#medicine vs bullshit

[kiefbowl]

one of the unfortunate issues with young people and/or naive people online learning "social justice" from social media for the first time ever (which is not a value judgement), and learning a weird "privilege vs. virtue" paradigm about minority classes, is that they seem oblivious to the fact that there are a lot of people who do not care about ""their people"" and will take the opportunity to scam the shit out of poor, desperate communities they have an "in" with. so you'll have people who promote, like, weird instagram "healers" as having the truth even though it takes 7 seconds to realize they're a grifter who sells $500 classes on zoom with no accreditation on anything and a website that drop ships cheap-o bullshit. or reblog every e-begging post they can find. idk how to tell you this, but even disabled non white poor gay people can lie their asses off, if they even are any of those things. even though white mormon moms have a death grip on the mlm market, they really aren't the only ones out there getting people's asses into debt. "but why would a former cancer patient sell false medicine?" bc getting cancer doesn't make you a good person. "but why would a disabled person lie about their disability summer program?" bc being disabled doesn't make you a good person. "but why would a queer poly thruple of black autistic lesbians lie about their therapy services?" bc they aren't good people and they wanted to make fast money!! it's always the answer, if they scammed people it's because they aren't good people and they wanted to make fast money. and they love dopes that will promote them so they can make more money even faster. they'll drop everything in a heartbeat when the heat comes bc it wasn't a legitimate business, and because they aren't good ppl and it was about making fast money.

so, like, it's okay to be discerning. it's okay to be like "hmmm, I think selling $100 fertility candles and diet cleanses on instagram under the guise of ancient wisdom and colonial trauma is, actually, very suspicious" even if that person "looks like" they "should know" what they're talking about.

[crippleprophet]

do you have any thoughts on functional neurological disorder?

it’s one of the cruelest inventions of modern medicine.

for a bit of context on my positionality i don’t currently have an fnd diagnosis but i am at huge risk of one (my rheumatologist already thinks i have a conversion disorder) & it’s one of the many reasons i’m terrified to pursue a second neurologist after my first one dumped me. fnd is, like, maybe not the pinnacle but definitely a major player in the field of doctors gaslighting us as hard as possible & being furious every time it doesn’t work.

i’m not gonna find these articles bc it gets to a point of self harm for me to (re)read some of this shit but literally doctors are like “the more convinced patients are there’s something wrong the more they’re lying,” “the more symptoms patients have the more likely it is to be fnd and not something really wrong,” etc. again just unfathomably cruel. also the fact that mainstream medicine can unironically write that people with hypermobility are “more likely to have fnd” rather than going huh maybe there’s a neurological component here is just. what the fuck are y’all doing.

a really fun (fucked up) “i told you so” moment with the social construction of the ‘real vs fake’ tics false binary was when doctors literally can’t tell the difference based on their own bullshit criteria.

i highly recommend checking out @fndportal for incredibly insightful thoughts on a lot of these issues. sociological research on post-hysteria diagnoses & the genealogy of hysteria has also been super helpful for me although it’s obviously a very difficult history.

on a peer support level i think disability community is especially vital in the face of these kinds of psychological warfare from doctors. & to anybody who’s been diagnosed with fnd or similar conditions: i believe you. something is really wrong, it is not your fault (& it would be okay, & you’d still deserve effective compassionate care, if it was), you’re not making it up.

obviously i personally want to destroy the whole thing from the ground up, but if i could change one thing about the medical field, it’d be that it needs, desperately & urgently, to create space for not knowing. to say “something is happening here but science hasn’t caught up with it yet.” …unfortunately, to do so would be to destroy medicine from the ground up, because the whole project is predicated on the manufactured authority of knowing our bodies wholly & irrevocably, of rendering our own knowledge irrelevant at best & lies at worst.

also imo cbt, especially for a physical symptom, is evil & in situations where people can ghost their doctors rather than go i wholeheartedly support that.

[bonefall]

since you did a guide for deaf/hearing loss, could you do one for blind cats maybe?

I plan to! I have a huuuge list of herb guides to do lmaoooo. Unfortunately there is only one me, and I also deal with college and other adult bullshit. PLUS all the other projects I run on this blog, like BB, Clanmew, the Clan Culture series, etc etc etc

Short list of herb guides I want to do;

Corrective Procedure Physical therapy for bone and muscle degeneration, several fixable birth defects, wobbly cat syndrome, etc.

Surgery 101 The sorts of invasive techniques cats can do using my basic Clan Culture expansions, how to create stitches, wound care including puffball mushrooms and how to identify "cob" webs vs "weaver" spider webs, how to prevent infection, etc.

Poisons Just like... poisons broadly. What "deathberries" are and how yew works, nightshade, foxglove, beating Alderheart's ridiculous yewberry antibiotics with my fists like a chimpanzee, etc

Invasion Theory lads, I have to confess, I decided to make my own version of a pre-scientific method medical theory. You've heard of Humor Theory and Miasma Theory, WELL, I actually worked out a basic philosophy of medicine for Clan cats. Invasion Theory; the idea that all illness is a result of internal battles against external forces.

