Blessed by the Potato

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario is creating a new policy to guide physicians in dealing with CAM. There’s a bit of an uproar over the document, even down in the states. There’s a fair bit of good commentary around the web so I won’t get too far into it here, especially since there’s only a few days left on the consultation period. I did agree with the bit about using “their” word, allopathic, right in the title of the document. It framed the discussion all wrong right from the beginning.

My somewhat rhetorical questions for the College on the policy:

• If the College is willing to allow physicians to recommend CAM therapies on weak evidence of a chance of improvement then they should equally allow placebos. If the College currently has an ethical objection to physicians prescribing placebos, it should examine why the same rationale does not apply to CAM.
• The current regulations are quite rigorous for prescribing medications that have good evidence of safety and efficacy but which have not yet received Health Canada approval for use in Canada. Why is it much harder to prescribe a drug that does have some evidence than a CAM therapy that has none?
• The College permits in the policy draft physicians to associate with for-profit CAM clinics, even to offer such services themselves. Why is that not a considered a conflict of interest?

Note that I wasn’t able to quickly dig up the College’s current policy regarding prescribing of placebos, but I doubt it’s looked upon favourably.

Also note that in general I’m not all that hard-line on CAM, but though there may be a place for it, it’s not in the CPSO.

My dad killed the lawn recently.

Not killed it in the way I might have killed a lawn, by slow neglect and poor gardening skills, leading to patchy dead spots, thinning grass, or the slow creep of weed infestation. No, he killed the lawn, the entire thing in one fell swoop with some kind of scorched-earth herbicide application.

There was some kind of mumbled reasoning about weeds and starting from scratch in the spring, but to hear my sister tell the tale “No, dad just got angry and killed the lawn.”

It looks so bizarre, because it is not the yellow-brown, patchy-looking thing that you might associate with the natural death of a lawn. Instead it is full of thick blades of grass, all greeny-brown and slimy looking.

The thing that it most closely resembles is the terrain of an undead world in some video game. Indeed, that’s exactly what I think of now when I see that lawn: that if I were to go around to all the houses in the neighbourhood with their green (or ocassionally, yellow) lawns, they would have perfectly ordinary townsfolky things to say, like “nice weather we’re having” or “things were better when the old king was around” or “I heard there’s lost pirate treasure down by the cove, but I’m not brave enough to go looking myself!” But if I went knocking at my parents’ door their video-game-selves would say suspicious things like “what a beautiful lawn we have, it’s just a little undead” or “zombies aren’t so bad once you feed them some brains” or “there’s been a lot of strange sounds coming from the basement lately.” I can only imagine that somewhere down there a portal has opened up, or a secret chamber wherein rules the Lich King.

Is my dad the Lich King???

I got a strange email today. First off it was to the wrong address (I have a preferred gmail contact address in the sidebar, this person had figured out how to get my host to forward an email to me). It quite simply was from a person claiming to be a follower of this humble blog, and asking to do a guest post.

She said “I really liked the following two articles” [and linked to two posts] I have about 5 years of experience writing about similar subjects and would love to provide a detailed post that matches the tone of your blog…” then went on to link to some of her articles, which even from the URLs looked like search engine robotext.

Now what makes it hilarious was the two articles of mine that she chose to link to and to try to match the tone of, and had “experience writing about similar subjects”: they were some of my more random posts that did not have any kind of subject to them. One was “on Q-tips” and the other was my shot-gun catch-up post after I finished my PhD (“It’s Over!“).

Note to Jennifer: if you are real and that was genuine, I’m sorry for not responding by email, but your request was really weird.

On our street there’s a little girl who rides her scooter up and down the sidewalk in good weather. Today she knocked on the door and asked Wayfare if she had seen her scooter. It’s silver with black handles, she said.

Wayfare’s response to the situation of someone stealing a little girl’s scooter:

Just thought I’d put this up: the printed copies of my thesis before sending them off to be bound. All-together they’re almost as tall as two cans of coke! (Note that this is more a function of the number of copies that ended up being requested than the actual length of the thesis, which is unremarkable for a PhD).