BRI member Ben Brand sent us this information about a couple of experiments conducted by a Stanford professor a few years ago. The results are a little scary -but frankly, they’re not that surprising, are they?
EXPERIMENT #1
Researchers: Dr. David Rosenhan, a professor psychology and law at Stanford University. He was assisted by eight people, carefully chosen because they were “apparently sane in every measurable aspect, with no record of past mental problems”: three psychologists, a psychiatrist, a pediatrician, an artist, a housewife, and a psychology graduate student.
Who They Studied: The people who run America’s mental institutions.
* Using pseudonyms, the researchers presented themselves at 12 different mental institutions around the U.S. as patients “worried about their mental health.” They were admitted and diagnosed as insane. According to Ron Perlman in the San Francisco Chronicle, “All told the same tale of trouble: they had been hearing voices which seemed to be saying ‘empty’ or ‘hollow’ or ‘thud.’ This was the only symptom they presented, and the pseudopatients were scrupulously truthful about all other aspects of their lives during interviews and therapy sessions.”
* Perlman adds, “As soon as they were admitted to the hospitals, they stopped simulating any symptoms at all, and whenever they were asked they all said they felt fine and that their brief hallucinations were gone. They were cooperative a patients and behaved completely normally. The only symptom they might then have shown was a little nervousness about the possibility of being found out.”
* They remained in the institutions for as long as 52 days, getting regular treatment.
* The eight “mental patients” scrupulously kept a written record of both their treatment and the things that happened around them in the mental wards. At first they did it furtively, hiding their notes so that the staff wouldn’t find them. But gradually they realized that the staff didn’t care, and never even bothered to ask what they were writing. “One nurse,” writes Perlman, “noticing that a pseudopatient was taking regular notes, saw it as a symptom of a crazy compulsion. ‘Patient engages in writing behavior,’ she wrote portentously on his chart day after day.”
What They Learned: “We cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals,” Rosenhan reported. Moreover, he added, “it’s the hospitals themselves that might be ‘insane,’ rather than the patients confined there.”
Some of the evidence:
* Of the eight experimenters, seven were diagnosed as schizophrenics; one was diagnosed as “a victim of manic-depressive psychosis.”
* And when they were released, they were described as “improved,” or “in remission,” but no doctors listed any of them as “cured.”
* The staff at the institutions never suspected the eight experimenters weren’t crazy …but the real patients did.
* Perlman writes, “Many of the real patients challenged them. ‘You’re not crazy,’ they insisted. ‘You’re a journalist or a professor. You’re checking up on the hospital.’” Rosenhan’s wry comment on the subject: “The fact that the patients often recognized normality when staff did not raises important questions.”
EXPERIMENT #2
At one of the hospital included in the experiment, administrators doubted Rosehan’s results. It was, they insisted, impossible for professionals to make such egregious mistakes. So Rosenhan suggested a new experiment that would prove either the hospital or his own findings right.
Researchers: Rosenhan, and an undetermined number of “pseudopatients.”
Who They Studied: The hospital staff. Rosenhan told the hospital that his new assistants would pull the same stunt they’d tried before, and challenged hospital officials to detect them.
What They Learned: Rosenhan’s original findings could well have been correct.
Some of the evidence:
* “The hospital staffs took extra pains diagnosing the next 193 patients admitted for psychiatric treatment,” Perlman writes, “and sure enough, 41 new patients were determined by at least one staff member to be a “pseudopatient” -a sane person posing as insane. Twenty-three patients were judged to be sane by at least one psychiatrist.”
* Actually, not a single one of the 193 were sent there by Rosenhan.
* That didn’t mean they were really insane, of course -Rosenhan offered no conclusions about them. He merely pointed out that as soon as doctors and their staff expected to find sane people among the patients, they did.
* His conclusion: “Any diagnostic process that lends itself so readily to massive errors of this sort cannot be a very reliable one.”
This was an article from Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader.
By Andrew Myers
Someday, your doctor may turn to you and say, “Take two surgeons and call me in the morning.” If that day arrives, you may just have Ada Poon to thank.
Yesterday, at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) before an audience of her peers, electrical engineer Poon demonstrated a tiny, wirelessly powered, self-propelled medical device capable of controlled motion through a fluid—blood more specifically. The era of swallow-the-surgeon medical care may no longer be the stuff of science fiction.
