Quickies

Skepchick Quickies 9.1

Amanda

Amanda works in healthcare, is a loudmouthed feminist, and proud supporter of the Oxford comma.

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19 Comments

    1. Actually, what it says is that having a culture that empowers women empowers women. Changing cultures is a lot harder than changing policies.

      1. Or, it might say that men in societies where they can own property are more motivated by cash rewards than men in societies where they cannot own property.

        If you follow the first link in the wired story, there’s also the interesting conclusion that, while gender equality improves female math scores relative to male math scores, it apparently increases he disparity between female and male reading scores.

        http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/06/why-judy-cant-add-gender-inequality-and-the-math-gap.ars

  1. “Pain during intercourse”… is that sort of like “Chronic Fatigue” that we were mocking a bit yesterday?

    I think the real problem isn’t saying that things are “in your head”, it is pretending that “in your head” means that you’re making it up. Parkinson’s is “in your head” too, and no one dismisses Parkinson’s sufferers as being hysterical or exaggerating. On the other hand, I hope that women suffering from this don’t freak out if they are prescribed anti-depressants or other psychiatric meds because they think they are being dismissed as “crazy”. “In your head” can mean psychological OR neurological, or sometimes both!

    1. Chronic pain has been demonstrated to have a significant impact on mental health, mostly depression. And major depression and suicidal ideation and attempts are closely associated with chronic back pain and other chronic pain problems. My state has recently enacted new laws that will be placing chronic pain sufferers and their treating physicians at greater risk of being labeled drug seeking addicts and drug pushers in a knee jerk attempt to reduce the other serious problem of pain medication abuse and overdose. It’s a shame that again reasonable discussion has been replaced with two dimensional thinking when it comes to drug laws.

      1. They should just make pain illegal, and cut out the middlemen. Then there wouldn’t be any more.

    2. One of the biggest problems IS saying “it’s all in your head” because that term *means* that someone is making things up, or that it’s imaginary, or that if they just think positive thoughts all the bad things will go away.

      It may be all in the brain. It seems like every problem a person can have with chronic pain has something to do with the nervous system, but it’s not always psychological.

      When doctors say “it’s all in your head”, it’s demeaning and very belittling. They know what the term means, and they use it as a way to dismiss problems. It’s when doctors use it that it really bites, because they’re supposed to be helping, not making you feel like there’s something wrong with you that you just aren’t trying hard enough to fix.

      It’s just like when people tell me that if I were a happier person, I wouldn’t be bipolar, and if I wasn’t so sad all the time, I wouln’t have fibromyalgia.

      1. “It’s just like when people tell me that if I were a happier person, I wouldn’t be bipolar, and if I wasn’t so sad all the time, I wouln’t have fibromyalgia.”

        Except that at least one of those things might be true in some sense. At least, in the sense that the drugs that can make you happier and/or less sad/depressed might also help alleviate your fundamental issues. Fibromyalgia may be psychological, neurological, or BOTH depending on the person. Maybe the nerves and their connecting points in the brain are tied together, and the brain-state of depression can cause the pain of fibromyalgia, and the neurological state of fibromyalgia can cause depression in the brain.

        So yeah, maybe the fibromyalgia causes the depression, but that doesn’t mean that treating the depression can’t help the fibromyalgia.

  2. I misread that last one as “Palin during intercourse: It’s not histrionics”. Totally confused me.

  3. Hi there!

    I thought the same thing! I thought: I don’t even want to THINK about Sarah Palin having intercourse!! 0_0

    — Craig

  4. The problem was specifically that she was not diagnosed at all. Any of these doctors could have taken a couple minutes to get on google and realize that perhaps they were completely ignorant of a fairly common condition. Instead the first four of them basically just decided she was crazy. The comments after the article show that she’s not the only woman this has happened to.

  5. So “Pastor Mike” has simply no idea why discrimination based on religious beliefs would be anything but a great idea. He just doesn’t see why would anyone oppose such an obviously good idea.

    I guess he must not know much of anything about the history of his own religion. Oh well.

  6. I don’t believe that anyone thinks targeting athists will convert them. I do like that Paster Mike basically says that the belief in god is the only reason he can think of that would stop someone from eatting babies and having blood-filled sex orgies. He doesn’t even CONSIDER the problem of access. All the registery would do is help other people have easy access to others who a to eatting babies.

    …oh, now I get why he wants it…

  7. Feeding Satan? Atheists no more believe in Satan than any other Deity. This idiot doesn’t even know what an Atheist is. I think was is needed is a registry for kooks, and he should top the list.

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