Healthy! Plus Blog Carnivals

May 1, 2008 Greta Christina1 Comment

Some of you very kindly have been asking after my health in the last few weeks. I’m pleased to let you know that, as of today, I am declaring myself officially recovered from this damn illness.

I’ve been tentatively going back to the gym for a couple of weeks, doing very short, gentle little strolls on the treadmill, gradually building up to get my strength and stamina back without triggering a respiratory freakout. But yesterday, for the first time since I got sick, I was able to do a complete workout, treadmill and weights both, for a full session. With happy lungs all the way. Yay, happy lungs! Just thought y’all might like to know.

And now, blog carnivals!

Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy #2 at Labyrinth Walk.

Skeptic’s Circle #84 at Archeoporn.

Carnival of the Godless #90 at No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Carnival of the Liberals #63 at Vagabond Scholar.

Carnival of Feminists #58 at Be a Good Human.

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My Trip to the Circus: Albert Hofmann and LSD

April 30, 2008 Greta Christina17 Comments

Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD, has died at the ripe old age of 102. So in honor of him, now seems like a good time to talk about my experiences with the drug he created.

I took LSD a lot in college, and for a year or two after. Quite a lot. For a while, I was taking it almost every week; and for most of my college years, I was taking it about once a month or so. And after I’d been taking it for a while, I was taking moderately hefty doses. You don’t get a physical tolerance to LSD — but you can get a sort of psychological tolerance to it. After I’d been taking it for a while, a hit or two would give me a light, fun trip — but if I wanted the experience of taking my mind into a radically unfamiliar place, I’d take five, seven, even ten hits.

And for the most part, it was a great experience. Kind of an important experience, too. I had a couple of bad trips (especially early on, before I’d figured out the “don’t take seriously the crazy shit your mind comes up with when it’s tripping” principle)… but on the whole, LSD was a positive, happy part of my life that shaped me in ways I feel good about. Partly it was just fun and entertaining, like fascinating and hilarious movies in my brain. But I actually got some important insights out of it as well: insights that have stayed with me long after I stopped taking the drug.

I could gas on about this subject for hours. But I realize that there’s little in this life more tedious than listening to other people describe their drug experiences. So the main thing I want to say is this: Taking LSD is what gave me the awareness — not just the intellectual concept, but the immediate, visceral experience — of just how much of my perception and intuition was about how my brain worked, and how little of it was about how the world worked. There is nothing quite so humbling as putting a chemical into your body — a chemical measured in millionths of a gram — and having everything you see and feel and know be radically altered, to the point of being unrecognizable.

So in a lot of ways, taking LSD was the beginning of my skepticism. It was the beginning of my awareness that my brain could fool me, that my brain had its own agenda, and I couldn’t automatically trust what it was saying.

Now, the downside is that, in a lot of other ways, it was the total opposite. Many of my stupider woo beliefs came directly out of “insights” I had when I was on LSD or other hallucinogens. The idea that mystical forces were guiding the Tarot cards when I shuffled them. The idea that subatomic particles must have free will, since their behavior isn’t predictable. The idea that every person on Earth was in exactly the right place, doing exactly what they were intended to be doing by the great World-Soul. (A pretty Calvinist idea when you think about it, although at the time I would have rejected that suggestion hotly.) I had drug hallucinations that I took very, very seriously, and believed to be accurate perceptions even after the drug faded. (I was, for instance, convinced for an embarrassingly long time that, when I was under the influence of LSD, I could make rosebuds bloom into roses, simply through the force of my concentrated drug-enhanced will. Loki, have mercy.)

So while I’m overall positive about my LSD experiences, I feel that I should acknowledge this side of them as well. I am strongly of the opinion that a lot of the more fuzzy, uncritical, poorly- thought- out ideas of the hippie and post-hippie movement (New Age woo and otherwise) were the result of an entire generation being unclear on the “don’t take seriously the crazy shit your mind comes up with when it’s tripping” concept.

But you know? All that stuff eventually faded. And what I was left with — along with a lot of warm, happy, hilarious memories of profound and wildly entertaining times shared with friends — was the deeply- ingrained, vividly- understood awareness that my perception and intuition did not necessarily represent reality. It was the beginning of my skepticism. And it was the beginning of the end of my solipsism. In a lot of ways, it was the beginning of my adult compassion: my relativism, my understanding that other people saw reality differently than I did and that this didn’t automatically mean that they were stupid and wrong. It was the beginning of my borderline- obsessive, sometimes irritating dedication to seeing things, as much as possible, from other people’s points of view.

