May 20, 2009 by
47-Million-Year-Old Fossil Suggests Primate Link
"Ida," or Darwinius masillae, is just one of the many missing links that make their way to the divergence of primate evolutionary paths, one of which produced the primate forms of monkeys, apes, and humans, and another which produced animals such as lemurs. In fact, the gap is so large in the known fossil record, scientists are uncertain exactly where the divergence began.
Still, "Ida" has a lemur-like skeleton.
"Ida" also has primate characteristics such as opposable digits, grasping hands, nail-less fingers (as opposed to claws), and relatively short limbs. Since the newly discovered missing link is dated as being from the Eocene era, a time period from which few fossil records have been found, the fossil will be entered into the religion versus science debate.
For scientists, the more important aspect of Darwinius masillae is that it was found in Germany, which might point toward Europe as being more important in the evolutionary spectrum than was heretofore believed. And regardless of where "Ida" stands on the evolutionary path, one thing is unique about the fossil: It is amazingly preserved.
The 47-million-year-old fossil allowed paleontologists to study the fossilized record of fur, soft tissue, and even the remains of the animal's last meal, which consisted of seeds, fruits, and leaves.So is Jorn Hurum's "Ida" really a missing link, another stop on the evolutionary road that has led to the present, or is she just another singularly unique prehistoric creature? "Ida" is both. Her existence will not "prove" or "refute" the argument that every creature was "designed" for a singular purpose, nor will it prove or discount evolutionary theory.
The missing link found at the Messel Pit in Germany suggests itself as a link in the overall concept of evolution and the record of life on the planet, just another piece of the puzzle. Whether one believes that Darwinius masillae was created by an omniscient force or was the end result of ages of natural selection -- or a combination of the two methods of thinking -- becomes the province of subjective accommodation.
******
Source: NationalGeographic.com
woensdag 20 mei 2009
woensdag 25 maart 2009
GEE! THEY FOUND THE GENES...
... AND NOW THEY KNOW THAT AUTISM IS LINKED WITH RESPONCES TO THE ENVIRONMENT AND LEARNING!
The question of course is, do they know what that means or will they make again the wrong assumptions that support their wrong claims and offer again the wrong solutions? One thing is sure, if all the wrongs offer them riches, I already know what the outcome will be...
Autism Genes That Control Early Learning
New study confirms importance of early behavioral intervention in treating the disorder (how wish we could find a cure for the Science Disorder at hand...)
By Nikhil Swaminathan
A new genetic analysis of large, inbred Middle Eastern families found that genes linked to a heightened risk of autism are crucial to a child's ability to learn.
A group of scientists, led by a team at Children's Hospital Boston, has pinpointed six new genes that may contribute to autism, a disorder characterized by asocial behavior, difficulty communicating and repetitive actions that affects an estimated one in 150 children born in the U.S. each year.
They report in Science that all of the linked genes are involved in forming new and stronger connections, called synapses, between nerve cells in the brain, which is the biological basis of learning and memory formation."We're showing, on the one hand, that autism seems to have a large genetic component," says study co-author Christopher Walsh, chief of genetics at Children's Hospital. "But, the genes that are involved are actually those that are involved in responding to the environment and learning."
The findings, Walsh says, reinforces the importance of early diagnosis of autism and intervention, particularly behavioral therapy and learning in enriched environments through repeated activities. Performing these sorts of tasks may help strengthen cellular connections, compensating for the malfunctioning genes.The researchers studied 88 families in which one or more children had been diagnosed with autism, and the parents of each autistic child were cousins.
Marrying second and third—and even first cousins—is not uncommon in the Middle East, and by studying such families scientists were able to track recessive genetic traits (caused by mutations that only affect individuals with two copies of the flawed genes). Such traits occur far more frequently in inbred families than in others.The team found a total of six mutations affecting genes that had previously not been linked to autism.
The mutations came in the form of deletions, where part or all of both copies of the genes were missing in a child with the disorder. All of the genes are known to be involved in parts of the same process: creating and strengthening synapses.Normally, when nerve cells (neurons) activate in response to an environmental factor (such as processing a new face or a new sound), synapses between two active cells change to provide stronger connections so the cells can pass on information more efficiently.
As the brain develops, new connections are continuously formed among nerve cells, reinforced and, in some instances, broken as the brain starts to mature and divvy up its different functions to specific groups of neurons.
According to the findings, "All of the relevant mutations could disrupt the formation of vital neural connections during a critical period when experience is shaping the brain," says Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Md. To wit, most children are diagnosed with autism between the ages of one and three years of age.Walsh says the team believes these deletions—which in most cases found here only remove some, but not all, of the DNA that makes up a gene—may mean that the genes can regain some of their normal function.
In fact, some of these genes may just be switched off. "This presents the possibility that in some kids we could get the gene going again without necessarily having to put it back in the brain," he says.Jim Sutcliffe, a molecular physiologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., in a Science editorial notes that the majority of autism research is geared toward prenatal development, even though the brain continues to develop well after a child is born. "Experience and environmental input play an important role in subsequent development," he says.
He calls the notion that learning in early life is disrupted by these autism genes "an intriguing proposal," but says that further research is needed to validate it.
Dan Geschwind, a neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that to test the hypothesis that autism genes affect synaptic strength, it would be important to examine the 20 to 30 other genes that have been implicated in autism and see which ones also play a role in strengthening neuronal connections. "If its a significant proportion," he says, "that would provide support for the hypothesis being put forward."
Walsh notes that many children diagnosed with autism tend to show vast improvement when they are placed in environments that allow them to practice learning repetitively. He says that these activities essentially train the neurons to make up for their lost function."Our work reinforces the importance of early intervention and behavioral therapy," he says. "The more we understand about genetics the more we understand how important the environment is."
Gee! Not much hope here either. The ISS (Idiotic Scientist Syndrome) has strike yet again!!!
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=autism-genes-that-control
The question of course is, do they know what that means or will they make again the wrong assumptions that support their wrong claims and offer again the wrong solutions? One thing is sure, if all the wrongs offer them riches, I already know what the outcome will be...
Autism Genes That Control Early Learning
New study confirms importance of early behavioral intervention in treating the disorder (how wish we could find a cure for the Science Disorder at hand...)
By Nikhil Swaminathan
A new genetic analysis of large, inbred Middle Eastern families found that genes linked to a heightened risk of autism are crucial to a child's ability to learn.
A group of scientists, led by a team at Children's Hospital Boston, has pinpointed six new genes that may contribute to autism, a disorder characterized by asocial behavior, difficulty communicating and repetitive actions that affects an estimated one in 150 children born in the U.S. each year.
They report in Science that all of the linked genes are involved in forming new and stronger connections, called synapses, between nerve cells in the brain, which is the biological basis of learning and memory formation."We're showing, on the one hand, that autism seems to have a large genetic component," says study co-author Christopher Walsh, chief of genetics at Children's Hospital. "But, the genes that are involved are actually those that are involved in responding to the environment and learning."
The findings, Walsh says, reinforces the importance of early diagnosis of autism and intervention, particularly behavioral therapy and learning in enriched environments through repeated activities. Performing these sorts of tasks may help strengthen cellular connections, compensating for the malfunctioning genes.The researchers studied 88 families in which one or more children had been diagnosed with autism, and the parents of each autistic child were cousins.
