Only in it’s liquid or solid form - it can actually be used medicinally in it’s gaseous form.
Honestly, I think a lot of the problem is that science education in this country is so bad that it’s possible to pretty much avoid ever taking a decent science class*. This doesn’t just deprive people of a science education (which is a shame, because a well-taught science class is tremendous fun), but it also deprives them of a class which will teach logical, critical, analytic thinking. I’m certainly a huge supporter of the humanities, but analyzing literature is not grounded in logic the way that science is.
*Only now am I beginning to realize how damn lucky I was that I had plenty of science options to choose from in high school, and how insanely lucky I was to have teachers who were not only true scientists, but also good teachers. (had some awful ones, too, including one whose name I can’t remember, nor can I remember actually learning a single thing in that class.)
I hear the OP, and , was pretty much fine on the fence with drinking/eating with plastics, but, well, today, when I watched a National Geographic [url=http://www.pbs.org/strangedays/aboutproject/]program, “Strange Days on Planet Earth”. It detailed plastics being dumped into the ocean, and how it decomposes, at a great risk to wildlife. The biggest example to me was when the reseachers trolled with a net meant for plankton collection, and collected way more plastic bits than plankton.
It’s all there floating out where we dump it, deteriorating into small bits, which are ingested by marine shore creatures, and further, leaching out into the marinesphere, effecting all life there. That sort of cascade effect is immense, and affects our human food chain. Water bottles aside, down our precious windpipes for thirst, plastics are having an effect on the whole ecosystem on the planet. It’s not just your gullet, but the whole system that will feed us all .
Well Theraputic Touch apparently has research to back it up, but I never read it. I did learn this in nursing school, and one of my teachers was a high level practitioner. I find all the aura stuff too much, but it is a great relaxation technique, and a combination of TT, relaxation and creative visualization knocks down a migrane much better than any drug therapy. But, since I know about placebos, subjective responses, and the fact that anything that takes my mind off my migrane and reduces stress will help, I don’t count that as “proof” of healing. I count it as yet another technique to use to help calm people, same as turning down lights, turning off the tv, maybe some soft music, etc.
No, turning down the lights and the like is simple stress reduction, and no one’s claiming miraculous effects. Therapudic Touch is new-age aura nonsense: healing at a distance using the power of the mind. There has been research done on it, (including an infamous study by a 14-year old), all demonstrating that it’s bunk, pure and simple. It doesn’t even have the thin veneer of edge-condition statistical noise that things like acupuncture have, and it’s a travesty for it to have made it into professional nursing schools.
We’re in MPSIMS, so I won’t ask for a cite, but I can assure you there isn’t any properly-done research out there in support of TT, and your teacher was a charlatan, whether she knew it or not (an awful lot of folks delude themselves into believing they have these psychic powers – they don’t).
I never believed the crap about it they fed us in nursing school, (I did say apparently but I really never read it nor believed it for anything more than a tricked-out relaxation technique) because to me it was a lot of new-age mumbo jumbo. I liked having my migranes reduced, but I am under no delusion that it was some kind of energy therapy. It doesn’t piss me off, mainly because I know that most people aren’t doing it/believing it. My teacher was a good rigourous nursing school teacher, but what I knew of her personal life (a very small bit) she was looking for something else and thought she found it in TT. That was a small segment of our ciriculum, one day in three years, and I went to her twice after that because I had to write exams and had a migrane so severe I couldn’t stop vomitting, and I needed to be at school drug free. I know it worked because her office was comfy and relaxing and I wanted it to work, so it did. I might have achieved the same thing going home for half an hour and listening to something I enjoyed, but that wasn’t an option that day.
Yes it is crap that they are teaching it. Do not misunderstand me. I take it for what it is, redirection and relaxation, and it works to that extent. I have no experience with the diagnosis stuff, and I certainly do not want to. In with the rest of the technique… focal breathing, meditation, and relaxation there is probably a bit of cold reading thrown in, but I’ve never seen it done by a certified TT practioner on someone who is a complete stranger.
I’m seeing SIGG stainless steel water bottles on shop shelves these days, going for $22.00 a bottle. They’re touted as BPA-free and environmentally friendly. Does anyone have any details as to their environmental manufacturing costs? It seems to me I’m ahead of the game if I merely wash a simpler product over and over compared to SIGG and its initial manufacturing impact upon the environment.
