so I don't know where to put this but it's a gem, so lets create a

[MENTAL HEALTH] subsection. Here's where I think a lot of white educated males are at currently (it's hilarious, he's very low key sarcastic)

Hallelujah!

Woman wakes days after surgery with different accent

A woman who's never been to Ireland wakes up with an Irish accent. Jeanne Moos reports on foreign accent syndrome.

short vid segment @ CNN.com

Not b.s. if you watch the entire tape - it's a real medical syndrome with over 100 reported cases in medical literature.

Five myths about obesity

By Susma Vaidya and Nazrat Mirza @ WashingtonPost.com, May 13, 2021 at 3:20 p.m. EDT

[....]

Myth No. 1

Obesity results from lifestyle choices. [....]

Myth No. 2

Obesity is not a disease. [....]

Myth No. 3

Dieting and exercise will reverse severe obesity. [....]

Myth No. 4

It's just 'baby fat.'  [....]

Myth No. 5

I can be both fit and fat.[....]

Susma Vaidya is a general pediatrician and associate medical director of the IDEAL Clinic, a pediatric weight-management clinic, at Children’s National Hospital.

Nazrat Mirza is a general pediatrician and the medical director of the IDEAL Clinic, a pediatric weight-management clinic, at Children’s National Hospital.

It's not always going to be pretty, the new normal:

Black residents now account for more than 8 in 10 D.C. coronavirus cases

By Lola Fadulu and Dan Keating @ WashingtonPost.com, May 25, 2021 at 6:30 p.m. EDT

Black people make up more than 80 percent of coronavirus cases reported in the District in recent days, compared with 46 percent late last year, a disparity that D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) highlighted in a call with Ward 8 community leaders Tuesday.

The share of new infections involving Black people spiked sharply in the city starting around mid-April, when the coronavirus vaccine became widely available to D.C. residents. The share of cases involving White people, meanwhile, has fallen below 10 percent, compared with 33 percent of cases in December.

It is yet another way in which the highly contagious virus — which has disproportionately sickened and killed people of color throughout the pandemic — has exacerbated the nation’s deep racial divides. Similar trends have been seen elsewhere in the country, including in both Kentucky and Tennessee.

The District’s population is about 45 percent Black and 42.5 percent White, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. But White residents have been significantly more likely to get vaccinated, due to higher rates of both hesitancy and access issues for Black Washingtonians.

“I got a troubling statistic from Dr. Nesbitt today that the percent of people of color — Black and Brown people — who are getting covid has gone up,” Bowser told the Anacostia Coordinating Council, referring to D.C. health director LaQuandra Nesbitt. “And that is a direct function of vaccination.”

Bowser urged the more than 90 people on the Zoom call to get vaccinated if they had not already done so: “You’re putting yourself at risk and you’re putting the city at risk, because if this virus kicks up again, among unvaccinated communities, it could drive our numbers up and shut us down, and none of us wants that.”[....]

HOW CAN WE BLAME THE POLICE?

Edit to add:

Kaiser poll on U.S. vaccination and anti-vax, best available data assured (mho):

see whole thread, it continues

Neuroscientists Have Discovered a Phenomenon That They Can’t Explain

“Scientists are meant to know what’s going on, but in this particular case, we are deeply confused.”

By Ed Yong @ TheAtlantic.com, June 9 (already 2nd most popular story there)

Carl Schoonover and Andrew Fink are confused. As neuroscientists, they know that the brain must be flexible but not too flexible. It must rewire itself in the face of new experiences, but must also consistently represent the features of the external world. How? The relatively simple explanation found in neuroscience textbooks is that specific groups of neurons reliably fire when their owner smells a rose, sees a sunset, or hears a bell. These representations—these patterns of neural firing—presumably stay the same from one moment to the next. But as Schoonover, Fink, and others have found, they sometimes don’t. They change—and to a confusing and unexpected extent.

Schoonover, Fink, and their colleagues from Columbia University allowed mice to sniff the same odors over several days and weeks, and recorded the activity of neurons in the rodents’ piriform cortex—a brain region involved in identifying smells. At a given moment, each odor caused a distinctive group of neurons in this region to fire. But as time went on, the makeup of these groups slowly changed. Some neurons stopped responding to the smells; others started. After a month, each group was almost completely different. Put it this way: The neurons that represented the smell of an apple in May and those that represented the same smell in June were as different from each other as those that represent the smells of apples and grass at any one time.