Marrying second and third—and even first cousins—is not uncommon in the Middle East, and by studying such families scientists were able to track recessive genetic traits (caused by mutations that only affect individuals with two copies of the flawed genes). Such traits occur far more frequently in inbred families than in others.The team found a total of six mutations affecting genes that had previously not been linked to autism.
The mutations came in the form of deletions, where part or all of both copies of the genes were missing in a child with the disorder. All of the genes are known to be involved in parts of the same process: creating and strengthening synapses.Normally, when nerve cells (neurons) activate in response to an environmental factor (such as processing a new face or a new sound), synapses between two active cells change to provide stronger connections so the cells can pass on information more efficiently.
As the brain develops, new connections are continuously formed among nerve cells, reinforced and, in some instances, broken as the brain starts to mature and divvy up its different functions to specific groups of neurons.
According to the findings, "All of the relevant mutations could disrupt the formation of vital neural connections during a critical period when experience is shaping the brain," says Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Md. To wit, most children are diagnosed with autism between the ages of one and three years of age.Walsh says the team believes these deletions—which in most cases found here only remove some, but not all, of the DNA that makes up a gene—may mean that the genes can regain some of their normal function.
In fact, some of these genes may just be switched off. "This presents the possibility that in some kids we could get the gene going again without necessarily having to put it back in the brain," he says.Jim Sutcliffe, a molecular physiologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., in a Science editorial notes that the majority of autism research is geared toward prenatal development, even though the brain continues to develop well after a child is born. "Experience and environmental input play an important role in subsequent development," he says.
He calls the notion that learning in early life is disrupted by these autism genes "an intriguing proposal," but says that further research is needed to validate it.
Dan Geschwind, a neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that to test the hypothesis that autism genes affect synaptic strength, it would be important to examine the 20 to 30 other genes that have been implicated in autism and see which ones also play a role in strengthening neuronal connections. "If its a significant proportion," he says, "that would provide support for the hypothesis being put forward."
Walsh notes that many children diagnosed with autism tend to show vast improvement when they are placed in environments that allow them to practice learning repetitively. He says that these activities essentially train the neurons to make up for their lost function."Our work reinforces the importance of early intervention and behavioral therapy," he says. "The more we understand about genetics the more we understand how important the environment is."
Gee! Not much hope here either. The ISS (Idiotic Scientist Syndrome) has strike yet again!!!
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=autism-genes-that-control
zaterdag 14 maart 2009
How Society Ate all Human Beings. A true story!
I am Autistic.
That is about enough to require from me to look at life in a way that others do not. That includes society and social rules. They are utterly unfair because they are simply based on supporting the ones on the top of the social ladder, while making it as hard as possible for the ones underneath, the social underdogs.
After all, all societies, from the very first at the dawn of the so called civilization, until today, needed "slaves" to endlessly turn the wheels of fortune for the ones who sat comfortably at the top. This is a fact that we are forced every day through the mass media to ignore if not completely forget.
What rules is not Love or compation, not even God anymore, not even we humans. We do not rule. We are all slaves. What rules is money. As simple as that. Whoever has it is at the topo of the social ladder, benefits from all the social rules, and struggles to keep that position of priveledge!
Those who do not have it, struggle to fill in the gap with notions such as love, compassion and God. As John Lennon very wisely said, God is the measure of ones hardships. The more the hardshiops, the more we turn to God for help and mostly it seems what we ask is ... MONEY!!!
Now, you will say that there are many people who have money and also pray to God. Now that I feel is a huge lie. One of those social things that people use to interact in a proper way. If people with money pray is only because they are either afraid they might lose that money, or because they have some health issue they can't seem to solve with money, or they are one of these regious fanatics who make money from "selling" faith and God!!!
Oh dear! Did I step on someone's toes? Well, excuuuuuuse me! Maybe your toes were in the wrong place. So mind where you keep them next time. Maybe they are too long and take someone else's space, or simply stand on the way. After all they are YOUR toes so keep your eyes on the ground looking out for on coming feet!!!
Yes, that is the kind of obnoxious way that Autistics tend to think and get in the way of society's rules and status quo. Now, let's imagine that once society and the human beings were friends. Walked side to side caring for each other. One day society realized that the human being had some flaws, some weaknesses that were easily used, easily exploited to own's favor. That is when society began abusing what was meant to help and protect: the human being. Instead it made a new friend. This new friend was greed!
That is what caused society's old friend, the human being to change tactics. It slowly began to be born ... Autistic! This way the human being was not as vulnerable to society's rules and influence. The Autistic human had a free mind and did not feel the need to follow the herd of society nor to act socially. This made society vert upset. The more Autistic humans were born, the less society could exploit them. "Aha!" Society thought, "I have to find a way to claim back my influnce and control!" But that was not as easy as it sounded. Society had to find some collaborators and make them execute a dark and evil plan.
The plan was simple, "devide and rule" it was called and all society had to do was to turn human beings against each other. Not just strangers against each other, that was very easy and it was done daily through greed and brainwashing. Now society had to strike deeper, in the heart of the human family. Society would not do that alone. It has slaves willing to do the dirty work. They are called professionals who, as a reward for their obedience, they are granted high ranking places in the social pecking order, and are given lots of money and even more power, since we all now that power can drive anyone crazy...
These professionals had to come up with a plan to separate the family. First they thought out the family's ranks of weakness. The child was by far the weakest. Bingo! Their strategy was to separate the child from the parents, that way the family would fall a pile of cards. Easy pickings.
Then they came up with a label. Something very horrible, an illness so awful, a disorder, an abnormality, a stigma!!! They did not have to look far for a name. Autism. It sounded Greek, so it had a sort if historical and cultural aura, it was easily pronounced and it sold like fresh baker rolls!
But how? Tell a parent that his or her child is different than the rest, convince them that it will never make it as the rest, allow them to fall into the trap that what causes this difference is something so horrible that has NO CUR, and ... tadah!!! Parents believe it. They want to have the same kid like their neighbor has, they have the same car like the neighbor, they live in teh same house like their neighbor's, they eat the same junk like the neighbor, so why not have the same child like the neighbor???
This sounded so, bad so unfair! Money. They could "buy" a new child. No, that is not possible, what then? They would buy a cure! Yes, a cure. Find us a cure!!! Here is all our money but please, pretty please, give us our child back... but please... make sure it is exactly the same like the one the neighbors have!!! We do not want one that is different.
That was the day when the parents sold their kids to the professionals who labeleld them abnormal and defective, and took the parent's money to fix them and one day, maybe one return them to the parents...
They just forgot one thing these professionals. They forgot the kids. They forgot that the kids grow up and one day can use a computer and one day find a way to break their silence and speak out and defend themselves and accuse the professioanals and the greedy rotten society for doing what it did. That day came, but no one listened. They were all too scared, too brainwashed, to enslaved to listen or care.
They kept screaming for a cure to the epidemic, they were pilling up all their money and asking for more from the UN and all Governments, to stop this curse! To find a cure, to stop Autism from kidnapping their children and eating them up.
They were screaming and yelling louder than any Autistic adult could speak, so no one listened to them, and that is how society won the dirty game.
The End (of the decent human beings)
ZEITGEITS - PART 2
That is about enough to require from me to look at life in a way that others do not. That includes society and social rules. They are utterly unfair because they are simply based on supporting the ones on the top of the social ladder, while making it as hard as possible for the ones underneath, the social underdogs.
