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This is the standard "chasing zebras" narrative in medicine, and I've honestly never given it much serious consideration. We might hear about the odd obese person whose health problems were caused by something unrelated to their weight and carelessly overlooked by a GP, but for every one I'm sure there are at least 100 cases where the GP's snap diagnosis was right on the money. It seems the height of narcissism to demand that healthcare professionals disregard their training and ignore statistical fact (in fact, to demand that healthcare professionals administer substandard care to their patients) just because it makes some of them feel sad. (See also trans activists, who demand that healthcare professionals waste hundreds of man-hours asking 6-foot tall, bearded, broad-shouldered people if they are or have been pregnant recently.)
Sure, but the same is true of smokers, drinkers, drug addicts etc. and no one expects me to take the Alcoholic Acceptance movement seriously or check my Drinks-In-Moderation Privilege.
And from the fat person's perspective, they go to the GP saying "I have this new issue; I've had this body type my whole life, so that part is not new." and the GP is ignoring their history.
Well, that question has been on every medical history form I've ever gotten because they don't print different ones for men and women.
My father was getting a Covid vaccine in 2021 and the nurse was completing an intake form in which she verbally asked him the questions on the form and filled in his answers for him. She asked him if he'd been pregnant recently. In his 60+ years, he'd never been asked this question by a medical professional before. See also this article about a blood donor clinic which used to ask "for female donors only have you been pregnant recently?", but changed the form to ask all donors that, even donors who'd already explicitly stated that they were male and hence incapable of getting pregnant. (They changed the form back to its non-pseudoscientific version in response to public outcry.)
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And from the smoker's perspective, they go to the GP saying "I have this new issue; I've been smoking since I was in high school and I've never been coughing up blood before" and the GP is ignoring their history.
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Oddly, if anything, as fat acceptance has grown, acceptance of smoking and drinking has shrunk.
Medical guidelines for what constitutes "acceptable" levels of drinking have been reduced to very low levels. A single glass of wine is now the limit of what is allowed under new British guidelines. Pointedly, the new guidelines also eliminate any difference between males and females.
The science on this is less than clear. For one, we don't really know if moderate drinking (2 glasses wine/day) is good for you, bad for you, or neutral. And certainly, men can safely drink more than women for many reasons, including higher body mass and the fact that they don't get pregnant.
Perhaps this a noble lie, that by advising people to drink 1 glass a day, they will reduce consumption from 4 to 3. If so, this is immoral and unlikely to work.
I think more likely it is politically motivated.
Acceptance of smoking tobacco has shrunk. Acceptance of smoking marijuana has grown.
I doubt that we will eventually find marijuana to be significantly better for you than tobacco(although there is enough crap in cigarettes that it would shock me if they weren't worse than pure cannabis leaves).
My understanding was that no one really thought smoking marijuana was better for you than smoking tobacco, possibly even worse, if you smoked the same amount. But tobacco smokers smoke way, way more than marijuana smokers, so in practice marijuana is a lot less dangerous. And edibles exist.
I have encountered this exact view a couple of times "in the wild," as it were. Specifically, based in the earnest belief that, while tobacco causes cancer, marijuana cures cancer — and that the reason it's been kept illegal for so long is because "they" don't want you to know that, so that Big Pharma can keep people endlessly paying for their overpriced "treatments" rather than the true cures Nature provides us.
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Cigarette smokers smoke way more than potheads. Pipe and cigar smokers probably smoke about the same. It makes sense to regulate cigarettes as a highly addictive substance with ruinous health consequences(because that's what they are for the majority of users) while treating marijuana more leniently on the basis of less-addictive. But pipe tobacco and cigars don't fall in the same category.
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Generally don't smoke leaves, mate. The good stuff concentrates in the flowering portion, the female sex organs specifically.
Low effort post really wants to be incoming. Instead I'm going to wax nostalgic and write another scrollpast.
Many years ago I got high for the first time with my good friend, R. Let's just call him R. It happens to be his real first initial, but whatever. I loved him dearly. Past tense not because my love has ended, but because he is dead now; I'll get to that.
