THE LEADING CAUSES OF DEATH AND DISABILITY and Leading Drivers of the Nation’s $2.7 Trillion in Annual Health Care Costs
www.cdc.gov
As for the discussion about migraine, are you using the word migraine interchangeably with headache? Migraine is a primary, genetic headache disease characterized by attacks lasting 4-72 hours. The pain is typically unilateral, pulsating, with moderate to severe intensity, and aggravated by physical activity, and associated with nausea and/or photophobia and phonophobia. An attack has 4 phases and can come with a range of other symptoms including vomiting, confusion, blurred vision, fatigue, numbness in extremities, seeing flashing lights, feeling hot or cold, dizziness, and more. More often than not, an attack cannot be treated with a couple of Advil and a nap. The average person living with migraine disease has 4-6 migraine days a month. This is enough to impact a typical 9-5 job. About 5 million people living with the disease have chronic migraine, with 15 or more migraine days a month. Of those, about 1/5 have intractable migraine, which is a migraine attack that just never goes away but may vary in intensity.
Until very recently, I was living with a migraine attack that started in 1991. I have tried over 70 treatments including but not limited to dozens of pharmaceuticals both preventive and abortive alone and in various combinations, yoga, physical therapy, elimination diets, behavioral therapy, biofeedback, neurofeedback, acupressure, acupuncture, psychedelics, various exercise routines, strict routines, IVIG, mindfulness, meditation, dozens of vitamins and supplements, putting my feet in hot water and ice on my head, putting my feet in cold water and a heating pad on my head, ice packs, ice baths, chiropractic, massage, tai chi, salt caves, transcranial magenetic stimulation, hyperbaric chamber, craniosacral therapy, various nerve stimulating devices, breathing techniques...and I'm sure there is more. The only thing anyone ever suggested to me that I have not tried is rubbing a banana on my head. I'm very allergic to bananas.
There are over 100 different primary headache diseases. Most of them are rare compared to migraine, but cluster headache (not cluster migraine - that's not a thing) is the second most common. If it weren't compared to migraine it would not be rare, with an estimated 250,000-400,000 people living with that disease in the US. Yes, cluster headache can be treated with psilocybin and some other psychedelics, although those treatments do not work for everyone and they often stop working after some time.
I'd be interested to know where your friend lives that they have a prescription/license to cultivate psilocybin mushrooms to use as treatment. I'm guessing Canada. I know that only a few people have gotten those permits so far. I'd love to meet your friend so that we can help others get through the subsection 56(1) process. If you aren't aware, I'm the president of Clusterbusters, the people who developed the busting method and are driving the research into psychedelics for cluster headache, migraine and other headache diseases. Bob Wold, the founder, is one of my best friends, and last year I got to meet Flash for the first time. Flash is the guy that stumbled upon the idea of psychedelics for cluster when he missed a cycle after using LSD recreationally. He told Bob and a few others about it back in the old days of message boards. They took the idea and ran with it. Bob developed a treatment protocol after gathering a ton of anecdotal evidence, then convinced Drs. Sewell and Halpern at Harvard to study it. Later Yale picked up the work. I've been working with Bob, clusterheads, and researchers for about 10 years and am heavily involved in psychedelic policy creation in the states and globally. I've talked to thousands of clusterheads and helped many of them learn to bust, even though we are aware it is illegal here. Until Emgality, there were no treatments developed specifically for cluster headache, and not everyone has access to that medication. Tangentially, April is also a part of this team. She's awesome.
Reducing the financial burden on the individual doesn't start with masking up, it starts with the government reducing its size and decreasing the amount of funds it steals from the citizens. The IRS didn't need those 90k agents, ukraine didn't need those billions, etc...
This is an opinion, and one that I understand and recognize, but I don't think it is fact. We make choices about what we want to spend our money on. And please, for the love of GOD, somebody pay the IRS more so that you can actually get someone on the phone over there. I've wasted about 100 hours of my life on my kid's school's PTA due to an IRS issue that we did not cause, but have no hope of resolving soon because the IRS is so underfunded. You can argue that we shouldn't have as much IRS, but what we've done is defund it without putting new policies in place that reduce the regulatory and legal need for it. That doesn't help anyone.
I'm not going to touch the part about Ukraine. I'm not an expert on foreign policy.
Costs in the medical world is a discussion in itself... The pharmaceutical industry is the same as every other industry, they're using the same subscription model.
I agree with this, although I would never just point the finger at the pharmaceutical industry. Also, I'm sitting here because of pharmaceuticals, so I'm not saying they aren't without merit.
I'd like to see the medical industry shift focus back onto the patients they're supposed to be helping instead of primarily focusing on their bottom line. Public health is a service, not a for-profit industry. Every time I have to call my health insurance company I'm reminded why I pay so much in premiums, the massive call centers full of fucktards that can't help cost a lot of money.
Fucking yes. I 100% agree. It's a fucked system. I was in a room recently with Dan Kueter, who is one of the CEOs of United Healthcare and it was all I could do to not kick him in the nuts. If I wasn't sure that would land me in prison forever, I would have done it. He deserves to be tortured. They all do. I think everyone in the country has a right to healthcare EXCEPT for payer execs, PBM execs, and pharma execs. Maybe for-profit hospital system execs too. I'm sure I'm leaving some people out here. But they should all be step-therapied, nonmedical switched, and denied to death.
Society is already a community. Ironically, moving out of the metropolitan area I grew up in allowed me to feel more like I was part of a community. When there's a million people all in one place the individual gets lost.
I did not enjoy living in a rural community where there was no social safety net, access to good healthcare, or variety of culture. I actually found rural living to be much more homogenous and less individual. Everyone spoke, thought, and behaved the same like a giant Asch's Conformity Experiment.
It's not possible to force everyone to comply with public safety measures that are overly restrictive to make everywhere safe for the compromised few, and it's against human nature.
I also think this is an opinion and one that comes with an individualistic mindset. Clearly, we do force people to comply with public safety measures that are restrictive all the time. We have all kinds of regulations and laws about workplace safety, wearing seatbelts, not smoking around other people, how car manufacturers can make things, how we grow food, what we put in the water, and sooooo much more. We have laws that say that everyone has to wear something covering their junk in public, yet people are somehow upset about having to cover their faces. And the laws about covering your junk aren't even based on safety, they are based on someone's idea of modesty. We have lots of laws that protect a few people because we know that it is important. We've just decided for whatever reason that we don't like THIS regulation. It's bizarre.
Honestly, I don't really think there should be mask mandates anymore. However, until people can prove that they are responsible enough to make good choices on their own, it is, unfortunately, necessary. People are not making good choices, which is something that I bet these elementary students understand better than most adults.
