291–300 of 314 posts
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Has he tried antabuse or something like that? Those pills make you vomit when you drink and are quite effective in harnessing the body's natural anti-poison response system to curb drinking.
These are pretty often contraindicated in cases like this, especially when the patient is also managing anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds.
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AA barely works, though.
I know lots of ppl with years of sobriety through AA so I would say it does work for some. It existing as a choice free of charge around the world for ppl suffering is a good thing.
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I don't know about shame or moral failure, but alcoholism is obviously different from cancer or a broken leg in that you can control it yourself, even if it might be very hard for some. A lot of other conditions also benefit from a more holistic approach, things like obesity, heart problems etc are easy to prevent, hard to cure.
I don’t think it’s “obviously different”. A generation ago people said the same thing about depression and suicidal ideation: you can control it yourself. Just be happy. It’s a lovely sentiment for those of us who don’t suffer from it because it makes us feel like we are immune from the problem. It could never happen to us because we have the mental fortitude to overcome it. It’s a nice thought but it’s nonsense.
Or are you saying alcoholics lack free will?
Then I suppose drug addicts should be immune from prosecution if they commit crimes to get drugs?
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Deaths from alcohol != deaths from lockdown. Have you factored in the deaths from cancer, for instance? In the UK, the Macmillan Trust, a cancer charity, have estimated that there are 50,000 missing diagnoses that will be a possible 17,915 deaths in the 12 months following the report[1]. Precision is often as important as accuracy. [1] https://www.macmillan.org.uk/get-involved/campaigns/we-make-...
It’s a pointless argument because the only way to prove that lockdown resulted in more deaths is to spin up a parallel universe and see how many more people would have died if we didn’t go into lockdown. Since we cannot do that you are all comparing the COVID deaths despite lockdown (which is still an order of magnitude higher then any of the estimates provided for deaths resulting from the lockdown). So you’re not m…
> So you’re not making a like for like comparison.
I'm not making the comparison at all, I'm pointing out the errors of making an out-of-hand dismissal of lockdown deaths and the faulty logic of the dismissal.
> It’s a pointless argument because the only way to prove that lockdown resulted in more deaths is to spin up a parallel universe and see how many more people would have died if we didn’t go into lockdown.
Two things here. The first is that it's not pointless to consider how deaths could be reduced even if we were reduced to wild guesses. Most of human history has only had access to trial and error, and the hope of some insight springing up, and our ancestors did a fine job. We've got it easy.
However, we don't need a parallel universe, different countries did different things, and - as the Macmillan report shows - it's possible to see that there's a link between the effects of lockdown (e.g. missed cancer diagnoses) and higher levels of mortality resulting from that, even if the precision is unknowable (which is won't be, it just won't be perfect).
People aren't stupid, and the main point is don't compare deaths from lockdown with deaths from COVID-19, the questions are:
- were lockdowns more effective than not?
- which kinds of lockdowns were beneficial?
- what lessons can we learn?
It'll take a while (because of politics and cognitive dissonance / pride) but I'm confident we'll see that lockdowns were largely ineffective at best and detrimental at worst.
Finally:
> Hospitals were already cancelling appointments even before lockdown happened because of staffing issues. This would only have been a bigger problem if we hadn’t gone into lockdown
You can't on the one hand use a there is no parallel universe argument for your own rebuttal and then hope to avoid it by claiming bigger problems without a lockdown. Be fair.
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I know lots of ppl with years of sobriety through AA so I would say it does work for some. It existing as a choice free of charge around the world for ppl suffering is a good thing.
I know lots of people who haven't been attacked by bears since they bought a bear protection talisman so I would say that they work for some.
I notice that "the pandemic" is quickly found as the root cause and no analysis at all is done to identify if the response to the pandemic is to be implicated as well. I'd wager that waking up one day and discovering that one's job is not essential might be stressful. Being forbidden from going to the beaches and parks might have contributed. The stress of learned helplessness from countless bureaucratic decisions la…
I'm not trying to blame all our problems on social media, but I think a significant confounding factor that should be considered in any analysis blaming bad unrelated outcomes on the pandemic, is that TikTok exploded in popularity right around the same time as the start of the pandemic(in the US, at least).
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Not only is it religious, its not founded in any empiricism or medical study. Here's a decent article laying out the critiques, the opening paragraph is what everyone should keep in mind: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/the-surpr... > Say you’ve been diagnosed with a serious, life-altering illness or psychological condition. In lieu of medication, psychotherapy, or a combination thereof, your docto…
AFAIK, AA doesn't make you swear on the Bible or profess one's faith in Christ before you're allowed to join a meeting. You can ignore the religious stuff and still make use of AA's highest-impact features: - regular meetings, no appointment required - being open and vulnerable in front of other people who understand the hell of addiction in ways your partner or family won't. - having an accountability partners to ca…
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I only have one kid, but similar situation for me. I learned something about jobs during this time. The effort and stress involved is not proportional to the pay. Some jobs are just hell and you can go next door and make the same thing in a pleasant environment. I ended up taking about half my skills off my resume. I'm no longer a full stack dev, I'm a backend engineer. I removed the stuff about DevOps and project/pr…
Yeah, I dialed back significantly and found that everyone was still super impressed. I approach everything gently and only work a few hours a day now to keep my energy and creativity up.
But I spend much more time planning and thinking, which actually lets me get more done when I do work.
Why are we fighting ourselves by trying to be creative after lunch when we should be taking a nap? I’m seriously considering getting a day bed for work.
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So introducing a catalyst to a stable reaction and then not attributing the increased reaction rates to the catalyst...
You’re coming across like you’re trying to miss the point. The entire article is attributing increased reaction rates to the pandemic.
My response needs to be read as a response to nautilius's attempt to interpret psychlops' root comment.