After all, all societies, from the very first at the dawn of the so called civilization, until today, needed "slaves" to endlessly turn the wheels of fortune for the ones who sat comfortably at the top. This is a fact that we are forced every day through the mass media to ignore if not completely forget.
What rules is not Love or compation, not even God anymore, not even we humans. We do not rule. We are all slaves. What rules is money. As simple as that. Whoever has it is at the topo of the social ladder, benefits from all the social rules, and struggles to keep that position of priveledge!
Those who do not have it, struggle to fill in the gap with notions such as love, compassion and God. As John Lennon very wisely said, God is the measure of ones hardships. The more the hardshiops, the more we turn to God for help and mostly it seems what we ask is ... MONEY!!!
Now, you will say that there are many people who have money and also pray to God. Now that I feel is a huge lie. One of those social things that people use to interact in a proper way. If people with money pray is only because they are either afraid they might lose that money, or because they have some health issue they can't seem to solve with money, or they are one of these regious fanatics who make money from "selling" faith and God!!!
Oh dear! Did I step on someone's toes? Well, excuuuuuuse me! Maybe your toes were in the wrong place. So mind where you keep them next time. Maybe they are too long and take someone else's space, or simply stand on the way. After all they are YOUR toes so keep your eyes on the ground looking out for on coming feet!!!
Yes, that is the kind of obnoxious way that Autistics tend to think and get in the way of society's rules and status quo. Now, let's imagine that once society and the human beings were friends. Walked side to side caring for each other. One day society realized that the human being had some flaws, some weaknesses that were easily used, easily exploited to own's favor. That is when society began abusing what was meant to help and protect: the human being. Instead it made a new friend. This new friend was greed!
That is what caused society's old friend, the human being to change tactics. It slowly began to be born ... Autistic! This way the human being was not as vulnerable to society's rules and influence. The Autistic human had a free mind and did not feel the need to follow the herd of society nor to act socially. This made society vert upset. The more Autistic humans were born, the less society could exploit them. "Aha!" Society thought, "I have to find a way to claim back my influnce and control!" But that was not as easy as it sounded. Society had to find some collaborators and make them execute a dark and evil plan.
The plan was simple, "devide and rule" it was called and all society had to do was to turn human beings against each other. Not just strangers against each other, that was very easy and it was done daily through greed and brainwashing. Now society had to strike deeper, in the heart of the human family. Society would not do that alone. It has slaves willing to do the dirty work. They are called professionals who, as a reward for their obedience, they are granted high ranking places in the social pecking order, and are given lots of money and even more power, since we all now that power can drive anyone crazy...
These professionals had to come up with a plan to separate the family. First they thought out the family's ranks of weakness. The child was by far the weakest. Bingo! Their strategy was to separate the child from the parents, that way the family would fall a pile of cards. Easy pickings.
Then they came up with a label. Something very horrible, an illness so awful, a disorder, an abnormality, a stigma!!! They did not have to look far for a name. Autism. It sounded Greek, so it had a sort if historical and cultural aura, it was easily pronounced and it sold like fresh baker rolls!
But how? Tell a parent that his or her child is different than the rest, convince them that it will never make it as the rest, allow them to fall into the trap that what causes this difference is something so horrible that has NO CUR, and ... tadah!!! Parents believe it. They want to have the same kid like their neighbor has, they have the same car like the neighbor, they live in teh same house like their neighbor's, they eat the same junk like the neighbor, so why not have the same child like the neighbor???
This sounded so, bad so unfair! Money. They could "buy" a new child. No, that is not possible, what then? They would buy a cure! Yes, a cure. Find us a cure!!! Here is all our money but please, pretty please, give us our child back... but please... make sure it is exactly the same like the one the neighbors have!!! We do not want one that is different.
That was the day when the parents sold their kids to the professionals who labeleld them abnormal and defective, and took the parent's money to fix them and one day, maybe one return them to the parents...
They just forgot one thing these professionals. They forgot the kids. They forgot that the kids grow up and one day can use a computer and one day find a way to break their silence and speak out and defend themselves and accuse the professioanals and the greedy rotten society for doing what it did. That day came, but no one listened. They were all too scared, too brainwashed, to enslaved to listen or care.
They kept screaming for a cure to the epidemic, they were pilling up all their money and asking for more from the UN and all Governments, to stop this curse! To find a cure, to stop Autism from kidnapping their children and eating them up.
They were screaming and yelling louder than any Autistic adult could speak, so no one listened to them, and that is how society won the dirty game.
The End (of the decent human beings)
ZEITGEITS - PART 2
woensdag 4 maart 2009
Stigmatized with Autism for EVER!!!
From Medscape Family Medicine
My comments are at the end of this article!
The Government Push for Electronic Medical Records
Posted Feb. 24, 2009
Author: Nancy R. Terry
The economic stimulus plan currently being considered by Congress allocates $20 billion to health information technology such as electronic medical records (EMRs). Recent postings on Medscape Physician Connect (MPC), a physicians-only discussion board, offer frank opinions about the utility of EMRs in clinical practice -- opinions that are decidedly mixed.
"EMR is the worst thing that has happened to me professionally in over 25 years of practice. My care of patients is impeded and the quality of my care is worse as a direct effect of the introduction of EMR," says a MPC contributor who championed the installation of an EMR system for his physician group.
"I absolutely love our EMR," says a nephrologist. "It has improved the quality of our practice immensely. I spent a lot of time customizing for our practice, but it was worth it. Everything is point and click. To improve care and cost, all patients need a Web-based collection of medical records that include hospitalization, lab reports, x-rays, as well as office notes. That would be the ultimate care."
Physicians who are dissatisfied with EMR systems cite loss of productivity, the negative impact on patient care, and high maintenance requirements. Physicians who have embraced EMRs cite the increased efficiency the systems have brought to their practices. EMRs tend to get high marks from subspecialists and low marks from primary care physicians.
Some of the MPC physicians least satisfied with their EMR systems are those practicing at large healthcare companies or medical centers. "My hospital solicited medical staff support for EMR," says one MPC contributor. "After implementation, administration took over and now EMR is solely for the benefit of medical records as a storage device. To hell with the medical and nursing staffs. RNs are input clerics rather than beside nurses."
"The very few efficiencies were all on the administrative side," says a regional medical director who helped bring an EMR system to a nationwide healthcare company. "A good sales pitch with nice graphics and testimonials sell it, then the clinical staff is left to suffer."
"EMRs need to address work flows and clinical efficiencies and not seek to provide administrative support," says a general practice physician. "Unfortunately, the administrators are the ones with the time and energy. The rest of us are seeing patients."
In smaller practices, issues of EMR maintenance and support infringe upon patient care. "In my clinic," says a family medicine physician, "provider meetings are completely dominated by EMR issues and problems. There is virtually never time left for discussing topics pertinent to improving patient care."
In speaking about their day-to-day experience with EMRs, primary care physicians complain that entering patient information is cumbersome and time consuming, often because of a template-based system that does not reflect the patient encounter.
"The assumption of the EMR is that you already know the diagnosis when the patient arrives." says an MPC contributor. "This may be better for specialty care, but in primary care, patients come in with fatigue, rash, insomnia, diarrhea, and cough. It's difficult to enter all this until after the visit."
