New study warns that herbal supplements and medicines don’t always mix well.
Feb 8th
What’s the harm, the question goes, if herbal supplements don’t actually help cure anything? Well, they could kill you if you’re on certain types of real medications:
Researchers are warning that popular herbs and supplements, including St. John’s wort and even garlic and ginger, do not mix well with common heart drugs and can also be dangerous for patients taking statins, blood thinners and blood pressure medications.
St. John’s wort raises blood pressure and heart rate, and garlic and ginger increase the risk of bleeding in patients on blood thinners, the researchers said. Even grapefruit juice can be risky, increasing the effects of calcium-channel blockers and statins, they said.
via Vital Signs – Study Warns That Some Supplements and Medicine Do Not Mix – NYTimes.com.
People don’t tend to think of herbs as being a type of chemical, but they are and they can have an impact on any other chemicals you might be taking:
The paper includes a list of more than two dozen herbal products that patients should approach with caution, as well as a list of common drug-herb interactions. Among the products listed are ginkgo biloba, ginseng and echinacea, as well as some surprises like soy milk and green tea — both of which can decrease the effectiveness of warfarin — and even aloe vera and licorice.
The abstract to the paper will get your attention:
More than 15 million people in the U.S. consume herbal remedies or high-dose vitamins. The number of visits to providers of complementary and alternative medicine exceeds those to primary care physicians, for annual out-of-pocket costs of $30 billion. Use of herbal products forms the bulk of treatments, particularly by elderly people who also consume multiple prescription medications for comorbid conditions, which increases the risk of adverse herb-drug-disease interactions. Despite the paucity of scientific evidence supporting the safety or efficacy of herbal products, their widespread promotion in the popular media and the unsubstantiated health care claims about their efficacy drive consumer demand. In this review, we highlight commonly used herbs and their interactions with cardiovascular drugs. We also discuss health-related issues of herbal products and suggest ways to improve their safety to better protect the public from untoward effects.
Visits to so-called complementary and alternative medicine practitioners exceeds those to primary care physicians? Really? Have we all gone that nuts? The $30 billion a year in money wasted doesn’t surprise me that much, we’ve been a nation willing to waste tons of money on shit that doesn’t work for quite a while now, but the fact that the woo-woo practitioners are seeing more people simply shocks me.
Given that they’re talking about health effects from supplements made from a single herb, consider what that means when you take something like (We-Can’t-Say-It-Cures-Colds-Anymore-But-It-Kinda-Does-Wink-Wink) Airborne which contains a shit load of herbs and vitamins. According to the official site it has the following in it: Vitamins A, C, and E, Zinc, Selenium, Manganese, Magneisum, Riboflavin, Amino Acids, and a proprietary herbal blend that includes Lonicera, Forsythia, Schizonepeta, Ginger, Chinese Vitex, Isatis and Echinacea.
That’s quite the mix and you have no idea what the dosages are for most of the ingredients. Consider that it contains 5,000 units of Vitamin A per tablet and you are encouraged to take five tablets a day or more. Did I mention that taking more than 10,000 units of Vitamin A a day is considered unsafe? Not to mention that it also contains high doses of Vitamin C which can lead to kidney stones, among other problems. Combine that with the fact that several of its components are known to interact with legit medicines and you could be doing quite a bit of harm by taking it.
But hey, it was created by a school teacher and they know better than any stupid old doctor what’s best to put in your body, right?
Soldier uses torture on his 4-year-old daughter.
Feb 8th
27-year-old U.S. Army Sergeant Joshua Ryan Tabor has served 15 months in Iraq and apparently he picked up some less than appropriate parenting techniques while he was there:
“We had a report of [Tabor] walking around his neighborhood holding a Kevlar helmet and threatening to bust out windows,” Stancil told ABCNews.com today. “In the process of talking to Tabor’s girlfriend about what was going on, we learned that he had also been abusing his daughter.”