Poon is an assistant professor at the Stanford School of Engineering. She is developing a new class of medical devices that can be implanted or injected into the human body and powered wirelessly using electromagnetic radio waves. No batteries to wear out. No cables to provide power.
“Such devices could revolutionize medical technology,” said Poon. “Applications include everything from diagnostics to minimally invasive surgeries.”
Certain of these new devices, like heart probes, chemical and pressure sensors, cochlear implants, pacemakers, and drug pumps, would be stationary within the body. Others, like Poon’s most recent creations, could travel through the bloodstream to deliver drugs, perform analyses, and perhaps even zap blood clots or removing plaque from sclerotic arteries.
Challenged by power
The idea of implantable medical devices is not new, but most of today’s implements are challenged by power, namely the size of their batteries, which are large, heavy and must be replaced periodically. Fully half the volume of most of these devices is consumed by battery.
“While we have gotten very good at shrinking electronic and mechanical components of implants, energy storage has lagged in the move to miniaturize,” said co-author Teresa Meng, a professor of electrical engineering and of computer science at Stanford. “This hinders us in where we can place implants within the body, but also creates the risk of corrosion or broken wires, not to mention replacing aging batteries.”
Poon’s devices are different. They consist of a radio transmitter outside the body sending signals to an independent device inside the body that picks up the signal with an antenna of coiled wire. The transmitter and the antenna are magnetically coupled such that any change in current flow in the transmitter produces a voltage in the coiled wire — or, more accurately, it induces a voltage. The power is transferred wirelessly. The electricity runs electronics on the device and propels it through the bloodstream, if so desired.
Upending convention
It sounds easy, but it is not. Poon had to first upend some long-held assumptions about the delivery of wireless power inside the human body.
For fifty years, scientists have been working on wireless electromagnetic powering of implantable devices, but they ran up against mathematics. According to the models, high-frequency radio waves dissipate quickly in human tissue, fading exponentially the deeper they go.
Low-frequency signals, on the other hand, penetrate well, but require antennae a few centimeters in diameter to generate enough power for the device, far too large to fit through all but the biggest arteries. In essence, because the math said it could not be done, the engineers never tried.
Then a curious thing happened. Poon started to look more closely at the models. She realized that scientists were approaching the problem incorrectly. In their models, they assumed that human muscle, fat and bone were generally good conductors of electricity, and therefore governed by a specific subset of the mathematical principles known as Maxwell’s equations — the “quasi-static approximation” to be exact.
Poon took a different tack, choosing instead to model tissue as a dielectric — a type of insulator. As it turns out human tissue is a poor conductor of electricity. But, radio waves can still move through them. In a dielectric, the signal is conveyed as waves of shifting polarization of atoms within cells. Even better, Poon also discovered that human tissue is a “low-loss” dielectric — that is to say little of the signal gets lost along the way.
She recalculated and made a surprising find: Using new equations she learned high-frequency radio waves \ travel much farther in human tissue than originally thought.
Revelation
“When we extended things to higher frequencies using a simple model of tissue we realized that the optimal frequency for wireless powering is actually around one gigahertz,” said Poon, “about 100 times higher than previously thought.”
More significantly, however, her revelation meant that antennae inside the body could be 100 times smaller and yet deliver the same power.
Poon was not so much in search of a new technology; she was in search of a new math. The antenna on the device Poon demonstrated at the conference yesterday is just two millimeters square; small enough to travel through the bloodstream.
She has developed two types of self-propelled devices. One drives electrical current directly through the fluid to create a directional force that pushes the device forward. This type of device is capable of moving at just over half-a-centimeter per second. The second type switches current back-and-forth in a wire loop to produce swishing motion similar to the motion a kayaker makes to paddle upstream.
“There is considerable room for improvement and much work remains before these devices are ready for medical applications,” said Poon. “But for the first time in decades the possibility seems closer than ever.”
Stanford doctoral candidates Daniel Pivonka and Anatoly Yakovlev contributed to this research.
Ada Poon’s research was made possible by the support of C2S2 Focus Center, Olympus Corporation, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
Andrew Myers is associate director of communications for the Stanford University School of Engineering.