And for that, I’m grateful.

Thanks, Albert.

(Tip of the hat to Susie Bright, both for the news and for the “everyone tell your LSD experiences” meme. Also for this unbelievably hilarious video. Video below the fold.)

Photo of Albert Hofmann by Stefan Pangritz, copyright CC-BY-SA.

Continue reading “My Trip to the Circus: Albert Hofmann and LSD” →

Atheism, Bad Luck, and the Comfort of Reason

April 9, 2008 Greta Christina12 Comments

Warning: The first bit of this piece contains a hearty gripe. Stick with me: except for occasional outbursts, the kvetching doesn’t last past the first couple of paragraphs, and there really is a point.

As people who are close to me know (and as people who follow the blog closely may have guessed), the last month or two has been among the lousiest times of my life. I’ve had worse months — months of death, of divorce, of serious family illness. But in terms of the sheer stupid dogpiling of badness upon badness, I’m hard-pressed to think of another that’s sucked more. It’s not just been the pneumonia and my cat dying; I’ve been dealing with other health problems (mostly behind me now, but it wasn’t fun); a trip to the emergency room for Ingrid (she’s totally fine now, but it was a scary few hours); a small but painful second- degree burn; missing the queer contra dance camp because I was sick; and my hard drive crashing. (Yes, I’ve been doing backups; no, I haven’t been doing them often enough, and I lost some work that I really did not want to lose.)

It’s getting to the point where it’s almost comical, except that I lost my sense of humor about a week and a half ago. Along with my patience. But of course, you can lose your patience all you want to with bad things in your life, and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference — you still have to endure them.

I don’t bring all this up to cadge sympathy, or to dump on you. I bring it up because of this: This has been the kind of month (two-month? fortmonth? bimonth?) that would make believers in God wonder what they were being punished for. It’s the kind of bimonth that, back in my woo days when I believed that everything happened for a reason, would have made me rack my brains trying to figure out what the fuck it was that the universe was trying to teach me. (Amazing, isn’t it: the arrogance of thinking that the universe arranges itself around you in order to personally teach you a lesson.)

But I don’t think that. Any of it. And I’m so glad that I don’t think any of it, I can’t even tell you.

I know that religion is repeatedly defended as a source of comfort in difficult times. But this has been one of the more difficult times in my life… and I’ve been finding that my atheistic, skeptical, rational view of my difficulties is more comforting than any religious belief I’ve ever held, or could ever imagine holding.

So here is my atheist, skeptical, rational look at why runs of bad luck happen.

1. Just plain luck. Anyone who studies statistics will tell you that, in any random sequence that’s long enough, mini-sequences will show up that look like patterns. Pseudopatterns, they’re called. You roll a pair of dice for long enough, chances are that at some point you’re going to get snake-eyes ten times in a row. And that’s some of what this run of bad luck is about. A good example is my cat dying and my hard drive crashing. Nothing to do with each other, as far as I can tell. They just happened to happen in roughly the same time frame. When a lot of it happens in a row, it can feel like a pattern, with intention behind it… but that doesn’t mean it is.

2. Bad things can cause other bad things to happen. If you’re tired, stressed, distracted, sleep- deprived, etc. from a bad thing happening, you’re more likely to make serious mistakes, get into accidents, and/or get sick. Ingrid and I are convinced that this is why she had her trip to the emergency room: it happened in the middle of Catfish’s final illness, and Ingrid was upset and distracted and not looking where she was going. And I think it’s very likely that the dogpile of stress was a big factor in my getting pneumonia. (At the doctor’s visit when the pneumonia was diagnosed, my blood pressure, normally in the very healthy vicinity of 120/70, was 144/87.)

3. Bad things make you less able to cope with other bad things… thus making them feel worse than they otherwise would. I don’t think pneumonia is ever a picnic… but I think I’d be handling it with a lot more patience and good humor if it hadn’t come at the tail end (what I hope is the tail end, what bloody well better be the tail end) of this ridiculous run of shitty luck.

4. Big bad things make you more conscious of, and more sensitive to, little bad things. This, I think, is a big one. Normally, I pride myself on my ability to take the ordinary bumps of life in my stride, even to have a sense of humor about them, to make them part of the overall optimistic pattern of my life. But in the last month, every little inconvenience and annoyance has been magnified by stress. Ingrid getting a cold, a stain on our nice bedspread, the store being out of the kind of tea that I like… all of it gets magnified into One More Fucking Thing I Have To Deal With This Month. All of it seems like part of the pattern. The non-existent pseudopattern.