The Other Sensory Disabilities Y'know. Vision impairments, scent impairments, whiskersense impairments, maybe taste impairments too in tandem with an entry on the Jacobson's Organ and how exactly THAT functions (I have a clanmew entry on this im working on but since a lot of my followers aren't Clanmew Fanatics maybe I should do two entries on this...)

Chronic pain The sorts of pain that doesn't go away, how to manage it, what usually causes it, etc.

Oral hygiene Do you want to learn how to make a toothbrush? ill show you

Allergies

Plus, I would love to touch-up my aaaaancient HRT herb guide. I'm still proud of it, but I can do better now. Same with the Epilepsy guide. There's also a combined herb guide/clanmew expansion on parasites and the medicinal uses of leeches and maggots in my drafts I'm still playing with.

But first, I worked on the Hearing Loss guide for like two weeks and I want to draw Breezepelt

[lizbethborden]

Interested in how you feel the witch misinterprets the folklore/beliefs surrounding witches

Hi anon. I started writing you an answer last night while squorked to high heaven on edibles and cold medication. Needless to say, it was gibberish. Here is my second attempt.

I'll start by talking about the function of the witch figure in Eggers' film.

The Vvitch is basically a reframing of the classic "man vs nature" conflict, which is not uncommon for movies taking place in the colonial period or along a frontier, such as New England was in the 1600s. In a way, it shares common ground with movies like Revenant (the one where a bear tries to eat Leo DiCaprio) or Ravenous 1999 (the one where soldiers in the old west eat each other in various ways), or even the series The Terror, where the wilderness is both the material, actual wilderness that deprives and starves the sailors, as well as the supernatural Tuunbaq which pursues them. Like The Terror, nature in The Vvitch is both the material reality of isolation, poor harvests, and lack of resources AND the supernatural being, the witch, who lives in the woods and hunts the family.

The threat of nature in all these stories is to dissolve and ultimately prove false all the rules, roles, and ethics of civilization, which the characters value and depend on for their identities. You can see why this trope works hand in hand with the colonial and frontier periods, when white people underwent a lot of stress and had to invent whole new racisms as a result. In the case of the characters in The Vvitch, they have self-consciously struck out into what they see as a Biblical wilderness, after being cast out of their settlement, and they see their fight against nature in those terms, framing the dissolution of their morals and roles in terms of sin. This is where the witch figure comes in. The material dangers of the wilderness are evident: their rotten corn, their lack of food, their isolation from help and medicine. The function of the witch in their story is to literalize the moral and personal dangers of the wilderness: sin and sexuality.

Each character in the story feels like a failure, and that they are not fulfilling their assigned and appropriate roles in the Christian household they keep. Thomasin resents being scapegoated and forced to work harder than her siblings. Katherine is afraid to keep following her husband and struggles to love him in their deprived condition. William feels helpless to protect and guide his family the way a patriarch should. Caleb is confused and questioning their whole way of life after the loss of Samuel. Probably the only characters with no moral struggles are those rotten little twins. As the witch's attacks on their family progress and their resources dwindle, these tensions grow in intensity until they erupt. Ultimately, the last vestiges of civilization are lost in the form of Thomasin's clothes as she walks naked to join the witches' sabbath. She has been reduced or degraded or uplifted, depending on your interpretation, to a state of raw nature, civilization's opposing and eroding force.

This is not the role of the witch in the early modern colonial period. Where The Vvitch imagines her as coming from outside the community, from nature and the wilderness, arguably the witch was in fact an INTRA-community figure to the Puritans--someone from within their society, feeding off of it like a parasite.

The Puritans inherited their conceptions of witchcraft from the general European model in the early modern period. The English version of the witch figure had quirks compared to the continental form, which I won't get into because I can't remember the details and I'm at work without my books rn so I'd just be bullshitting you. English law also did not call for the death penalty for witches except in extreme cases, so England had comparably fewer executions than the continent. The tl;dr of the witch is that she is functionally the inverse of a Christian; by "inverse" I mean like an inverted photograph--the Christian has holy sacraments, she has Blasmphemous Evil Sacraments (kissing Satan's anus), the Christian has the holy meal of Christ's blood and body, she has the Blasphemous Evil Meal (eating garbage and offal at the witches' sabbath), etc. Did you ever watch Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix? A joke going around at the time was that the dialogue for the witches went something like, "Sabrina, pass the UNHOLY butter for my SATANIC toast"--well, that's kind of how people actually thought of witches at this time.

From an academic and theological standpoint, this "inverted Christian" idea was useful to reify the beliefs of the Church. On an interpersonal level, the witch had a different function, which was to expurgate unchristian conflicts and emotions from the community. There is a popular myth that witchcraft accusations were used by authorities etc to get rid of lay practitioners of folk medicine and "white" magic--midwives, cunning folk, etc--but this is not accurate and it was uncommon for cunning folk, at least in England, to be swept up in the net of witch trials. For the ordinary person, witch accusations were more about interpersonal conflict, about arguments and fights between ordinary people in their day to day, than they were about theological differences or the practice of folk magic (which was incredibly common and even practiced in Salem at the time of the trials there).

