Archive for the ‘medicine’ Category

CNN Discovers Pot Can Be Bad For You? Who Knew…except for anybody with a Brain & Memory

Posted: May 31, 2025 by datechguy in culture, medicine

Ben Franklin: Experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn in no other.

Many years ago my wife was a school nurse and once in a while I’d visit her at her school, usually when something had to be dropped off, a forgotten lunch or set of keys or occasionally flowers etc.

On the wall of her office were two charts. One was for alcohol and one was for pot. Each one had pointers to parts of the body that it’s use had a bad effect upon and stated those effects.

That chart stuck with me even as during the Obama years the best and brightest decided to push for legalization of pot all over the nation, pushing the myth that it is basically harmless and suggesting that it would be a cash cow for states. What was really amazing to me was the number of connected people who suddenly seemed to find themselves with licenses for the stuff.

What really interesting is that if you do any kind of web search there is no shortage of sites referencing government studies that confirm all of the problems that were still known 20 years ago before the woke crowd successful push on the subject. To quote a government site:

Marijuana use can have negative and long-term effects:

Brain iconBrain health: Marijuana can cause permanent IQ loss of as much as 8 points when people start using it at a young age. These IQ points do not come back, even after quitting marijuana.

Gears iconMental health: Studies link marijuana use to depression, anxiety, suicide planning, and psychotic episodes. It is not known, however, if marijuana use is the cause of these conditions.

Bicycle iconAthletic Performance: Research shows that marijuana affects timing, movement, and coordination, which can harm athletic performance.

Driving signDriving: People who drive under the influence of marijuana can experience dangerous effects: slower reactions, lane weaving, decreased coordination, and difficulty reacting to signals and sounds on the road.

Baby carriage iconBaby’s health and development: Marijuana use during pregnancy may cause fetal growth restriction, premature birth, stillbirth, and problems with brain development, resulting in hyperactivity and poor cognitive function. Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and other chemicals from marijuana can also be passed from a mother to her baby through breast milk, further impacting a child’s healthy development.

Arrow iconDaily life: Using marijuana can affect performance and how well people do in life. Research shows that people who use marijuana are more likely to have relationship problems, worse educational outcomes, lower career achievement, and reduced life satisfaction.

So when I saw this CNN/Yahoo story at Instapundit I almost laughed out loud:

Healthy people who regularly smoked marijuana or consumed THC-laced edibles showed signs of early cardiovascular disease similar to tobacco smokers, a new small study found.

“To my knowledge, it’s the first study looking at THC’s impact on vascular function in humans,” said senior study author Matthew Springer, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

“We’re looking at a window in the future, showing the early changes that may explain why smoking marijuana has been linked to later heart disease,” Springer said. “It appears the act of smoking and the THC itself both contribute to those changes in different ways.”

This has to be almost as big a shock to them as the news the Joe Biden wasn’t 100%!

Given that we had 12 of the previous 16 years with government by:

  • A corrupt Chicago leftist pol
  • An even more corrupt Washington pol
  • Whoever paid either one

I find the end results of all of this completely unsurprising and emphasizes why the culture war was worth fighting.

But the satisfaction of being right pales before the damage done to our country and the displeasure of being unable to drive through large parts of my city with the smell of Pot all around me.

I’d just as soon have been wrong and have things be OK.

Young Sheldon, George Cooper and the Ivermectin Irony

Posted: May 10, 2024 by datechguy in covid, entertainment, media, medicine
Tags: , , , ,

CBS’ popular series Young Sheldon has been trending on twitter/X last night because the character of George Cooper, Sheldon’s Dad excellently played by Lane Smith was killed off by a heart attack.

It was very realistic in the sense there wasn’t a lot of “drama” involved. No big scene with him, nobody else around, he left for work that morning heading for his job in the knowledge that he had just achieved what has to be the dream of every high school football coach in Texas, being recruited to coach at the college level and just like that he was gone, all of his plans and the plans of his family eliminated in an instant.

All over twitter all kinds of users were in mourning even though it had been established by the parent series “The Big Bang Theory” that Sheldon’s dad died when he was 14. Everyone knew it was coming, although perhaps they figured it was coming next week or they and the fictitious Cooper would get a chance to say goodbye. The series writer Chuck Lorre who has a history of leaving endcards at the end of his shows left this one:

In case you can’t read the print:

Eighteen years ago , when we were writing and producing The Big Bang Theory, it seemed like a good idea to imagine that Sheldon’s childhood was deeply disrupted by the loss of his father. No one could have thought that someday we would regret that decision. That someday is now.

There were a lot of tears on stage when this episode’s last scene was shot. A reminder that we had all fallen in love with a fictional character Which is itself, a reminder to love the characters in our live who are real. To do otherwise is to live with regret

While I agree with the sentiment I found it rather ironic considering this story from a few days ago concerning Chris Cuomo late of CNN, apparently having nasty side effects from the COVID Vaccine and is taking ivermectin daily, the same drug that the administration along with practically the entire media and entertainment industry and CNN insisted was only for horses and urged the public to avoid.