Or, to sum it all up in a couple of words: Shit Happens.

So where’s the comfort in all this?

Here is the comfort:

I know what’s happening.

I understand what’s happening.

So I’m not afraid of it.

And I don’t have to feel guilty about it.

I don’t have to add guilt to the dogpile. I don’t have to add the shameful and frightened feeling that the dogpile is a punishment for some unknown sin. I don’t have to add sleepless nights trying to figure out what I’ve done wrong, what I’ve done to deserve this, what lesson is being taught me that I’m too dense to learn. I don’t have to feel like it’s my fault. (Okay, not backing up my data often enough was my fault… but other than that.) I don’t have to take it personally.

Now, I understand that “not taking it personally” is itself hard for many people. If shit happens simply because shit happens, and not to teach you a lesson, then the shit can seem both meaningless and out of control. Believing that runs of bad luck are punishment for some sin is a way to give your suffering meaning… and it’s a way to convince yourself that you have it in your power to prevent it from happening again.

But given a choice between thinking that the meaning of my suffering is “Shit happens,” and that the meaning of my suffering is “You’re a bad person,” I’ll take “Shit happens” any day. And given a choice between spending my life in a desperate, futile attempt to figure out which set of rituals and sacrifices I need to make to appease my god and prevent the shit from happening again — and instead having some sort of reasonable expectations and wisdom about what in my life I can and cannot change — I’ll take the latter in a heartbeat.

Memories of a Good Science Education… and Worries About Bad Ones

April 2, 2008 Greta Christina19 Comments

I didn’t see the point at the time.

When I was a kid, I always got annoyed by the lab portion of my science classes. I guess I’ve always been more of a theory person than a research person (hence my career as an essayist instead of a journalist). Rolling balls down inclines and measuring the speed; putting nails in different liquids and seeing how fast they rusted; cutting up fetal pigs… it always seemed like a waste of time.

I mean, I never had any problem understanding the theories being taught by the books and the teachers. And I was perfectly happy to believe the books and the teachers. After all, it’s not like my measurements of gravity or magnetism or whatever were going to be written up in the science journals. Even at the time, I knew perfectly well that if my numbers didn’t come out the way the theory said they should, the discrepancy would, without a doubt, turn out to be caused by my experimental methodology… not the theory.

And it’s not like the theories we were learning in second -grade or sixth-grade or tenth-grade science class were on the cutting edge of new scientific thinking. Again, even at the time, I knew that the stuff we were learning was well-established, and had been experimentally verified thousands upon thousands of times… by researchers who were a whole lot more careful than my sixth-grade science class. I knew we weren’t really verifying the theories. The theories had been verified, many times over. We were just seeing how they worked for ourselves.

Which I didn’t think I needed. I got it. The books and teachers and theories made sense. I didn’t need to roll the damn ball down the damn incline to see it for myself.

So it seemed like a waste of time.

But now that I’m an adult, I see the value in it much more clearly. And especially now that I’m so engaged in the skeptical/ rational thinking/ science groupie blogosphere (what I’ve seen referred to as “the reality-based community”), I value it even more.

I see the value because I think there’s an enormous difference between learning something purely by authority — “it’s true because I say it’s true, and you can trust me” — and learning something by seeing it for yourself. And the latter is the core of the skeptical, rational, reality-based approach to life that I think is so very valuable.

Let me give you an example. We’d learned very early on, of course, that the earth was round. But in a high school science class (freshman year, if I remember correctly), we learned how, exactly, the ancient Greeks determined that the earth was round. It had to do with comparing shadows: you measure the shadows of two poles of equal height set, say, a mile apart. You do it at noon, and again an hour later. And you do the math. The difference in the length of the two shadows will be different on a curved surface — i.e., the earth — than they would be on a flat surface. You can even figure out, within a crude approximation, how large the curved surface is.

So we learned how exactly this information was acquired. And then we went outside and acquired it ourselves. We did it with sticks set a few feet apart, so of course our measurements weren’t super-accurate — but we got measurable results that weren’t that far off the mark.

And so now I know. I know that the earth is round, not because I read it in a book or was taught it by a teacher, but because I measured it myself. And now when I’m in a debate with some theist who says that science is just another religion and my belief that the earth is round is no different from their belief in God, I can say, “Yes, it is different. I know that the earth is round — because I measured it myself.”

