Rant

A 66-post collection

Murderous Modern Medical Science

Yesterday, I promised you, my dear reader, that I would tell the sordid story of how modern medicine nearly snuffed my talent out in the cradle. But before I get onto that tale of intrigue, business ventures, and just plain fucking up... I have to define a few things.

"Modern Medicine", when I use it in the context of this story, is actually shorthand for "modern medicine at the time" because modern medicine is constantly in flux and capable of change. Except where the results are profitable. Then their attitudes can stick around long past the time that actual science has been done to prove them wrong.

Eg: Modern medicine will accept that you, as a parent, would much rather not do the inoculation thing. Why? Because then they make loads more money when your kid gets sick from preventable diseases.

All right. Enough mini-rants.

Rewind to the year 1973. Baby me has just grown some teeth and is using them in entirely predictable ways on MeMum (ouch!). So, of course, weaning takes place.

The problem? Modern Medicine recommends that MeMum swap me over to chemical formulas which are either mixed with Cow Milk, or vanilla tap water with absolutely nothing done to it. Not even "boil, then cool".

I displayed my fine ability to get along with over-the-counter solutions to everyone else's problems. Translated, I was sick. Biliously sick. Gloriously, technicolour, something-is-wrong-here sick.

Modern Medicine recommended all the different formulas out there. And every single one of them failed. And instead of recommending MeMum pump-and-save, they instead started talking about exploratory surgery.

Surgery. On a baby. They were going to cut me open (with little in the way of anaesthetic, mind. Because you can't give anaesthetic to babies) to see if there was anything wrong with my innards because I wouldn't slug down chemicals like every other average child of the time.

Fortunately for me and survival rates for that kind of surgery, MeMum took the advice of a neighbour and learned about how goat's milk was better for babies. And goat's milk was harder to find at the markets back then than it is now3. Fortunately, MeMum had other options. We knew a goat farmer.

So, for about eight years of my life, my family never popped up to the shops for milk. We toddled across the road to swap some of our eggs, or the odd chook, for some fresh goat squeezings in some good, old-fashioned, rural barter.

Well... our neighbour of goats did possess a home-pasteurisation rig, because it was and still is illegal to sell or give away 'raw' milk. Even in the best of farms, mastitis and other bad bacteria in the milk is still a problem.

This was the main cause of Modern Medicine diagnosing me with Large Fat Globule Intolerance. I couldn't come at a lot of fat. It just made me sick. And for roughly eight years, I didn't indulge in cow's milk, or cow's milk byproducts.

I still ate eggs, toast (with Modern Medicine approved margarine), and other mainstream things. And white sugar. But the important part was... not much bread, and not much sugar.

Around about my eighth year of being a baby nerd, my family discovered that I had grown out of my more violent reactions to the cow milk. And it was also around the time that I got a bad pertussis inoculation (sold to Aus for profit by Modern Medicine in the US because our stipulations were not as strict as theirs) and fell victim to whooping cough. And repetitive bouts of bronchitis, which lead to my chronic asthma.

Things that make you go 'hmmm'...

Fast forward to the modern era, and I look up the nutritional facts of goat's milk. Because (a) shits and giggles, and (b) I'm a writer and I like to know about strange things.

Goat's milk has a very ketogenic balance of essential elements. 25% carbs, 53% fats, and 22% protein.

More things that make you go 'hmmm'...

Maybe I got that sick because my infant body wanted to remain in ketogenesis1. Maybe I reacted to the way cow's milk is processed and how cows are essentially mistreated in order increase yield.

Alas, the successes of LCHF are only eleven years old and only recommended in Switzerland. If only... if only Modern Medicine was open to actually looking at the science involved2 and not just going with the stuff the pill companies' paid research points to.

Waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with Switzerland is personal agony for me. Mainly because MeMum is no longer shopping for alternatives in the face of bad news, and is trusting Modern Medicine with her health.

Given that it's nearly killed and has killed members of the family, I'd have thought that trust would be very thin indeed. But that's not the way any more.

I wish I knew why.

  1. LCHF fact of the day: Babies are in ketogenesis until they are weaned or otherwise taken off of breast milk and fed a diet recommended by Modern Medicine.

  2. Seriously. The rise in obesity, diabetes and other new problems with people in this world practically echoes the amount of carbohydrate intake that Modern Medicine recommends.

  3. This has been corrected for facts.

Slow recovery and horrible green things

I'm pretty sure my virus is done. Hooray. I'm still coughing up things ranging from chartreuse to pea-green, including a random few bronchial casts1. And first thing in the morning, some of my ejecta is so dark that it could double as scabs.

Hooray for night-time drying effects? I guess?

And for those of you who are watching my weight with concern, I actually wobbled upwards by 0.1 of a kilo and am holding steady in the 84 kilo range.

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What another fine day for politics...

...ze said whilst oozing sarcasm until hir audience drowned in it.

There's an old law that the POTUS can't have any kind of business earnings whilst also in power, lest conflict of interest rear its ugly head and corruption eat the government alive. And since the Muppet has shown no signs of surrendering his holdings to anyone else, it looks like the grand old new rule of "It's okay if Republicans are doing it" seems to be coming to the fore.