This was a society that was highly interdependent. Especially for the Puritans living on a frontier in a foreign country, across an ocean from their homeland, the reliability of a neighbor with a tool, a meal, or some other charitable loan could be the difference between security and hardship. Hospitality was the baseline expectation and it was considered rude not to do a favor if you were asked--to spare food or money for a person begging at your door, give beer to a traveler, or help your neighbor bring the hay in from their meadow. And because well-being was so tenuous--poverty was always a bad harvest, wave of sickness, or shipwreck away--it was an environment that bred marginalization (people being pushed into poverty and dependence by outside forces) and resentment (those in need had to be taken care of by the community, and were a living reminder of the fragility of material success).

The figure of the witch gave the community a way to express and expel its fears and resentments. Your oxen getting sick and dying wasn't a fluke, it was because that beggar woman yelled at you when you wouldn't give her something to eat. Your baby dying in childbirth wasn't just a sad happenstance, the neighbor who attended you at the birth and was always jealous of your husband's money put a curse on the infant. Etc and so forth. These were dangers from inside the community, from neighbors and people who were known, not from malefic outsiders--that particular fear, of outsiders, wilderness, etc. was neatly symbolized for the Puritan colonists along ethnic lines (the Native Americans, to some extent the French). Rather than symbolizing an external force unraveling Christian livelihood and goodwill, witches were the force from within, the people closest to you, and thus the most likely people to really piss you off. Especially in large witch trials like in Salem, there was a conspiratorial "shadow society" element to it all that really emphasized that witches and their community were a mirror inverse of the Christian community, worshipping Satan instead of God.

For whatever reason, Eggers did what he did in The Vvitch, which was fine. But it really brought down the verisimilitude of the work. He was very accurate in a million other ways, particularly in the idea of predestination that scares Caleb so badly (the belief that some people are destined to go to heaven and some to hell and there is no way of knowing which; some are just saved by divine grace and some aren't). But he wanted to make a modern horror movie in the end with the result being what you see, and his witch conforms to the contours of what the modern mind thinks she should be. The truth is that in some ways, The Crucible captures the mood if not the reality of Puritan witch beliefs better, in that witchcraft accusations exploded from interpersonal conflicts within communities, rather than being incited by the darkness outside them.

[xinimartsy]

It’s a mobile game made for the Japanese audience not foreigners. They will never make Belle or any of their MCs change and be strong. It is different with Switch games where MCs might be that way. You should look for games made by Americans or something because it will never change, it is just a cultural difference

Oh, I know, anon. While I do complain about little things that make me feel iffy, I greatly enjoy the games and believe me, I do not expect astounding writing from a mobile game. The game is harmless fun and so are my critics towards it.

Though I do disagree on the front that it's a cultural difference and more of a general genre thing, because there are plenty of ocidental visual novels in which MC falls in the same damsel in distress category, while we can see from anime, manga and dramas that Japan is no stranger to strong female characters.

Mai herself, from Cybird's Ikemen Sengoku, for example, she insisted in working on her craft and making her own money despite Nobunaga guaranteeing her easygoing life, in most routes she picked up some skill from her suitor, she learned medicine from Ieyasu in several routes, learned how to ride a horse, learned negotiation in Mitsuhide's route, she even rode a horse into the battlefield to butt heads with an unhinged Kenshin in one of his routes. Yes, she had to be saved several times, but they never made her look inappropriately clueless (there were things that were logical that she didn't know and things that she knew, like everyone else), she never paled in comparison to her suitors and was always witty within her own capabilities. She never had to master the blade or become stronger or smarter than the warlords to be strong, she brought her own qualities to the negotiation table, and at least I hardly ever felt helpless or like the MC was unbearable while playing, actually, she's my favorite specially cus of her snark hehe

Emma is not all bad, tho, I think it very much depends on the route. In Clavis' route, I particularly find Emma delightful, because since they want to portrait Clavis as being, well, eccentric, they gave his Emma a more grounded personality to contrast his, while making her brave and adventurous enough to keep up with Clavis' bullshit. They exaggerated aspects from the character to emphasize the other, which in this case works, Clavis' weirdness vs Emma's common sense and their willingness to meet halfway through for each other.

But that same tool doesn't work in routes such as Jin and Chev. In Jin's route they wanted to emphasize his maturity as an older man who fooled around a lot, so they made Emma uncharacteristically innocent and almost childish. And in Chev's, they spent half of the word count telling us that Chevalier was a genius instead of showing us, and whenever they did show it, that was done by dumbing everyone, SPECIALLY Emma, down as to emphasize his geniality, making characters uncharacteristically dumb, not understanding basic concepts that they should very much understand, only so Chevalier could basically spell it out for them, call us "fools" and have everyone in game in awe of his geniality while us as the player feel unsatisfied cus, duh, that was the logical answer, are all these characters really THIS dumb?

Therefore, rather than "cultural differences", I think what we're seeing here is just.... Well, lousy writing.