Of course, in practical terms, most of what I know about science — or what any other layperson knows about science — is learned from authority. I haven’t personally done experiments to see the effectiveness of antibiotics in treating pneumonia; I haven’t personally dug up any of the millions upon millions of fossils supporting the theory of evolution. Had I but world enough and time… but I don’t, so I’m not going to.

But the difference is that I could. Any smart, dedicated person with access to education can get into epidemiology or paleontology, and find out for themselves whether or not the stuff that the books say about antibiotics or fossils is true.

We can do this because scientific knowledge is transparent, and it’s replicable. When researchers publish their findings, they publish not only what their results were, but how exactly they obtained them. They don’t keep it an arcane secret, accessible only to those who have achieved the 34th Level of Poobahhood; they don’t tell overly- inquisitive students to stop asking so many questions and just accept their teachings on faith. They say, “Here’s what we think, and here’s why, and here’s what we did to find it out, and here’s the kind of evidence that would prove us wrong, and here’s exactly what you need to do to see it for yourself.”

There were other good things about my grade- school and high- school science education. We learned a lot about the scientific method — even as early as third grade, we were learning about the difference between observation and inference (illustrated with cartoons about wet tricycles on lawns — the observation is that the tricycle is wet, the inference is that it rained… or that someone turned on the sprinkler). And we started learning very early on about the importance of careful measurements — we were measuring liquids by reading the meniscus as early as third or fourth grade, and I remember a stern lecture from a science teacher about how screaming and cheering at the hamster running the maze would probably have a negative impact on his learning curve.

But of all the good things in my science education, I think the “see it for yourself” labs were probably the best. As annoying as I found them at the time, I now think that they were some of the most important and influential experiences in all of my early education. Because it taught me not to believe what the teacher told me, just because they were telling me. It taught me that I had the power to find things out for myself.

And it’s one of the main reasons I get so upset when I read about the “No Child Left Behind,” teaching- to- the- test style education that American public school kids are getting. Science education — and indeed, all education — needs to be about more than learning enough facts to let you pass standardized tests. Science education — and indeed, all education — needs to teach kids how to learn. It needs to teach kids how to think critically; how to ask questions; how to look things up. And it needs to teach kids that they don’t have to believe everything they’re told, just because they’re told it. It needs to teach kids that they have the power to find things out for themselves.

Blood and Suffering: A Seriously Pissed-Off Rant About Alternative Medicine

March 28, 2008 Greta Christina37 Comments

Readers, be warned: This is not one of my more diplomatic pieces. I’m angry, and while I’m trying to be fair here, I’m not trying to be nice. If you don’t want to read that, please don’t. (It was also written under the influence of an entertaining assortment of prescription drugs; so if I’m more meandering than usual, please forgive me. Hey, what a pretty tree!)

As regular readers of this blog know, I’ve been home sick for several days with pneumonia. The experience hasn’t been a picnic: as anyone who’s had pneumonia knows, even a relatively moderate case that you don’t have to be hospitalized for will totally kick your ass. I’ve been exhausted; I’ve been uncomfortable and at times in actual pain; and since all I could do for days was sit on the sofa breathing steam and watching TV, I’ve been bored out of my mind. (It’s only been in the last couple of days that I’ve been alert enough, or able to stop hovering over the steamer for long enough, to do any writing.)

But the experience has given me a renewed respect for conventional medicine. And it’s given me a renewed rage at the alternative medicine practitioners and proponents who are undermining it.

Here’s the thing. As soon as I started suspecting that my bad cold was something more than a bad cold, I hightailed it over to Kaiser. And within two hours, I had a diagnosis, medicines in my hand, and a treatment plan. In case you’re curious, here’s what I’m on:

Antibiotics. Penicillin, quaintly enough. Obvious purpose — to kill the infection in my lungs.

Cough medicine. Purpose: to quiet my cough, which had been doing this nasty self-perpetuating loop — the cough was making my lungs irritated, which was making me cough even more. (This also reduces my pain and discomfort and lets me rest, since I got the good stuff with codeine.) Also — not to be too gross about it — it loosens the gunk in my lungs, so when I do cough it does some good.

Bronchiodilators. Purpose: to ease the constriction in my lungs. Thus helping me breathe, as well as helping me sleep.

Decongestants. Purpose: at the risk of thoroughly grossing you all out, to stop post-nasal drip from dripping into my lungs and gunking up the works even further. (The gross-out portion of this blog post is now complete. My apologies.)

All of which — how exactly shall I put this? — works. It does what it sets out to do. All of it was carefully, rigorously tested, with placebo controls and double-blinding and peer review and replicability and all that good stuff… and all of it has been shown to work. It’s going to be a little while before I’m back to normal — pneumonia is no joke — but I started writing this three days after I started the treatment, and I’m already significantly and measurably better.