R was the son of a very interesting father who probably once worked for the CIA in some capacity in the 70s. R's family, due to his father's interesting career, in R's childhood at least, traveled all over the world, in particular the middle east, and he had the tchotchkes and prints and flotsam of such trips all over his high school downstairs room (he was from a wealthy family and his "room" consisted of the entire downstairs.) R's dad--who treated him shamefully post-divorce until he decided he wanted to bond with his only son--had similar decor in his own home: Original folk-type paintings of sheiks, large brass platters on the wall, various brass tea urns and pitchers, حُقَّة, etc.
R told many evocative stories about his childhood travels, mingling these with reflection on the pain of his parents' divorce ("like getting shot with a shotgun in the gut"), his sadness at the inevitable loss of the childhood idyll, and his suspicion that he would, if he ever became a father, fuck up his own children (He never did. Either.) One memory of his that sticks, oddly, with me, I who may be the only one who has any memory of it now: He, his father, his mother, his sister, on some beach in Greece, happened upon an American woman sunbathing topless. They--his family, the woman--happened to be once-removed through some friend back in Alabama, and ended up cooking an octopus in the sand.
My own childhood memories were of sitting in a screened-in deck at a rented cabin in Gulf Shores staring at jigsaw puzzles and giving myself third degree burns upturning an electric pitcher of hot coffee. Less romantic.
Anyway the first time I enjoyed the intimate ministrations of Mary Jane I was probably 17 or so years old. This would have been circa 1985. Rocky had reached IV. Brazil had just come out. It was the year of The Breakfast Club. Don't you. Forget about me. The first time I got high, possibly smoking whatever parts, possibly the female sex organs but I doubt it seriously: I felt nothing. I sat there over our board game of trivial pursuit ("Who killed Jabba the Hutt?" So easy as to be laughable, but these were the days before you could look anything up in five seconds) and, after smoking at least one shared joint and taking several hits off a water bong, asked: "What am I supposed to be feeling?"
I have since learned that this is not unusual the first time. One expects the drunk, the alcohol buzz. It's different. I would get high many times after this, though always only with R. This was as much about naïveté as trust: I didn't know anyone else well enough to know whether they got high, or when, or how often. I knew R well enough to know all of the above, and also to be invited along. I remember he would sometimes share a joint with me and then have to be somewhere else--his social life was always very active. He eventually became some sort of crystal meth dealer, which, contrary to my own understanding of how the world should work, altered his social circle such that he did not have to hang around with the likes of me, but was often surrounded by extremely confident and well-dressed people: leggy women, beautiful female French exchange students, sardonic boys with what seemed like an inexhaustible supply of witty comments and, ever ready, subtle putdowns. In other words, The Rich.
I remember sitting on a rock in a creekbed, midnight. My parents were long asleep, not knowing where the hell I was but trusting that I wasn't doing what it was I was, in fact, doing: Getting high with my feet dangling in the water. Everything was funny, or extremely important, or beautiful. R had a cassette deck with batteries and he took it out and made a recording of us talking on that creekbed, sitting on that rock, and I still have this recording--it is, alas, on the same cassette that he made it, in a pile of cassettes my wife periodically urges me to toss: For we have no cassette player. When I read reddit comments or any ripostes of the young, I sometimes remind myself of this: Someday they, too, will have memories they cannot access simply because they don't have whatever the future equivalent is of a fucking cassette player.
R and I stayed friends for many years. Have I mentioned he was fat? He was. I remember walking through supermarkets with him and his picking out the Snackwells and counting the grams of fat (not, in those tender years, concerned with the sugar). He lost the weight, then gained it back, then lost it again, then gained much of it back. It kept going like that. Fast forward through time, through his great lake parties, his girlfriends, both true and not, his studying to be a chef in Italy, his eventual marriage to the woman I think, in my worst moments, may have been the instrument of his death. His last email to me of his health problems--liver failure. Or maybe it was kidney failure. Or both.
When I flew home to see him in his hospital bed the doctor assured me his brain was already so full of ammonia that he would have no idea of what was going on. And yet when I had entered the room no more than twenty minutes earlier, R had grasped my hand, sat up, and looked at me with what I can only describe as anger. That he was being kept alive. That he had been reduced to this bloated mass surviving only because of machines. Or maybe he was still pissed at me for something I had done 20 years ago.