An internist who describes herself as "tech savvy" says that her system's scripted entries for patient information are inadequate. "If you free-text, it is much more time consuming. And we are discouraged from free-texting by our administration because it doesn't trigger adequate billing codes. Not only has it reduced my time with patients, it has added an extra 2 to 3 hours of work each night from home."
The Choice of Systems
"My advice to practitioners," says one MPC contributor, "is wait for a decent EMR that produces useful notes that accurately describe a patient encounter in a way that helps a clinician."
Waiting may not be an option for much longer, however. One provision of the government stimulus plan would impose reduced payments on physicians who are not "meaningfully using" information technology. Whatever is meant by the provision's phrasing, one thing is clear: the push is on to go electronic. Physicians must learn how to make information technology work for them. One EMR expert says that it starts with the choice of systems. "Primary care practices should stay away from templates and stick to a new program by Praxis® [Infor-Med Medical Information Systems, Inc., Woodland Hills, California] that uses pattern recognition of similar cases as well as rare cases. It decreases the workload immensely. For specialty practices, I recommend templates, and Visionary™ Dream EHR [Visionary Medical Systems, Inc., Tampa, Florida] is excellent in being very user friendly," says an MPC contributor whose research in medical management focuses on EMR systems.
Another MPC contributor notes that the technologically adventurous can customize an EMR system by using open-source software. In open-source systems, he explains, the source code needed for programming is included in the software, making the program infinitely adaptable. "When you buy most proprietary software, you have to accept the functions that come with it, as designed by the developers. With open-source systems, you can modify the software to your heart's content."
Is a Choice of Systems Really a Choice?
For some physicians, however, EMR systems remain a nonissue, and the heavy government funding of healthcare information technologies is nothing more than a smokescreen obscuring the real issues in primary care.
"The government and the public are not able to deal with the real problems facing medical practice and the real solutions necessary to turn it around (ie, reasonable reimbursement rates, malpractice reform, regulation of the unscrupulous practices of the insurance industry)," says an otolaryngologist. He adds that once healthcare information technology is "fully implemented and solves nothing, we can start to talk about real reform and real answers."
My comments
If you read this article and do not feel you understand the topic "Stigmatized with Autism for EVER!!!" and the connection with the Government Push for Electronic Medical Records, then think that children that are diagnosed as autistic and thus bear the stigma of having the worst disorder of the human kind, will be known to all who have access to their medical records, including those who have access to electronic records whether they are medically trained or not and whether they have an oath of secrecy and protection of privacy towards their patients.
Besides, why is the Government so keen in keeping records of all we do or have, including our Medical records?
To find out this answer, you need to devote an hour or two to watch this documentary. Then you will know why the Government is pushing (if not shoving) to ensure all info is electronically registered.
What seems to be for your protection as patient and as human being might after all look like an endless removal of freedoms and our right for privacy. So be careful what you wish for, cause you just might get it!!!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4573704334162675487
My comments are at the end of this article!
The Government Push for Electronic Medical Records
Posted Feb. 24, 2009
Author: Nancy R. Terry
The economic stimulus plan currently being considered by Congress allocates $20 billion to health information technology such as electronic medical records (EMRs). Recent postings on Medscape Physician Connect (MPC), a physicians-only discussion board, offer frank opinions about the utility of EMRs in clinical practice -- opinions that are decidedly mixed.
"EMR is the worst thing that has happened to me professionally in over 25 years of practice. My care of patients is impeded and the quality of my care is worse as a direct effect of the introduction of EMR," says a MPC contributor who championed the installation of an EMR system for his physician group.
"I absolutely love our EMR," says a nephrologist. "It has improved the quality of our practice immensely. I spent a lot of time customizing for our practice, but it was worth it. Everything is point and click. To improve care and cost, all patients need a Web-based collection of medical records that include hospitalization, lab reports, x-rays, as well as office notes. That would be the ultimate care."
Physicians who are dissatisfied with EMR systems cite loss of productivity, the negative impact on patient care, and high maintenance requirements. Physicians who have embraced EMRs cite the increased efficiency the systems have brought to their practices. EMRs tend to get high marks from subspecialists and low marks from primary care physicians.
Some of the MPC physicians least satisfied with their EMR systems are those practicing at large healthcare companies or medical centers. "My hospital solicited medical staff support for EMR," says one MPC contributor. "After implementation, administration took over and now EMR is solely for the benefit of medical records as a storage device. To hell with the medical and nursing staffs. RNs are input clerics rather than beside nurses."
"The very few efficiencies were all on the administrative side," says a regional medical director who helped bring an EMR system to a nationwide healthcare company. "A good sales pitch with nice graphics and testimonials sell it, then the clinical staff is left to suffer."
"EMRs need to address work flows and clinical efficiencies and not seek to provide administrative support," says a general practice physician. "Unfortunately, the administrators are the ones with the time and energy. The rest of us are seeing patients."
In smaller practices, issues of EMR maintenance and support infringe upon patient care. "In my clinic," says a family medicine physician, "provider meetings are completely dominated by EMR issues and problems. There is virtually never time left for discussing topics pertinent to improving patient care."
In speaking about their day-to-day experience with EMRs, primary care physicians complain that entering patient information is cumbersome and time consuming, often because of a template-based system that does not reflect the patient encounter.
"The assumption of the EMR is that you already know the diagnosis when the patient arrives." says an MPC contributor. "This may be better for specialty care, but in primary care, patients come in with fatigue, rash, insomnia, diarrhea, and cough. It's difficult to enter all this until after the visit."
An internist who describes herself as "tech savvy" says that her system's scripted entries for patient information are inadequate. "If you free-text, it is much more time consuming. And we are discouraged from free-texting by our administration because it doesn't trigger adequate billing codes. Not only has it reduced my time with patients, it has added an extra 2 to 3 hours of work each night from home."
The Choice of Systems
"My advice to practitioners," says one MPC contributor, "is wait for a decent EMR that produces useful notes that accurately describe a patient encounter in a way that helps a clinician."
Waiting may not be an option for much longer, however. One provision of the government stimulus plan would impose reduced payments on physicians who are not "meaningfully using" information technology. Whatever is meant by the provision's phrasing, one thing is clear: the push is on to go electronic. Physicians must learn how to make information technology work for them. One EMR expert says that it starts with the choice of systems. "Primary care practices should stay away from templates and stick to a new program by Praxis® [Infor-Med Medical Information Systems, Inc., Woodland Hills, California] that uses pattern recognition of similar cases as well as rare cases. It decreases the workload immensely. For specialty practices, I recommend templates, and Visionary™ Dream EHR [Visionary Medical Systems, Inc., Tampa, Florida] is excellent in being very user friendly," says an MPC contributor whose research in medical management focuses on EMR systems.
Another MPC contributor notes that the technologically adventurous can customize an EMR system by using open-source software. In open-source systems, he explains, the source code needed for programming is included in the software, making the program infinitely adaptable. "When you buy most proprietary software, you have to accept the functions that come with it, as designed by the developers. With open-source systems, you can modify the software to your heart's content."
Is a Choice of Systems Really a Choice?
For some physicians, however, EMR systems remain a nonissue, and the heavy government funding of healthcare information technologies is nothing more than a smokescreen obscuring the real issues in primary care.
"The government and the public are not able to deal with the real problems facing medical practice and the real solutions necessary to turn it around (ie, reasonable reimbursement rates, malpractice reform, regulation of the unscrupulous practices of the insurance industry)," says an otolaryngologist. He adds that once healthcare information technology is "fully implemented and solves nothing, we can start to talk about real reform and real answers."