And contrary to one of the more popular misconceptions about conventional medicine, the doctor didn’t just send me home with a bag of drugs. She also sent me home with instructions to breathe steam; drink enormous amounts of fluids (especially tea); stay warm; not talk too much; and rest as much as I possibly could. Plus she asked me about fifty times if I smoked. Contrary to the accusation leveled in a comment in this blog that “anything that isn’t designed by a human in a lab isn’t considered ‘real medicine,'” a large part of my treatment plan had nothing to with anything designed in a lab or cooked up by a pharmaceutical company. And the non-drug part of the treatment didn’t make anybody rich… except perhaps the Celestial Seasonings tea company. (Even the drugs in a bag weren’t making anyone terribly rich; they’re mostly old-school drugs that moved into generics long ago.)

Now, I haven’t been tremendously happy these past few days. I’ve been exhausted, cranky, woozy, uncomfortable, and bored out of my mind. And let me tell you, the combination of codeine and Sudafed is one weird-ass speedball. I don’t recommend it.

But here’s what I haven’t been:

Dead.

Or dying.

Or even suffering all that much.

The history of pneumonia before antibiotics is not pretty. Until the 20th century, treatment was pretty much non-existent. You either got better on your own, or you died. Mostly, you died. Pneumonia killed a ton of people, and it was known and feared for its special ability to kill young, healthy people in the prime of their life. And death from pneumonia is no fun at all. (I’ll spare you the details, since I promised earlier to stop grossing you out.) There was some treatment beginning to be available in the early 20th century — but antibiotics completely changed the picture.

Pneumonia still kills people today. Mostly the very young, the very old, the immune-suppressed, and people who don’t get medical care in time. But thanks to conventional medicine and Big Pharma, I am rotting on the sofa for a week, feeling sorry for myself and watching all of “Firefly” on DVD… not rotting in a grave. And so are thousands of other people who got pneumonia this week. (Well, they’re probably not all watching “Firefly”…)

Okay. All very good reasons for me to be happy about conventional medicine. So why is this experience making me angry about alternative medicine? Not just annoyed, not just amused, but deeply, seriously, lividly angry?

I’m angry because I think alternative medicine undermines conventional medicine.

I’m angry because so many alt medicine practitioners convince sick people to treat their illnesses, not with treatments that have been rigorously tested and shown to be effective, but with whatever powders and potions and procedures the practitioner’s fancy happened to light upon, backed up at best with carelessly-done testing, and at worst with nothing but an interesting philosophy. With the best result being a placebo effect, and the worst being actual harm being done, either from neglect of the medical condition or from the sometimes harmful treatments themselves.

I’m angry because so many alt medicine practitioners promise “alternatives” that are easier, more pleasant, and more palatable than conventional treatments… along with promises of more complete and dramatic cures. I’m angry that they encourage people to pursue preventions and treatments based not on thorough testing of what does and does not work, but on what they find emotionally and psychologically and culturally appealing. I’m angry that they encourage people to abandon conventional medicine, which is often unpleasant and sometimes only partially effective, by offering appealing promises that they can’t back up.

I’m angry because so many alt medicine practitioners and proponents convince people that conventional medicine only cares about symptoms and acute conditions and ignores prevention and overall health… when the reality is that doctors and nurses and public health officials around the world are desperately trying to get people to exercise, eat better, reduce their stress, and quit smoking.

Along that line, I’m angry because so many alt medicine proponents and practitioners convince people that “doctors don’t know anything, and all they care about is making Big Pharma rich.” (As if alt medicine practitioners were all-knowing, and nobody in the world were getting rich off of it.) I’m angry at the ways that alt medicine encourages the anti-intellectual strain so prevalent in American culture; the all- too- common attitude of, “What does that hi-falutin’ doctor know anyway, with their book larnin’ and their fancy degrees? Us simple folk know more about (X) than Dr. Fancy-Pants, with their years of specialized training and experience.”

And I don’t mean that altie practitioners and proponents encourage people to question doctors; to have a healthy skepticism about them; to treat them as fallible human beings who aren’t God. I encourage people to do that. Hell, most doctors and nurses I know encourage people to do that. I mean that they encourage people, not to question doctors, but to disregard them at their whim.

