How To Kill Laziness
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Laziness Is A Scooby-Doo Villain.
Which means: to tackle it requires doing a Scooby-Doo unmasking.
You know, when the mystery-solving gang has the “ghost” or “monster” tied to a chair, and they pull the mask off, to reveal that there was no ghost etc, and in fact it was a real estate scammer or somesuch.
Social psychologist Dr. Devon Price wrote about this (not with that metaphor though) in a book we haven’t reviewed yet, but will one of these days:
Laziness Does Not Exist – by Dr. Devon Price (book)
In the meantime, and perhaps more accessibly, he gave a very abridged summary for Medium:
Medium | Laziness Does Not Exist… But unseen barriers do (11mins read)
Speaking of barriers, Medium added a paywall to that (the author did not, in fact, arrange the paywall as Medium claim), so in case you don’t have an account, he kindly made the article free on its own website, here:
Devon Price | Laziness Does Not Exist… But unseen barriers do (same article; no paywall)
He details problems that people get into (ranging from missed deadlines to homelessness), that are easily chalked up to laziness, but in fact, these people are not lazily choosing to suffer, and are usually instead suffering from all manner of unchosen things, ranging from…
- imposter syndrome / performance anxiety,
- perfectionism (which can overlap a lot with the above),
- social anxiety and/or depression (these also can overlap for some people),
- executive dysfunction in the brain, and/or
- just plain weathering “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune [and] the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”, to borrow from Shakespeare, in ways that aren’t always obviously connected—these things can be great or small, it could be a terminal diagnosis of some terrible disease, or it could be a car breakdown, but the ripples spread.
And nor are you, dear reader, choosing to suffer (even if sometimes it appears otherwise)
Unless you’re actually a masochist, at least, in which case, you do you. But for most of us, what can look like laziness or “doing it to oneself” is usually a case of just having one or more of the above-mentioned conditions in place.
Which means…
That grace we just remembered above to give to other people?
Yep, we should give that to ourselves too.
Not as a free pass, but in the same way we (hopefully) would with someone else, and ask: is there some problem I haven’t considered, and is there something that would make this easier?
Here are some tools to get you started:
- Imposter Syndrome (And Why Almost Everyone Has It)
- Perfectionism, And How To Make Yours Work For You
- How To Set Anxiety Aside
- Mental Health First-Aid (To Get Yourself Or A Loved One Through Depression)
- Procrastination, And How To Pay Off The To-Do List Debt
- Take This Two-Minute Executive Dysfunction Test
Take care!
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Why rating your pain out of 10 is tricky
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“It’s really sore,” my (Josh’s) five-year-old daughter said, cradling her broken arm in the emergency department.
“But on a scale of zero to ten, how do you rate your pain?” asked the nurse.
My daughter’s tear-streaked face creased with confusion.
“What does ten mean?”
“Ten is the worst pain you can imagine.” She looked even more puzzled.
As both a parent and a pain scientist, I witnessed firsthand how our seemingly simple, well-intentioned pain rating systems can fall flat.
altanaka/Shutterstock What are pain scales for?
The most common scale has been around for 50 years. It asks people to rate their pain from zero (no pain) to ten (typically “the worst pain imaginable”).
This focuses on just one aspect of pain – its intensity – to try and rapidly understand the patient’s whole experience.
How much does it hurt? Is it getting worse? Is treatment making it better?
Rating scales can be useful for tracking pain intensity over time. If pain goes from eight to four, that probably means you’re feeling better – even if someone else’s four is different to yours.
Research suggests a two-point (or 30%) reduction in chronic pain severity usually reflects a change that makes a difference in day-to-day life.
But that common upper anchor in rating scales – “worst pain imaginable” – is a problem.
People usually refer to their previous experiences when rating pain. sasirin pamai/Shutterstock A narrow tool for a complex experience
Consider my daughter’s dilemma. How can anyone imagine the worst possible pain? Does everyone imagine the same thing? Research suggests they don’t. Even kids think very individually about that word “pain”.
People typically – and understandably – anchor their pain ratings to their own life experiences.