[thegeminisage]

sigh it is star trek update time. last night we. sigh. watched voy's "heroes and demons" and "cathexis."

heroes and demons:

this episode made us look up how many holodeck episodes there are in voy vs the other shows. i guess i shouldn't be surprised that voy has the most considering it has a main character who IS a holoperson - it's also got the most borg episodes, and seven's only in it for four seasons. still, disheartening, especially considering how much i LIKE the doctor.

this episode DID have a couple of moments. the doctor picking and then discarding a name, him getting to see trees and a sky, and of course him getting smooched. it's great for him! i just wish it hadn't been buried in the dumbest holodeck shenanigan possible. there are surely creative ways to let the doctor get some screentime and see trees without resorting to vikings. vikings, which is exactly what i tuned in to star trek to see.

side note, poor harry. this shit is always happening to harry kim.

the existence of the holodeck in general continues to plague me. firstly, we have seen in voy and ds9 that holo-people are alive. like, they're real. so i can't get over things like that detective asking if his home was still gonna be there after the holodeck shut off, or trapping the fake moriarty in a simulation, or sex slave deanna (barclay die challenge). it's especially jarring, in a show with the doctor, who is alive, to have these holodeck characters running around as though they're less alive than he is. like at the end of this ep after the doctor said the last time his name was spoken it was painful, so he's gonna pick a new one, and janeway is like well it sounds like you had quite the adventure! like, girl, this isn't a character in a novel that died. she is a real ass person!!

furthermore all the CONSTANT safety issues of the holodeck - we quite literally only seem to get an episode about it when something breaks, because otherwise it's too boring to write about. so it's just this piece of tech that's always broken and endangering the crew and they don't have MECHANICS or REPLACEMENTS out there. like, yes, holodeck good to distract them from their predicament or take them back to earth, but HOLODECK BAD IN GENERAL

this will continue to be a struggle for future me, i'm sure - trek can never seem to decide where it wants to land with this holodeck shit.

cathexis:

to be honest, i feel like it wasn't possible for me to give this one a fair chance. we had the one-two punch of holodeck/racism after having JUST finished a holodeck ep and even though i probably would have really liked the other parts of this episode in different circumstances i was just not able to recover very well. i maybe could have suspended my disbelief for one or the other, but not fucking both.

like, we opened with a holodeck novel, which was perhaps the worst possible sin - again, i did not sign up for this to watch some p&p/sound of music mashup. i wanna watch space people doing space shit. and since they did two time travel eps in a row i was TERRIFIED they were gonna do two holodeck eps in a row and totally checked out. like, we were playing chess while this ran

then janeway got called away for plot stuff and i started listening again, only to be IMMEDIATELY met with the medicine wheel. and like, look. i don't pretend to be an expert on native american culture. but i just have the sneaking suspicion that the medicine wheel as presented in star trek voyager was not wholly accurate to any type of medicine wheel used in real life.

actually, the sad part about chakotay's whole deal is, if they do accidentally somehow do something with his culture that IS good and authentic most people would still not know it and assume it was bullshit fed to them by that hack. i probably would.

that said the concept of this episode was good and fun. i love chakotay's brain getting stolen out of his head like he's spock. i also love a good body-hopping ghost. OH YEAH AND IT WAS A GHOST. JUST LIKE JACK THE RIPPER IN TOS. IT WAS CHAKOTAY'S GHOST. i said this about 1000 times during the episode and was met with total SKEPTICISM but i was RIGHT. it was his ghost telling them not to go into that freaky ass nebula

possessed tuvok my best friend. i really wish i'd been able to enjoy this episode...i don't think a rewatch would hit the same since i already know the plot twists, but i just was not in the headspace to meet it. but it was fun watching his feathers get ruffled and watching him get into fights.

the standoff between tuvok and janeway was SOOO fun. harry literally had a choice to make and he did a great job. you could tell he was sweating bullets though. i mean who wouldn't be.

i did like janeway touching chakotay's shoulder and her Very Big Smile when he woke up and was fine. idk how into that i may or may not be but i think almost any two people on this cast could get it as long as one of them wasn't tom paris.

speaking of. tom paris was sooo rude to the doctor in this ep i hope he dies

TONIGHT: ds9's "improbable cause" and "the die is cast." i was tricked into reading the summary for the latter and i'm going to be in anticipatory AGONYYY until we finally watch it. THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!

[granulesofsand]

Y’all, CDDs are underresearched. Most of psychology is when it comes to western medicine, and that’s how we’re approaching this.

It’s less of an information issue than a communication issue. People make blanket statements about disorders and then act like there is no deviation.

The general population doesn’t always believe DID is a thing, and within our own communities we dismiss any presentation deemed “too much” or “not enough”.

We aren’t validating everyone, which is the key need for science at all— ya know, explaining observable experiences. Citing resources shouldn’t depend on a person’s ability to sift through bullshit, and a lot of old papers are very out of date.

When I can open my search engine or go to my local library and find myself and my community represented, I’ll agree that we’re on the right track. But that isn’t true right now, so stop telling me it’s well and fine.

A few topics that we don’t know enough about: polyfragmentation and structures, multiplicity vs division, endogenic systems, dissociation in full, I can keep going.