Now, a lot of people will argue that many alt medicine practitioners don’t do any such thing. They’ll argue that many altie practitioners see alt medicine as a supplement to conventional medicine, not a replacement for it. That’s why it’s often called complementary and alternative medicine, or CAM — because it complements conventional medicine, rather than supplanting it.

Okay. Fair enough. So look at it this way. If I had gone to an alt medicine practitioner with my pneumonia symptoms, one of two things would have happened.

Option A: They would have tried to treat my pneumonia with their dilutions, their energy fields, their sacred herbs, whatever. Seriously. Here are some of the gems that my Google search on “pneumonia” + “alternative medicine” turned up. We have this site, recommending that pneumonia be treated with diet, bowel and dental cleansing, and — believe it or not — exercise. (Exercise being absolutely the last fucking thing in the world you ought to be doing if you have pneumonia — except maybe for smoking.) No mention of antibiotics. We have this site, which mentions antibiotics but says they’re problematic, and suggests as alternatives cayenne pepper, manuka honey, and hydrogen peroxide. And then we have Holisticonline.com, which recommends that pneumonia be treated with chiropractic care, pleurisy root, and the color red.

In which case they would, in my opinion, be guilty of reckless endangerment of human life. If anyone anywhere in the world has died, or even suffered needlessly, because they acted on the advice of an alt medicine practitioner and treated their pneumonia with exercise, cayenne pepper, or the color red, then that is blood and suffering on the hands of alternative medicine.

Don’t believe me? Don’t think that CAM practitioners prescribe CAM treatments for serious, life-threatening illnesses — in the place of conventional medicine? Here’s a nice little story from the BBC about homeopathists in Britain telling people that they didn’t need to take anti-malarial drugs when visiting Africa or other high- malaria- risk parts of the world — they just needed to take the homeopathic remedies. Read it and seethe. And there is no reason to think they did this for malaria only and not for any other life-threatening illnesses. Even a cursory Google search will turn up alt medicine treatments for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, AIDS, and more. And check out these “what’s the harm?” sites for more stories of people suffering or dying because their serious illnesses got alt medicine instead of conventional medical treatment.

So that’s one option. The reckless endangerment option. But the other option is B: They would have recognized that I had a serious medical condition that they couldn’t treat, hustled me out the door, and sent me scurrying to a conventional doctor. (When I Googled “pneumonia” + “alternative medicine,” this is what a number of the sites I found essentially did.)

In which case, what the hell is the point? If the only thing alt medicine is good for is mild health problems that quickly go away on their own, then why bother? What on earth is the point of a multi-billion dollar alternative medicine industry if it exists solely to make people feel slightly better when they have sniffles or sore muscles or tummy aches? (If it even does that, in any way other than as a placebo.)

Conventional medicine is far from perfect. Insert a standard “I know conventional medicine is flawed” disclaimer here; I’ve written them before, and I don’t feel up to writing another one now. But it’s the best game in town. It is, pretty much by definition, medicine that has been rigorously tested using the scientific method, with placebo controls and double-blinding and replicability and peer review and all that other difficult, expensive, time-consuming stuff that alt medicine doesn’t bother with.

And the chances are excellent that you — personally — are alive today because of it. Whether it’s the polio you didn’t get because you got vaccinated, the smallpox you didn’t get because it’s been eradicated, the heart attack you didn’t have because your high blood pressure is being treated, the pneumonia you didn’t die of because it got cured… I could go on and on and on. And on. The benefits of conventional medicine are often invisible, an invisibility that’s enhanced by short memories and insufficient history lessons. But the fact is that we easily prevent and treat diseases and conditions that used to routinely kill thousands and millions of people.

Medicine is about the prevention of death and the relief of suffering. And conventional medicine is, by definition, medicine that has been rigorously tested and shown to prevent death and relieve suffering. Alternative medicine, on the other hand, is, by definition, medicine that is outside that rigorous testing system. It is medicine that promises to prevent death and relieve suffering, but is unwilling to spend the time and work and money making damn well sure that it can back up that promise. It is medicine that shares every single one of the flaws of conventional medicine, from greed to arrogance to cultural blindness, without offering any real benefit that conventional medicine doesn’t.

And it is medicine that undermines conventional medicine; medicine that draws people away from conventional medicine by making enticing promises that it can’t deliver.

So it is therefore medicine with blood and suffering on its hands.

