The Gaming Den

It's got the standard stimulant caveat that people sleep for a reason, and that just gets put off.

That said, take it exactly as frequently as prescribed.

Nachtigallerator wrote:The valsalva maneuver, where you breathe in, breath out against a closed glottis (so that no air actually escapes, but the intrathoracic pressure is raised) is actually standard procedure in boring academic medicine, so I doubt this trick would provoke much hate from doctors. We used the maneuver in anatomy class to get a good look at our own external jugular veins, but it can have an effect on a subset of tachycardias.

Even if you don't breath out against a closed glottis, deep inspiration always increases your heart rate by a small margin (because the negative thoracic pressure increases venous return), while exspiration decreases it. I suppose it could have a similar effect to valsalva by forcing a change on the heart rhythm.

I'd suggest having a comfortable chair nearby when you try it, it always makes me a little dizzy.

(Edited for more physiology)

I've found it also works wonders on hiccups.

FrankTrollman wrote: Acne is essentially a three part process. Hair follicles are partially or fully blocked by keratin, sebaceous glands over produce sebum and create a cyst, and that cyst gets colonized by bacteria and forms an infected abscess. So methods to go after acne really start from the standpoint of addressing one of those three. Vitamin A derivatives can help clear keratin from follicles, and antibiotics can kill bacteria. Sebum accumulation is more complex, as you can essentially reduce the amount you create (by being less stressed and consuming less fat), or you can get the sebum to come out of your pores (by exercising more or washing it out).

So I'm looking at trying to fight the acne as much as I can, basically clearing keratin, killing bacteria with a topical antibiotic, and trying to fight sebum accumulation. What kind of vitamin a derivative should I be looking at? Would just taking Vitamin A capsules work?

Oral vitamin A derivatives that are effective against acne are prescription medication because high doses of those will do really ugly things to embryos and can have other significant side effects like eye inflammation, dermatitis, and rarely perhaps even psychosis and suicide. Standard issue Vitamin A capsules will not be effective against acne unless the dose you take is already toxic. In general, vitamins should only be supplemented if there is clinical or laboratory evidence for a deficiency. Doubly so for fat-soluble vitamins (A, E, D, K) as these accumulate more easily.

Oral Retinoids are only used for treating severe acne precisely because of side-effects; moderate cases are managed with topical applications. I don't know if those are prescription-free in the US, otherwise you can try BPO.

Damn. Ok, well, I'll try the benzoyl and scrubbing.

Vitamin e helps skin health, and fights acne in a minor degree. It can heal scars, applied through eating, and rubbing it on the skin.

Sashi wrote:

Nachtigallerator wrote:The valsalva maneuver

I've found it also works wonders on hiccups.

+1.

Doesn't work on the first try always for me, but a few attempts gets it done.

This isn't really a question, but I wanted to make everyone aware:

A few years ago, my wife was diagnosed with an abdominal parasite. They are apparently fairly common in females, though less common for women in Mrs. FBMF's age category. As you might imagine, it caused discomfort, nausea, vomiting, fatigue, and abdominal distension before she finally had the surgery to remove it. The surgery itself was routine and successful, but definitely changed our lives permanently.

She was just diagnosed today with another one. We expect to have surgery to remove it in November. Leading up to that time and immediately afterward I'll be very preoccupied, so Mrs. FBMF and I ask for your patience and understanding if moderation/administration response times slow a bit.


Game On,
Mr. & Mrs. fbmf

That sucks! I'm so sorry!

fbmf wrote:...abdominal parasite ... fairly common in females ... discomfort, nausea, vomiting, fatigue, and abdominal distension ... surgery to remove it. The surgery itself was routine and successful, but definitely changed our lives permanently.
...
She was just diagnosed today with another one. We expect to have surgery to remove it in November.

I'm thinking congratulations are in order, actually...

Yes! Congratulations are in order! I totally missed it...



I'm blaming the fact that we've been in and out of the hospital, so everything sounds absolutely dire... Ess' final diagnosis today was adult onset Type 1 diabetes, which I've been researching since we got home.

Maj wrote:Oh! Yeah, I've seen those. I used the word trick because I never remember the actual name. I want to call it Veblen or Van der Graaf, because I think it starts with a V, but those are definitely not right.

And no. Doctors don't hate me now (I tried! Really I did!). In fact, Ess' doc at the hospital said she wanted to go home with us.

Yabut, if it can't make a 52-year-old local-area woman look like she's 27, is it really a good trick?

fbmf wrote: She was just diagnosed today with another one. We expect to have surgery to remove it in November. Leading up to that time and immediately afterward I'll be very preoccupied, so Mrs. FBMF and I ask for your patience and understanding if moderation/administration response times slow a bit.

Congratulations! I hope your second parasite brings you as much joy as the first! My wife had two of those, as well. From personal experience, I can tell you it's fun watching them interact with each other post-extraction (assuming you keep them, like we did).

So my mother has some... grievances... with the medical industry and has managed to apply that to medicine as a whole, preferring alternative medicine. I fortunately didn't have any major medical issues as a child, so I'm okay, and as an adult I've been moving from "yeah, fuck medicine" to "medicine is good but this other stuff doesn't seem to be damaging, at least, except the part where people don't actually treat stuff."

But I recently realized that there's some pretty major damage possible there - her anti-vaccination stance is a good example. So what other things are actual problems and not just placebos?

• Chiropractors: my understanding of this is that it does nothing
• Tinctured Herbs: I feel like with proper knowledge these could be better than nothing (and historically have been) but that it'd be super easy to mess up and hurt someone because they actually do something.
• Egg White in the Eye for Eye Infections: this is the one that made the question occur to me - isn't eating raw egg white the thing that puts you at risk for salmonella? How can smearing it in your eye be anything but awful??
• Other stuff? Who knows.