I think the argument for paying that much for a SIGG vs. a cheaper brand is that they’re made in Switzerland and are, therefore, being manufactured by people who are being paid fairly and who are working in safe conditions.
Interestingly, SIGG recently faced a bit of a scandal after the lining in their bottles (which are aluminum, not stainless steel, with some sort of baked enamel on the inside) was found to contain BPA. IIRC, it was in bottles made before 2008 and they couldn’t even detect the BPA in tests.
I absolutely agree. We have more information available to us at our fingertips than humans have ever had before, and we settle for having talking heads feeding us mis-information and mis-directing us without taking any responsibility for becoming better informed (or even putting any value on thinking better).
Okay, this is enormously frightening to me. I take it this is the reaction to every vaccine, not just the swine flu vaccine? How on earth do people with education in medical science justify such a stance?
Hey, I’ve been to Europe, and plastic definitely reacts with chicken broth to form arsenic molecules. I confirmed it with this guy in Europe who was from Germany.
Especially the H1N1 vaccine, but also the seasonal flu (Oh are you going to get your "please give me Guillian-Barre Syndrome Shot? Why why would you do that) and also to the Human Papillomavirus Vaccine. I am very sorry that that girl went into anaphylaxis but thats very rare, much rarer than the incidence of HPV.
I don’t even know what to say anymore. Even people I work with who I respected for their intelligence are running around sounding the panic alarms. One co worker got sick within an hour of her H1N1 vaccine, and everyone is convinced that she got the swiney-hiney flu. I think it was either in her system anyway, or histrionics.
Sorry to make people scared, but I am just so fed up with everyones pet conspiracy theory regarding… well everything…Now I just leave the nursing station and go wipe butts, or read to a patient or something.
I keep a .pdf of The Dread Tomato Addiction on my hard drive, and have occasionally printed it out and passed it around whenever someone comes up with the type of nonsense the OP describes.
The Perpetrator of Nonsense™ may not be much amused, but everyone else usually is.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but normally the list of “possible side effects” for any given vaccine looks a lot like “a mild version of the illness we’re preventing.” Sometimes kids get a bit of “rubella-like spots” in the days following the rubella shot, for example. This is not a bad thing in that it’s simply your body reacting to the “bugs” in the vaccine. SiL-the-doctor has the theory that the people with strong reactions to the milded-down bugs in the vaccines may be the ones who would have gotten it worse if they’d encountered the Real Thing.
I had to get a couple of vaccines when last I was in the US (1): first, the nurse was irritated that I went and read the consent form and the list of possible secondary effects, then when I did develop those effects (2) she claimed it could in no way be linked to the vaccines. I’m not any kind of anti-vaxer, but that kind of attitude doesn’t help endear medical stuff to the layman.
1: not to go there, these were required by my employer before sending me to “barbarian lands” even though WHO did not recommend them for the specific locations I was going to visit
2: never before nor after have my joints hurt so badly, if I could have cut my arms and legs off and placed them in the fridge for a couple of days I would have; waving my hand caused pain all the way to the shoulder; whomever wrote “joint pain” in the documents should be flogged alive, because it was also the only time in my life that “joint pain” included every single vertebral interstice. Both vaccines listed “sharp joint pain” in the list of possible side effects, which by the way leads me to wonder why not give them separatedly so they won’t sinergize.
Omgalion, that’s what the parties with “Basque” in their name want you to think. But for example, the current presidents of both Euskadi and Navarra (the Spanish areas of the Basqueland) are both from non-Basquist parties. One is from Euskadi Socialist Party PSE, the other from Union of the Navarrese People UPN. It’s common for “big parties” to get local offshoots in those areas (PSE is an ofshoot, UPN isn’t) due to those two locations having their own legal structures which mean that a politician from there isn’t easily interchangeable with an “import.”
I just had this debate with a ‘friend’ on facebook of all places, in regards to the scientific method going to pot. He’s totally cool with the idea that a theory is just the same as an opinion, they carry the same weight (and then he went off on how science is attacking his church or some stupid strawman)
I don’t understand anti-vaxxers at all. Well, I mean, I do, but I don’t understand why they think it is a good idea, why you can just reject years and years of experimentation with… ‘well, I think it causes autism’