Stancil said that when the cops coaxed the little girl out of the bathroom they saw that she was covered in “multiple bruises pretty much all over her body.”
“She was very open with us,” Stancil said of the young girl, whose name is not being released because she is a minor. “She basically came right out and said, ‘Daddy does this to me. He uses his hands.’”
Both the girl and the father admitted to the torture, even detailing how Tabor would sit the girl on the edge of the bathroom sink and hold her head down until it was nearly submerged in water, dunking her if she refused to recite the alphabet, said Stancil.
Yes, the terrible thing this little girl did that prompted her punishment was refusing to recite the alphabet.
But at least Tabor is being upfront and honest about what he’s done:
Tabor told authorities that “his purpose was to punish her by putting her in the water because he knows she is afraid of it and he wanted her to cooperate.”
“She said her letters after that,” Tabor told the cops, admitting that he had grown frustrated with the girl after practicing the letters for “approximately three hours.”
After three hours of practice I’d refuse to say the fucking alphabet as well.
It seems Tabor felt that his daughter was not mentally up to where she should be for her age. And we all know that the best way to motivate a mentally deficient child is by repeatedly dunking their head into a sink full of hot water. Tabor’s girlfriend may also end up facing charges in the incident. She noted that Tabor has an “anger management problem” to police. Gee, ya think?
Oh, and according to investigators, the 4-year-old girl seemed quite articulate and without any developmental problems. Though after living with this asshole for the past couple of months – he has joint-custody in five months increments – she’ll probably need some therapy in the future.
The first SEB Podcast is complete.
Feb 7th
There’s still some work in massaging the file for audio levels and size, but it’s actually done. We were shooting for an hour and ended up overshooting by about 22 minutes and 36 seconds. The final file size ended up being 37.8 MBs of random babble. I have no idea if any of you will enjoy it, but ***Dave and I had a lot of fun doing it. Now I just need to figure out how to make it reasonable in size and where I’m going to post it. Should I break it up to keep the quality higher or reduce the quality to keep it a single file. I also need to try and raise the volume level of ***Dave’s track as it’s a little low compared to mine.
But it’s done and that’s the important bit and, after a bit of research on the best way to do this, I’ll post it to the site. We didn’t even get through half the questions so we’ve got material for the next one if folks find this one amusing enough that you want more.
Turkish girl buried alive by the family that loved her.
Feb 5th
They say you always hurt the ones you love, but this is taking it too far:
A Turkish teenager found dead in a hole next to her house was probably buried alive, a post-mortem examination has revealed.
Medine Memi, 16, was found in the hole in December. Large amounts of soil were in her lungs and stomach, according to a source who has seen the report.
Her father and grandfather have been arrested, but not charged.
[...] Her hands had been tied behind her back, and they discovered large amounts of soil in her lungs and stomach.
The autopsy has concluded that she was almost certainly buried alive.
The police went to her home after a neighbour reported that Medine had not been seen for a month.
They found her body in a hole, newly covered with concrete, next to the hen-house.
I was going to make this another in the Too Much Faith series of posts I’ve been doing, but the article claims religion didn’t really have anything to do with it:
Medine, who had never been to school, lived in Kahta, a town in the mainly Kurdish south-east of Turkey, where most honour killings have taken place.
The town is known for being very conservative and religious; it is a stronghold of the once powerful Naksibendi Islamic sect, which was banned by modern Turkey’s founding father Ataturk in 1925 but has revived in recent years.
But while it is true that most such killings are carried out in conservative Muslim communities, the practice is linked more to the customs of this region of Turkey, than to religious belief.
When girls or women are deemed to have stained the family honour, by behaviour as innocent as simply talking to boys, there is strong peer pressure from the community on the male members of the family to restore their honour, say groups working on the issue in the south-east.
The only way allowed by their code is to kill the girl or woman – usually a young man is given the task after a family council meeting, and the method and location of the killing are discussed in detail.
