A bottle of LSD from a Swiss clinical trial for end-of-life anxiety in cancer patients, circa 2007, conducted by Dr. Peter Gasser, sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Ladies and gentlemen, the ongoing incursion of the new psychedelic research renaissance into the mainstream American mediasphere has officially reached critical mass. Behold NPR: Today,…
Category: Health & Medicine
Teeming Links – September 27, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s opening and presiding word comes from Jonathan Franzen: While we are busy tweeting, texting and spending, the world is drifting towards disaster, believes Jonathan Franzen, whose despair at our insatiable technoconsumerism echoes the apocalyptic essays of the satirist Karl Kraus — “the Great Hater.” Nowadays, the refrain…
Teeming Links – September 20, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s opening word comes from novelist and National Book Award winner Richard Powers, speaking to The Believer magazine in 2007 about the unique value of reading — and specifically, reading fiction — in helping to “deliver us from certainty” during an age when a great deal of evil…
Teeming Links – August 30, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s opening word is actually double: two opening words. The first is from John Michael Greer, writing with his typically casual and powerful lucidity. The second is from international studies expert Charles Hill, who writes with equal power. They’re lengthy, so please feel free to skip on down…
Cannabis and Cthulhu: Dr. Sanjay Gupta wakes the Old Ones with his marijuana metanoia
Okay, please pardon the ludicrously sensationalistic title. But seriously, is there anybody who hasn’t heard about this yet? On the slim chance that there is, here you go. This is Dr. Sanjay Gupta speaking, who, as we all surely recall, is not just a media personality but someone whose medical opinion carries political clout, as…
Teeming Links – August 6, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net James Howard Kunstler was in rare form in a recent salvo against the pervasive and putatively hopeful (but actually despairingly awful) wish, especially here in America, that techno-industrial society might continue to survive indefinitely instead of doing what it’s actually in the very earliest stages of beginning to…
“Row upon row, aisle upon aisle of nutritional zero, gaily boxed and packed”
Not that anybody should be surprised by this, but it turns out that what we commonly regard as “healthy foods” may be nothing of the sort, not because the specific foods in question (fruits and vegetables) are wrongly characterized in and of themselves, but because farming techniques — the ones we’ve honed and developed over…
Recommmended Reading 42
THIS WEEK: A report on the riots in Sweden and what they may portend for affluent liberal-democratic nations that have thought themselves insulated from such crises. Thoughts on how the Internet is using us all. The crumbling facade of mainstream authority and received wisdom in public health pronouncements, along with internal strife in the medical…
Recommended Reading 35
This week, a more America-centric set of recommendations than usual, covering: the gargantuan crisis of America’s “health-care-industrial” complex, which is literally killing the nation with galactically inflated prices and substandard healthcare; the Alice-in-Wonderland nature of America’s “sequestration” debacle; how the “personalized” Internet experience created by user profiling and content filtering actually delivers up two different…
The other mind-body connection: Food and psychological health
For the past several decades, the term mind-body connection has been used to refer to the idea, familiar in both the world of alternative health care and the world of “positive thinking,” that our thoughts and emotions can exert a powerful effect on our physical health. I’ve personally verified and validated this to an extent…