My comments
If you read this article and do not feel you understand the topic "Stigmatized with Autism for EVER!!!" and the connection with the Government Push for Electronic Medical Records, then think that children that are diagnosed as autistic and thus bear the stigma of having the worst disorder of the human kind, will be known to all who have access to their medical records, including those who have access to electronic records whether they are medically trained or not and whether they have an oath of secrecy and protection of privacy towards their patients.
Besides, why is the Government so keen in keeping records of all we do or have, including our Medical records?
To find out this answer, you need to devote an hour or two to watch this documentary. Then you will know why the Government is pushing (if not shoving) to ensure all info is electronically registered.
What seems to be for your protection as patient and as human being might after all look like an endless removal of freedoms and our right for privacy. So be careful what you wish for, cause you just might get it!!!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4573704334162675487
maandag 2 maart 2009
Are Scientists Studying Autism Smart?
To be able to answer this very important question, let's first find out about octopuses. This is because the behaviour of an autistic child bears a great deal of resemblance with the behaviour of a "bored" octopus playing with a pill bottle...
Unfortunately, the scientists studying autistic children do not seem to have the same level of intelligence or attention to details as the ones studying octopuses. Could it be that their idea that "all humans are one and the same" blocks their mental abilities? Or is it just that their intelligence passes first through their bank account and social status?
More research is needed to establish which correlation is affecting scientists from seeing the intelligence behind the autistic child's repetitive behaviour!
Are octopuses smart?
The mischievous mollusk that flooded a Santa Monica aquarium is not the first MENSA-worthy octopus
By Brendan Borrell
On Thursday morning, workers filing into the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium in California were surprised to find 200 gallons (750 liters) of seawater soaking into their spanking new, ecologically sensitive flooring. It turns out that a curious two-spotted octopus had disassembled a water recycling valve and directed a tube to spew out of the tank for about 10 hours, according to the Los Angeles Times.
"It found something loose and just pulled on it," the aquarium's education manager Tara Treiber told the Times. "They are very smart creatures."
Octopuses, some 300 species of which inhabit tropical waters around the world, can change colors, squirt out poison, and exert a force greater than their own body weight. But calling the eight-armed cousin of your garden snail "smart" seems a bit of a stretch. In fact, the animals are part of an elite group of slimy mollusks known as cephalopods that range from giant squid to the shelled nautilus and all have remarkably large "brains"—at least for creatures sans backbones.
Scientists have found that octopuses can navigate their way through mazes, solve problems quickly and remember those solutions, at least for the short term. To find out more about octopus intelligence, we spoke to Jennifer Mather, a comparative psychologist at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. Mather has been studying octopuses for 35 years in an effort to gain insight into the evolution of intelligence. While most scientists hold octopuses in high regard, it's worth noting that not everyone shares Mather's lofty assessment of their intellectual abilities and personalities.[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
Are octopuses smart?
Yes, but of course one has to ask what that means. I would say intelligence means learning information and using the information that you've learned.
So, how do you know they are smart?
We observed how octopuses figure out how to open clams and what sort of flexibility and variety they have. We give them clams and mussels in order to figure out which they like best. They are very strong, but we found they prefer mussels because mussels are easier to open. They switched to clams when we put the clams on a half shell. They clearly made a decision to go with what was easiest. We noticed along the way that yanking them open wasn't the only thing the octopuses could do to open them.
They have a cartilaginous beak, which looks a lot like a parrot's beak, and they could chip at the edge of the clamshell and then they could inject poison and weaken the clam. Or they actually have a salivary papilla, and they can drill a hole to inject the toxin that way in the stronger clams. They were selective about what technique they would use with what species. We decided we would cheat on them: We took one of the easier ones and wired them shut. They switched techniques according to what would work best. Of course, this doesn't sound hard to you because you're a human, but most simple animals keep trying the same technique.
What other indications are there that octopuses are intelligent?
Octopuses play, and play is something that intelligent animals do. At the Seattle Aquarium, my colleague Roland Anderson and I figured out a situation in which they might play: a boring situation. We gave them an empty tank and a floating pill bottle and waited to see what would happen. Nothing happened the first time, but, after the fourth time, a couple animals did something we call "play."
The octopus blew a jet of water at the pill bottle and that caused it to go over a water jet in the tank and come back to the octopus. These two individual animals did it in a sequence over 20 times. That's just exactly the kind of thing we do when we bounce a ball. When you bounce a ball, you are not trying to get rid of the ball, you are trying to figure out what you can do with the ball.
My note: When the above happens with an autistic child's play they call it "stereotypical behaviour"!!! How about calling it an intelligent child's play while trying to figure out all one can do with a ball, a ring, a car, a piece of paper, a piece of string, anything and everything... So, tell me now "Are the Scientists studying Autism Smart???" Any ideas? Anyone???
Octopuses also have personalities.
We used the same kind of setup people use when they want to study human personalities. You just ask what do the animals commonly encounter during the day in different situations and look at the variability. We put them in three common situations: alerting (opening the top of the tank), threatening (touching the octopus with a test tube brush) and feeding (the octopus was given a crab to munch). This takes awhile because we tested 33 animals, each for two weeks. We found there are three dimensions and we settled for names: activity, reactivity and avoidance. Avoidance is how shy you are. Activity is if you are very active or passive. And reactivity indicates whether you are very emotional or more blasé. Octopuses can have any mix of those traits. We didn't take it any further, but there's a former graduate student in Australia looking at the extent to which personality affects ecology.
Do octopuses have brains?
The molluscan nervous system has a bunch of paired ganglia (a cluster of nerve cells), which in an animal like a clam or a snail are not very big and are widely distributed through the body. They control different functions and are located in different areas. Well, the cephalopods—that's the octopuses, squids and cuttlefish—they are unique in that all these ganglias have condensed so they form a centralized brain. The other thing that is unique amongst the mollusks is there are two areas of this brain that have developed that are specialized for memory storage. It's not just that the brain is larger and condensed, but they have areas of the brain dedicated to learning. That's the kind of thing we humans have, but it’s a completely different brain. By invertebrate standards it’s a huge brain, but by vertebrate standards, it’s a small brain. What's interesting about the octopus is about one third of the neurons (nerve cells) are in the brain. They have a huge neural representation in the arms, and there's a ganglion controlling every sucker, so there's quite a bit of local control. As humans, we're very proud of having a pincer grasp—the thumb and forefinger—and we say that's responsible for our ability to manipulate the environment so well. The octopus can fold the two sides of its sucker together to form a pincer grasp and it can do that with every single one. It has a hundred pincer grasps.
Why do you think octopuses evolved such big brains?
Probably because the tropical coral reef is the most complex environment in the world. There's such a huge variety of situations, lots of kinds of prey, lots of predators, and if you are not armored, you'd better be smart. The octopus has gone the smart route. Also, we talk about mammalian intelligence evolving in social situations, but clearly the octopus, a solitary organism, has evolved intelligence to solve ecological problems.
Do octopuses often cause trouble in aquariums?