It still stinks of delusion to me. Seriously, how fucked up do you have to be to bind one of your own kids, put them in a hole, and shovel dirt in on them until they choke to death on it? I can’t imagine the horror of being the victim of such an act let alone it being compounded by the fact that the perpetrators were people who supposedly loved me. And what horrible thing had this poor girl done to deserve such a fate? She had talked to some boys.
According to the news article, there have been 16 honor killings in the province of Adiyaman, where Medine lived, between 2003 and 2007. It’s the sort of thing you’d think the world would have outgrown by now, but it’s not confined to just Turkey.
Here’s something to think about: According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) there are some 5,000 honor killings yearly around the world with some countries having laws that make it perfectly legal.
The SEB Podcast is finally happening.
Feb 4th
So the long-planned and consistently procrastinated SEB Podcast is going to happen this Saturday thanks to the very responsible ***Dave who’s been pestering me that we should actually do what we said we would do. This will be our first attempt and I fully expect it to be… interesting. Yeah, interesting is a good, positive sounding word. I just hope it’s interesting for the right reasons.
Here’s the thing: As most of you who follow both SEB and ***Dave Does the Blog already know, outside of him being a theist and me an atheist, we have more in common than not. My concern is that we’re going to ask each other questions about topical items and we’re going to agree with each other so much that the entire podcast will be similar to this:
Me: I think Pat Robertson is stone-cold crazy.
***Dave: I agree completely. And I think the Teabaggers are a wee bit deluded.
Me: I totally agree.
Which is going to make for a fairly boring podcast. So I’m opening this up for you guys to participate. Got a topic you’d like to hear us pontificate on? A question burning a hole in your brain? A query you’re curious if we can help you with? Leave it in the comments or alternatively drop me an email or drop ***Dave an email if you prefer. Topics can be anything you want – politics, religion, technology, pop culture – and we’ll do our damnedest to talk about them in an amusing manner.
Yes, I know I’ve made this plea previously only to have it go nowhere, but we’re really going to do it this time barring the world coming to an end. Remember, this is our first try at this and neither one of us has done it before. Which, if nothing else, should add an air of unintentional comedy to the proceedings.
Frontline looks at the “Digital Nation.”
Feb 2nd
I like to consider myself to be a wired individual, but even though I grew up alongside the technology that is now commonplace these days I am nowhere near as wired as some of the kids who have never known anything other than the highly digital world we have today.
I’m not even that good at multitasking. If I’m doing something I’m usually doing that one thing to the exclusion of anything else. Be it writing a blog post, chatting in IM, playing a game, or talking on the phone. I think I’ve sent a total of a dozen texts on my phone in my entire life. I don’t own a smartphone. Occasionally I’ll talk on the phone while driving or do a little IM chat while working on a blog post, but I usually end those conversations quickly so I can get back to concentrating on the primary task at hand. I’ve never had a lengthy, pointless conversation on my cell while driving. It’s too distracting. About the best I can do is listen to the radio while driving or talking to a passenger.
Compared to some of the kids I know today that makes me a total Luddite. Every time a break come around at work the kiosk computers are filled instantly with people checking their Facebook pages while chatting on IM and eating a snack. They’d have their cellphones out if it were for the fact that they’re banned from the building and some of them go out to their cars to get around that restriction.
This is why I found the following episode of Frontline so interesting. In it they take a look at how all these highly wired and constantly multitasking people are affected by the technology they’ve so immersed themselves in. How is it affecting them socially and physically? What’s it doing to their brains? How’s it affect their relationships? How will it all change the way the world works?
As per usual with Frontline, this is a very balanced bit of journalism that points out the pros and cons. In the end they don’t draw any conclusions one way or the other, but simply look at where things are headed and what it might mean. We’re going to lose some things along the way, but we will gain others.
The episode airs tonight on your local PBS station, or you can watch it here as I’ve embedded all nine chapters in this entry. The first is below and the rest are after the jump. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on it if you take the time to watch it.