This'll help me know, for instance, what to do if she buys me a visit to the chiropractor - do I give it a try but not expect it to be any better than a weird massage, or do I avoid it because my joints are plenty fucked up already thank you very much?

Chiropractors are mostly a placebo. There's evidence they can help people recover from herniated disks and similar problems, because maintaining good spinal flexibility is actually helpful there. Otherwise you're just letting people fuck with your spine in surprisingly safe ways for teh LOLs. It clicks and cracks just like all your other joints, only it's your spine, so not dying comes to mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic

Herbs can be full of interesting medicines in highly uncertain dosages, and also full of things that just make you shit (which is fine). Fortunately, the real world solved this issue by figuring out which chemicals were actually doing something useful and calling those things "medicine". Burnt willow bark had Aspirin in it, but now you just take an aspirin, so as to not kill yourself.

Do not rub fucking egg white in your eye. You use a sterile saline solution, which your body provides naturally in the form of tears. If you have an actual infection, rather than just a mild allergy to some pollens like everyone else on the planet, see a fucking doctor before you go permanently blind. Really. Also, see a doctor for your allergies, they shouldn't really be puffing up your eyes, we have medicines now.


I am not a doctor. That is not medical advice. But I couldn't wait for a doctor to tell you to not rub egg white in your eyes. OK? Also do not put butter on burns. Nor raw meat on a cut. It's cold water on burns (or anything similar, really, warm beer is vastly better than nothing), and fucking soapy water on your abrasions to get the dirt and shit out.

Chiropractors hurt people. It isn't necessarily common in sheer relation to number of times you go to the chiropractor, but it is more common than car crashes per times you get in the car. Also there is no evidence it provides any medical benefits of any fucking kind. There are some things that some people think it might help with, but no evidence, and those people are mostly chiropractors. Then there are tons of things that it definitely doesn't help with at all, but chiropractors will tell you it does, like lower back pain, just to get you as a permanent customer they can gouge.

Do not go to a chiropractor ever.

On the subject of chiropractors: What is the best thing to do about a stiff neck? I saw a chiropractor once (because like all peddlers of ineffective cure alls, he had a "First one's free" deal), and it did genuinely seem to help my neck at the time, even if just because it got cracked and popped and stretched and that's actually kind of hard for me to do myself. He told me to do certain exercises to stretch it out, but of course those never happened.

Most herbs have essentially no health effects. The most you can say for them is that having a more varied diet does make you less likely to run into a micro-nutrient deficiency. However, some have very real effects, and the people at the herb store are extremely unlikely to know what they are. For example, St. John's Wart acts as an inducer of the CYP450 system in your liver, meaning that it causes your liver to chemically modify various chemicals via oxidation at a higher rate. Is that good? Bad? Depends on what chemicals are in your body at the moment. It substantially increases the rate at which statins are rendered inert, which could be bad if you are taking statin based medications to live. Some of the herbs sold as stimulants actually are stimulants, and taking stimulants that were put into a brown bottle by a nameless hippie is only slightly better of an idea as smoking meth you got from some guy at the rail yard.

And some "traditional" Chinese medicines are straight up poison. There is cinnabar in some of that shit. That's mercury ore. Like, the neural toxin heavy metal mercury.

Most chiropracty is basically just massage. More aggressive chiropracty can be pretty dangerous. Your spine is an impressive weight bearing system, but it's also pretty delicate in some surprising ways.

Don't put raw anything in your eyes. Just... don't... do that. Seriously.

-Username17

In a related story, I used to think I would never be bummed out by a sibling's career choice, but that was before I found out my brother was studying chiropracty. I mean, I guess he's not a homeopath, but damn.

Sounds good all 'round. Thanks.

Now to figure out how to get my younger siblings vaccinated...

Well, there WAS that measles outbreak that started in a megachurch whose pastor was dead set against vaccination. That shit's still out there, and vaccinations are still used for a reason.

If they try to bring up autism, well, let's just say it's very offensive to me to hear someone effectively saying they'd rather their child die of disfiguring diseases if there's a small chance the kid could be autistic.

And it's not like the god-damned vaccines even cause it start with.

This may help too.

Maxus wrote:If they try to bring up autism,

Firm but fair.

Koumei wrote:

Maxus wrote:If they try to bring up autism,

Firm but fair.

anti-hotlinking. Here's the image: http://randomc.net/image/WORKING!!/WORK ... e%2007.jpg

Maxus wrote:Well, there WAS that measles outbreak that started in a megachurch whose pastor was dead set against vaccination. That shit's still out there, and vaccinations are still used for a reason.

If they try to bring up autism, well, let's just say it's very offensive to me to hear someone effectively saying they'd rather their child die of disfiguring diseases if there's a small chance the kid could be autistic.

And it's not like the god-damned vaccines even cause it start with.

Prak_Anima wrote:This may help too.

Very good points, thanks.

Koumei wrote:Firm but fair.

Heh.

---

Three of 'em are fine because their schools require it, so that's good. The other two are still homeschooled, though - maybe I should try to push for them to go to school too. They could get vaccinated and learn about science from someone other than Ken Ham.

(bluh)

So, one of my girlfriends has a shock collar meant for dogs. She really wants to put it around her neck, but has been repeatedly instructed to only use it on her leg. So we only use it on her leg.

What are the consequences of using it around her neck such that I can convince her not to try it when I leave/pressure her next partner into it and accidentally kill herself?