Crisis of Meaning

Addiction is the development of a physical dependence on various kinds of drugs, more typically opiate drugs. It happens in essence because establishing an outer supply of opiates tends to interfere with the level of production of opiate-like or opioid substances in our bodies.

The requisite sign of addiction is withdrawal-which is just the body in a state of opioid/pleasure chemical deficit before it is able to adjust the level of production back toward a normal range. When that occurs, the acute stage of withdrawal completes itself. 

Withdrawal is not a syndrome, it is the direct symptom of a body's physical dependence on an outer supply of opioids. "Post withdrawal" is injury from damage inflicted before and during addiction, that ends when those injuries heal sufficiently.

A syndrome by the way is a collection of related symptoms that have no recognised or definite source or cause. "Cravings" are the body craving restortion of normal levels of (pleasure) chemical function. 

Addiction is a bit like a process of going from a wholly inner supply, to less of that topped up by an outer supply. When you stop "topping" you enter withdrawal, 'recovery' is when the body goes back toward prior production levels. 

Some make a distinction between physical dependence and addiction, I don't per se.

Though there might have been a meaningful distinction once. There's a case for physical dependence from necessary use and addiction from non-necessary use of drugs. Because the former is likely to have its own challenges that aren't always the same as those who don't need to take medication for an original or underlying physical ailment.

The point of explaining this yet again is a feature of the current US opioid crisis is that people apparently didn't know opioids are inherently addicitve due to the nature of human biochemistry;

From 1996 to 2001, American drug giant Purdue Pharma held more than 40 national “pain management symposia” at picturesque locations, hosting thousands of American doctors, nurses and pharmacists. The healthcare professionals had been specially invited, whisked to the conferences to be drilled on promotional material about the firm’s new star drug, OxyContin, and recruited as advocates, the US government later documented.

Don't doubt similar game isn't being played out with the 'obesity' cult, for "pain management" read "weight management." This quack cult is hell bent on creating a drug and surgery crises in the plural, in fat people, if we are dumb enough to allow them to have their way, again.

A bulletin from the American Public Health Association in 2009, reviewing the rise of prescription opioids, is titled “The promotion and marketing of OxyContin: commercial triumph, public health tragedy”. The document also asserted that Purdue had played down the risks of addiction.

"Played down the risks of addiction", um-hum, like playing down the risks of "stomach reduction surgery" and various prescription drug-abuse. That sort of thing can only make an impact if people no longer get what's being talked about, in this case, addiction.  

Short Definition of Addiction:
Addiction is a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry. Dysfunction in these circuits leads to characteristic biological, psychological, social and spiritual manifestations. This is reflected in an individual pathologically pursuing reward and/or relief by substance use and other behaviors.

That's from the American Society of Addictive Medicine, playing the current trick of describing things in ways that obscures what is really being talked about. Does this definition help you to understand non-addictive opioid is chemically implausible? Do you understand it? Does it even make sense?

If I wanted to know why exactly people got stuck on OxyContin and the like, how would "primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry" help? Its agenda is concerned with selling addiction as a disease, rather than education. Note the same employ of phoney 'disease' in the area of weight.

This opioid crisis/crises has many factors, but ultimately a basic grasp of what addiction really is, without the more recent insistence on collapsing neural compulsions/ neuroses and any old undesired or troublesome habit into "addiction" would have enabled people to get a clearer view of dubious promise such as non-addictive opioids. 

 Democracy Now on Oxycontin with Christopher Glazek

Even the deepest desire for denial can fail under the surer gaze of knowing better.

6 Things The Human Body Doesn't Need

Something from the BBC's "Terrific Science" website "Five things our bodies may no longer need";

The human body is the result of millions of years of evolution. However, it isn't perfect - there are some parts that we've been left with but may not actually need any more. 

That's; wisdom teeth, ear muscles, goosebumps, appendix, tailbone. Five in all. There's a sixth one they've omitted, the human stomach. I say human because no one's trying to remove the stomachs of other animals. I say human as in a human being with a body mass inex of 30+.

...in 1956 ten Swedish women, each at least a hundred and twenty-five pounds overweight, agreed to a trial of an intestinal bypass.  ...then the bypasses were reversed. Now that the patients were at a healthier weight, it was thought, they could maintain that weight with a normal intestinal tract. However, after the reversal surgeries the women regained every pound, sometimes more.