His admissions drew a nasty rebuke from Gino Carano one of the many people tarred as “anti-vaxers” over questioning the shots, an excerpt:

You were a part of one the most powerful news organizations in the world and you bullied and shamed the genuine questions from the public that you were supposed to be offering unbiased news to. Instead, you all called them “anti vaxxers” and “alt right extremists”. Don’t try and change the story now. Show some humility. People weren’t allowed to sit next to their loved ones as they died because of the propaganda you spread! This phase in major news media history will go down as one of the most embarrassing, destructive moments that cost people’s lives and careers, broke up families and destroyed our economy. You don’t look like a hero now, you look arrogant with no idea how deep this goes for the people this destroyed.

What’s even more ironic, news that Astra Zenica has withdrawn its COVID vaccine from the market insisting it has nothing to do with any side effects. Perish the thought!

I bring this up because the grief of the cooper family that so many are commenting on and sharing is the same grief that the families of the 1483 young athletes who had sudden heart attacks and died after receiving the COVID vaccine and of thousands and thousands of others who have “died suddenly” since the push for the vaccine and the push against ivermectin.

Now for the record Mr. Lorre while supporting Joe Biden, did not attack people who didn’t take the vaccine (putting up a single vanity card making a joke about side vaccine side effects) and I can’t find a single entry in his cards containing the word: “ivermectin”

But I DO wonder how many people in mourning over George Cooper online were part of the crowd that pressured people into taking the COVID vaccines, who went after people who recommend ivermectin, who were part of the crowd who tired to cancel Joe Rogan for speaking the truth about this subject?

I wonder how many of them were hiring managers who would not let people work if they didn’t get the vax, I wonder how many of them were people involved in decision making that penalized and ostracized folks in the medical profession who spoke out about the safety of Ivermectin and how many if they were not part of that decision making crowd, merely added their voices online in support of the treatment of any who dared strayed from the orthodoxly of the message pushed every day by the media, the administration and the left?

I wonder if such people have any grief for all those families whose suffering and grief are real and question, even for a tiny moment, if they had any the slightest part in enabling that suffering and reflect on it.

I suspect such number are few but for those who are self aware enough, particularly those who had the power over others and made decisions that cost lives, be aware forgiveness for these acts is a single sacramental confession away.

Gimmie that old time Science It’s good enough for me

Posted: March 28, 2024 by datechguy in culture, medicine
Tags: , , , ,

Matthew Harrison Brady: Does right have no meaning to you, sir?
Henry Drummond: Realizing that I may prejudice the case of my client, I must tell you that right has no meaning for me whatsoever. But truth has meaning… as a direction!

Inherit the Wind 1960

One of the most perverse attacks that the left in general and the Biden administration in general have made on people these days has been claiming that people who opposed them were “anti-science” and “science deniers”. For me this type of thing is the ultimate end in the rush to redefine words and meanings to serve an agenda. While I may no longer work in an engineering field one of the things about being having a Computer Science degree from the 1980’s in the days before “woke” entered everything was the idea of evidence driving conclusions.

Thus the famous quote from Feynman

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.

Richard P Feynman

There was a time when the left and even Hollywood believed this and in fact the most celebrated episode of the entire Star Trek TNG franchise celebrated Science as it was

Picard (as Kanin): Hey, that’s my hobby. Find your own.
Meribor: You’re the one who taught me. Don’t complain if you’ve turned me into a scientist.
Picard (as Kanin): And what has the scientist been up to today?
Meribor: Analyzing soil samples. There isn’t any anaerobic bacteria. The soil is dead. This isn’t just a very long drought, is it, Father? I have entries in my log that go back ten years. You have data preceding that for fifteen years. You’ve reached the same conclusion, I know you have.
Picard (as Kanin): I haven’t reached any conclusion. A good scientist doesn’t function by conjecture.
Meribor: A good scientist functions by hypothesizing and then proving or disproving that hypothesis. That’s what I did.

Star Trek The Next Generation The Inner Light 1992

Note that he doesn’t prioritize if the data confirms to some “woke’ theme or advances a social standard, it’s observation, experimentation and deduction. You go where the evidence takes you no matter how much China or a particular industry might want to pay. Why? To serve the truth:

Meribor: You’ve taught me to pursue the truth, no matter how painful it is. It’s too late to back off now. This planet is dying.
Picard (as Kanin): Perhaps I should have filled your head with trivial concerns. Games and toys and clothes.
Meribor: I don’t think you mean that.
Picard (as Kanin): No, I don’t. It just saddens me to see you burdened with the knowledge things you can’t change.

