseases that regular medicine does have a handle on.

To be clear: alternative medicine is not all worthless. Our minds and bodies are one interconnected whole that the Cartesian approach of mainstream medicine is ill equipped to understand or treat. Alternative therapies that work for some things, generally at least try to understand and address the interconnected whole, even if they are completely wrong in their underlying theory (the energy lines of acupuncture, for instance, may be completely bogus, but doing something to the nervous system here can have significant effects on pain levels over there). Calling the positive results of therapies the placebo effect is simply to give them a label without understanding them, and to dismiss those results as based on nothing, as being "all in the head." But at least a few lonely researchers in mainstream medicine are trying to understand the placebo effect, and to properly acknowledge its immense power. The rest of the world's doctors just use it as a thought terminating cliche that lets them ignore all the things pointing to how their profession's arrogance creates huge blind spots and lacunae in their knowledge.

Meanwhile, most alternative medicine practitioners just assume the positive results they get mean their theories (based on mysticism or completely outdated and incorrect 19th century science) are right, and go on from there. And that's a problem - we know that alternative medicine can help with some things in some ways, even if we are very unclear as to why or how they work. But many, many alternative practitioners go beyond that to assume they have the knowledge and the results to justify replacing mainstream medicine completely, telling their patients that doctors don't know anything and that alternative medicine can help with everything. There's plenty of arrogance and hubris in both camps. Arrogance that gets patients killed.

For instance: my mentally ill mother was diagnosed with multiple chemical sensitivities and brain allergies in the late 80's. At first she sought treatments from real doctors practicing environmental medicine, and following their advice about eliminating scented products, being aware of pollen/mold season, getting air filtration, using titrated allergy drops, etc, helped. It helped a ton, not just with the headaches that sent her to her first allergist, but with the insanity as well. Which started her quest for someone who could finish the job and heal the psychosis. But there's no cure for MCS. And while you can avoid chemical exposures by becoming a hermit, there's really no way to avoid pollen and mold. Since becoming a hermit in the desert was unacceptable to her, and since she'd quite unexpectedly found so much progress, my mother kept looking for different, better treatments, and that eventually led her into the realm of woo.

In the late 90's, she found her miracle wooist, a homeopathist in Montreal. He convinced her to give up on a complex regimen assembled from the prescriptions of multiple doctors which had been mostly working (acetazolamide plus thiamine plus a tiny daily dose of Loxapine to keep the insanity under control, semi-hermit living plus a restricted diet plus allergy drops for pollen and mold to minimize brain allergy flare ups) and just take sugar pills.

And because of the immense power of the placebo effect, my mother stopped doing all of that complicated regimen and just relied on nontoxic living at home, plus taking sugar pills, for the next 27-ish years. And she continued to talk to the homeopathist regularly, at length, for $3 per minute, and to take whatever new sugar pills he prescribed, for everything that ailed her, for two decades.

Then in 2016, she was diagnosed with lymphoma. Her wooist had sugar pills for that too, which she took faithfully for three years while the cancer continued to flourish (the lymphoma was indolent, which means "not spreading beyond the lymph nodes and thus not really trying to kill you, yet").

Six years ago this summer, the untreated cancer finally triggered a different problem, and she ended up in the hospital with disastrously low sodium levels (as in "your heart might stop at any minute if we don't start giving you salt").

The near-death experience was finally enough for my mother to agree to begin taking a daily chemotherapy pill, which rapidly shrank the tumors and brought the cancer under control. When my mother died last year, after five extra years of life, it was not from cancer.

But that was no thanks to her wooist, who she continued to talk to regularly, and to take whatever new sugar pill he prescribed along with the treatments prescribed by her real doctor, right up until her death. He made a fortune off of her, and I don't like to think how many people whose lives he has shortened by gulling them into just taking his sugar pills instead of seeing a regular doctor for things that have real treatments and real cures.

This post is about RFK Jr. The deaths he is causing can at least partially be blamed on mainstream medicine's ongoing refusal to admit that the placebo effect is something worth looking at and understanding, and its refusal to believe in chronic diseases it doesn't understand and cannot cure.