In other words, calorie restriction, which this kind of surgery exists to assist the enforcement of-never mind the flummery about its effect on gherlin and leptin and hunger hormones. This operation says, calorie restriction cannot be usefully maintained with a normal intact body.

Nothing could illustrate the fundamental problem with calorie restriction, it is unsuited to the human body.

It requires the deliberate disabling of the body to implement it. To get a sense of how that fits in with 'health', it's like what smokers and alcoholics are accused of increasing the risk of damaging their organs particularly  the lungs and liver respectively-to the point where they can no longer function.

That is the whole point of bariatric surgery's removal of the stomach, and it directly and immediately does this. It doesn't give it the respect smokers and alcoholics do by giving their organs a chance to recover and restore.

This use of gastrectomy is closer the category of body integrity disorder than medicine which it isn't in any conceivable way. The excuses given that this helps metabolic problems -but the 'obesity' cult is in the way of that, in favouring of imposing cal res.

Body integrity disorder by the way is a dubious psychosis where a person feels the overwhelming conviction that one or more of their limbs is not a part of them or must be removed. Note that article's subtitle asks whether its a good idea or not. Our default is to defend the human body's integrity, unless a terminological construct has bypassed [geddit] your humanness. 

Surgery changes a person into a being with a different intestinal tract, a different hormonal response to food—it’s almost like becoming a member of a new species, one better adapted to our current world. 

Along with the obvious, see the puff about a different hormonal response to food, as if this person doesn't know you don't have to remove the stomach to achieve that.

Fat Feet

Or, ya feets too big.

Person A: "What do you want to study?"

Person B: "Fat feet".

Person A: "Don't you mean feet?"

Person B: "No, fat feet".

Person A: "Podiatry?"

Person B: "Fat feet".

Person A: "If fat feet is not simply feet that are bigger, how do you define fat feet?"

Person B: "When feet are above a certain size, it becomes a disease we call fat feetishness."

Person A: "But surely that just refers to feet that are fatter?"

Person B: "There are feet and then there are feet above a certain index of mass."

Person A: "Surely all feet produce their mass using the same anatomical processes? Pathologising feet on the basis of size would mean a person who has bigger feet no longer has feet, they have a disease instead?"

Person B: *Crickets*

Many years later......

Person B: "They're a person with fat feet."

Person A: *Yawn* "How does that differ from a person's feet?"

Person B: "The WHO, the AMA, the DSMV and other authoritative bodies all agree fat feet is a thing."

Person A: "Do you wish to study fat feet to find the most efficient means to stop feet getting above a certain size?"

Person B: "The priority is to overwhelm with evidence of how bad fat feet is."

Person A: "What will that do?"

Person B: "It's the only way"

Person A: "To achieve what?"

Person B: "It's obvious!"
 
Person A: "I still don't get why don't just study the anatomy and physiology of the human foot and work out the easiest way to nudge the physiological function of feet into stopping at an acceptable size. It's a question of mechanics of biology surely." 

Person B: "I don't think you understand how bad fat feet is. You seem to be enabling fat feet, because you are; addicted, disordered, not feeling your emotions, sexually abused..... You need treatment, therapy, education, pity, taxation, advice, sanction, support..."

Person A, (again): "I promise you fat feet are just feet that are bigger, they're feet just the same as any other, just the same size. Seriously, podiatry has not [yet] announced that it has broken away from any particular size of feet."

"Why didn't you.....?"

This Weinstein pile-up is turning out to be far more thought-provoking than I'd have imagined when the dirt first hit the fan. Then I was very much of the deja, non school of response. Someone your mind had snagged on and given the beady eye, only to move on because nothing appeared in public.

"After Weinstein, let's stop asking women to answer for their sex predator's crimes" by Laura Bates is very well expressed, but I suspect there's not much chance of that, sadly.

Why didn’t they respond differently has been a regular response to victims’ stories.

As if indeed, as she says, that would have changed anything. 

....all the usual questions have been directed at his victims. Commentators have questioned their stories, their motives, their timing, their responses, their actions, their inaction, their silence and even their clothing.

I've only once received an answer to the question of why there are "health costs of obesity"-which places all the focus on the target- but no 'health costs' of child sex abuse, rape etc., in the face of rape being used to prop up the "people choose to be fat" line. It was from an mra troll, he said;

"We can do something about obesity." 