It’s practically impossible to think of an episode of Star Trek advancing such a line now in an age where everyone has their own “truth” which can be whatever it is. Today science must serve the cause or it must be suppressed.

Thus when a black Harvard professor, a winner of the MacArthur Genius Fellowship, the author of dozens of papers studied interactions with the police and came to a conclusion contrary to THE NARRATIVETM and his own expectations It and he must be attacked

“All hell broke loose” immediately after the 104-page economics paper with a 150-page appendix was published, according to Fryer.

Within four minutes of publishing the paper, Fryer received an email that read: “You’re full of s**t.”

He explained, “I had colleagues take me to the side and say, ‘Don’t publish this. You’ll ruin your career.'”

The hostilities toward Fryer were so intense that he required police protection for about a month, including his then-7-day-old daughter.

“I was going to the grocery store to get diapers with the armed guard. It was crazy. It was really, truly crazy,” Fryer said during a recent episode of “Honestly with Bari Weiss.”

Mind you he was surprised at his own results but unlike people who trusted “The ScienceTM” he took steps to confirm they were not mistaken:

Fryer said he was surprised by the results because he “expected” to see racial bias towards blacks in police shootings.

He hired eight fresh researchers to ensure the results were correct, and the results remained the same.

Richard Feynman would have been proud but he’s been dead for 36 years plus he’s a white guy so obviously today his opinion wouldn’t count.

I bring all this up because of a story I saw today about a study out of Japan that is rather troubling:

A team of researchers in Japan say that, based on the volume of evidence that has come to light about post-vaccination harms, medical professionals worldwide should be alerted to potential dangers in using blood derived from people who have had the jab, as well as from those suffering persistent symptoms from covid itself (‘long covid’). They say methods to identify and remove the contaminants are urgently needed, and propose a range of specific tests and regulations to deal with the risks.

Again this was not the expected result:

Contrary to initial expectations, the genes and proteins are now known to persist in the blood for prolonged periods, and post-vaccination syndrome, or ‘spikeopathy’, has become a major global problem, the researchers say. The jabs should have been regarded as biomedicine, but because they were classified as vaccines, huge numbers of people were inoculated and many areas of medicine are beginning to become involved with the consequences. ‘This has never happened before in the history of biomedicine, and consequently it is highly suspected that blood products for transfusion have been affected.’

Now as this is from the pre-print of the paper and is yet to be peer reviewed so it’s a tad early to have an opinion it but I predict we will see two different methods of dealing with this study by the media

  1. Ignore it
  2. Attack it

However I being a believer in actual science rather than THE SCIENCETM I’m going to do what an engineer or a scientist of the old school, of the Feynman school would do: Take in the evidence given while awaiting the peer review of this paper before I make any final conclusions. Because that is how the old time science works.

It’s good enough for me.

Norovirus and my cruise ship trip

Posted: February 18, 2024 by John Ruberry in business, medicine
Tags: , , , , , ,

By John Ruberry

Okay, let me get say this before I get into the details of our ten-day cruise. Yes, barely, we can afford a cruise. So I’m not bragging about our wealth. Because we have nothing to brag about.

To celebrate an anniversary birthday for Mrs. Marathon Pundit–I’m not going to reveal the year–we departed on a Caribbean cruise earlier this month which concluded last Friday where it began, Fort Lauderdale.

Which cruise line? Let’s just call it Joyful Cruises.

This post is designed to start an honest conversation about cruise ships, one that you will be less likely to find in dinosaur corporate media, largely because cruise ships are major advertisers with them. 

I have no such restraints. Oh, I am not a doctor or any sort of health professional.

On the upside, a cruise makes affordable–barely again, for us–visits to remote places such as Carribean islands. I can drive from my home near Chicago and reach Key West, Florida in a couple of days. I can make it a week-long trip with extended stops. I cannot drive from Key West to the Bahamas. 

The highlight of the cruise for us were the excursions in Charlotte Amalie, US Virgin Islands, St. Lucia, Martinque, and Antigua. Issues with high waves cancelled plan stops at “Joyful Cay” in the Bahamas and Dominica. I understand, snowstorms and hurricanes force highway closures and baseball games are rained out. But according to a cruise Facebook group, those stops were also cancelled on that same Joyful cruise ship, which departed the same day our cruise ended. 

To compensate for the missed stops, our already paid for excursion was refunded and we each receivedc a $75 on-ship credit.

Fewer stops means more time on the ship–more time to interact with other passengers–and more time to become ill.

And people get sick–not just motion sickness–on cruise ships. Norovirus, commonly but mistakenly referred to as “stomach flu,” is a big problem on cruises.