They are very strong, and it is practically impossible to keep an octopus in a tank unless you are very lucky. One of the early researchers said if you leave a floating thermometer in a tank, it will last about five minutes. Octopuses simply take things apart. I recall reading about someone who had built a robot submarine to putter around in a large aquarium tank. The octopus got a hold of it and took it apart piece by piece. There's a famous story from the Brighton Aquarium in England 100 years ago that an octopus there got out of its tank at night when no one was watching, went to the tank next door and ate one of the lumpfish and went back to his own tank and was sitting there the next morning. The aquarium lost several lumpfish before they figured out who was responsible.
Original story at:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=are-octopuses-smart
Unfortunately, the scientists studying autistic children do not seem to have the same level of intelligence or attention to details as the ones studying octopuses. Could it be that their idea that "all humans are one and the same" blocks their mental abilities? Or is it just that their intelligence passes first through their bank account and social status?
More research is needed to establish which correlation is affecting scientists from seeing the intelligence behind the autistic child's repetitive behaviour!
Are octopuses smart?
The mischievous mollusk that flooded a Santa Monica aquarium is not the first MENSA-worthy octopus
By Brendan Borrell
On Thursday morning, workers filing into the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium in California were surprised to find 200 gallons (750 liters) of seawater soaking into their spanking new, ecologically sensitive flooring. It turns out that a curious two-spotted octopus had disassembled a water recycling valve and directed a tube to spew out of the tank for about 10 hours, according to the Los Angeles Times.
"It found something loose and just pulled on it," the aquarium's education manager Tara Treiber told the Times. "They are very smart creatures."
Octopuses, some 300 species of which inhabit tropical waters around the world, can change colors, squirt out poison, and exert a force greater than their own body weight. But calling the eight-armed cousin of your garden snail "smart" seems a bit of a stretch. In fact, the animals are part of an elite group of slimy mollusks known as cephalopods that range from giant squid to the shelled nautilus and all have remarkably large "brains"—at least for creatures sans backbones.
Scientists have found that octopuses can navigate their way through mazes, solve problems quickly and remember those solutions, at least for the short term. To find out more about octopus intelligence, we spoke to Jennifer Mather, a comparative psychologist at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. Mather has been studying octopuses for 35 years in an effort to gain insight into the evolution of intelligence. While most scientists hold octopuses in high regard, it's worth noting that not everyone shares Mather's lofty assessment of their intellectual abilities and personalities.[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
Are octopuses smart?
Yes, but of course one has to ask what that means. I would say intelligence means learning information and using the information that you've learned.
So, how do you know they are smart?
We observed how octopuses figure out how to open clams and what sort of flexibility and variety they have. We give them clams and mussels in order to figure out which they like best. They are very strong, but we found they prefer mussels because mussels are easier to open. They switched to clams when we put the clams on a half shell. They clearly made a decision to go with what was easiest. We noticed along the way that yanking them open wasn't the only thing the octopuses could do to open them.
They have a cartilaginous beak, which looks a lot like a parrot's beak, and they could chip at the edge of the clamshell and then they could inject poison and weaken the clam. Or they actually have a salivary papilla, and they can drill a hole to inject the toxin that way in the stronger clams. They were selective about what technique they would use with what species. We decided we would cheat on them: We took one of the easier ones and wired them shut. They switched techniques according to what would work best. Of course, this doesn't sound hard to you because you're a human, but most simple animals keep trying the same technique.
What other indications are there that octopuses are intelligent?
Octopuses play, and play is something that intelligent animals do. At the Seattle Aquarium, my colleague Roland Anderson and I figured out a situation in which they might play: a boring situation. We gave them an empty tank and a floating pill bottle and waited to see what would happen. Nothing happened the first time, but, after the fourth time, a couple animals did something we call "play."
The octopus blew a jet of water at the pill bottle and that caused it to go over a water jet in the tank and come back to the octopus. These two individual animals did it in a sequence over 20 times. That's just exactly the kind of thing we do when we bounce a ball. When you bounce a ball, you are not trying to get rid of the ball, you are trying to figure out what you can do with the ball.
My note: When the above happens with an autistic child's play they call it "stereotypical behaviour"!!! How about calling it an intelligent child's play while trying to figure out all one can do with a ball, a ring, a car, a piece of paper, a piece of string, anything and everything... So, tell me now "Are the Scientists studying Autism Smart???" Any ideas? Anyone???
Octopuses also have personalities.
We used the same kind of setup people use when they want to study human personalities. You just ask what do the animals commonly encounter during the day in different situations and look at the variability. We put them in three common situations: alerting (opening the top of the tank), threatening (touching the octopus with a test tube brush) and feeding (the octopus was given a crab to munch). This takes awhile because we tested 33 animals, each for two weeks. We found there are three dimensions and we settled for names: activity, reactivity and avoidance. Avoidance is how shy you are. Activity is if you are very active or passive. And reactivity indicates whether you are very emotional or more blasé. Octopuses can have any mix of those traits. We didn't take it any further, but there's a former graduate student in Australia looking at the extent to which personality affects ecology.
Do octopuses have brains?
The molluscan nervous system has a bunch of paired ganglia (a cluster of nerve cells), which in an animal like a clam or a snail are not very big and are widely distributed through the body. They control different functions and are located in different areas. Well, the cephalopods—that's the octopuses, squids and cuttlefish—they are unique in that all these ganglias have condensed so they form a centralized brain. The other thing that is unique amongst the mollusks is there are two areas of this brain that have developed that are specialized for memory storage. It's not just that the brain is larger and condensed, but they have areas of the brain dedicated to learning. That's the kind of thing we humans have, but it’s a completely different brain. By invertebrate standards it’s a huge brain, but by vertebrate standards, it’s a small brain. What's interesting about the octopus is about one third of the neurons (nerve cells) are in the brain. They have a huge neural representation in the arms, and there's a ganglion controlling every sucker, so there's quite a bit of local control. As humans, we're very proud of having a pincer grasp—the thumb and forefinger—and we say that's responsible for our ability to manipulate the environment so well. The octopus can fold the two sides of its sucker together to form a pincer grasp and it can do that with every single one. It has a hundred pincer grasps.
Why do you think octopuses evolved such big brains?
Probably because the tropical coral reef is the most complex environment in the world. There's such a huge variety of situations, lots of kinds of prey, lots of predators, and if you are not armored, you'd better be smart. The octopus has gone the smart route. Also, we talk about mammalian intelligence evolving in social situations, but clearly the octopus, a solitary organism, has evolved intelligence to solve ecological problems.
Do octopuses often cause trouble in aquariums?
They are very strong, and it is practically impossible to keep an octopus in a tank unless you are very lucky. One of the early researchers said if you leave a floating thermometer in a tank, it will last about five minutes. Octopuses simply take things apart. I recall reading about someone who had built a robot submarine to putter around in a large aquarium tank. The octopus got a hold of it and took it apart piece by piece. There's a famous story from the Brighton Aquarium in England 100 years ago that an octopus there got out of its tank at night when no one was watching, went to the tank next door and ate one of the lumpfish and went back to his own tank and was sitting there the next morning. The aquarium lost several lumpfish before they figured out who was responsible.
Original story at:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=are-octopuses-smart
vrijdag 28 november 2008
Solar Eclipse - The Eclipse of the Male
About a year ago, no... actually more than that almost 2 years ago, I predicted the eclipse of the male. The post I wrote back then is here in this link. Read it and also the two more following it. The explain who what happens in the Sky, also happens on Earth.