This creates dramatic variation. For example, a patient who has never had a serious injury may be more willing to give high ratings than one who has previously had severe burns.
“No pain” can also be problematic. A patient whose pain has receded but who remains uncomfortable may feel stuck: there’s no number on the zero-to-ten scale that can capture their physical experience.
Increasingly, pain scientists recognise a simple number cannot capture the complex, highly individual and multifaceted experience that is pain.
Who we are affects our pain
In reality, pain ratings are influenced by how much pain interferes with a person’s daily activities, how upsetting they find it, their mood, fatigue and how it compares to their usual pain.
Other factors also play a role, including a patient’s age, sex, cultural and language background, literacy and numeracy skills and neurodivergence.
For example, if a clinician and patient speak different languages, there may be extra challenges communicating about pain and care.
Some neurodivergent people may interpret language more literally or process sensory information differently to others. Interpreting what people communicate about pain requires a more individualised approach.
Impossible ratings
Still, we work with the tools available. There is evidence people do use the zero-to-ten pain scale to try and communicate much more than only pain’s “intensity”.
So when a patient says “it’s eleven out of ten”, this “impossible” rating is likely communicating more than severity.
They may be wondering, “Does she believe me? What number will get me help?” A lot of information is crammed into that single number. This patient is most likely saying, “This is serious – please help me.”
In everyday life, we use a range of other communication strategies. We might grimace, groan, move less or differently, use richly descriptive words or metaphors.
Collecting and evaluating this kind of complex and subjective information about pain may not always be feasible, as it is hard to standardise.
As a result, many pain scientists continue to rely heavily on rating scales because they are simple, efficient and have been shown to be reliable and valid in relatively controlled situations.
But clinicians can also use this other, more subjective information to build a fuller picture of the person’s pain.
How can we communicate better about pain?
There are strategies to address language or cultural differences in how people express pain.
Visual scales are one tool. For example, the “Faces Pain Scale-Revised” asks patients to choose a facial expression to communicate their pain. This can be particularly useful for children or people who aren’t comfortable with numeracy and literacy, either at all, or in the language used in the health-care setting.
A vertical “visual analogue scale” asks the person to mark their pain on a vertical line, a bit like imagining “filling up” with pain.
Modified visual scales are sometimes used to try to overcome communication challenges. Nenadmil/Shutterstock What can we do?
Health professionals
Take time to explain the pain scale consistently, remembering that the way you phrase the anchors matters.
Listen for the story behind the number, because the same number means different things to different people.
Use the rating as a launchpad for a more personalised conversation. Consider cultural and individual differences. Ask for descriptive words. Confirm your interpretation with the patient, to make sure you’re both on the same page.
Patients
To better describe pain, use the number scale, but add context.
Try describing the quality of your pain (burning? throbbing? stabbing?) and compare it to previous experiences.
Explain the impact the pain is having on you – both emotionally and how it affects your daily activities.
Parents
Ask the clinician to use a child-suitable pain scale. There are special tools developed for different ages such as the “Faces Pain Scale-Revised”.
Paediatric health professionals are trained to use age-appropriate vocabulary, because children develop their understanding of numbers and pain differently as they grow.
A starting point
In reality, scales will never be perfect measures of pain. Let’s see them as conversation starters to help people communicate about a deeply personal experience.
That’s what my daughter did — she found her own way to describe her pain: “It feels like when I fell off the monkey bars, but in my arm instead of my knee, and it doesn’t get better when I stay still.”
From there, we moved towards effective pain treatment. Sometimes words work better than numbers.
Joshua Pate, Senior Lecturer in Physiotherapy, University of Technology Sydney; Dale J. Langford, Associate Professor of Pain Management Research in Anesthesiology, Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell University, and Tory Madden, Associate Professor and Pain Researcher, University of Cape Town
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The Plant Power Doctor
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A Prescription For GLOVES
This is Dr. Gemma Newman. She’s a GP (General Practitioner, British equivalent to what is called a family doctor in America), and she realized that she was treating a lot of patients while nobody was actually getting better.
So, she set out to help people actually get better… But how?
