Cory Doctorow: “British Airways has broken new exciting new ground in the race to make flying as awful as possible: they have announced a fee (ranging from £10-60 per passenger) for advance seat selection, explaining that this will be the only way that families and other groups travelling together can be assured that they’ll be sitting next to each other. I wonder what happens if you don’t pay it while flying with a two-year-old in her own seat; do they seat her at the other end of the plane from you and explain to the strangers on either side of her that they’re responsible for her well-being for the duration? …” (Boing Boing)

ethereal Sydney scene

“A storm which blew in from the Australian outback blanketed Sydney in a layer of orange dust. Here, residents describe the bizarre and frightening scene.” (BBC

During my psychiatric career, I have worked at several of these now abandoned or demolished-and-redeveloped sites, including Metropolitan State Hospital, Boston State Hospital and Worcester State Hospital. I routinely pass the sites of MSH and BSH. I can’t say that I have ever been back inside in an ‘unofficial’ capacity since their closures, although I am tempted.

'Ghost fleet' near Singapore.

“The world's ship owners and government economists would prefer you not to see this symbol of the depths of the plague still crippling the world's economies…” ( Daily Mail )

“The power of the imagination is well-known: it’s no surprise that scary music is scarier with your eyes closed. But now neuroscientist and psychiatrist Prof. Talma Hendler of Tel Aviv University’s Functional Brain Center says that this phenomenon may open the door to a new way of treating people with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other neurological diseases.” (Science Daily)

He said,”It was the greatest shot I ever hit in my life”. (kottke).

“Fancy a three-day weekend – not just once in a while but week in week out? You may think your bosses would never agree to it, but the evidence suggests that employers, employees and the environment all benefit.” (New Scientist).

“Electromagnetic pulses — high-altitude bursts of radiation that could disable power grids and cripple modern life over wide areas — are a security concern. But right and left disagree on how plausible, or far-fetched, the threat is.” Idea of the Day Blog – NYTimes.com.

“When a building collapses or a train wrecks, specialized rescue teams can extricate trapped people often in a matter of minutes, working with techniques and technology developed over the past two centuries.” (American Heritage)

“A cornucopia of drugs will soon be on sale to improve everything from our memories to our trust in others.” (Prospect)

Drugmakers Are Desperate to Find Out.. I became a web friend of Wired writer Steve Silberman because of the uncanny parallelism in our interests, and I usually post blinks to his thoughtful and important pieces. Here, he describes the difficulty drug manufacturers are having in distinguishing the efficacy of medications they are testing from that of the placebos to which they are compared. Perhaps surprisingly, the rates of placebo response seem to be growing, so that the claims for pharmacological effectiveness of their products are harder and harder to make. Big Pharma desperately wants to know why, both to succeed again in establishing the efficacy of the products they are developing and to capitalize on the placebo effect if they can find a way to bring it to market itself.

As Silberman describes, comparison with placebo has long been the gold standard in evaluation of drug efficacy. This has largely made the placebo effect a troublesome enemy of allopathic medicine. This is a weakness of those with a concrete, limited conception of how healing works. In fact, our understanding should be stood on its head. Instead of being a nuisance, the placebo effect may be the basis of most therapeutic effects, both in particular of the ‘magic pills’ we physicians give our patients and, more generally, of the healing relationship per se. I have long found it pitiful that most physicians do not see that much of what they are doing is mobilizing their patients’ intrinsic healing responses through enlisting them in a shared belief system. Of course, those healing responses have a physiological basis themselves. It is only the incredibly naive, for the past thirty or fifty years at least, who still must distinguish ‘mind’ from ‘body’ as if they are separate.

The placebo response may be getting stronger, if indeed it is, because it is more and more difficult to find subjects who are not in the grip of the Big Pharma Big Lie, in this era of TV advertising for prescription drugs and of physicians in the pockets of the manufacturers of the medications they prescribe.

The other reason it may be harder to distinguish pharmacological from palcebo effects is that drug development in the last decade or more has been largely a story of trying to squeeze larger and larger profits out of smaller and smaller distinctions in drug efficacy. There have been relatively few ‘breakthrough’ discoveries in pharmacology that have not been swamped by a rush of competing products consisting of slightly altered molecules claiming to be improvements but in reality serving only to establish or extend patent rights.

This is especially true in my own field of psychiatry. While there are certainly in some cases differences in individual patients’ responses to different medicines in the same class (say, for example, serotonin-reuptake-inhibiting antidepressants or dopamine-blocking antipsychotics). Prescribers, pitifully, trot out one after another drug in the same or similar class when a patient does not do well with an initial choice of medication, subjecting the patient to a futile and prolonged cycle of sequential expectation and disappointment. Even patients who are doing well on a medicatioon are often switched to far more expensive newer analogues which hit the market claiming to be improvements. And these claims are largely written by the ad copyists and marketing specialists rather than the scientists, who by and large cannot demonstrate advantages of their products in head-to-head comparisons with older, tried-and-true gold standard medications.

Finally, although I am not talking merely about the mental health domain when I argue for a broadened conception of how healing works, it is surely true that neurobiological and mental disorders have been one of the last frontiers in pharmaceutical development, and (along with a shift of emphasis to chronic diseases from the acute diseases with which medicine has had its greatest successes) a major focus in drug development in the last two decades or so. The placebo effect is probably at its strongest in the realm of behavioral disorders.

Click on ‘the film’ (Neurosonics Audiomedical Laboratories)

After seeing more than 60 zombie films, Johnathon Williams explains: “If civilization is ever overrun by zombies — which for the purposes of this essay shall be defined as reanimated corpses who feed on the living until they’re dispatched by a gunshot to the head — I know exactly what I will do. I will gather my family and I will take them to Wal-Mart.” (The Morning News)

“After a successful birth, opting not to breast-feed may trigger evolved mourning behaviors.” (Scientific American)

“It succors and drowns human life. And for the last eight years, oil — and the people and places that make it — was my obsession.” (Foreign Policy)

Robert Krulwich: “Here’s a surprise: Wild crows can recognize individual people. They can pick a person out of a crowd, follow them, and remember them — apparently for years. But people — even people who love crows — usually can’t tell them apart. So what we have for you are two experiments that tell this story.” via NPR (listen).

Related:

• Ira, Jad, and Robert (snarkmarket.com)

The Straight Dope via Lifehacker.