From Today.com last year:

Outbreaks of the stomach bug have surged on cruise ships this year, reaching the highest levels seen in 10 years. Since January 2023, there have been 13 confirmed norovirus outbreaks [My note–there were just 12, one of those was salmonella and E. coli] on cruise ships under U.S. jurisdiction — that’s more outbreaks in six months than there have been during any full year since 2012, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More…

Most recently, a norovirus outbreak in June on the Viking Neptune sickened 110 passengers (over 13% of the ship’s guests) and nine crew members with vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal cramps, according to the CDC. The CDC has tracked outbreaks of gastrointestinal illness on cruise ships through its Vessel Sanitation Program (VSP) since 1994. 

Several weeks prior, a Celebrity Summit cruise ship reported an outbreak of norovirus that sickened more than 150 passengers and 25 crew members, per the CDC. It was the third norovirus outbreak on a Celebrity Cruises vessel this year. Another popular cruise line, Royal Caribbean International, has reported four outbreaks since January.

Late on the eighth day of our Joyful Cruise, Mrs. Marathon Pundit became quite ill, and her symptoms were fever, vomiting, and diarrhea. I visited the medical center of the ship on her behalf, the medical staffer explained that my wife would need to be confined to our stateroom–really, it was a tiny cabin—for 24 hours. Or longer if her symptoms continued. Notably, he didn’t say “quarantine.” Per CDC protocol, my wife was required to complete a form about her illness and conditions. He provided her with anti-diarrheal medication, the charge for it was $14. 

A day later it was my turn to get sick. How sick? 

While sitting on the toilet doing, well, you know, I took advantage of the compact bathroom in our stateroom, which allowed me to simultaneously and painfully vomit into the sink. A two-for-one cruise ship special! And four days later the soreness remains. The lower back muscular pain from the unnatural vomit-induced contortions severely challenged my fit body.

I didn’t bother to visit the medical center–I already knew what was wrong with me. And I didn’t need fill out a report. As we disembarked our ship in Fort Lauderdale, I overheard a few other passengers complain about “stomach flu,” and there was a mention of it on the unofficial cruise Facebook page organized by another passenger.

Getting sick with norovirus on a cruise is surprisingly common. Last year, the Miami Herald reported, “Some people know it as the ‘cruise ship virus’ because it’s often the cause of over 90% of diarrhea outbreaks on cruise ships, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

Neither Mrs. Marathon Pundit nor I were officially diagnosed with norovirus. But that 90 percent CDC statistic works for me. 

Yes, norovirus on cruise ships is also an official thing, a federal thing. The CDC even has a Facts About Noroviruses on Cruise Ships page on its website.

So far in the seven weeks of 2024, the CDC has reported official illness outbreaks on two cruise ships, one was confirmed as norovirus.

On the flipside, norovirus is not a cruise ship-exclusive bug, it’s far more common in schools and nursing homes, according to the CDC. 

The CDC reports on norovirus cruise ships outbreaks are incomplete, because they don’t include people like me who silently suffered in their staterooms, or passengers who didn’t exhibit symptoms until after disembarking. 

Still, not everyone gets sick on cruise ships. Most don’t. And of the folks we mingled with on our Joyful cruise, most said, even after over a dozen cruises, that they’ve never gotten sick.

Where did we go wrong? Out of convenience, we ate all but one of our cruise meals–three of them most days–in the crowded “hot bunk” style set up in the buffet dining hall, even though our cheapskate package allowed us, with a reservation and paying an eighteen percent “cover charge,” to dine in some of the restaurants. Mrs. Marathon Pundit, who you’ll remember got sick first, spent a lot of time in the ship’s spa.

Our cruise ship boasts that it can hold over 3,600 passengers–our trip was sold out–and it has a crew of over 1,300. Most of the crew sleep in compact steerage rooms in bunk beds. Perhaps that’s too many people in too small of a space for too long of a time.

Our two port cancellations increased the odds of illness. You’re more likely to get sick with any bug on a massive cruise ship as opposed to a beach or a rain forest. 

I’m not a germophobe. During the COVID pandemic, I was against the lockdowns and mask mandates. While I don’t have any specific suggestions, I believe cruise lines can do better, even if that means simply informing passengers that they face a norovirus risk. COVID warnings, many that have turned out to be exaggerated, have desensitized us to health advisories, so it’s no surprise that the handwashing stations outside the buffet halls were little used. Washing hands of course is a good thing.

My guess was that the median age of the passengers on our cruise was 65–and most were overweight. That meets my definition of a vulnerable population. 

When I returned home, I entered “norovirus” into the Joyful Cruises website search box. I received just two matches.

Do better.

Will we go on a cruise again? Perhaps on a smaller ship. And not for ten days. Supposedly a norovirus vaccine is in the works. If it’s available and we decide to head to sea again, I’m taking that jab.

I’m going out for a run now, despite that back-muscle pain from the puking.

And once again, Happy Birthday Mrs. Marathon Pundit!

John Ruberry, pictured on that cruise, regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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