Well that’s one way to get him to attend church more often.
Feb 1st
It can be tough to be the son of a clergyman. You’re held to a higher standard and any transgressions on your part can reflect poorly on your father. This sometimes results in extra pressure from your Dad to put forth the best image you possibly can.
In this case it seems the Pastor may have gone a tad too far in motivating his son:
ALCOA, Tenn. (AP) – The son of a well-known Alcoa pastor has taken out an order of protection against his father, claiming he was threatened with a gun during an argument at a church over his lack of church attendance. The order of protection was filed by 32-year-old Michael Louis Colquitt against 60-year-old Joe Colquitt, pastor of St. John Missionary Baptist Church.
The younger man told police his father pulled out a handgun when they met at the church to discuss church attendance. He told officers his father pointed the gun at him and threatened to kill him, his wife and family.
Good thing you didn’t tell him you’re an atheist and have stopped attending church altogether. He would’ve used a tactical nuke on your house.
Frat boy’s ass branded by his “brothers” while he’s passed out.
Jan 29th
Here’s a tragic story of a fraternity initiation gone awry.
Who am I kidding? I find this funny as hell:
“Most college students returned for the spring semester rested and relaxed. Amon Carter IV headed back to class with the mark of his fraternity burned into his backside.The family of Texas Christian University student, who returned from a winter break ski trip with second and third-degree burns from being branded by his fraternity brothers, have already hired a lawyer to pressure school officials and police to punish all involved.
Carter, who goes by Chance, will require surgery to repair the damage done to his buttocks with a hot coat hanger after he passed out during a night of drinking.
Apparently it’s not enough to be obnoxiously insufferable once you join a fraternity these days; now you have to be branded as well. Not surprisingly, the family already has plans to sue… someone… over the incident.
Interestingly enough I only just learned about this practice the other day from one of the kids here at work when I noticed the bottom part of what turned out to be a huge letter I that had been crudely branded in his bicep. I was incredulous that he had had it done intentionally as it makes even the worst tattoo look like art by Michelangelo. There was also the fact that this kid was black which made the brand suggest some slave imagery to me and I was surprised he’d want to make that a permanent part of his body, but apparently this is something that’s been common among African-American fraternities for some time now:
Branding has been a rite of passage in black fraternities for decades, but is still a fairly uncommon ritual among white fraternity members.
Lawrence Ross Jr., author of “The Divine Nine: The History of African American Fraternities and Sororities,” told ABCNews.com that he’s starting to hear more and more cases of branding among white fraternities, which he attributed to Internet videos and pictures glorifying the ritual.
“I tend to look at it as a personal choice,” Ross said, adding that he chose a tattoo, not a brand, during his frat days with Alpha Phi Alpha.
Our hero here, however, is white and the brand he got looks like it makes sitting down an uncomfortable activity:
Texas Christian University student Amon Carter IV and his amazing ass brand.
Johnson, who is close to the TCU sophomore, told ABCNews.com that Chance Carter had drunkenly consented to letting his fraternity brothers finish branding his rear with the Kappa Sigma symbols, a mark he had started during spring break, unbeknownst to his family.But his fraternity brothers took it upon themselves to continue the branding — this time large triangles to represent the Tri Delta Sorority — on his other buttock while he was passed out.
Johnson said the Tri Delta mark was mingled with numerous other brands, most of which are unrecognizable, since they overlap.
“They are large,” she said.
As if this story weren’t already awesome enough, it turns out that Amon Carter IV comes from a very wealthy and renowned family:
The Carters are one of the most prominent families in Forth Worth. Amon G. Carter was the president and publisher of the Forth Worth Star-Telegram newspaper in the 1920s and was credited with bringing several major businesses to the area, including a General Motors assembly plant and the company now known as Lockheed-Martin.
[...]
Craven said the Carters, who brought Chance Carter to the emergency room for treatment as soon as he returned home, have already consulted with a plastic surgeon who estimated it would take at least six procedures to repair.