According to Germany-based BILDBlog, Bild may have, shall we say, "augmented" the statistics for Germany — the average cup size for German women is C, not D. The blog also points out that the map was made over a year ago by a website called "Target Map," so it's weird that Bild is promoting it now. But, as the writer muses: "On the other hand: What journalistic diligence exercise, if you have a map of the world tits?" ~Gotta love Google Translator.
You would think that the editors of a newspaper with a daily circulation of 3 million and enough power and influence that it basically forced the former President of Germany to resign in February after a huge corruption scandal would consider it beneath themselves to publish a dumb boob map. But apparently print is dying in Germany, too.
"Bondage Makes You Just Be"
by Dalton Ott of SeriousBondage.com
April 5, 2012
A young woman contacted me several months ago with questions about our style of heavy bondage.
She has been in the BDSM community for ten years and has experienced every type of play except heavy gear bondage. As we talked more her interest grew and before long she wanted to give it a try. I chose to put her into fully hooded sensory deprivation using my floating bouncing sleepsack setup.
After a long sensory journey she emerged from the warm moist womb like rubber cocoon as if she was being reborn.
Sensory deprivation was the type of bondage she struggled most to understand. It had no sexual element, strong sensation, or power dynamic, it was simply bondage.
She asked a very common question: why would anyone want to be so immobilized and separated? During her confinement she experienced uncontrolled laughter, followed by a deep journey into subspace, ending in a cathartic tearful release. This was a totally unexpected result.
Our subsequent conversations were quite informative. She is perceptive and smart with an ability to clearly put her experience into words.
The one phrase that struck a chord was “bondage makes you just be”. After my lifelong journey into bondage, this young woman put it all into a few simple words: BONDAGE MAKES YOU JUST… BE.
I am always grateful for fresh eyes. I am around so much bondage as part of my job, I sometimes lose perspective. She opened my eyes and mind so I could look at bondage in a fresh new way. I began to realize more fully what my own driving need for bondage does to me and for me.
Thinking back to when I was in school the words used for my behavior were bad, slow, and undisciplined. Today they have different words; ADD, ADHD, obsessive, compulsive, and others. Whatever it is called, I have struggled with this restlessness and lack of focus for as long as I can remember. I have personally come to terms with this experience and the fact that I am different. This took only a few decades, plus a few therapists.
When death was knocking on the door of a Canadian man, he took drastic measures to save his own life — with a self-injected fecal transplant.
The poop-injecting patient is a 66-year-old man from Albert Bridge, Nova Scotia, who suffered from a bacterial infection known as Clostridium difficile, or C. difficile, since undergoing routine surgery 18 months ago, according to the Chronicle Herald.
The man, who spoke to the paper on the condition they would not reveal his name, said he was so frustrated and ill that he decided to get rid of the infection once and for all by giving himself an enema last Friday using feces belonging to his cousin that had been tested for other infections and parasites.
"It’s a nasty topic to discuss, but fecal transplants work, and I was not ready to wait any longer," the man told the paper.
Want to know how he did it? Here's the straight poop. Basically, he mixed the stool with water and flushed it into his nether regions using an enema, Gizmodo reported.
In the process, he jumped the gun. His doctor, Baroudi Fashir, was originally set to perform the "transpoosion" on March 9, but, despite it being approved by the hospital, there were no set guidelines for it so it could not go ahead.
Fashir was reportedly shocked when he learned that his patient had done the procedure himself.
"He did it by himself?" Fashir told the Chronicle Herald. "It’s not good to do by himself."
Treating medical patients with feces sounds, well, facetious, but some doctors think it's not such a crappy idea.
In fact, in September 2010, the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology published research suggesting that poop transplants could help patients suffering from the nasty clostridium difficile bug, which patients are increasingly catching in hospitals and nursing homes, according to AOL News.
Enemas are one way to inject the healing power of poop, but gastroenterologist Dr. Lawrence Brandt of New York's Montefiore Medical Center says a gastric tube inserted in the nose also can be good for what ails you.
"At the moment, it's a treatment of last resort," Brandt told AOL News. "But it's very efficient, with a cure rate of 90 percent for first-time users. Plus, it's safe with no adverse effects, and it's fast, sometimes solving the problem within hours."
But while Brandt believes that poop as medicine has "poo-sibilities," other experts like Dr. Saad Habba, a gastroenterologist at Overlook Hospital in Summit, N.J., isn't ready to flush the use of antibiotics down the toilet.