The biggest thing
The single biggest thing she recommends is a whole foods plant-based diet, as that’s a starting point for a lot of other things.
Click here for an assortment of short videos by her and other health professionals on this topic!
Specifically, she advocates to “love foods that love you back”, and make critical choices when deciding between ingredients.
Click here to see her recipes and tips (this writer is going to try out some of these!)
What’s this about GLOVES?
We recently reviewed her book “Get Well, Stay Well: The Six Healing Health Habits You Need To Know”, and now we’re going to talk about those six things in more words than we had room for previously.
They are six things that she says we should all try to get every day. It’s a lot simpler than a lot of checklists, and very worthwhile:
Gratitude
May seem like a wishy-washy one to start with, but there’s a lot of evidence for this making a big difference to health, largely on account of how it lowers stress and anxiety. See also:
How To Get Your Brain On A More Positive Track (Without Toxic Positivity)
Love
This is about social connections, mostly. We are evolved to be a social species, and while some of us want/need more or less social interaction than others, generally speaking we thrive best in a community, with all the social support that comes with that. See also:
How To Beat Loneliness & Isolation
Outside
This is about fresh air and it’s about moving and it’s about seeing some green plants (and if available, blue sky), marvelling at the wonder of nature and benefiting in many ways. See also:
Vegetables
We spoke earlier about the whole foods plant-based diet for which she advocates, so this is that. While reducing/skipping meat etc is absolutely a thing, the focus here is on diversity of vegetables; it is best to make a game of seeing how many different ones you can include in a week (not just the same three!). See also:
Three Critical Kitchen Prescriptions
Exercise
At least 150 minutes moderate exercise per week, and some kind of resistance work. It can be calisthenics or something; it doesn’t have to be lifting weights if that’s not your thing! See also:
Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)
Sleep
Quality and quantity. Yes, 7–9 hours, yes, regardless of age. Unless you’re a child or a bodybuilder, in which case make it nearer 12. But for most of us, 7–9. See also:
Why You Probably Need More Sleep
Want to know more?
As well as the book we mentioned earlier, you might also like:
The Plant Power Doctor – by Dr. Gemma Newman
While the other book we mentioned is available for pre-order for Americans (it’s already released for the rest of the world), this one is available to all right now, so that’s a bonus too.
If books aren’t your thing (or even if they are), you might like her award-winning podcast:
Take care!
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Study Tips for Exam Season?
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You’ve Got Questions? We’ve Got Answers!
Q: Any study tips as we approach exam season? A lot of the productivity stuff is based on working life, but I can’t be the only student!
A: We’ve got you covered:
- Be passionate about your subject! We know of no greater study tip than that.
- Find a willing person and lecture them on your subject. When one teaches, two learn!
- Your mileage may vary depending on your subject, but, find a way of studying that’s fun to you!
- If you can get past papers, get as many as you can, and use those as your “last minute” studying in the week before your exam(s). This will prime you for answering exam-style questions (and leverage state-dependent memory). As a bonus, it’ll also help ease any anxiety, because by the time of your exam it’ll be “same old, same old”!
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How anti-vaccine figures abuse data to trick you
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The anti-vaccine movement is nearly as old as vaccines themselves. For as long as humans have sought to harness our immune system’s incredible ability to recognize and fight infectious invaders, critics and conspiracy theorists have opposed these efforts.
Anti-vaccine tactics have advanced since the early days of protesting “unnatural” smallpox inoculation, and the rampant abuse of scientific data may be the most effective strategy yet.
Here’s how vaccine opponents misuse data to deceive people, plus how you can avoid being manipulated.
Misappropriating raw and unverified safety data
Perhaps the oldest and most well-established anti-vaccine tactic is the abuse of data from the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration maintain VAERS as a tool for researchers to detect early warning signs of potential vaccine side effects.
Anyone can submit a VAERS report about any symptom experienced at any point after vaccination. That does not mean that these symptoms are vaccine side effects.
VAERS was not designed to determine if a specific vaccine caused a specific adverse event. But for decades, vaccine opponents have misinterpreted, misrepresented, and manipulated VAERS data to convince people that vaccines are dangerous.