Brief Blog Break

March 24, 2008 Greta Christina17 Comments

Hi, all. Greta here. I wanted to let you all know: I went into Kaiser today about the bad cold/ asthma attack I got this weekend, and it turns out to be pneumonia. Not to worry or freak out — it’s not a terribly bad case, and with antibiotics and other nice modern medicines I should be okay in a week or two. But I’m going to be home and out of it for several days, sucking down cough syrup with codeine and breathing steam nonstop. So the blogging will probably be minimal to none for the next few days. (Also, while the Best Sex Writing event at the Center for Sex and Culture on Thursday is still happening, it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll be there.)

And yes, the timing on this is so spectacularly bad as to be comical. This is definitely going to go down as one of the five worst months of my entire life. Hopefully I’ll be able to look back on it someday and laugh grimly. Anyway, just wanted to let you all know. Take care, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Love,
Greta

Catfish, 1991-2008

March 7, 2008 Greta Christina38 Comments

I wanted to let you all know that Catfish, my beloved cat, died today at about 4pm, at the age of almost seventeen years. She was diagnosed with cancer two weeks ago; we gave her some treatment, appropriate to her age and her prognosis, but she faded very quickly and was obviously suffering, and we had her euthanized at home this afternoon.

I am, of course, extremely sad and grieving about this. Catfish was a good friend and a dear companion for close to half my life, and letting her go is extremely hard. But I also know that I — and for the last few years, Ingrid and I — gave her a good, long, happy life. And I am very glad that we were able to give her a good death, safe and comfortable and peaceful with us at home.

If I haven’t been my usual cheerful and prolific bloggy self for the last couple weeks, and have been focusing on death and grief in my writing to an unusual degree — and if I’m not my usual cheerful and prolific bloggy self for the coming days and weeks, and focus on death and grief in my writing to an unusual degree — this is why. In addition to all the other reasons this is hard, this was the first death of someone I was very close to since I became an atheist and let go of any belief or hope in an afterlife. But I want to thank all my friends, family, colleagues, and increasingly beloved total strangers, for being part of the meaning of my life and reminding me every day that life is no less precious and amazing for being temporary. I’ll talk to you all again soon.

Love,
Greta

“Things to be angry about”: Google Poetry

February 25, 2008 Greta Christina7 Comments

Saw this at An Apostate’s Chapel, and I loved it, so I’m doing my own version. The concept: Compose a poem, a more or less coherent one, using search terms that people used to arrive at your blog. It’s an entertainingly eerie exercise, and while I am generally a suck poet, I think that mine freakishly captures the essence, both of my blog and of my current mental and emotional state.

I did mine as a set of quasi-haikus. And yes, the title is also a search term that was used to find my blog. (No images for this one, btw; I want the images of the poem to speak for themselves, or some such poetry blather.) Enjoy — and if you’re inspired to do your own, please feel free to post the link in the comments!

things to be angry about
by Greta Christina

prayer of looking after someone
pray for someone with terminal illness
now with 40% more design

galileo nonconformist
letters of comfort in terminal sickness
slut

weird photos of naked girls
let’s see some women with nice asses that like sex
girls fuck with fruits

Harry potter porn for adults
flintstones having sex
simpsons make sex look like church

marriage no sex
sex fun
deliberately fucking with me weird shit coincidence

has barack obama voted for same sex marriage
Why does Barack Obama feel wrong to me?
if it’s different it’s wrong

perfect porn
spanking her on her bare bottom
he spanked her and then started to lick her pussy

blue eyed cats
55th Academy Awards Ceremony
keep fresh bread fresh

attempting Reason
strange and terrible earthly coincidences
you have the right to your own truth

agnostic grace
atheist rant
i just became an atheist

list of reasons why parents argue with their children
children thinking thoughts of death
the meaning of death

i have weird thoughts about death
fear of being dead forever
FEAR OF DEATH

On Illness, Bodies, and This Weird Free Will Thing

February 19, 2008 Greta Christina11 Comments

So for the last week or so, I’ve been dealing with some health issues. Nothing serious, and I’m dealing with it, so don’t anybody worry. That’s not why I’m telling you this.

Here’s why I’m telling you this. I spent much of last week pretty well flattened: in serious discomfort, occasionally verging into real pain. And I was struck — as I always am when I’m sick or injured — by how fragile I am.

I don’t just mean my body. I mean my… well, me. My selfhood, my identity. What I would call my soul, if I believed in that.

This is what I mean. So many of the things that are central to my identity, things I pride myself on and think of as central to my self — my optimism, my cheerful disposition, my compassion, my ability to cut people slack, my energy, my libido, my hard-workingness, my consciousness of others — all of these were shot to hell last week. I was irritable, I was lethargic, I was self-absorbed, I was whiny. I was everything I don’t like.