Read below the whole page from the first post to the very last titled: Solar Eclipse 11 September 2007
Not only the amount of male men is decresing, as it is shown in this article and video here, but the ones who are actually born, are 1 in 165 divided by 4 times 3 times all countries' populations! Do the math idiotic neurotypical world.
The men who are born, might be fewer, but as the Autistic ones whose amount you can figure out using this simple mathematical equation, are far better than their 164 in 165 times all countries' populations counterparts!!!
You lose!!!
Just keep in mind that it happens above it also happens below. This is the Age of Aquarius, the time for the Sun, the Ra to set, the Yang needs a rest. Now it is time for the Moon to rise, the Yin the female, the MOTHER!!!
The Autistic Female is the root and the cause and the reason for Autism. Autistic Females, become Autistic Mothers, who birth Autistic children, 3 in 4 are Autistic MEN!!!
Unless we HEAL the Female, the GYNH in Greek, the daughter of the Earth, GYNH = GHINH, meaning the one born of the Earth, that is of Earth, the one that borns like Earth, creates.
Women, females, mothers, daughters, have lived lives in the shadow on the male, in the shadow of the Sun, the Ra, the Apollo. Now as the Sun is eclipsing, hiding, like it hides at night behind the body of the Earth, and allows the night to come, to allow the rest, the sleep, the healing to come.
Now, humankind is entering the night time, when the Moon is in the sky and the light it sheds is soft and friendly. It is the light for lovers, it is the light of Love. This Love has been gone for a long time from the daily lives of the human kind. We need, we MUST bring it back.
Love will heal the women, the mothers and they will heal their children. Their sons AND their daughters. Love is the water that feeds the Earth and allows things to grow on its surface. It makes even desert, fertile and rich.
This water of Love, the element of Yin will bring the necessary healing in out hearts and bodies, and most importan of all, OUR SOULS!!!!
I have come to awake the asleep and allow them to climb out of the cave that Pluto spoke of, and show them the posibilities beyond the cave walls, the Earthly womb!
The Autistics are the next human evolutionary step, and as such they will inherit the Earth. As much as you will try to eliminate us, wipe out Autism by a so-called cure or chellations, you cannot wipe out what lies within our DNA, our each cell, our bodies. No matter what you do, you can never reach our souls. Our strength, our abilities lie there.
We have a different relationship with our body and our soul than the other human beings. We do not need to search it, look for it with our eyes, because our brains thinks in a different way, it uses the 3-dimensional sense of touch. We thus, touch and feel our souls with our whole body.
That is because we wear the body as a cover of the soul, a shell. Like a pearl that grows with the shell, so grows our soul from all pain we encounter. Pain is what creates the pearl. It is an irritation turned into a jewel!!!
The pearl like Athena who jump out of Zeus' head with its wisdom, carries the wisdom of the shell, the wisdom and genius that created it. Instead of expelling it, it kept it, it nourished it, it caressed it, covering it with each stroke, protecting it and also neutralizing it.
The caressing of the shell, is the MOTHER, Mother of Pearl they call it. The Mother, each mother must learn again how to cover, surround and protect the child in a loving way, so that later in life it has a protective hard and shiny layer like the white substance that covers the pearl, to protect it throughout its life.
The love of the mother builds the outer protective shell of our souls. Without it, we are naked. Now that love has become so scarce, and we are all so thirsty, now comes the night that will cool us and nurish us with Moon dew carried by river and ocean nymphs. The Yin is awakening.
The Pearl is the Moon in the sky. The Mother. The Mother of all Autistics. We are the nocturnal humans, just like bats our senses of sight and hearing are under developed, we see in 2-dimensions, we hear in 2-dimensions, not 3! We do not use Gestalt like the beings that prefer the daylight.
Our bodies are almost invisible, without an armour because our mothers did not touch us, hug us, play with us, hold us, caress us, kissed us enough. Society did NOT ALLOW THEM TO DO THAT!!!
Back in the 70s, when the first solid theories about child raring and childcare were surfacing, many advised mothers to let the child cry and not pick it up every time it cried. The idea was to teach children to interact with the mother in a better way and thus also free the mother of the constant burden of being in physical contact with the child.
What they did not foresee was the longterm effect this kind of childrearing had to the future of mankind. Once mothers learned how to reduce the close interaction time between them and their child by using ways that the industry and science supported as acceptable, no one realized how easy it was to sliep from a little less, to little more less, to even a little bit more less, and less and less physical interaction between mother and child.
Mothers hardly play in a physical way with their children, they hardly touch them compared to the generations before when children where constantly held and carried and breastfed and held some more!
We all know how physical contact heals mental traumas, emotional traumas, psychological traumas, soul traumas. We as human being have become more and more traumatized as individuals because we do NOT RECEIVE ADEQUATE sensory integration with our nearest and dearest, OUR OWN MOTHRERS and last but not least, FATHERS.
We learn to form and shape our Animus and Anima from these major presences in our lives. Their presence and the absence of their presence or their negative presence affects deeply the way we understand both our selves and own gender as well as the orther and opposite gender. We create through these interactions the two streotypes of male and female, animus and anima, Yin and Yang, from our own parents or parental figures.
Yung knew that. But even Yung, got something slightly wrong!
A female forms her Anima not from her mother, but from her FATHER! She sees the male and learns from his interaction with her, what kind of woman is the ideal. The ideal woman is the one that will be a perfect mate to her father. The female will either become that perfect female, the perfect wife to her father if his presence in her life is a positive one, or she will become the exact opposite than what she percieves as the perfect female, the perfect wife to her father if his responce and interaction with her is negative and traumatic.
This means that the anima is shaped by the father in a woman's mind. The animus is shaped by the mother. The ideal man, and husband to the mother becomes the ideal man to the daughter, provided that the mother's presence in the womans' life was and still is a positive one. A negative and traumatic experience will tell the woman that her mother is not happy and will wish to have a male in her own life that will make sure to make her happy, unlike her mother who is not happy!
It is a game of forces, and magnetic fields. The (-) attracts the (+) not another (-). We bocome the force missing from the lives our parents. We become their opposite, their mirror image, or their identical alter ego, their twin depending what we see and perceive that they lack in their lives!
The problem is that most men hardly spend time, real quality time with their daughters. If they do spend time it will be by a wide margin more with thei rsons. The daughter, the growing female is deprived of love, physical contact, love, acceptance, and friendship by her own father.
I have seen and heard so many stories about "wounded" women that I now know how this vicious cycle of unloving has began. From father to daughter, and then from mother to son, from son that then becomes again a father to his daughter and she once a mother to her own son.
Fraud called these the Oedipus and the Electra Simplexers, but they are more than just a situation, it is a basis that has caused us human beings to forget how to love, to truly love with out bodies not just through words, and material gifts!!!
We are now suffering from many sexual frustrations, adding to the lack of love, of closeness and physical tenderness. We are human beings deprived from sensory experiences that cause a bad, almost disasterous sensory integration. We are hungry. Not for food, but for LOVE!!!!
The result in all this spiraling and evolving, is an evolutionary path that leads through an environment, a social environment without love, without compasion, without understanding for each other, for each other's needs, wants, likes and dislikes. We assume we know the other as we know ourselves.
But we do NOT! We hardly know our selves, let alone someone else. How ignorant and arrogant it is to claim we know ourselves when we hide from our selves all that hurts us. We lock it away and throw away the key. We ignore the pain and pretend it does not exist, it NOT there. We refuse to see and hear it so stubbornly that we eventually become blind and deaf to pain. All pain. Everyone's pain. Our OWN pain and . . . worst of all, our own child's PAIN!