Anyone relying on VAERS to draw conclusions about vaccine safety is probably trying to trick you. It isn’t possible to determine from VAERS data alone if a vaccine caused a specific health condition.
VAERS isn’t the only federal data that vaccine opponents abuse. Originally created for COVID-19 vaccines, V-safe is a vaccine safety monitoring system that allows users to report—via text message surveys—how they feel and any health issues they experience up to a year after vaccination. Anti-vaccine groups have misrepresented data in the system, which tracks all health experiences, whether or not they are vaccine-related.
The U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) has also become a target of anti-vaccine misinformation. Vaccine opponents have falsely claimed that DMED data reveals massive spikes in strokes, heart attacks, HIV, cancer, and blood clots among military service members since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. The spike was due to an updated policy that corrected underreporting in the previous years
Misrepresenting legitimate studies
A common tactic vaccine opponents use is misrepresenting data from legitimate sources such as national health databases and peer-reviewed studies. For example, COVID-19 vaccines have repeatedly been blamed for rising cancer and heart attack rates, based on data that predates the pandemic by decades.
A prime example of this strategy is a preliminary FDA study that detected a slight increase in stroke risk in older adults after a high-dose flu vaccine alone or in combination with the bivalent COVID-19 vaccine. The study found no “increased risk of stroke following administration of the COVID-19 bivalent vaccines.”
Yet vaccine opponents used the study to falsely claim that COVID-19 vaccines were uniquely harmful, despite the data indicating that the increased risk was almost certainly driven by the high-dose flu vaccine. The final peer-reviewed study confirmed that there was no elevated stroke risk following COVID-19 vaccination. But the false narrative that COVID-19 vaccines cause strokes persists.
Similarly, the largest COVID-19 vaccine safety study to date confirmed the extreme rarity of a few previously identified risks. For weeks, vaccine opponents overstated these rare risks and falsely claimed that the study proves that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe.
Citing preprint and retracted studies
When a study has been retracted, it is no longer considered a credible source. A study’s retraction doesn’t deter vaccine opponents from promoting it—it may even be an incentive because retracted papers can be held up as examples of the medical establishment censoring so-called “truthtellers.” For example, anti-vaccine groups still herald Andrew Wakefield nearly 15 years after his study falsely linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism was retracted for data fraud.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought the lasting impact of retracted studies into sharp focus. The rush to understand a novel disease that was infecting millions brought a wave of scientific publications, some more legitimate than others.
Over time, the weaker studies were reassessed and retracted, but their damage lingers. A 2023 study found that retracted and withdrawn COVID-19 studies were cited significantly more frequently than valid published COVID-19 studies in the same journals.
In one example, a widely cited abstract that found that ivermectin—an antiparasitic drug proven to not treat COVID-19—dramatically reduced mortality in COVID-19 patients exemplifies this phenomenon. The abstract, which was never peer reviewed, was retracted at the request of its authors, who felt the study’s evidence was weak and was being misrepresented.
Despite this, the study—along with the many other retracted ivermectin studies—remains a touchstone for proponents of the drug that has shown no effectiveness against COVID-19.
In a more recent example, a group of COVID-19 vaccine opponents uploaded a paper to The Lancet’s preprint server, a repository for papers that have not yet been peer reviewed or published by the prestigious journal. The paper claimed to have analyzed 325 deaths after COVID-19 vaccination, finding COVID-19 vaccines were linked to 74 percent of the deaths.
The paper was promptly removed because its conclusions were unsupported, leading vaccine opponents to cry censorship.
Applying animal research to humans
Animals are vital to medical research, allowing scientists to better understand diseases that affect humans and develop and screen potential treatments before they are tested in humans. Animal research is a starting point that should never be generalized to humans, but vaccine opponents do just that.
Several animal studies are frequently cited to support the claim that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous during pregnancy. These studies found that pregnant rats had adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccines. The results are unsurprising given that they were injected with doses equal to or many times larger than the dose given to humans rather than a dose that is proportional to the animal’s size.