This is, of course, just one study, of one brain region, in mice. But other scientists have shown that the same phenomenon, called representational drift, occurs in a variety of brain regions besides the piriform cortex. Its existence is clear; everything else is a mystery. Schoonover and Fink told me that they don’t know why it happens, what it means, how the brain copes, or how much of the brain behaves in this way. How can animals possibly make any lasting sense of the world if their neural responses to that world are constantly in flux? If such flux is common, “there must be mechanisms in the brain that are undiscovered and even unimagined that allow it to keep up,” Schoonover said. “Scientists are meant to know what’s going on, but in this particular case, we are deeply confused. We expect it to take many years to iron out.” [....]

600,000 dead: With normal life in reach, covid’s late-stage victims lament what could have been

By Marc Fisher, Fenit Nirappil, Annie Gowen and Lori Rozsa @ WashingtonPost.com, JUNE 11, 2021

They came so close. Philip Sardelis already had his vaccine appointment in hand. Cinnamon Jamila Key had just received her first shot. Charles Pryor tried but couldn’t get the coronavirus vaccine in time. Alexey Aguilar had been reluctant to commit to such a new medicine but was coming around to the idea.

And then covid-19 took them. On top of the grief and sorrow, their families now also must deal with the unfairness, the eternal mystery of what might have been.

The Americans who have died of covid-19 in recent days and weeks — the people whose deaths have pushed the total U.S. loss from the pandemic to nearly 600,000 — passed away even as their families, friends and neighbors emerged from 15 months of isolation and fear. The juxtaposition is cruel: Here, masks off; workplaces, shops and schools reopening. There, people struggling to breathe, separated from loved ones, silenced by ventilators.

“The finish line is in sight and if you don’t make it now, it’s like the astronauts who make it all the way home and then their capsule splashes down and sinks,” said Peter Paganussi, an emergency room physician in Ranson, W.Va., who still sees new cases of covid, the illness caused by the coronavirus, every day. Even as the number of Americans dying of covid has plummeted from thousands to hundreds each day, the death toll keeps climbing [....]

continues with anecdotals and a warning that they are heartbreaking. Not a single one can be faulted as a covid denier, either.

The Grief Crisis Is Coming

For each person who dies of Covid-19, experts say there are at least nine newly bereaved. We must begin to address the toll.

By Allison Gilbert Ms. Gilbert is an author who writes extensively about grief and resilience. Her latest book is “Passed and Present: Keeping Memories of Loved Ones Alive.”

April 12, 2021 @ NYTimes.com

The end of the Covid-19 crisis in the United States is in sight, thanks to effective vaccines being deployed on a massive scale. But the still growing death toll will leave behind millions of bereaved people, wracked by the suffering that the loss of a loved one can bring. This is a public health crisis with consequences that may last generations, which we do not currently have the policy tools or resources to address.

We first need to get a sense of the scope of our national grief. Researchers are just beginning to count the bereaved, and while current estimates suggest five million Americans have lost a loved one to Covid-19, the final tally is likely to be much larger.

Ashton Verdery, an associate professor of sociology and demography at Pennsylvania State University, recently led a study that introduced the Covid-19 Bereavement Multiplier. By his team’s calculus, for every person who dies of Covid-19, nine loved ones are left behind [....]

It's starting to happen:

A good example of the fucking wonders of our "public" (quotes intentional) health care plans when they are managed care:

Those who have no familiarity with all this lovely lingo will find out soon enough if they get their "dream" of a "public option." Warning: if you get it, it is likely it is not going to be the heaven you think it is. You can avoid a lot of it by: paying lots of money for extra private insurance, as always.

Edit to add: in the past, the lucky few could get around a lot of this by having a primary care doctor who was willing to understand the system and spend a lot of time playing the game to the patient's benefit. After covid, there are even fewer of those kind left, they are all burnt out and want a vacation and you'll have to find another advocate to play games for you, probably yourself, while you are sick.

No surprise to me:  the pandemic has exposed how much doctors did not know.

 “We have this paternalistic attitude in medicine,” SO STOP IT, JUST STOP IT, why is that so hard? The best doctors work with a patient as a team, it's not hard. If the patient needs to be taught to do that, that's what you teach them! 

HOW ABOUT you apply this principle to every single disease Asthma can be very individual, with exact triggers varying from person to person because -DOH! - human bodies are not robots and if you were honest you would admit you don't really have a full understanding of how they work, do you?

FLORIDA COVID SURGE!

South Korea has suffered fewer covid deaths than Palm Beach County

plus de fraternite, moins de liberte en France (there's gonna be protests!)

DOJ making a big deal about this:

He is correct, however the CDC cards we got now are not much proof: