Fifty people stared straight at the sun to see the Virgin Mary and caused themselves to go blind. It happened in THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India. At least 50 people in Kottayam district have reportedly lost their vision after gazing at the sun looking for an image of Virgin Mary. Though alarmed health…
I recently went to the doctor because I have had pain in my back and left side. The doctor sent me down to a diagnostic office for X-rays. When those x-rays came back, my doctor thought he saw evidence of a pinched nerve. But that's not what I saw when…
For its entire existence as a sport bodybuilding has struggled to gain acceptance with a mainstream audience. Some say it never will. They say that the freakishly exaggerated physiques of bodybuilders will never be applauded by the general public. And so, bodybuilding remains a cult sport. Looked down upon by many as a freak show.
As hard as it is for male bodybuilders to gain acceptance as legitimate athletes, it’s even harder for female bodybuilders. The male bodybuilder creates an exaggeration of the male form. They have taken the shape and the characteristics of male-ness and pushed it to its limits. They give the impression of being a “super-male”. Though freakish to some, at least it’s consistent with their gender.
The problem for very muscular women is that as they become more muscular the general public sees them as becoming less feminine and more manly. This has been a growing problem for women’s bodybuilding since the early nineties as advances in training and chemistry have enabled female bodybuilders to far exceed their natural muscle building capacity. Debates about “feminity vs masculinity” in female bodybuilding are an eternally hot topic on bodybuilding forums around the world and discussed with the same fervor that “God vs no God” is debated here on Dangerous Intersection.
Into this fray jumps celebrated photographer Martin Schoeller. Martin’s latest project is a series on female bodybuilders that is being exhibited at the Ace Gallery starting in March. Known for his stark brand of portraiture, Martin’s work has …
Are they gone? Are all the millions of people who take Prozac, Effexor, Paxil and Serzone-who-are-not-severely-depressed gone? Good. Now we can talk. The rest of you have probably already read the news that:
Antidepressant medications appear to help only very severely depressed people and the drugs work no better than placebos in many patients, British researchers said Tuesday.
Why would the news media ever report the truth regarding these wildly-hyped antidepressants? After all, scientists have long known that most of the power of these drugs is in the placebo effect. Or, at least, scientists should have suspected this, because the FDA was refusing to release the full data sets regarding these drugs trial, at least until the good scientists who work on this new report (Prof Irving Kirsch and colleagues) requested “the full data under freedom of information rules from the Food and Drug Administration, which licenses medicines in the US and requires all data when it makes a decision.” Gosh, it appears that some of the relevant data wasn’t available to the forty million people taking these drugs, until long after the release of these drugs through massive corporate guerilla marketing.
In its advertisements, the manufacturer of Prozac, Lilly, doesn’t say anything about the drug not working well for large numbers of the patients for whom it was being prescribed. In fact, Lilly makes this claim:
…The safety and effectiveness of PROZAC have been thoroughly studied in clinical trials with more than 11,000 patients. There have been more than
The March 2008 addition of Consumer Reports contains an article called "Nine Ways to a Longer Life." There's lots of common sense advice, such as get enough sleep, exercise and don't smoke. There is also some less-obvious good advice, including the need to eat the right kind of fat. For instance, the…