Free Republic

What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think... and 5) who to vote for. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30y of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, microeconomic papers wrong 40% of the time, the appointment of...

It's hard to imagine contemporary society without Oedipus complexes, defence mechanisms, Freudian slips, and the psychiatrist's couch. But Catholic, Dutch psychologist Gerard van den Aardweg is not cracking the champagne on Sigmund Freud's 150th birthday. [This is Freud's 160th.] MercatorNet interviews Dr. Van den Aardweg on the impact of Freudian theories on modern psychology and views on sexuality. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was born on May 6, 1856, 150 years ago. In New York, it was Sigmund Freud Day; in Austria, it was Sigmund Freud Year. For his supporters, the 20th century was the Sigmund Freud Century....

Asperger's syndrome. A myth. An invention by government to punish its victims for government's failures. This is because the government is supposed to always be right to the left. But far from it the government even in its efforts to conceal its failings and the failings of socialism and public education continues to fail and continues to injure innocent people in the name of the greater good. Instead of punishing bullies, instead of allowing educational alternatives, the government has invented a phony and dubious illness called Asperger's syndrome to punish the victims of bullying so our lazy teachers and...

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is proposing to report people who receive disability benefits and have a mental health condition to the FBI’s background check system. The proposal, which stems from a memorandum that President Obama issued in 2013, would essentially block some people with severe mental health problems from buying guns. The SSA, which will propose the rule in Thursday's edition of the Federal Register, says it plans to notify disability beneficiaries who might be reported and establish a process for them to appeal their placement in the FBI’s background check system. The proposal is just the latest attempt...

A groundbreaking trial to see if it is possible to regenerate the brains of dead people, has won approval from health watchdogs. A biotech company in the US has been granted ethical permission to recruit 20 patients who have been declared clinically dead from a traumatic brain injury, to test whether parts of their central nervous system can be brought back to life. Scientists will use a combination of therapies, which include injecting the brain with stem cells and a cocktail of peptides, as well as deploying lasers and nerve stimulation techniques which have been shown to bring patients out...

In a bid to solidify her leftist credentials, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton floated a couple of ridiculous ideas about how this country will improve when she is president. On the urban violence front, Clinton proposes to "reset" the relationship between police and street gangs. "The knee jerk attitude of the average American toward urban gangs is that they are a bad thing," she observed. "What they overlook is that joining a gang is like having a family. It's feeling like you're part of something bigger than yourself. I think this is a positive thing. Another positive is that the...

Yes, got the call for my biopsy; it is cancer.

An impressive array of brainpower —“Fat? Blame your genes, say doctors” —“Overweight? Maybe you really can blame your genes” —“Blame your genes for obesity” Headlines such as these have become a staple of science and health journalism. Are they right? Are obese people really helpless victims of their genes? Let us begin by distinguishing between “monogenic” obesity and what scientists call “common” obesity. Monogenic obesity, as the name implies, is caused by a mutation in a single gene, which is inherited in a Mendelian fashion, just as conditions such as sickle-cell anemia and cystic fibrosis are. In the case of...

Researchers from the Cybernetics Department of the Military University of Technology in Warsaw and the Optoelectronics Department of the Silesian University of Technology have been using 3D printed heart models for research purposes. 3D printing, like any burgeoning area of technology, has both its champions and its skeptics. But whatever one’s position on the industry as a whole, there is one area in which its usefulness is rarely doubted: medicine. Over the last few years, additive manufacturing has been used by medical professionals and researchers to create a variety of models, surgical guides, and bioprinted body parts, contributing to the...

Hello Everyone; Once again I have to apologize for not posting when I should. But life just gets in the way of me doing things like this. I do have a couple of different topics for discussion, [and please comment on BOTH of them] 1] How in shape are you? I ask this because I have been tilling in a brand new garden [about 1 1/2 acres] in an area that has never had a garden before. And am I feeling it too. [I have an older tiller ( I was lucky to get it for $20.00 at a yard...