Similarly, a German study on rat heart cells found abnormalities after exposure to mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccine opponents falsely insinuated that this study proves COVID-19 vaccines cause heart damage in humans and was so universally misrepresented that the study’s author felt compelled to dispute the claims.
The author noted that the study used vaccine doses significantly higher than those administered to humans and was conducted in cultured rat cells, a dramatically different environment than a functioning human heart.
How to avoid being misled
The internet has empowered vaccine opponents to spread false information with an efficiency and expediency that was previously impossible. Anti-vaccine narratives have advanced rapidly due to the rampant exploitation of valid sources and the promotion of unvetted, non-credible sources.
You can avoid being tricked by using multiple trusted sources to verify claims that you encounter online. Some examples of credible sources are reputable public health entities like the CDC and World Health Organization, personal health care providers, and peer-reviewed research from experts in fields relevant to COVID-19 and the pandemic.
Read more about anti-vaccine tactics:
- How vaccine opponents spread misinformation
- How misinformation tricks our brains
- How vaccine opponents use kids to spread misinformation
This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Castor Oil: All-Purpose Life-Changer, Or Snake Oil?
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As “trending” health products go, castor oil is enjoying a lot of popularity presently, lauded as a life-changing miracle-worker, and social media is abuzz with advice to put it everywhere from your eyes to your vagina.
But:
- what things does science actually say it’s good for,
- what things lack evidence, and
- what things go into the category of “wow definitely do not do that”?
We don’t have the space to go into all of its proposed uses (there are simply far too many), but we’ll examine some common ones:
To heal/improve the skin barrier
Like most oils, it’s functional as a moisturizer. In particular, its high (90%!) ricinoleic fatty acid content does indeed make it good at that, and furthermore, has properties that can help reduce skin inflammation and promote wound healing:
Bioactive polymeric formulations for wound healing ← there isn’t a conveniently quotable summary we can just grab here, but you can see the data and results, from which we can conclude:
- formulations with ricinoleic acid (such as with castor oil) performed very well for topical anti-inflammatory purposes
- they avoided the unwanted side effects associated with some other contenders
- they consistently beat other preparations in the category of wound-healing
To support hair growth and scalp health
There is no evidence that it helps. We’d love to provide a citation for this, but it’s simply not there. There’s also no evidence that it doesn’t help. For whatever reason, despite its popularity, peer-reviewed science has simply not been done for this, or if it has, it wasn’t anywhere publicly accessible.
It’s possible that if a person is suffering hair loss specifically as a result of prostaglandin D2 levels, that ricinoleic acid will inhibit the PGD2, reversing the hair loss, but even this is hypothetical so far, as the science is currently only at the step before that:
However, due to some interesting chemistry, the combination of castor oil and warm water can result in acute (and irreversible) hair felting, in other words, the strands of hair suddenly glue together to become one mass which then has to be cut off:
“Castor Oil” – The Culprit of Acute Hair Felting
👆 this is a case study, which is generally considered a low standard of evidence (compared to high-quality Randomized Controlled Trials as the highest standard of evidence), but let’s just say, this writer (hi, it’s me) isn’t risking her butt-length hair on the off-chance, and doesn’t advise you to, either. There are other hair-oils out there; argan oil is great, coconut oil is totally fine too.
As a laxative
This time, there’s a lot of evidence, and it’s even approved for this purpose by the FDA, but it can be a bit too good, insofar as taking too much can result in diarrhea and uncomfortable cramping (the cramps are a feature not a bug; the mechanism of action is stimulatory, i.e. it gets the intestines squeezing, but again, it can result in doing that too much for comfort):
Castor Oil: FDA-Approved Indications
To soothe dry eyes
While putting oil in your eyes may seem dubious, this is another one where it actually works:
❝Castor oil is deemed safe and tolerable, with strong anti-microbial, anti-inflammatory, anti-nociceptive, analgesic, antioxidant, wound healing and vasoconstrictive properties.
These can supplement deficient physiological tear film lipids, enabling enhanced lipid spreading characteristics and reducing aqueous tear evaporation.
