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Woo for You!
The CBC needs a proper throwdown on alternative medicine. Alternative medicine is untested, unproven and most of the time ineffective. Does the CBC title for the story reflect this? – “Herbal medicine may be risky for kids.” Talk about a time to relegate journalistic “objectivity” to the sidelines. Presenting a ‘balanced case’ for both sides when one side is a dangerous illusion is irresponsible reporting.
“Giving alternative treatments such as homoeopathic remedies instead of conventional medicines to children may have deadly side-effects in rare instances, a new analysis says.”
Trying to cure ailments with unproven treatments is a deadly practice. End of line.
“Australian researchers monitored reports from pediatricians in Australia from 2001 to 2003 looking for suspected side-effects from alternative medicines like herbal treatments, vitamin supplements or naturopathic pills. They found 39 reports of side-effects including four deaths.”
You know why you only hear about the alternative medicine success stories? The majority that did not make it are dead.
“In the study, researchers found infants to children aged 16 were affected by complementary medicines and that in nearly 65 per cent of the cases, side-effects were classified as severe, life-threatening, or fatal. In 44 per cent of cases, pediatricians believed their patient had been harmed by a failure to use conventional medicines.
“We have known for a long time that alternative medicines can put patients at risk,” said Edzard Ernst, a professor of complementary medicine at Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, England. He was not linked to the study.
“Perhaps the most serious harm occurs when effective therapies are replaced by ineffective alternative therapies,” he said. “In that situation, even an intrinsically harmless medicine, like a homeopathic medicine, can be life-threatening,” Ernst said.
Embracing woo is hazardous to your health.
“Many of the adverse events associated with failure to use conventional medicine resulted from the family’s belief in complementary and alternative medicine and determination to use it despite medical advice,” Alissa Lim of the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne and colleagues wrote.
They described one case of a 10-month-old baby who had severe septic shock after being given naturopathic medicines and was assigned to a special diet to treat eczema. In another case, an infant who suffered multiple seizures and a heart attack died after being given alternative therapies — which the parents had chosen due to their concerns about the side-effects of regular medicines.”
Misinformed, ignorant people paying woo practitioners to kill them and their loved ones. A deplorable state of affairs that could have been averted with just a touch of critical thinking.
Sleep, like being coherent, is for the weak. Prepare people, we get two celestial events instead of one today.
“This year’s winter solstice on Tuesday will fall on the same day as a full lunar eclipse for the first time in 456 years. The rare, 72-minute lunar eclipse — when the sun, the Earth and the moon align — will begin in the early morning hours on Dec. 21 in North America, and should cast an amber glow on snowy landscapes, said NASA.”
Well, it is nice when we finally reach the nadir of the bleak midwinter, AND we get to see a full lunar eclipse to boot.
“Tuesday marks the first day of winter in the northern hemisphere, and the winter solstice begins in the evening at 6:38 p.m. ET, which is 8:08 p.m. NT, 7:38 p.m. AT, 5:38 p.m. CT, 4:38 p.m. MT, and 3:38 p.m. PT.
Scientists said the last time a full lunar eclipse coincided with the winter solstice was in AD 1554. NASA forecasts that at 1:33 a.m. ET on Tuesday, “Earth’s shadow will appear as a dark red bite at the edge of the lunar disk.”
After roughly an hour, that “bite” will eventually grow to cover the whole moon. That stage, known as “totality,” will probably start at 2:41 a.m. ET and last 72 minutes.
As for the best time to witness the cosmic event, NASA suggests being outside at 3:17a.m., “when the moon will be in deepest shadow, displaying the most fantastic shades of coppery red.”
So, if sleep is not in the cards on Tuesday night, your plans have already been made.
Remember 3:17am is optimal viewing time.
Ever wonder about the processing abilities of your brain and wondered about how accurate it actually is? This neat clip from the BBC about the McGurk Effect illustrates our imperfect grasp of the real word and how much brain interpretation is actually going on.
Hey, quick, how does a internal combustion work in layman’s terms. You have 1 minute to get in all the pertinent information. Go!
Obviously, decisions are going to be made about what content to keep and how to say as much as possible with the time allotted. Climate change is like describing an internal combustion engine in 1 minute, only that that the science behind climate change is much more complex. Our media is guilty of not doing their homework on Climate Change. Potholer54 gets us more up to date on what the science actually says, as opposed to media mistranslations and inaccuracies.
Another refreshing video from Qualia Soup. Science, it works b*tches. :)
We are not alone in our galaxy. We have a visitor. By the name of HIP 13044 b? Leave it to science to find a really poetic name.
“Astronomers say they’ve found the first known planet to orbit a star that began its life outside our own Milky Way galaxy. In the last 15 years, almost 500 planets have been detected orbiting stars in our galaxy. But until now, no planet has been discovered that came from another galaxy.The discovery of a giant planet around the star HIP 13044 changes all that, a team of astronomers claims.”
“Because of the great distances involved, there are no confirmed detections of planets in other galaxies,” he said in a statement. “But this cosmic merger has brought an extragalactic planet within our reach.”
The planet — named HIP 13044 b — lies about 2,000 light years from Earth in the southern constellation of Fornax. Its mass is at least 1.25 times that of Jupiter’s and takes only 16.2 days to complete an orbit.
It was discovered by looking for the tiny wobbles produced when an orbiting object creates a pull on a star’s gravity. Astronomers used a high-resolution spectrograph attached to the 2.2-metre MPG/ESO telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.
Way to go astronomers. I’m looking forward to more news on our first exoplanet discovery.
How cats defy gravity and get tasty milk noms!
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