Medical Aid in Dying, Heart Attacks on Ice, Disaster in Ohio, Hersh's Mistakes, A Cure for Autism - Dinner Table Digest № 43
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
If you haven’t yet read my piece on Medical Assistance in Dying, published yesterday by the CBC, be sure to check it out today!
Sections: Heart Attack on Ice / The Environmental Disaster in Ohio / Mongolian Metal / Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh’s NordStream Story / A Drug that Cures Autism?
How to Stop a Hockey Game - Barry Cull
A couple of months ago the world watched in horror as Damar Hamlin, a safety with the Buffalo Bills, collapsed on the field in a game against the Cincinnati Bengals, having suffered a heart attack after a hard, but perfectly legal hit. The world then celebrated with him as he has made a swift recovery, appearing with the Commissioner of the NFL at the Superbowl on February 12th, 2023. Here my friend Barry Cull, a retired professor of psychology at Conestoga College with whom I had the privilege of serving on the Board of Directors at Supportive Housing of Waterloo, describes his own heart attack experience, leaving the ice in the middle of a hockey game. More specifically Barry explores the possibility that anger played a role in his experience, describing a difficult childhood, along with interesting research on how feelings of hostility and anger contribute to heart attack risk.
The hospital reading material doesn’t say anything about hostility and anger. It hints that stress can contribute to coronary heart disease but offers no helpful information about what kind of stress and is mute on the topic of irritation, frustration, and rage. It has a lot to say about cholesterol and medications. I suspect that the so-called “hard sciences” are considered more credible than the “soft sciences,” such as psychology or psychiatry.
In some ways, the silence on hostility and anger is not surprising. I heard from a colleague some years ago who was invited to sit on a National Institute of Health (US) panel that included physicians, nutritionists, drug representatives and other healthcare professionals who looked into the obesity epidemic among American children. My colleague, a psychologist, was excited about the opportunity to introduce behavioural strategies that promoted healthy eating and nutritional education in families as a prevention strategy. She left the panel a few months later, discouraged that the group’s primary focus was the search for a medication that could lower the body’s intake of carbohydrates and thus make obese children skinny. The panel panned the idea of behavioural strategies – like nutrition counselling or teaching kids to avoid sugary cereal as being outside of the medical model.
Timothy Smith and colleagues have collected several decades of research establishing a clear link between hostility and coronary heart disease. The evidence gets to the nitty-gritty about what type of stress is toxic; it isn’t anxiety or depression, both of which are not risk factors. The type of stress that kills is anger. Anger is learned and, by age thirty, well established in those who suffer from the affliction. Most healthcare professionals are likely to get angry if you tell them that the effects of these behavioural patterns rival what they believe about cholesterol and statin medication.
Inside the Hell of East Palestine - Eric Sandy - Grid News
With news of the toxic train derailment in Ohio comes increased concern about how the environmental disaster is being managed. It seems that the people of East Palestine, Ohio are not getting any answers.
“I don’t think [local residents] have to be worried in the short term,” Singh said. “In the short term, of course, the [drinking] water supply is being monitored, and they know they are able to get fresh groundwater right now. They may be able to get fresh groundwater for the foreseeable future. But that is not what society should be concerned with. Society should be concerned with the long-term sustainability: How do we come out of this environmental disaster for the rest of our lives? That is a bigger question because we live in places for the rest of our lives — not just 10 days.”
Mongolian Metal
Lately I’ve been listening to Mongolian band The Hu, who do a great job of mixing traditional Mongolian folk music with heavy music. This song is pretty catchy:
Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream - Oliver Alexander
In Dinner Table Digest № 41 I included a link to a rather explosive piece from famed journalist Seymour Hersh about the destruction of the NordStream pipeline. It seems, however, that the story just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
When first reading through Hersh’s account of the events, the level of detail he provides could add credence to his story. Unfortunately for Hersh’s story, the high level of detail is also where the entire story begins to unravel and fall apart. It is often stated that people who lie have a tendency to add too much superfluous detail to their accounts. This attempt to “cover all bases” is in many cases what trips these people up. Extra details add extra points of reference that can be crosschecked and examined. In Hersh’s case, this is exactly what appears to have happened. On the surface level, the level of detail checks out to laymen or people without more niche knowledge of the subject matter mentioned. When you look closer though, the entire story begins to show massive glaring holes and specific details can be debunked.
A Drug That Cures Autism? - SciTechDaily
In what is likely to cause massive waves within the neurodivergent community, particularly among people with autism, it seems that neuroscientists have discovered a drug that acts on the protein MYT1L in such a way as to cause the behavoural challenges associated with autism to disappear.
In their current work, which is funded by the European Research Council ERC, Mall and his team examined the exact role of the “guardian of neuronal identity” in the development of an ASD. To do this, they genetically switched off MYT1L — both in mice and in human nerve cells that had been derived from reprogrammed stem cells in the laboratory.
The loss of MYT1L led to electrophysiological hyperactivation in mouse and human neurons and thus impaired nerve function. Mice lacking MYT1L suffered from brain abnormalities, such as a thinner cerebral cortex. The animals also showed several ASS-typical behavioral changes such as social deficits or hyperactivity. …
“Apparently, drug treatment in adulthood can alleviate brain cell dysfunction and thus counteract the behavioral abnormalities typical of autism — even after the absence of MYT1L has already impaired brain development during the developmental phase of the organism,” explains Moritz Mall. However, the results are still limited to studies in mice; clinical studies in patients with disorders from the ASD spectrum have not yet been conducted. The first clinical studies are in the early planning phase.
While I don’t know a lot about the autism acceptance movement, I do know that folks who consider themselves to be neurodivergent generally do not consider this to be a deficiency in their own biological functioning. Instead they see their ASD as an integral part of who they are, how they think, and how they interact with the world. As behavioural corrective therapies continue to go out of style, replaced by the idea that people with autism are just interacting with the world using different operating systems, the search for a biological cause and an associated drug-based solution may not go over so well with autism advocates.
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