Studies reveal that castor oil applied topically to the ocular surface has a prolonged residence time, facilitating increased tear film lipid layer thickness, stability, improved ocular surface staining and symptoms.❞
Source: Therapeutic potential of castor oil in managing blepharitis, meibomian gland dysfunction and dry eye
Against candidiasis (thrush)
We couldn’t find science for (or against) castor oil’s use against vaginal candidiasis, but here’s a study that investigated its use against oral candidiasis:
…in which castor oil was the only preparation that didn’t work against the yeast.
Summary
We left a lot unsaid today (so many proposed uses, it feels like a shame to skip them), but in few words: it’s good for skin (including wound healing) and eyes; but we’d give it a miss for hair, candidiasis, and digestive disorders.
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Take care!
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A Fresh Take On Hypothyroidism
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The Three Rs To Boost Thyroid-Related Energy Levels
This is Dr. Izabella Wentz. She’s a doctor of pharmacology, and after her own diagnosis with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, she has taken it up as her personal goal to educate others on managing hypothyroidism.
Dr. Wentz is also trained in functional medicine through The Institute for Functional Medicine, Kalish Functional Medicine, and the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists, and holds certifications in Medication Therapy Management as well as Advanced Diabetes Care through the American Pharmacists Association. In 2013, she received the Excellence in Innovation Award from the Illinois Pharmacists Association.
Dr. Wentz’s mission
Dr. Wentz was disenchanted by the general medical response to hypothyroidism in three main ways. She tells us:
- Thyroid patients are not diagnosed appropriately.
- For this, she criticises over-reliance on TSH tests that aren’t a reliable marker of thyroid function, especially if you have Hashimoto’s.
- Patients should be better optimized on their medications.
- For this, she criticizes many prescribed drugs that are actually pro-drugs*, that don’t get converted adequately if you have an underactive thyroid.
- Lifestyle interventions are often ignored by mainstream medicine.
- Medicines are great; they truly are. But medicating without adjusting lifestyle can be like painting over the cracks in a crumbling building.
*a “pro-drug” is what it’s called when the drug we take is not the actual drug the body needs, but is a precursor that will get converted to that actual drug we need, inside our body—usually by the liver, but not always. An example in this case is T4, which by definition is a pro-drug and won’t always get correctly converted to the T3 that a thyroid patient needs.
Well that does indeed sound worthy of criticism. But what does she advise instead?
First, she recommends a different diagnostic tool
Instead of (or at least, in addition to) TSH tests, she advises to ask for TPO tests (thyroid peroxidase), and a test for Tg antibodies (thyroglobulin). She says these are elevated for many years before a change in TSH is seen.
Next, identify the root cause and triggers
These can differ from person to person, but in countries that add iodine to salt, that’s often a big factor. And while gluten may or may not be a factor, there’s a strong correlation between celiac disease and Hashimoto’s disease, so it is worth checking too. Same goes for lactose.
By “checking”, here we mean testing eliminating it and seeing whether it makes a difference to energy levels—this can be slow, though, so give it time! It is best to do this under the guidance of a specialist if you can, of course.
Next, get to work on repairing your insides.
Remember we said “this can be slow”? It’s because your insides won’t necessarily bounce back immediately from whatever they’ve been suffering from for what’s likely many years. But, better late than never, and the time will pass anyway, so might as well get going on it.
For this, she recommends a gut-healthy diet with specific dietary interventions for hypothyroidism. Rather than repeat ourselves unduly here, we’ll link to a couple of previous articles of ours, as her recommendations match these:
She also recommends regular blood testing to see if you need supplementary TSH, TPO antibodies, and T3 and T4 hormones—as well as vitamin B12.
Short version
After diagnosis, she recommends the three Rs:
- Remove the causes and triggers of your hypothyroidism, so far as possible
- Repair the damage caused to your body, especially your gut
- Replace the thyroid hormones and related things in which your body has become deficient
Learn more
If you’d like to learn more about this, she offers a resource page, with resources ranging from on-screen information, to books you can get, to links to hook you up with blood tests if you need them, as well as recommended supplements to consider.
She also has a blog, which has an interesting relevant article added weekly.
Enjoy, and take care of yourself!
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- Thyroid patients are not diagnosed appropriately.