If

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Hello, Inertia. Can I kick your arse?

Yesterday, my Beloved begged off of the daily walk because of a light rain. I could understand because they have cloth-sided walking shoes. Even the best of athletic shoes are water permeable and not proof against the slings and arrows of early morning dew.

Or a good, soaking rain.

It's why I wear my boots when the ground is moist.

Today, however, Beloved's diabetes pills are kicking their arse and they're not feeling so very well at all, this morning.

At first,

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I wrote a cursed book

Well, that's the half-joke. During most of 2014, I was working on a novel entitled Kung Fu Zombies, which threw a lampshade on every zombie trope and every kung fu trope I could make fit. And possibly a bunch of American survivalist tropes as well.

For all the fun I had writing the bloody thing - my life went sideways in a big way. Disasters big and small plagued my life. Culminating in the death of my father barely a week before

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Wiki Walks and how they fuel me

For those who've never been on one, a Wiki Walk is where you look up one topic [for example, on wikipedia] and follow interesting areas down a rabbit-hole. Only to emerge somewhere around Real Ghost Stories or Cryptids Near Me wondering how the hell you got there from where you started.

Today's Wiki walk started with Extra Credit - which covers a lot of interesting things, including various languages you can tell a story to an audience in, and I'm not talking

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Ekka Monday! Yay

Welcome, one and all, to the most frelled-up school week in Queensland. Because of the Royal National Agricultural exhibition, everyone has Wednesday off, and various school children in various districts get an extra day of the week off of school.

If that extra day happens on a Monday, then you get an awful lot of sickies being thrown on the following Tuesday. Or, as we like to call it, "the super long weekend". Similar things happen to the Thursday if the day

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Fun was had

We had a good handful of hours out. The entire family commenced their Pokejourney and, thanks to some lures set out by the businesspeople of Chermside, the little darlings and I leveled up a snootch.

The kids got more leveling done because my game crashed 90% of the time. My fickle fingers worked their anti-magic once more and I spent most of my time attempting to load pokemon go.

But I still made it to level 8, so suck it.

There's an

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Good morning

Once again, my fucked-up sleep cycle strikes in the wee small hours. I plan to use it to my advantage, though. You all get your instant story ahead of time, and I get a day of luxurious loafing.

The only downside for me is that I'll have to update my master files when I finally exit my bedroom. Yay for laptops, boo for non-cloud files.

Pretty sure the Google editor does rich text and not plain text. That could plausibly fuck up

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Secondary skills

In the words of Odo when Quark questioned his interest in funerary rituals, "Everybody needs a hobby." It didn't come in to the Hevun's Child trilogy, because almost everyone I was writing about literally did not have the time to kick back, relax, and faff around.

I glimpsed at it in The Amity Incident but by and large, the entire human colony were a bunch of nerd whose primary focus was their better future. The luxury of messing about with things to

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I feel... not yet fantastic

Throwing off lurgi is easier with ginger and rest. It's day three of feeling awful, and I'm almost back up to my base levels.

At least I have an appetite, now.

Which means that I can go ahead with booking the flu jabs for the family. Which means the dreaded phone call because the health app won't let you do multiple bookings.

On the downside, there is something wrong with the rig I had thought was recharging my laptop and investigation needs

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::Zombie noises::

I've had the second shitty night in a row and that sort of thing is never good for me. My spoons are at a minimum. My entire day is going to be "Can't be arsed, gotta do it anyway" with a side order of slow, uncomfortable moaning.

Good thing Steam Powered Giraffe is there to help my limited powers of concentration and at least keep me in the same plane of reality.

Also good thing - Beloved has taken a shine to

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Zip ties and superglue solve lots of problems

...but not the one where I have to spend a lot of money to keep breathing.

Beloved and I restocked my medication stores, yesterday. It was quite the shopping list:

  • Ventolin nebules
  • Atrovent nebules
  • Magnesium tablets
  • Olive leaf extract tablets [I refuse to take the liquid, it is gut-wrenchingly gross]
  • Vitamin C
  • Probiotics
  • Cough syrup of the expectorant variety
  • Herbal anti-anxiety stuff

And a few items of sundry miscellany that were neither here or there. Now... how much would you expect to

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What would I miss most by turning Vegan?

Short answer: Chewing, because the only vegan food is Soylent(possibly).

Long answer:

Veganism is the lifestyle choice of eschewing food items that could possibly harm an animal. On the surface, that seems nice and friendly to our fur-bearing friends [and scale-bearing, and skin-bearing, and chitin-bearing etc] until you actually think about it.

There’s not a plant on our current menu that doesn’t exploit an animal.

Of the foods that don’t use bees to procreate, there&

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Shoutout to all those people who click the $0 option in “Pay What You Want” items. You have NO idea what goes into doing the...

Shoutout to all those people who click the $0 option in “Pay What You Want” items.

You have NO idea what goes into doing the thing.

[Or you’re completely broke, in which case, I forgive you]

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