One study is not enough. I want to see replication, case studies, unbiased opinions as far as we can get them. Medicine doesn’t know shit as it is, and it doesn’t get better by sitting down and kicking our feet up.

[stealthnoodle]

We're Fucking That Fish Again: Let's Play Tears of the Kingdom

It's getting hot in here (by which I mean I cleared the Fire Temple and found the Zoras.)

Well, it's happened. I've caved. I'm doing the goddamn Fire Temple. I hope you're happy, big son.

…And now I've DOUBLE caved. I'm wearing fireproof pants instead of my cute puffy pink ones. Don't look below my waist. Avert your eyes from my leggy shame:

(I will never cave on my fancy hat and bare chest.)

I get the sense that I'm subverting some puzzles in the Fire Temples with my sheer determination to scale every wall and swim up through every ceiling, but it's my prerogative to work harder, not smarter, okay

At this point Yunobo's unshakeable belief that the thing-in-Zelda's-body is in peril and requires rescuing is extremely funny to me. My boy could see her holding up a bank and be like, "Oh no! We have to save Princess Zelda from that gun in her hand!"

Marbled Gohma is giving me a taste of my own carpet-bombing medicine and I DO NOT CARE FOR IT

Oh fuck when I try to load a bomb arrow it IMMEDIATELY blows up in my face

This boss is a trap set for me, specifically

UGH I had to beat it by WHACKING it with a MELEE weapon like an ANIMAL

Damn, ancestor Goron has a cool mask, too! Like a big ol' toothy fish. I really hope this ends with my ass getting Majora'd. Or a big Good Masks vs. Evil Masks showdown where I get to be a jumbo-sized Fierce Deity. Fly me to the moon, please and thank you

Zelda continues to be the busiest and least temporally deferential time traveler since Lucca Ashtear

I got a fist bump and a gay little thumb ring, which is great, but the latest magatama is on Yunobo's belt instead of in my mouth, and that continues to be bullshit

I'm sorry, this quest is about me convincing people NOT to do their job in their underpants? No one has ever been more poorly suited to a task.

Every time I see Link's natural hair I am briefly disoriented

CAN'T RELATE:

My post-temple wanderings have brought me to the first Zora I've seen all game! I threw some wet fruit at him and learned how to clean up sludge. I'm gonna Captain Planet my way through that shit from now on

EXCUSE ME WHAT AM I LOOKING AT

DID YOU LITERALLY BUILD A STATUE OF LINK RIDING SIDON AND TUGGING ON THE EQUIVALENT OF HIS HAIR

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Holy shit holy shit and the Zora showing it off to me is his fiancée???

Am I being invited to a very wet threeway

Link just spurted all over a statue of himself barebacking her betrothed and she's like, oh, you should go talk to him and then come find me, wink! What is happening

Lol I just found Sidon and apparently the dynamic at play here is more Yona attempting to drum up interest from Sidon by inviting Link into their sex life. I am scarcely exaggerating when I paraphrase Sidon's dialogue as, "Greetings, my beloved friend! My most cherished bosom companion! I have longed after you and rejoice in gazing upon you at last! …Oh, my fiancée? Yes, I suppose I am to be wed. Nice girl, we grew up together, drifted apart, you know how it goes. Anyway, is there literally anything I can do for you, light of my life?"

I am NOT KIDDING:

Bless the devs who chose to carry on Link's fine fish-fucking tradition, they are the horny heroes we need

I have a hit a wall of untranslatable slab so I am zipping off elsewhere

Let the record show that just as I will fall for every assassin disguised as a researcher underground, so will I pick up a suspicious bunch of bananas in a field where bananas can't grow and be shocked when they are an assassin's trap

[oldbaton]

What’s interesting about The Doctor is that the pushback the main character gets for denying the priest unauthorized entry is at first east to dismiss. Because it’s the usual Christian bullshit. And obviously for a NYC audience it’s easy for us to go “ok yeah sure” but slowly the pushback became more and more nuanced and even had me going ….. there’s a scene in the second act where the main character goes on tv and faces a panel of people. And all are mad at her but some are Christian reactives and some are race activists and there’s a moment where after the doctor (in her usual stubborn absolutist character fashion) is asked to say the N word if words are just words. And you could feel the whole audience lean forward because we didn’t know if she would. And largely I felt like I went on the same journey because I still feel like she made the correct decision but now I have to sit with the inherent complication of the interaction. And an inherent acknowledgment that the “medicine vs faith debate” is also tied into race and gender and we have to consider that.