All because of pain.

Worse — for me, at least — I got almost no writing done. Partly because I was having abdominal pain and had a hard time sitting up, but largely because I just didn’t want to. I didn’t even want to read. I simply didn’t have it in me. I didn’t have it in me to do anything except lie flat on the sofa with a hot water bottle and watch TV.

And I started thinking: What if this were chronic?

What if I felt like this all the time?

Who would I be?

I have a tendency to be a bit smug and self-righteous about my optimism and cheerfulness and whatnot. I have a tendency to see having a good nature as something you can choose. Because most of the time, that’s how it is for me. I see a situation, and I see in front of me the way of looking at it that’s suspicious and gloomy and pessimistic, and I see the way of looking at it that’s generous and hopeful… and when it’s reasonable and not obviously deluded to do so, I opt for the latter. I see optimism as a choice, a conscious way of framing your life and the world that not only makes you feel better in the short run but makes actual external things in your life better in the long run. And I get truly baffled by people who can’t or won’t do it.

But when I’m sick or injured, I get a lot more humble about it. I realize that a huge amount of my ability to choose optimism is balanced on some very precarious teeter-totters: good physical health and financial stability being the most obvious. (It doesn’t help that I’m reading the new Oliver Sacks book, “Musicophilia,” and thus am reading all this stuff about the freaky ways that brain injuries can radically change the things most central to a person’s self and the things that connect them with the world. Eep.)

I just kept thinking last week, as I got up to refill the hot water bottle for the twentieth time: If the pain I’m in became chronic, would I adjust and find a way back to my native optimism and energy, sucking up and dealing with the pain the way I suck up and deal with the other things in my life that are crummy? I’d like to think so; but I really don’t know. I know some people can. I honestly don’t know if I’m one of them. (Ingrid says there’s a large body of research on chronic pain and its effect on people’s selves and lives and freedom; and not surprisingly, that effect is Not Good.)

And would I even have developed my native optimism in the first place if I hadn’t spent most of my life in pretty good physical health? Again, I’d like to think so; but I really don’t know.

I think this is important stuff for atheists and humanists and naturalists. This is the thing that was really striking me when I was on the sofa with the hot water bottle. If there is no God and no soul, and everything we are is comprised of physical things and the relationships between physical things… then when you change those physical things, the self changes as well. Our selves are not in our own hands nearly as much as we like to think.

I’m not saying that we don’t have any responsibility for ourselves and the choices we make. I think we do. I’m not quite sure what, if anything, this weird free will stuff is — I don’t think anyone does at this point — but I do think that we have something resembling free will and moral accountability. And unless a preponderance of evidence piles up showing that human beings really are just elaborate stimulus-response machines, I’m going to go on holding myself and others morally accountable for our choices. If I’m not responsible for how I manage my pain, then nobody is responsible for anything they do… and in the absence of a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, I’m just not willing to accept that.

What I am saying is this: Whatever free will is, it seems to not be a simple matter of either/or, a light switch that’s either on or off. (See the excellent On the Possibility of Perfect Humanity at Daylight Atheism for more on this.) Things happen in our lives that can limit or expand our freedom, that can broaden or diminish the choices that are available to us. Some of these are things that we can do something about; some of them really, really aren’t. And I think those of us who have a lot of choices need to remember to have compassion for people who don’t have as many.

Look, Ma, I’m On An Internet Poll!

February 15, 2008 Greta Christina4 Comments

C.L. Hanson of Letters from a Broad is doing a poll asking who the sexiest atheist blogger is… and I’m one of the seven choices.

Nifty, huh? I feel like I should change my home photo for the duration of the poll. Maybe to one of the corset photos… or maybe to my sexy, sexy Simpsons avatar.

Vote for me, don’t vote for me… but for the love of Loki, vote. It is your solemn duty as a citizen of the blogosphere. If you don’t vote for sexiest atheist blogger, the theocrats win.

Greta Christina's Blog

Atheism, sex, politics, dreams, and whatever.

Philosophy/ Life

Healthy! Plus Blog Carnivals

My Trip to the Circus: Albert Hofmann and LSD

Atheism, Bad Luck, and the Comfort of Reason

Memories of a Good Science Education… and Worries About Bad Ones

Blood and Suffering: A Seriously Pissed-Off Rant About Alternative Medicine

Brief Blog Break

Catfish, 1991-2008

“Things to be angry about”: Google Poetry

On Illness, Bodies, and This Weird Free Will Thing

Look, Ma, I’m On An Internet Poll!

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