Folks, let's be clear: Autism is almost-certainly not caused by vaccines. Let's remember the first rule of observational studies, which incidentally I was surprised to find a few years ago in my daughter's High School intro-to-stats class: Observational studies can only show correlation and correlation cannot prove causation. However, the absence of correlation is damn near bomb-proof evidence that the alleged cause you believe exists is false. Measles vaccination in the US began in 1963 following approval in 1962. Within five years near-complete compliance was obtained within the US. MMR, the combined vaccine that people like to blame autism on,...

This was originally written for Deadspin's Blood Week, but shit happens and we're running it now. A 20-pound jug of homemade explosives will take off one or both legs somewhere between the knee and hip, perhaps breaking the pelvis and shattering vertebrae as the shockwave travels up through the skeleton. After our first Marine was wounded this way—let's call him Patient Zero—he was stabilized by his squad's hospital corpsman and flown to the trauma center, a British base that abuts Camp Leatherneck, the hub for Marine operations in southwest Afghanistan. At the time I was running a forward combat aid...

Circumventing Congress's ban on the use of federal money to bail out ObamaCare casualties. I’m sure you’re all quite familiar with the Obama Administration’s proclivity for ignoring Congress and doing whatever it wants, whether that means refusing to enforce the law or attempting to shove gun control down the nation’s throat. But if you think Obama only does this via executive orders, you haven’t quite grasped the full scope of his lawlessness. Let’s say you want to spend money to bail out health insurers that you have driven to the brink of ruin by passing ObamaCare. But Congress (thanks in...

Michigan faces a widespread shortage of primary health care providers, and state rules on midlevel health care providers have held up a valuable solution to this problem. Nurse practitioners and physician assistants offer competent care in more locations and at a lower cost than physicians, but these professionals are limited by protectionist restrictions known as “scope of practice” rules. Policymakers should loosen these restrictions to make health care services easier to obtain and afford. Scope of practice restrictions are defended as an attempt to raise standards of care by limiting the range of procedures a medical professional is licensed to...

It might be time to rethink fertility treatment. Here’s the scoop: scientists at Northwestern University 3D printed a functional ovary out of Jello-like material and living cells. When implanted into mice that had their ovaries removed, the moms regained their monthly cycle and gave birth to healthy pups. The scientists presented their results last week at the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in Boston. Although the study was done in mice, “we developed this implant with downstream human applications in mind,” says lead author Dr. Monica Laronda in a press release. If successful in humans, the prosthetic would be able to...

Veterans earned their VA health care when they signed the dotted line to serve our country. So when American Legion Commander Dale Barnett saw that a commission that is top-heavy with private hospital executives was trying to dismantle it, he had to be blunt. “I don’t understand how commissions paid by the federal government are able to break ranks, create an unapproved report and try to advance self-serving agendas while operating as congressional appointees,” Barnett said. He's talking about the congressionally-mandated Commission on Care, an entity dominated by private hospital executives and Koch Brothers-affiliated "policy experts." The commission's charge under...

FULL TITLE: FDA Relaxes Restrictions on Abortion Pill: What Happens to a Couple When their Home Becomes an Abortion Clinic? Under the cover of the uproar from Donald’s Trumps recent flip-flop comments on abortion, the New York Times reported about a much more serious concern for those who care about women and their unborn children: The Food and Drug Administration has relaxed the guidelines for taking a pill that induces abortion, reviving one of the most contentious issues of the abortion debate. The change allows women to use the drug further into pregnancy and with fewer visits to the doctor…The...

Donald Trump was correct when he said a woman who had an outlawed abortion would likely be punished. However, the most likely way of ending abortions would be through regulation of those providing medical treatment. Chris Matthews question implied that abortion would become a criminal offense. In that case the woman as a participant in the “crime” would be subject to prosecution probably as an accessory, an accomplice or a “co-conspirator”. The courts might not allow prosecution unless the woman was potentially subject to prosecution. In such a legal environment prosecutors might use the offering of immunity from prosecution to...

My wife was released Monday from the Rehab hospital to come home and already the past two days have been full of our share of challenges and successes and many a small thing inbetween. Thanks to everyone for your prayers and please keep them coming as she still has a long road ahead of her.