[stormlit]

would love to think about anything but dragon age au georgie but marty and i have been talking about it since yesterday and alas it is my entire brain

bullet point run down bc i CANNOT be bothered to write this out properly rn:

human commoner from ? idk somewhere in ferelden lol, origins based. is at ostagar, has been through Some Things pre-blight.

she's a soldier and specifically a (mundane) medic who first meets balfour when her entire unit abandons lothering in the face of the darkspawn horde but she runs towards it bc there are still people who need to be saved and if she has to single-handedly fight darkspawn to do so then she will.

becomes a companion for the entirety of the blight, has her own specialised class like the da2 companions (bc i say so) that's essentially a combo of the guardian warrior specialisation from awakening + combat emergency healing + herbalism (and i actually think she and wynne would find a good synergy when it comes to healing the party bc georgie's medicine has always operated in a paramedic/emergency kind of way vs doctors in hospitals). probably a sword and shield user?? idk

uhh the blight is incredibly traumatising? it's awful she sees awful things, it fucks her up, but she is excellent for team morale and looking after everyone (at cost to herself). it's obvious to everyone in the party that she and balfour are into each other from pretty much the word go and it's honestly very them to fall in love in the middle of hell.

i think she might get knighted post-origins? she's a soldier so it'd be the logical reward from a monarch. she hates it it makes her an officer and a noble alksjdf. but then she marries bal, who becomes arl of amaranthine, and becomes a noble anyway and that's just something she has to live with (as does the rest of the nobility, who probably aren't used to an arlessa quite like her lmao).

they are so good for the arling bc they saw so many different ways of life over the blight and how much help is needed to set things back to rights, georgie's a commoner herself, she wants to make life better for city elves after seeing the bullshit in denerim alienage, etc. she also helps out the wardens when balfour has to go be warden-commander for a bit, but mostly she takes arlessa duties and also tries to teach people (both soldiers and probably amaranthine citizens) basic healing so that everyone has access to some kind of medicine. she never wants to fight again.

[a-tesseractis]

i feel like i could do smth w the duality btwn atari and sic, where atari is the one obsessed w immortality deep in the throes of some perverted cruelty and near incomprehensible mannerisms at points yet is deadset on achieving his goals through entirely flesh and blood clones VS sic being deadset on spreading compassion through advancing medicine with a clear conscience & reasoning of death being acceptable and expected, yet she consistently mods her body with prosthetics and cybernetics, shaving away whatever parts of her might otherwise die and rot away.

they both work together despite these fundamental differences in nature and beliefs. i can have my bullshit both ways <3

[nightsidewrestling]

D.U.D.E Bios: Saraid Grady-Sullivan / Sara Lucifarian

The Wrathful Imp Sara Lucifarian (2020)

The seventh of the seven, the fireball of a young lady, Sara Lucifarian. Sara isn't particularly smart, wise, cunning, tactful, any of that, but she has what the others lack, pure rage that can be released at a moment's notice. If Damien were honest he'd probably say that Sara even scares him, but Damien would never admit such a thing, rather he has taken to locking Sara in a cage whenever she fights or locking her outside of buildings for street fights so that her rage may never be directed at him.

"Your skull will look excellent as part of my collection."

Name

Full Legal Name: Saraid Ginger Grady-Sullivan

First Name: Saraid

Meaning: From Old Irish Sárait, derived from 'Sár' meaning 'excellent'

Pronunciation: suh-RAI

Origin: Irish, Irish Mythology

Middle Name: Ginger

Meaning: From the English word 'Ginger' for the spice or the reddish-brown colour

Pronunciation: JIN-jer

Origin: English

Surname: Grady-Sullivan

Meaning: Grady: From Irish 'Ó Gráda' or 'Ó Grádaigh' meaning 'Descendant of Gráda'. The byname Gráda means 'noble, illustrious’. Sullivan: Anglicized form of the Irish name 'Ó Súileabháin’ meaning 'descendant of Súileabhán’. The name Súileabhán means 'dark eye’

Pronunciation: GRAY-dee SUL-i-van

Origin: English

Alias: The Wrathful Imp, Sara Lucifarian

Reason: Sara isn't particularly tall, hence the 'imp' name and is a very rage-filled individual hence 'wrathful'

Nicknames: Sara, Red

Titles: Miss

Characteristics

Age: 18

Gender: Female. She/Her Pronouns

Race: Human

Nationality: Irish-American

Ethnicity: White

Birth Date: April 7th 2002

Symbols: Bears and the colour red

Sexuality: Straight

Religion: Catholic

Native Language: English

Spoken Languages: English

Relationship Status: Single

Astrological Sign: Aries

Theme Song: 'Rich Kids [Middle Cla$$ MIX]' - New Medicine (2018-)

Voice Actor: Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Geographical Characteristics

Birthplace: Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York

Current Location: On the road / Asheville, North Carolina

Hometown: Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York

Appearance

Height: 5'1"

Weight: 115 lbs / 52 kg

Eye Colour: Blue

Hair Colour: Brown

Hair Dye: Section (usually braided) dyed red

Body Hair: N/A

Facial Hair: N/A

Tattoos: (As of Jan 2020) 4

Piercings: Eyebrow Piercing (double, right. single left), Inner Eyebrow (right), Bridge, Nose (right), Anti-Eyebrow (left), Shark Bites, Cyber Bites, Nipple (both), Navel, Industrial (left), Double Helix (right), Triple lobe (both)

Scars: None

Health and Fitness

Allergies: None (Claims to be allergic to 'stupidity and bullshit')

Alcoholic, Smoker, Drug User: Smoker, Social Drinker, Occasionally Smokes Weed

Illnesses/Disorders: None

Medications: None

Any Specific Diet: None

Relationships

Allies: (As of Jan 2020) None

Enemies: (As of Jan 2020) None

Friends: Viola Nye, Bienvenida Marino, Pelageya Winter, Kirby Rhydderch, Honey Di Napoli, Elinor Herbert, Paulette Nye, Zella Nye, Rosaura Marino, Emperatriz Romero-Marino, Venetia Winter, Barbara Di Napoli, Tegwen Pritchard, Wanda Llewellyn, Gardenia Rhydderch, Tabitha Griffiths, Tacey Rhydderch, Calanthe Mulrennan, Velvet Rhydderch, Tallulah Rhydderch

Colleagues: The AEW locker rooms / Too many to list

Rivals: Alex Reynolds, Penta Oscuro, Jon Moxley, Jungle Boy, Yuka Sakazaki

Closest Confidant: Kirby Rhydderch

Mentor: Damien Lucifarian

Significant Other: None

Previous Partners: None of Note

Parents: Desmond Grady (38, Father), Honora Sullivan (39, Mother)

Parents-In-Law: None

Siblings: Oscar Grady-Sullivan (15, Brother)

Siblings-In-Law: None

Nieces & Nephews: None

Children: None

Children-In-Law: None

Grandkids: None

Great Grandkids: None

Wrestling

Billed From: The Underworld

Trainer: Damien Lucifarian

Managers: Damien Lucifarian

Wrestlers Managed: None

Debut: 2018

Debut Match: Billie Lucifarian VS Sara Lucifarian. Sara won by pinfall

Retired: N/A

Retirement Match: N/A

Wrestling Style: Street Fighter

Stables: The Lucifarians (2018-)

Teams: Post

Regular Moves: Kick to the Midsection, Diving Leg Drop, Forearm Smash, Diving Splash, Chair Shot, Jumping Knee Drop, Pump Handle Slam, Dropkick, Diving Back Elbow Drop, Berserker (Diving Knee Drop)

Finishers: Ripped Apart (Double Leg Slam), Son of Sam (Sitout Suplex Slam)

Refers To Fans As: The Wrathful, The Wrathful Ones, The Enraged, The Enraged Ones

Extras

Backstory: Raised by a college professor with her younger brother at her side whilst her mother is off fighting wars that Saraid herself doesn't believe in. Sara became wrath after a long streak of street fights led her to Damien's apartment building's underground parking lot and straight into a face-to-face confrontation with the King of Hell himself.

Trivia: None of note

[thessalian]

Thess vs "Sick Note Culture"

Yeaaaaaaah, I'm going back to yelling about Tory bullshit. Well. More like being singularly, horrifically depressed about Tory bullshit.

So Rishi Sunak is desperate to have some "claim to fame", some political impact, something that'll turn him into something more than an ineffectual interim PM--

(Side note: while it's true he hasn't made any impactful decisions as PM, he did change the course of this nation as Chancellor, as his "Eat Out to Help Out" campaign at the end of the first lockdown all but caused the second big peak, killed a lot of people and - a fact that I will be coming back to later in this rant - landed an awful lot more with long Covid.)

Anyway, his "Stop The Boats" thing involving sending refugees to Rwanda keeps getting cut off at the knees by the House of Lords, who don't really want to break international law. Oddly, he's entirely blaming Labour for this, which may or may not have something to do with how hard Labour are beating the Tories in the polls right now. So I think he's probably about half-past given up on having even a single plane-load of refugees take off for Kigali before he has to call an election. So he needs something else.

So today? He started frothing at the mouth about "Sick Note Culture". He had a plan to "eradicate Sick Note Culture", he said. And that plan? Was to no longer allow doctors to write sick notes for people declaring them unfit to work.

Oh, sick notes (or, as we actually now call them in this country, 'fit notes', indicating that they state whether or not a patient is fit for work) will still be available. Sort of. But apparently one will have to call some kind of hotline and get someone who ... knows something about medicine? Somehow? He wasn't clear on the qualifications involved-- Anyway, that these non-doctor people would decide, based on criteria no one is sharing with us, who is and is not fit for work. Instead of, y'know, the general practitioner.

Also there is apparently going to be some overhauling of the benefits for the disabled. Apparently they want to get rid of the Personal Independence Payment entirely, in favour of ... arranging for resources for treating their condition. It's all geared to pushing the disabled into work at all costs - for instance, anyone who doesn't just take whatever job is offered within a certain span of time (I think six months?) will just have their benefits cut entirely. Basically, there will be no recourse at all for the disabled unless whatever contractor they outsource for this hotline whatever, who will never have seen the patient or any medical notes, and will be making the call about this patient's suitability for work based on some ChatGTP-spawned checklist more than likely designed to turn people down, somehow sees reason.

Sunak is framing it as "giving the disabled their dignity back", but in the same breath saying how "people can't possibly be having this many more physical and mental health issues than they were a few years ago; they are skivers and we're going to shove them back into work at any cost". Yeah, you remember when I talked about the sheer number of people ill with long Covid, a lot of which can be laid at the door of his stupid Eat Out to Help Out bullshit back when he was Chancellor? THAT'S how. For the physical, anyway.

