Yeah, I think there are some cultural blinders people put on with this. It’s not like we’re talking about some westerner in a helicopter shooting rhinos with a machine gun. We’re talking almost universally about very poor, desperate people who just want to eke out a little bit more for themselves and their families.…

Predominately Hispanic school, majority low income. Which you would have known had you googled...

Side tangent on sober houses...

Well, that would make sense.

I think you misread my comment. There are high cost schools that are essentially open admission for the upper class. They offer scholarships to attract people from less wealthy backgrounds, but those are competitive. So you basically get rich kids who are mediocre students, and poorer kids who are very good students.

No…

USNWR is crap at ranking universities. Schools game the system.  Especially schools like USC that exists primarily for the 1%.

I’ll totally buy into the idea that USC is in the top 200ish schools in the US. But the top 25? Nope.

And they could have gone to any number of schools and gotten a good education. There are extremely expensive schools that are, essentially, open admission if you can pay full tuition. No need to break federal law, ffs.

This doesn’t apply to my aunt’s case, but it is an interesting phenomenon. She had tumors removed multiple times throughout her treatment. She also developed life threatening reactions to a couple types of chemo, but still did fairly well on chemo. The only thing that *may* have contributed is that they gave her a…

The five year survival rate is 1%. Note: that’s not the cure rate. That’s the “we’ve somehow managed to keep you alive for five years” rate.

My aunt survived stage 4 colon cancer (14% five year rate currently, like 7% when she was diagnosed) for 5 years. She then promptly had a tumor metastasize to right beside her…

If testing was inherently cheaper, I’d agree, but often testing is as expensive or more expensive than treatment.

Some rationing makes sense. Doing less expensive interventions first, usually, makes sense. Yes, there will be people like your mom, but there will also be many people who do better with the less costly intervention. Waiting periods can also make sense for not life threatening conditions because many things will…

Show me the research study that shows morbidly obese people can become normal weight with just diet and exercise, and maintain that weight loss in a real world context. Like please show me it. I’ll wait.

*The database of people who’ve lost and maintained large weight losses does not count because those people are…

“Health at Every Size” means this- people who are fat or not can still engage in healthful behaviors and activities, without the goal of losing weight, but rather then goal of improving health.

We know diets do horribly in studies. The weight loss is modest at best, people tend to regain the weight plus some. Only…

Dude, I have both hypothyroidism and poly-cystic ovarian syndrome. That shit isn’t rare, we’re probably talking about at least 20% of women having one or the other or both.

Then let’s add people with mental illness who have to take drugs like antipsychotics, and those antipsychotics fuck up everything, I had a client…

Yeah, except we’re people, not robots... so it’s not that simple.

Exercise is a great antidepressant. It is also extremely difficult if not impossible for severely depressed people, especially severely depressed people who have internalized self-hate from a fat-phobic culture, to just go exercise.

This type of study would be a nightmare to control. People who drink diet soda regularly are quite different from people who never drink it.

I had some interactions recently with a teen who *appeared* to have some level of psychopathy (homicidal thoughts concerning her family, would manipulate peers into doing things that were self-destructive).

I really enjoyed working with her, and I was also completely and totally terrified of what would happen to her…

Dear lord, Joy Behar is still on that show? I watched her on it when I was skipping class in 5th grade back in the 90s.

Maybe she’s prisoner. Maybe we need to do some welfare checks on her.  Why the hell would anyone stay on that mess for nearly 25 years.

I’m sorry :( rosacea sucks.