Posts by Peter Ashby
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Those who complain TV geeks don't look like geeks suggest to me that you guys don't have The IT Crowd in NZ. For which you have my sympathy, it's very good.
I too am a bit concerned about the UK thing of wanting women completely hairless. I want a woman, not a child and as far as I'm concerned pubic hair is sexy as. Provided its clean of course.
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@Russell
We have just been through buying a Belkin device for iPod playback in our latest car since the cassette widget doesn't work with CD players. I could not get it to work, it would transmit okay, until I started the engine and the connection in the ciggy lighter was well dodgy. It got returned to retailer (distance selling regs here in the UK are very useful) and apparently the entire ciggy charger range have been discontinued because of that sort of problem and apparently because they have been damaging people's ciggy lighters from an electrical p.o.v.So it looks like you have timed your search well. Look elsewhere. Not that we have found anything. As for phones in the UK people pull over, the law says you must cut the engine before answering as well. We haven't bothered with hands free even though a bluetooth ear dongle has been available for some time.
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Re tai chi
Wearing my scientist's hat I understand that, while the fall prevention program had some effectiveness tai chi is better and the stats are firm on that one. I can see the mechanism too. Walking is a very linear activity and if your exercise consists of walking carefully along smooth flat surfaces then your lateral muscles and ligaments will not be strong. Tai chi is a slow gentle program that asks you to stand on one leg, which can be a challenge for the elderly.
I'm mid 40s and a distance runner and a bit over a year ago I realised I had trouble standing steadily on one leg despite running 10miles not being any trouble. You can get away with not worrying about your adductors and abductors when you are young, as you age that luxury slowly leaves you.
In response I made myself a narrow, high wobbleboard and instigated core body strengthening. I try and do 20min on the wobbleboard once a week and have really felt the difference. Fewer little niggles and either side of my knees and ankles no longer plague me after 15+ miles.
My wobbleboard would be beyond most elderly persons, but Tai chi not so much but to much the same effect. If you have functional side to side muscles you will be more able to catch yourself if you lose your balance. There is nothing wrong with replacing something that works with something that works better. It used to be called progress.
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@Russell
Be aware that up here in Scotland we did not go down the route the system in England and Wales did. No SATS, no Foundation Schools, no League Tables (in the same way). This is one of the reasons we moved up here from London. Unfortunately we could not arrange to do so quite in time and the eldest had to engage with the hyper competitive world of 'getting into a secondary school'. It is to her great credit that she aced it and got into a very good school*.
*Good defined by the competition to get into it and its history. The rate of substance, particularly cocaine, abuse in the upper school indicates it burns out a lot of students along the way. We are glad we got out.
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you have to develop a sort of zen acceptance of failure to keep at this game.
Sounds like my PhD, after spending the first year using a technique that wasn't working to look for something that wasn't there I moved on to something that took 8ish months to make work, mostly. I developed one of those Zen attitudes. Mine was 'that no experiment will ever work'. Thus when the expected result eventuated no disappointment ensued. The payoff was that when the damn thing finally started working (via some chemical relaxation (on the mice, not me)) the euphoria was truly wonderful.
Then I began to generate some data.
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Why don't nested quotes work? Why didn't I press preview?
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<quote>This review of 39 trials found that spinal manipulation was more effective in reducing pain and improving the ability to perform everyday activities than sham (fake) therapy and therapies already known to be unhelpful. However, it was no more or less effective than medication for pain, physical therapy, exercises, back school or the care given by a general practitioner.
It performed better than sham treatment or known-inefffective therapies, and no better or worse than standard medical care. Both performed better than sham treatment. The authors clearly seem to find that some things treat back pain usefully and others don't.
You've been repeatedly touting this review and I don't think it actually serves your argument at all well.</quote>Russell you are still ignoring salient points. The report makes a distinction in the above piece between 'ineffective' and 'effective' therapies, yet their report finds that the difference is not statistically significant since nothing is actually effective.
I have pointed this important point out to you several times now. It is becoming tedious in the extreme that you seem unable to grasp it. Several eminent people got rather grumpy at Cochrane for, having proven there was no statistically significant difference between the 'ineffective' and 'effective' treatments it then talks about them as different groups.
This is why the numbers matter more than the words.
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@Russell
And if the efficacy of acupuncture can be demonstrated, then you and Peter have a bit of a problem -- because its core theory is, in scientific terms, all kinds of woo.
You know, intellectually, that it can't work. But, oops, it does.Not better than placebo it doesn't. We now have a number of different placebos for acupuncture, the absence of which held the analysis of its effectiveness back for some time. When you compare acupuncture with either sham acupuncture or random placing of the needles there is no difference.
It is an effective placebo though, but with everything be wary of what they claim to be able to treat and don't stop your meds.
Oh and why not save some money by just going to a massage therapist if that is all it is? or get your Darling to massage you, my wife is quite good at it. The general rule is massage towards the heart for long muscles and around the spine and from outside to inside for the sheet muscles of the back. It isn't as hard as you might think. And if you look online you will find all sorts of stretches you can do yourself. Having pulled my groin muscles recently i found a number of exercises on physiotherapy websites and now have them well under control. The thing about this sort of thing is it has to be done regularly and kept up along with attention to posture (he says sitting up straighter as he felt his back twinge from slouching). The problem is of course that the required dedication to exercise and stretch is hard to come by, mine comes as a side effect of wanting to run so I do what is necessary to continue to be able to do so. I am bad at it when I'm not running.
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BTW we now know how bumblebees fly and it is seriously cool (am I the only one who reads New Scientist?). When they flap their wings they generate vortices and it is the upward force they get from these that was missing from the earlier analyses.
So basically bumblebees dance across the sky balancing on a series of little vortices. Around here they don't bumble at all. I watch them flying in a straight line over the back fence and straight towards the large planter box with the herb garden and to whichever herb is currently in flower, they then gather the nectar before flying straight over the garage roof into next door's garden. I've watched them do this many, many times. The ones we have here have either orange or white bottoms.
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@Richard
We only have Russell's subjective view on that benefit. Where pray tell are the objective measurements of his range of movements before/after and a week later with no further interventions? How do we know that he doesn't feel better because he expects to and/or because he doesn't want to admit to himself he might have wasted his time and money? (I'm not saying these things are, only that they have not been objectively ruled out).
This is why we do randomised case controlled studies to tease out these factors and when we do nothing, nothing at all, including doing nothing works for back pain except perhaps, losing weight and a structured exercise program (the sort of things most people are never going to do).