For the mental? We're getting disaster news every single fucking day. The Tories are causing most of it. Utility companies are gouging us - electricity first, and now Thames Water, which is apparently going bankrupt, is trying to get Ofwat to let them raise water prices (the first time they asked for a 40% increase; now they're asking for 56%) even as they dump raw sewage into our waterways and haven't built new reservoirs since the 80s (which is why we have droughts every year). Food is more expensive than ever, and bad weather plus Brexit red tape is causing shortages that jack the prices up more. Not to mention us being told that climate change will be making those bad weather issues even harder on our food supply in the years to come, which is making us terrified. Landlords are taking the piss with our rents. We've had proof positive that the government doesn't care if we die; we've had statements from their own mouths to that effect. Now they want to strip away the social safety net entirely, and blame it all on us. No fucking wonder we've all got crippling depression and anxiety.

So, as with so many other things, Tories are causing all our problems, Tories are making our problems worse, and they seem to think that the answer to the problem is to blame us and proceed to punish us by making our problems worse still.

And of course, Labour is making noises about trying to deal with the various issues but won't say how. I don't know how far this plan of Sunak's is going to go before he has to call an election, but if it gets put into place before the next election ... well, even if Labour wins (and they almost certainly will), there's no guarantee that they'll scrap that policy once they get into Downing Street.

I've always been angry at the way this government treats people. I've never been this scared before. I can be in the closet about not being cis; I hate it, but I can do it. I cannot be "in the closet" about being disabled, exactly. I am very, very fortunate in that I have the support of my parentals. I own my privilege. I rage for others who don't have my advantages ... and I feel terror when I wonder what happens when that support goes away? I think my mother's organised her assets so that I'll be taken care of when she passes, but... I don't like thinking about it. I may have to think about it, but I don't like it - she's my mum and I love her.

(Tell you what, though - when she does pass, I am out of this country.)

So ... yeah. Twice over now, this country wants me dead. And for all the cruelty of it and the unfairness of it and all the rest? I think the thing that scares me most is how Sunak is laser-sighting the "undesirables". I sometimes wonder if their obsession with attacking antisemitism and their support of Israel to that end isn't in part being able to point at this support when someone accuses them of being Nazis.

[probablysomethingtm]

*trailer guy voice*: NEXT MARCH

*shot of me looking at myself in the mirror, clearly nervous, taking a deep breath*

GET READY FOR THE SHOWDOWN OF A LIFETIME

*cut to me in the gym lifting weights*

TWO SMALL LUMPS OF USELESS BULLSHIT

*cut to my endocrinologist talking about how after this long on hormones I'm likely sterile*

VS MODERN MEDICINE

*cut to my urologist saying it's a super easy procedure*

THE BOFAECTOMY

*inception horn*

COMING MARCH 2024 TO A TRANSFEM NEAR ME

*quiet trailer guy voice*: unless there's an earlier opening or my health insurance decides to be bullshit again

[eligalilei]

The 'Schizophrenic Brains Look Like This' Myth

As always, averages fucking lie.

This study of 304 people diagnosed with schizophrenia shows that a large portion of people diagnosed with schizophrenia have brains indistinguishable from 'normal' ones. Of course, they don't quite go far enough, and suggest that this indicates that there are 'two types'; it's not at all unlikely that there are many more than two types, though it might be fair to say that we might be able to more or less divide those diagnosed into two categories. It's also worth mentioning that this is 304 people diagnosed with SZ chosen at random, compared with 360-something other random people, so who knows exactly the numbers on how many people's brains are normotype vs. heterotype, but that's science.

In a perfect world, one would have analyzed what symptoms people actually have, instead of this PANSS score bullshit, but clearly no one thought very hard about that one. Numbers or bust, as usual. There's also probably something that can be drawn about the influence of medication, and the suggestion that perhaps medication might not actually prevent damage, or at least that of it which is visible, but that would require digging rather more into the data.

Maybe this is just a bit of theoretical paranoia on my part, but it really seems weird to me this division exists, but yet all you ever hear is 'schizophrenic brains look all messed up,' or, maybe occasionally, 'you lose a teaspoon of brain matter in an episode,' or summat. I realize that doing this could invite people to scry for faces in the graphological clouds, but why are spreads of values and graphs of all relevant points often left out of studies and trials, and certainly never even alluded to in popular science literature? Sometimes great things are easily made to look mediocre, and stuff that worked really well for maybe a fifth of patients, while doing nothing for anyone else, could imaginably get dressed up as 'successful'. The clusters and outliers matter, and sometimes they even provide maps to entirely new conceptual continents.

[woundedearth]

addendum to that post, the difference between ppl roasting widely spatially/temporally practiced bodywork techniques termed chiropractic or ~manual therapy~ and massage vs. the fucking psychiatric complex and valid criticisms that arise in anti psychiatry is that one of these disciplines of medicine has enormous institution power, is largely constructed with all the biases that come with it, and has done great harm to a great number of people.. and the other one, for any bullshit that it may carry (perverts and woo woo essential energy white ladies), rests on the fact that pressure applied strategically to the human body by another human consistently relieves pain