"Few of us can imagine using [stool], and it is unconventional," he admitted to AOL News. "Clearly, this is an end-of-the-road approach for recurrent C. Diff infection because of the obvious logistics of it."
Earlier this week at The Conference on World Affairs, I watched a panel about science in the movies. During the panel, physicist and science writer Sidney Perkowitz said that, out of all the people writing about science and medicine in Hollywood, the writers of House are some of the people who care the most about accuracy.
After I tweeted that, reader Jay Rishel pointed me toward Polite Dissent, a blog written by a doctor that periodically reviews the medical science presented on episodes of House.
It's a nice reminder that even the writers who care the most about getting science right, don't always succeed. That said, I am pretty impressed that, for the most part, the complaints the doctor-blogger has are usually closer to the nit-pick end of the spectrum. For a show that is so densely packed with medical information, that's pretty good. Some of the complaints about Season 2, Episode 1:
I’m surprised the inmate didn’t have a severely elevated blood pressure with the pheochromocytoma, and I’m equally surprised that his abdominal surgery went so well since pressure on the abdomen is enough to cause the tumor to release a large amount of adrenalin. This sends the blood pressure rocketing dangerously high.
The patient got over his respiratory depression remarkably quickly — one minute he’s sick enough to require intubation, and the rest of the time he’s fine. (And why wasn’t the endotracheal tube taped in place?)
It takes a great deal more alcohol than a few shots to clear that much methanol from the body, and that’s why IV ethanol is generally used.
The Hunterian Museum of The Royal College of Surgeons has teamed up with the Medical Artists’ Association of Great Britain to create an art exhibit that brings together sports and medicine.
New artworks were commissioned especially for the show that aims to profile the role that medicine, and particularly surgery, plays for the modern athlete. If you’re in London anytime between now and the end of September, be sure to stop by.
Find out about the latest techniques in orthopaedic surgery, innovative developments in prosthetics and the importance of training to muscle development. World-leading medical artists Joanna Culley, Emily Evans, Richard Neave/Denise Smith and Catherine Sulzmann have used have used a variety of art-forms including watercolour, video and sculpture to represent a selection of sports and para-sports. Their art provides a unique opportunity to study in detail the best of British at running, hurdling, canoeing and hockey.
Exhibition link: Anatomy of an Athlete…
BY Lana Fox, Boston Magazine POSTED ON 3/16/2012
I’ve been hearing the phrase “fetishization” a lot of late. Just look at Arianna Huffington’s recent (and intelligent) post on “What the Fetishization of Social Media is Costing Us All.” Sure, Huffington probably intends the other meaning of fetish — an object that is worshiped because of its magical powers — but it is just as likely in today’s culture that sexual fetishization is what springs to mind.
A sexual fetish can be defined as an arousal arising from a particular object or objects and can be as simple as an enjoyment of whips or as complex as eating sushi from a partner’s naked body. Sadly, we don’t live in a fetish-friendly society, so I want to put the record straight. Fetishes are often highly creative: from spandex to balloons to PVC corsets, the range of play is rich, often demanding an inventive mindset.
But those who believe that fetishes aren’t relevant to their social welfare should think again. When people fight their desires — rather than express them responsibly — the resulting suppression of anger or fear can erupt into other areas of life. Also, because fetishes are so widely misunderstood, persecution still exists. Just ask the New England Leather Alliance, which runs the Fetish Fair Fleamarket in Providence each year. The Alliance was apparently started in 1991 because three men who threw private leather/fetish parties in their home were charged with “prostitution,” even though the five-dollar cover charge only went toward the buffet.
Fortunately, Massachusetts is increasingly sex-positive, so shouldn’t our language encourage further growth? I’d love to hear “fetishization” used in a positive context. How about: “Your living room could do with some fetishization!” or “You look so gloriously fetishized tonight!”
Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
 ‘When I shoot I see fetish from the inside and try to convey the emotions as well as the visuals. I tied up my first “girlfriend” when I was six on the school bus and from that moment on I knew I was “different”. I have been a student and educator of BDSM, including but not limited to, age play, pony play, corporal, discipline, pain for pleasure play as well as a Kinbaku artist (Japanese bondage). I consider myself a top and some consider me their dominant.’ Lochai
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The Huffington Post | By David Moye Posted: 04/ 6/2012 12:43 pm