He died, had a funeral, I delivered the eulogy, the mic didn't work, then probably three years later his dad was reduced to a bedridden shadow of his former robust self. I remember holding his hand at his makeshift bed in his house while his home nurse gave us a moment. "I commune daily with R," he said, speaking of his son, my friend, the guy I had many times gotten high with. "He speaks to me," he said. I had my doubts. I, who in the years since R had died had tried all manner of ways to get in touch with him--astral projection, lucid dreaming, everything but paying a village shaman to do us a seance. Because I loved him, and he was gone too soon, and to this day getting high I remember him--though of course to get high in Japan will land you in all sorts of hot water. And so I don't. And this isn't some opsec bullshit. I truly don't. Not that it matters to any of you.
But if I did, and when I someday surely again will, I'll ask whoever it is I get it from for the female sex organ of the cannabis. So thanks for the tip, is what I'm saying.
Edit: Leia. Princess Leia killed Jabba the Hutt. Of course she did.
Bravo, honestly. I just wanted to say I really enjoyed that, and I hope you have a good night. Thanks so much for sharing it.
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Wow. That's a heck of a story, bud. Thank you for sharing.
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I recall reading a wine morbidity metastudy 15ish years ago. The results were astounding. Controlling for all relevant variables (age, income, race, sex, etc), the people who drank the most wine were the least likely to die. Really excessive wine drinkers beat regular wine enjoyers beat tea-totalers.
The study had a warning that they are not advocating drinking two bottles of wine a day. Sure, all evidence they could analyze shows that is peak human performance, but please don't.
And now more recently we have the ice cream study. Either the truths of human nutrition and health are rather counterintuitive, or health and nutrition science are largely shit. Replication crisis as academic disciplines.
I went searching and found this other one right off the bat.
And yes, a risk ratio below one does mean an inverse relationship -- that is, more wine less risk.
But WHO has spoken.
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Any chance you could find it again? I'd love to read it.
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This is definitely it. Nutrition science since 1970 has been a disaster for the human race. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-as-obese?tab=chart&country=~USA
Smoking is bad for you. It's completely obvious in the data. Moderate drinking is not bad for you in the same way. Some studies say it is. Some say it isn't. Whatever the result, the effect size is SMALL.
Why does the British medical establishment even care about moderate drinking at all while their citizens are eating themselves to death? My conclusion: they're losers.
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The guidelines always included "Don't drink every day" and the guideline was expressed as a weekly total. So it isn't one glass of wine a day, it is two glasses every day you drink (or three if you are a man and using the pre-feminist version of the guidlines).
"Glasses" should also be in inverted commas, because for typical strength wine 2 units is a 175ml glass - that is now standard for wine by the glass in pubs and restaurants, but it is bigger that a glass you would pour for yourself after buying the bottle. Two "glasses" of wine per wet day is closer to half a bottle, which is what the French always held out as a reasonable day's drinking even before modern booze-scolding.
That, I agree, is silly. OTOH, my parents will spend more effort ensuring that a decent bottle of wine is divided exactly evenly between them on any other marital conflict.
We don't have to go very far back before 1/2 bottle a day (375 mL) would be considered a very modest amount indeed.
In the 1950s in France, there was a campaign to try to limit people to 1 liter of wine per day! That's 1 and 1/3rd full size bottles and nearly 6 times the current British recommendation.
https://vinepair.com/articles/french-anti-alcohol-art/
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oi M8, u got a license for that second glass of cab sav??
Britain puts the rest of the world to shame when it comes to nanny state nonsense.
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They've gone and put out a few meta-studies which swear that any amount of alcohol is bad for you, and now they're just following their own science.
Other meta-studies are murkier but the WHO has spoken.
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By whom? Is the temperance movement still active and significant?
I can certainly see safetyism in general as a strong trend in politics, but it seems to pop up in all but the most libertarian political camps.
Nanny state health departments are blue coded since Covid.
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There's actually a strong streak of it in feminism, or at least feminism-in-tech. Not surprising considering how temperance has always been connected to feminism, ask Carrie Nation.
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