Tuesday, December 11, 2012

A day in the life

It's 11am on a Tuesday morning. I don't have anybody booked for treatment today. This is a situation that I hope will start to change very soon. I've spent the last 3.5 years of my life wallowing about, living frugally but comfortably on the proceeds of my Vancouver condo sale, waiting for my latest depressive state to resolve, motivation and energy to return.

I haven't been entirely a lazy bum the whole time. I have exercised more regularly than ever before in my life. I've looked after the social media communication for the Canadian PT PainScienceDivision.
I've taught, studied, presented, travelled, written. I just haven't been making any kind of living. But I did get organized to do so, have a sweet place all set up. Now I'm working on filling it with enthusiastic patients who have honed in on the fact that they don't have to be in pain, necessarily.

Anyway, all that aside, this post is going to contain bits and pieces of what I look at everyday online. I'm a hunter and a pecker. I stalk Google reader. I subscribe to multiple news feeds and blogs. Day after day, I open Google reader to see what awaits. Usually there are 500 or so headlines and full text to scroll by. It's a bit slower on the weekends. [So I design materials for my practice instead.]

Anyway, I'm sitting here, coffee cup in hand, able to check my practice for phone calls every hour or so to ensure I don't miss any. Google reader is open, and in front of me are 448 posts to scan, select out juicy bits from, to post on Facebook, Twitter, and SomaSimple - to contribute to the thinking PT community and hopefully stimulate my own brain into feeling better about life in general and about my chosen path through it in particular.

There are patterns. The same themes crop up over and over. This is today's sampling:

1. Why are there so few women in the X Y Z field?
2. How fish turned into land animals - fins to legs
3. Targeted molecular or gene or novel drug therapy for this and that, with dizzingly complicated and dyslexia-inducing names comprised of strings of letters, numbers and sometimes Greek letters.
4. Nerve cells made out of stem cells from blood, cells in urine, skin, bone, whatever. Remarkable, actually.
5. Studies on what captures attention best.
6. Tracking evolution through gene studies.
7. What occurs at the interface of salmonella bacteria (or whatever) and our gut wall. How they breach defenses.
8. Epigenetics, or how genes are just a launch pad for all sorts of random environmental influence, including cancers, homosexuality, you name it.
9. Countries where you are killed for being an atheist [or female, or male, or gay, or by societal whim of any kind].
10. Overeating and binge eating.
11. Better medical needles, maybe, by studying porcupine quills.
12. Superbugs, hospital dangers.
13. Perception. Threat makes things loom larger.
14. Dozens and dozens and dozens of papers with names like "Epidermal Expression of Neuropilin 1 Protects Murine keratinocytes from UVB-induced apoptosis", and "PRC2/EED-EZH2 Complex Is Up-Regulated in Breast Cancer Lymph Node Metastasis Compared to Primary Tumor and Correlates with Tumor Proliferation In Situ"
15. Profiles of up and coming researchers at some university or other. 
16. Announcement of a new psychiatric pavilion somewhere. Fanfare.
17. Effect of physical fitness on Everything.
18. How basketball teamwork teaches people about networking and communication. [Yeah, I know.. file under Duh]
19. Time of year stuff - New Year's, resolutions, gift-giving, blahblah
20. China
21. Same sex marriage
22. Hm. CRPS-UK seems to have developed a heavily Buddhist flavour lately. [There is plenty of mindfulness training around that has no religious overtones or undertones.. I wonder why this blog, which I like quite a lot, actually, doesn't favour that instead? Oh well, we move along..]
23. Eating salt and drinking sugar seem to go together
24. Underwater noise and health of marine wildlife
25. New kinds of solar cells
26. Soybean diesases
27. Hurricane aftermath
28. Death of a revered Brit astronomer
29. Examining gorilla poop. 
30. Enticing toys to attach to bicycles [file, then disregard, under seasonal content/gift stuff]
31. Laser beam applications
32. More wonders of oxytocin
33. Lucid dreaming and creative consciousness  40 minutes, might be good to watch a bit later.. nah, on second thought, too many capitalizations and references to "spirituality" - don't want my brain shaped by fluff into more fluff. 
34. American politics, military, religion, blahblah 
35. Digital management of whatever
37. Autism
38. Premature children in later life, increased risk for this and that
39. Biploar disorder
40. Macro and microcephaly (we humans are so concerned about our head size and contents therein)
41. Black holes
42. Immunotherapy for this or that type of cancer
43. Women outlive men [men are still trying to figure out why]
44. Quest for new antibiotics
45. PTSD
46. Recession, fiscal cliff, blahblah
47. MDs try to adapt to social media, learn to doctor by Skype in remote areas
48. Flu season, go get shots
49. Effects of serotonin
50. Diabetes, obesity in children
51. Bedbugs are undaunted by ultrasonic frequency devices
52. Link between watching TV and obesity. [File under Duh]
53. Hot flashes
54. ALS
56. Coral still in trouble.
57. Ketamine
Same guy who posted the Buddhist video earlier.
59. Eczema
60. Postpartum stress and stressors on the mom
61. Apps and devices for this and that
62. Don't feel lonely or you may become demented
63. Diesel fumes and childhood brain tumours
64. Kate, pregnancy, blahblah
65. Illustrated history of this and that - mostly pop culture
66. Toxoplasma [pretty sure I have this, NYD]
67. Compatibility or non-, of science and religion [theme more pronounced at this time of year I think]
68. Isagenix Study Is Not Convincing, from ScienceBasedMedicine
69. Concussion
70. "Pain doubted if medical basis is missing", Pain-Topics.org. [You can say that again]
71. Rocks on Mercury, or Mars, or wherever
72. Using drones to track poachers
73. Is the internet rotting? 


Now it's 1pm: while I sorted through that batch another 85 came into the feed, which I scanned also. 
Anyway, I may have missed some themes and topics due to glazed eyes, but those were the endlessly recycled news items, with a few good, or at least less boring, highlights. 

I need to get a new life I think. 

























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