[Indeed]

That's how the down-punchers feel. Those who are always expected to change to make things work or to keep things ticking over, will always be turned on and asked why they don't alter themselves sufficiently in any given situation.

Within that frame, people develop a feeling that the scapegoat can do something about being the target of unwanted attentions or assaults, along with the decent cohorts/compatriots of the alleged perpetrator can do something to interrupt their actions, but not the perpetrator him or herself.

Somehow they become the unstoppable, unchangeable force at the heart of everything to which all around must adapt to.

In the collective mind, the abusers become the power they presumably feel they are and are exercising through committing their various crimes.

The gainsayers are revealing they too feel powerless in response to hearing about these alleged crimes, they too are overwhelmed, unable to know how to react, reverting to some primitive basis of sub-rationale. A Randian style, everything that happens to you is somehow as much a product of your agency as the things you actually do.

Bates cleverly arranges the reports of the various women concerned into most castings of "Why didn't you......?" that are dredged up-pointing out these instructors can't even recognise their own instructions in action. Nor accept the shortcomings of their method. 

They are just placeholders for an intense desire for there to be some way of instantly transferring power from assailant to assailed, without having to upset the status quo. 

Proper Diagnosis is not Alt-Justice

"I'm an addict- and I know what Harvey Weinstein has isn't addiction". The title stopped me in my tracks. Having experienced internet know-it-alls yapping; "Anything can be an addiction", when not even food can be excluded;

Eating 30 doughnuts in a row every morning – that’s what someone could call an addiction.

It's hard to imagine what actions could possibly be more lacking in criteria for 'addiction' than that which is necessary for life.

The answer though not unfamiliar in tone, still surprised me, which is good;

By rushing straight off to rehab, Weinstein is begging for our compassion: “I know I hurt these women, but it’s an addiction! I need a second chance!” No mate, you messed up your second chance the second time you treated a young woman as your personal plaything

Umm, yes, buuut, him asking for a second chance can be dismissed outside of any considerations of whether he has a pattern of symptoms which meet diagnostic criteria, or not.

Diagnosis should neither be reward nor punishment. It's not validation or negation of suffering, identity, social value etc., Its considerations are purely presence or absence of any condition. Treatment too should not be about "compassion" or lack of it, but of efficacy-that is the ability of any remedy to effectively and efficiently bring resolution or cure of said pathology.

Crimes are tried by the legal system, not by medicine.

Health must not continue down the road of becoming an alternative system of justice. Health vigilantism is deliberate politic of science-blocking, regressiveness and should be perceived as such. It views science that solves problems as political, as progressive and antithetical to its own political take. Science =knowledge, kind of like Adam 'n' Eve and the tree of knowledge.

[I know]

Obviously, 'obesity' is a primary example of this.

Health is becoming a means of bypassing jurisprudence, handing out punishment. Led by the Liberal/Left, guardian hard selling the brutal punishment of gastric mutilation.

Ergo when an allegedly bad person wishes to be relieved of a health pathology, that turns into a moral problem, rather than no different than if the same person has to go to hospital with a sprained ankle [acquired by tripping over a gargantuan ego.]

12 step bunkery, as well as 'obesity' and its crusade is largely driven by a conservative polity. It's not even as if this has ever been hidden! It is about a particular take on human nature, rather than health or medicine. It makes the idea behind those political parties named such as "Christian Democrats" etc., make more sense [to me]. 

Yeah this alt kind of justice is supported by all comers and some of the few who oppose it or aspects of it are conservatives, but what is being supported above all is the politic of injecting a conservative/right-wing mentality into what could be deemed medical science. [You'll need a translate if you don't speak Portuguese.]  


Let's refresh on the saggy, baggy criteria that is now addiction;

Behavioral addiction is a form of addiction that involves a compulsion to engage in a rewarding non-drug-related behavior – sometimes called a natural reward– despite any negative consequences to the person's physical, mental, social or financial well-being.

Behavioural addiction, is not addiction it is referencing nervous or neurotic compulsion.

It’s a compulsion: he feels that if he doesn’t act on it, the sky will fall on his head or something.

That's compulsion and compulsion is not addiction, though addiction could be said to be a form of compulsion. And, "rewarding non-drug-related behaviour", well?