Craven said the possibility of a lawsuit is “nothing I can say at this point.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Johnson said, “his backside is a crime scene.”
It’s hard to say whether there’s anything that can be done, other than the plastic surgery, in this case. Amon did technically consent to the procedure before he passed out so it’s possible the people directly responsible might not be charged with a crime. As for suing, well, the family is already pretty wealthy so it’s hard to see the point outside of revenge.
If I were dumb enough to allow a bunch of drunken frat buddies to take a hot coat hanger and draw doodles on my ass I’d just write it off as a lesson learned the hard way and try to move on as best I could considering that my hips would probably catch on the inside of my jeans when I walked from that point forward.
“Bioshock 2″ following in “Modern Warfare 2’s” footsteps for multiplayer.
Jan 28th
It looks like the folks at Infinity Ward may have started a trend among developers of first person shooters on the PC. Word now comes from a Q&A about Bioshock 2’s multiplayer mode over at The Cult of Rapture that it will not have dedicated server support, LAN play, or the ability to kick troublemakers from the game:
Do you support LAN play on consoles or PC? Do you support dedicated servers?
Short answer, no and no. There is always a finite amount of time for the development of a game. Bringing Multiplayer to BioShock was a daunting task between the tech (there was no multiplayer support in the codebase from the first game) and the expectations of the community. Either you try to do everything and so nothing feels finished or you focus your efforts to do a smaller number of things really well like an accessible online experience. We chose to spend the time we had creating a solid game foundation and unfortunately that did not include LAN play or dedicated servers.How does your matchmaking system work and how do you make sure there isn’t lag or bad match ups?
The matchmaking system takes a couple of things into account. We try to get you into a game as quickly as possible (since we know how much waiting really stinks), but match you up to people who are as close to your rank and skill as possible, with a certain amount of weighting to each factor, as well as requiring a low ping for those matched players.How do you deal with people who grief or cheat or are otherwise not making a good ranked experience? Can you kick them?
Even though we are doing everything we can to try to find exploits in our own game, there will always be people who will find a way to grief a game. There is no kick option as we felt like it often leads to more unfair kicking than fair kicking. We hope that because there are a variety of player goals and a multitude of options for ranking up and killing, the player will always feel like he or she is gaining something in a match with mean people and griefers. If you do get matched up with one of those people, please report it, leave that game, and we’ll try to smooth out the online experience as best as we can.
It sounds more or less just like the multiplayer system in Modern Warfare 2 which a lot of fans, including myself, weren’t happy about. This is disappointing to say the least and I expect it’ll be plagued with similar problems as a result. No word on what ant-cheat system they’ll be using, MW2 uses Valve’s VAC system, and that could go a long way to determining how much of a problem cheaters end up being.
Back when I wrote my rant discouraging folks from buying the PC version of MW2 the number of people using aimbots/wallhacks was simply ridiculous and, combined with how long it takes a ban in VAC to be enforced, was making the multiplayer almost pointless. These days it’s settled down quite a bit and I can only assume that someone must be banning cheaters more often as it’s possible to go through a number of sessions with nary a cheater in sight, but the damage has been done and now legitimate players are accused of cheating simply for having a high kill/death ratio. It’s even happened to me and I’m hardly a great player.
I never bought the first Bioshock due to the ridiculously restrictive SecuROM DRM it had and it was looking like BS2 was going in a similar direction, but they recently announced they were scaling back the restrictions for BS2 at least somewhat:
There will be no SecuROM install limits for either the retail or digital editions of BioShock 2, and SecuROM will be used only to verify the game’s executable and check the date. Beyond that, we are only using standard Games for Windows Live non-SSA guidelines, which, per Microsoft, comes with 15 activations (after that, you can reset them with a call to Microsoft.)
