Reading Time: 5 minutes Let’s talk about discrimination. Not the racial type: I’m talking about the ability of human hearing to discriminate, to distinguish the all-important but often whisper-subtle edges of what most people experience as the familiar sounds of vowels and consonants. For some of us, consonants are especially hard to discriminate among spoken sounds. Their delicate wisps […]
Health
Posted inCulture
Why the hell don’t we have a mask mandate?
Reading Time: 3 minutes I go to the grocery store. Some patrons are masked, some are not. Some employees are masked, some are not. Welcome to America, I guess, where any public activity is done at your own risk, and where ableist views continue to rule. I go to teach my college classes. Everyone is masked, hurray! This is […]
Posted inHealth
The ethical problem with denying diabetics no-prick glucose monitors
Reading Time: 5 minutes In the past few years, science has produced a few truly wonderful devices capable of monitoring diabetics’ blood-sugar levels 24/7 in real-time, with the power to help the afflicted self-manage very protective eating strategies. Unfortunately, even though I’m diabetic, I simply can’t afford all but one of these devices even if my doctor were willing […]
Posted inEthics
An ethical maze: Designing babies for a greater good?
Reading Time: 16 minutes “At ten months old, we were told he would need a heart transplant. There was no cure for his condition, so we would have to go to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital at some point. If they had a bed. And a heart. And agreed to the procedure.” Great Ormond Street, the famous children’s hospital […]
Posted inHealth
Narrative medicine: Why stories matter in healthcare
Reading Time: 5 minutes There was a low rumble in the room. I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying above the din, but I feel the excitement in my body even now as my memory-neurons fire. This new batch of future doctors was about to enter terrain more daunting than the fundamentals of pharmacology: They would read a poem […]
Posted inNews
Jex Blackmore has abortion live on the news
Reading Time: 2 minutes Former The Satanic Temple (TST) spokesperson and reproductive rights advocate Jex Blackmore, who was (evicted? I’m going to say evicted) evicted from the organization when … just go watch the movie. Anyway, Jex took an abortifacient pill on air. Let’s get you up to speed At some point during the filming of Hail Satan?, Jex […]
Posted inScience
Could an Epstein-Barr virus vaccine end Multiple Sclerosis?
Reading Time: 5 minutes I have primary progressive multiple sclerosis (PPMS). And it sucks. Multiple sclerosis isn’t just my problem. Indeed, some 2.8 million worldwide, 1 million in the US, and 130,000 in the United Kingdom suffer from the condition. It is a condition that comes in different forms (most people have an up-and-down version called relapsing-remitting—RRMS) and afflicts […]
Posted inPolitics
What’s behind conservative opposition to masks, vaccines, and lockdowns?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Fox News host Jesse Watters made headlines when he used violent language to denounce Dr. Anthony Fauci at a conservative conference. “Now you go in for the kill shot. The kill shot? With an ambush? Deadly. Because he doesn’t see it coming,” Watters said. Watters claimed that he was using a metaphor and wasn’t advocating […]
Posted inCritical thinking
Anti-vaxxers and ableism: 3 ways we must advocate for people with disabilities
Reading Time: 4 minutes When I saw that the CDC director stated that it’s “encouraging” mostly already-ill people will die from COVID, my ableist spidey senses went up. And, judging by the ensuing outrage on Twitter, I wasn’t the only one mentally going, “What the hell?!” We know that anti-vaxxers do not care about the needs or lives of […]
Posted inHealth
To freak out, or not to freak out? That is the question these days.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Sometimes freaking out is a good thing. It moves us to action. If you approached everything with slow and deliberate thought, you’d probably be dead by now. There is a good reason we jump at an unexpected noise, or something we catch out of the corner of our eye. It very literally kept us from […]