 Seeing as the above says, "type" of addiction, we'll continue on to "addiction";

Addiction is a brain disorder characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli, despite adverse consequences.

Compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli, does Weinstein's alleged activities match that, yes or no?

Furthermore;

Despite the involvement of a number of psychosocial factors, a biological process..... is the core pathology that drives the development and maintenance of an addiction.

Biological process? "....one which is induced by repeated exposure to an addictive stimulus". Shappi's objections are foundering on falsifiability. How can you exclude anything from that which was drawn not to exclude anything anyone wants to shove under 'addiction'?

It has never occurred that enforced 12 step quackery is also bad because its very inefficacy draws a heavier reliance on things like dispersing bad feeling, potentially, up to and including that which is something to feel guilty about. I was thinking in terms of relieving unnecessary suffering and inconvenience.

If we actually stopped using hate and other negative emotions for so called public health campaigns, and sought cured addiction proper along with nervous compulsion, then each person is free to feel feelings apt to their situation, whatever that is.

If 'compassion' is the treatment or a major part of the treatment for 'addiction'/sexual compulsion then if Weinstein meets the symptomatology, he should have every expectation of receiving the treatment available, regardless of his criminal status, just like any other condition or injury to his person. 

To emphasise the uselessness of faddiction to those currently looking to "food addict"- as some kind of promotion from "greedy" or whatever;

In responding to the ever-growing claims against him, the man who not so long ago was one of Tinseltown’s greatest titans has told reporters he is seeking help for sex addiction, which is an outrageous attempt to dodge the reality of his behaviour.

Underneath it all, perfectly thoughtful people consider "addict" to be dodging responsibility. Do you think that represents a life time of stepping up without hesitation and saying; "I am responsible for my weight"?

If you want to see this as a deal, it's a worse one. Not only can it not dispel the taint of your definition as inherently pathological ('obese'), it adds to that, dodging responsibility, something most have never done out of choice.

Try to see through your desperation for relief, only real answers to actual problems will do. Value yourself enough to remain clear-headed enough to demand them, that's the part of the validation you're missing, its within you, it's not the gift of your tormentors.

Social Justice Mutilation

From the horse's mouth in the form of a commercial published under "opinion","Obese people deserve surgical treatment, too" is written by a bariatric surgeon. He means folks have earned gastric strangulation/ amputation.

Well, with friends like these and all that.

His blunt sales pitch explains that insufficient suckers are putting money into his pocket for him to mess up and remove their healthy organs.

It is, as one surgeon puts it, “a mutilating operation” in which a person’s innards are rearranged with the aim of reducing eating.

Actually, rearranged and reduced through damage. People don't care too much about health do they? This fella's riding in on the current bariatric surgery is social justic wave, but is hardly persuasive;

Whenever possible, prevention is obviously better than cure. But this is no longer an option for people who have missed the boat of prevention and have gone on to develop severe, complex obesity with conditions such as diabetes.

This is such a clear reference to the whole 'obesity' sham that it is positively triumphalist. There's one "boat" to "prevent" weight, to prevent it, to reverse it and that's calorie restriction. You can't miss it, because everyone's being forced into it, including slimz, by the 'obesity' industry of which he's a part. 

As a reminder of what calorie restriction induced weight loss is all about. That's; anorexia, bulimia and exercise purging.

Anorexia nervosa is a serious mental health condition. It's an eating disorder where a person keeps their body weight as low as possible. People with anorexia usually do this by restricting the amount of food they eat, making themselves vomit, and exercising excessively.

What does seeking to impersonate this, using the same techniques say about your mental health? Luckily for, humankind, developing anorexia nervosa is largely, not a choice.

As for bulimia, if you can't stick your finger down your throat, help is now available,. If you want "support" for your anorexia, this guy can remove your stomach.

There could be a genuine question mark over why less of these operations are done in the UK, though it's likely to be the cost of them, and the costs of clearing up the damage they intend to do, remember smokers are vilified for increasing the possibility of damaging their organs, these people cut out healthy tissue.

France, Belgium and Sweden will have to pay out more when that particular dirt hits the fan. Ironically, they did more good, in not allowing industrial food to requisition their food environment, but equally, they're more active in mutilating their citizens.

The UK, couldn't be arsed to follow the logic of its own demands, and equally, seems to follow the same path with butchery.