What does that mean for your gameplay experience? This means that BioShock 2’s new DRM is now similar to many popular games you advised had better DRM through both digital and retail channels. Many of you have used Batman: Arkham Asylum as an example to me, which uses the exact same Games for Windows Live guidelines as us as well as SecuROM on retail discs, and now our SecuROM is less restrictive on Steam.
This is better than the first game, but still not fabulous. It was loose enough to make me consider buying the sequel along with perhaps the original – seeing as they’ve since dropped the DRM from the first game altogether – but the fact that they’re using a similar matchmaking system as MW2 has dropped my enthusiasm back down to zero.
SEB Safety Tip: Don’t glue your headset to your ear.
Jan 26th
You would think this would be self-evident, but apparently at least one fellow out there needed to be told:
“I hit my ear on the boom of my truck and broke the headset of my phone,” Mr Gardner told the Northern Territory News.
“So I got some superglue and glued it back together – and that was … when my boss rang.”
The truck driver said he usually had the phone’s headset in his ear most of the day.
“I guess I didn’t think much of it when I put it back into my ear to talk to the boss.
“I drove from Casuarina to Rapid Creek when I realised I had done something kinda stupid.”
If you do accidentally glue your headset to your ear, don’t compound the problem with half-assed attempts at removing it:
Mr Gardner told the Northern Territory News it crossed his mind to use his pocket knife to remove the unwanted gear from his ear.
“I realised I didn’t want to see myself going to a doctor to put my ear back on after I chopped it off.
“So I used a spoon.”
The 43-year-old said he scraped the earpiece out of his ear with a spoon but several pieces of skin were still stuck to the headphones.
“Yes, it did hurt – but I guess I did hurt my pride much more than it did hurt my ear.”
Kudos to Mr. Gardner for not using his pocket knife, but a spoon is hardly an adequate second choice. What he should have used instead is a bit of acetone, which is like Kryptonite to super glue. Just a bit of your average nail polish remover – check the bottle to be sure it has acetone in it – on a Q-tip is all it takes to remove the glue without removing parts of your ear along with it. Be sure to wash the acetone off your skin once you free yourself and perhaps put some lotion on the spot as well.
As it turns out, it’s possible to get super glue on parts of your body that you really shouldn’t use acetone on such as your lips or your eye. Apparently this has happened enough that the Original Super Glue Corporation actually has a webpage detailing what to do:
Should Super Glue bond to any body part where acetone should not be applied, such as the lips or eyes, the following steps will help you get out of any sticky situation!
- Skin
Immerse bonded areas in warm, soapy water. Peel or roll skin apart; a spatula or teaspoon handle or even a pencil will help. Remove cured adhesive with warm, soapy water (may take several applications). Fingernail polish remover with an acetone base has also been successful for removal of cured adhesive from skin.- Lips
If lips are accidentally stuck together, apply a generous amount of warm water and encourage maximum wetting and pressure from saliva from inside the mouth. Peel or roll (do not pull) lips apart. It is almost impossible to swallow the adhesive as a liquid. The adhesive solidifies upon contact with saliva (moisture) and could adhere to the inside of the mouth. Saliva will lift the adhesive in 1-2 days, avoid swallowing the adhesive after detachment.- Eyelid
In the event that eyelids are stuck together or bonded to the eyeball, wash thoroughly with warm water and apply a gauze patch. The eye will open without further action within 1-4 days. To our knowledge there has never been a documented case of adhesive in the eye causing permanent damage. Do not try to force eyes open.- Eyeball
The adhesive will attach itself to the eye protein and will disassociate from it over time, usually within several hours. Periods of weeping and double vision may be experienced until clearance is achieved. Use of a warmed 3% sodium bicarbonate solution to wash eyes repeatedly may assist in aiding more rapid removal of the adhesive.
WE SUGGEST THAT ALL INCIDENTS OF EYE EXPOSURE TO CYANOACRYLATE ADHESIVE (SUPER GLUE) BE DISCUSSED WITH A PHYSICIAN.
In other words, please don’t sue the shit out of us due to your own stupidity.
