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

36. A contest in Quebec for whoever can build the best Ice Hotel. Cool. 

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

55. Ciguatoxin-induced cold pain, nausea, diarrhoea, intense itchiness and abdominal pain. Ciguatera is an incurable disease caused by eating a type of poisonous fish. [Not to self, stick to eating only salmon]

56. Coral still in trouble.

57. Ketamine

58. Aha!! Here's something juicy: What does your pain mean to you? Learning from the #Messi injury

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? 

74. Smoking associated with worse back pain, via Medscape.

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.