Oh, and y ppl complaining about cicadas -- I am scheming and plotting and planning a way to spend a couple of days with Brood X, and I'll have to cross the country to do it! This is up there with the Monarch butterfly overwintering sites in Mexico for me, an insect spectacle of the must-see variety.
...der little boids is on der wing --
but dat's absoid!
Der little wings is on der boid!
Ah, curse you Teresa, for reviving this brainworm from my youth! And a no-doubt posthumous kick at Arnold Silcock, too.
How very odd then that the only thing that reliably undepresses me is a drug which regulates both neuroepinephrine and serotonin. I find this statement makes me cranky, but it could be that I haven't had dinnner...
Your depression != depression in general, and unless you are taking a drug I've never heard of you don't actually know what it does at a cellular level, only that certain neurotransmitter levels respond to it in a predictable fashion at the level of the whole brain. As the article I linked is at pains to point out, we don't know what the underlying mechanism is, nor do we know what the precise connection between depression and neurotransmitter levels is.
This is why therapy mixed with drugs is more effective than any other treatment for depression. We're just getting help making those new paths. Strangely, therapy+drugs is followed very closely in effectiveness by therapy alone, then just drugs lagging far, far behind.
Like Michelle, I'd like to know more about this. "Therapy" covers a lot of ground -- I thought of cognitive behaviour therapy, not ECT, myself. My understanding is that CBT and SSRIs have about the same success rate with mild to moderate depression, and the combination does better than either alone. For severe depression, however, CBT does very little without chemotherapy but SSRIs alone have a moderate success rate and ECT has a good relief rate but a high chance of relapse.
In case of confusion: the "go here" link is direct to Major Depression, if you scroll down instead you'll get links to dysthymia, cyclothymia and BMD as well. (None of those are synonymous with "low serotonin" either.)
depression is the condition of having low serotonin levels in the brain
No it's not. Here is the clinical definition (scroll down or go here; in either case, ignore the ads).
As I said above, there are major problems with the serotonin hypothesis. In addition, major depression can present in the absence of any serotonin irregularity and individuals with low serotonin do not always exhibit depression.
From this quick intro in Psychiatric News: Whatever the illness of depression is, it is not due to a deficiency of neuroepinephrine, dopamine, or serotonin.
Xopher: someone once asked me whether depression is the result of low serotonin levels, or whether low serotonin levels are the result of depression
At least in cases which respond to medication that increases serotonin levels, it seems likely that the serotonin defect comes first. There are, however, plenty of cases that don't respond (thank $deity mine is not one of them), and even in responders the serotonin hypothesis is pretty clearly not the whole story. For instance, why the lag (usually 1-3 weeks) between increased serotonin levels as a result of SSRI therapy and improved mood? State-of-the-art answer from molecular biology, clinical psychiatry and half a dozen related fields of intense research: um, we dunno.
(You probably knew all that, but I thought I'd chime in anyway. Got nothing to do until the next step in my 'sperrymint.)
Xopher:If your answer to all the whys in the cosmos is "God wills it," that's about as simple an explanation as you can get.
It's about as unnecessarily complicated as you can get, from where I stand. How does positing an all-powerful etc etc Being simplify things?
And even the modern version (the simplest explanation which accounts for the available data is best) doesn't mean that there might not be data you don't have.
But, but -- the point of the principle in question is that one should work with the data to hand, and modify the model as more information becomes available. One cannot argue for an unnecessarily complex model on the basis of evidence that might later become available.
I just think people should believe what does no harm
Before I could go along with that, we'd have to discuss what constitutes harm, and whether or not religious belief or lack thereof can be blamed for the greater weight of same.
Michael: Scientists tend to be very religious
Not the ones I work with. I don't have any hard data to hand either, but I'll bet you lunch that religious belief is much less common among scientists than the general population.
lack of evidence for OR against means it falls in the realm of choice. And choosing not to believe under those circumstances isn't morally or scientifically better than choosing to believe
It's certainly scientifically better: call it Occam's razor, the null hypothesis or parsimony of modelling, but believing in a God in the absence of evidence for or against one is the opposite of standard scientific procedure (insofar as any such thing exists). This doesn't feel like the right thread for a discussion of the moral value of such a choice. PZ Myers' comment pretty much sums up my view.
I vote fake. I don't have an Editor's Ear or any knowledge of military jargon, but I have a standard issue bullshit detector and it is ringing fit to beat the band at the idea that she is able to blog this stuff.
I dunno whether to hope I'm wrong (ie, I'm too damn cynical) or right (in which case, this woman is going through hell AND having some asshole in Portland cast aspersions).
imagine how much progress we could make if some our funding from certain wars was going to research these illnesses
Total NIH research funding for last year was about 65 billion dollars, so the cost of the current clusterfuck would probably cover all of the world's medical research for a year. Alternatively, it would fund, oh, say, HIV/AIDS research in the US at its current level for several decades.
On preview: PF, there are hundreds -- more likely thousands -- of recognised strains of HIV-1, which vary in characteristics such as host cell tropism, antigenic profile, disease progression, drug resistance and so on. None of them, however, are going to alter their basic transmission route any time soon. The leap to, say, insect-borne or aerosol transmission is virtually impossible (although, never say never where biology is concerned). (Disclaimer/bona fides: my first postdoc was in HIV research.)
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| 2004 | 11 |
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