We become so immune to pain that we fail to realize how much we have changed our world to very hostile place for our children, how we scare and frighten them by the things we do, because we can't recognize how much these things might hurt, them, us, everyone. Immunity to pain means no exceptions. No one is spared from this.
Immunity to pain, inability to recognize emotions, sexual and emotional frustrations, if you put these all together the end result is the epidemic we all see as Autism! It is not an epidemic though. The human natire has build in our DNA ways for us to evolve and overcome every possible threat that could cause us extinction. The survival of the fittest, means the fittest that can adjust faster and more adequate to the changing environment.
Once society has become a changing environment, turning into a hostile battlefield, the human evolution has brought forth warriors, fighters, hunters, retainers, protectors, organizers, and other highly skilled individuals. These highly skilled individuals are the Autistics. We have a special interest or more special interests. These become our special skills, our specific tools of surviving.
We each have a skill, because we also each have a task. We are here to preserve the Arts. The Arts of Life. We learn something so deeply and widely and totaly that we retain and preserve it. We collect, retain and preserve. From this collection, retainment and preservation we bring forth new ways, new tools, new knowledge. Because we combine it in a different way than the non-Autistics.
We do not use Gestalt. we use the 3-dimensional sense of touch to process our world, our knowledge, our life! We think is a way that is FUNDAMENTALY different than the non-Autistics that they cannot figure us out, they are anable to see what makes us tick, and what motivates our strange and irrational behaviors, our strange and clumsy ways or movement, of speech, of social behavior.
We have been labeled broken, damaged, abnormal. We are forced to follow treatments, interventions, special schooling, socializing, behavioral management and psychoanalytic therapies to become like the rest! It is absurd. No, not just absurd it is vulgar, it is hypocritical and completely rude!
We the Autistics are the ones who gave the world the mathematics, the philosophy that gave birth to science, and now science comes and renders us broken and damaged? How dare you?
Who do you think you are? Who gave you the right to dominate us in such a way? Who told you that the human spieces is one only and one is YOU?
May the one ONLY was and still is US, the AUTISTICS. How do you know it is you and only you? Think again cause time, your time is running out. We know more than you will ever be able to see and hear with your limited imagination.
Leave us Autistics alone. If you continue in this path you will be destrying your own humankind future. We are more skilled than you are and if you change us, you will not win. We know your weaknesses, and we knwo our strengths. You know our weaknesses and ypou also know your weaknesses. You have no idea what your strengths are, and even you know our's.
If an Autistic is bullied he will be tolerant many times of the pain you cause him, until one day he will strike back. He will strike back with such force that the hit will be fatal. This is because we look and see, we observe and record. We know the other's weakness because we also know our own. We do not hide our weaknesses, we do not lock them away. We carry them on us, what we feel is what we show, our emotionas are naked not hidden. Our joy is visible and so is our pain. If you look well you will see it.
But you can't see it. You are immune, blind to pain. Your own and everyone else's. We, on the other hand acknowledge our own, and therefore also everyone else's. We are hypersensitive. No. We are not hypersensitive, YOU ARE HYPOSENSITIVE, you are immune, numb, senseless. We are fine. It is the instruments that you mearure with that cause the misconception. You ASSUME that your hyposensitivity is the norm. Everything above that norm is hypersensitive.
Too bad you failed to notice that the scale is incorrect. Our hypersensitivity is the norm and you all fall far below our standards. Guess who is broken and needs fixing, guess who need social training and humanly acceptable skills? Not us, I can assure that.
The time has come to heal the world. We the skilled Artists will show you how, we will teach you how to change your hyposensitivity for a sensitivity that is up to standards, not ours or yours but OURS. We need to learn to accept each other as each is, who each is, what each is. We need to learn again SELFLESS LOVE!!!
donderdag 27 november 2008
Autism and Neurotypicality – Simply a Difference of Dimensions
An Article By Perla Messina / Illustration by Perla Messina
Background
Throughout the human history our body has been evolving in an invisible way, by recording and reproducing the last necessary adrenaline level needed to survive the last recorded threat.
To ensure a margin of error the human body not only reproduces the last recorded amount, but adds to that to enlarge its chances for survival. This means that with each generation the highest level of adrenaline produced by the mother’s body is carried over to the fetus through the mitochondria that the fetus inherits from the mother.
That level becomes the basic survival tool kit in the offspring’s life. This means that each generations is equipt with the memory of the last generations highest adrenaline levels, and the possibility to add on this levels and increase them as needed. The offspring’s own adrenaline levels will depend on the basic level it inherited from the mother plus the additional amount that his/her body feels is necessary as a margin of error. The highest recorded level will then become the basic level for the next generation.
This means that with each generation the adrenaline level seen as basic grow exponentially resulting in what Dr. Baron-Cohen found today as the greatly elevated adrenaline levels in fetuses and amniotic fluid!
Besides this evolutionary change in our bodies, another change occurs that is also invisible. This change occurs in the brain. The brain, as it develops within the womb, has the ability to know and recognize the sort of environment that the species will be born in through several factors, that reach the fetus through the mother's body. These factors are processed in the mothers body and their effect passes through the umbilical cord and affects the fetus, as well.
- The mother's diet (research shows that the kind of nutrition that the mother uses can affect the fetus’ gender and possibly also other parameters to ensure better abilities of survival),
- The mother's stress levels. The higher the adrenaline level, through higher stress levels the more the fetus will assume that the surrounding environment where the fetus will be born, is hostile and the more fit the fetus needs to be/become to ensure its own survival.
- The mother's pregnancy, gestation and delivery. This period will be combined with the nutrition and stress levels information to give the fetus the full (three dimensional) picture of what kind of survival tools it needs to have in the form of brain and muscle development to ensure it is fit –if not the fittest–to survive within the environment that it's being born!
What happens in the case of what we call “Autism”?
The diet is affected. The mother of an Autistic, research has shown is most probably also Autostic, and Autistics show an increased preference for foods that contain carbohydrates (sweets, pasta, bread, etc). These foods indicate that the Autistic body is made to consume and produce higher energy levels. The mother will consume these foods and then feel guilty for gaining weight because of the image of a thin woman brandmarked on all women by society. Her diet will change in ways that are unnatural. She will over eat, feel guilty and undereat, feel she is harming the fetus and overeat again and so on.
The stress levels. The higher stress levels produce also higher adrenaline levels, and these show that the Autistic body is capable of increased muscle strength, speed, reduced pain ability, hypersensitivity of the senses (all tools necessary for battle). The higher adrenaline levels have told the fetus that the environment where it's being born is increasingly hostile!!!
Gestation and delivery. The traumatic experience of birth is broadened by thses events since most women with Autism (due to increased adrenaline levels in their own bodies), suffer from complications during gestation that are based on hormonal imbalances, difficult pregnancies, and other gynecological problems. These imbalanced add to the stress levels, alter the diet (binge eating, anorexia, etc), create false alarms of near birth that are recorded by the fetus as a “get ready to be born” alarm that cause the fetus to become slowly immune to such alarms by frequent and repeated exposure. When the time of birth comes the fetus’ immunity to the "get ready to be born" stress, adds to the difficulties and duration of the delivery, creating yet another cause for stress for both mother and child.
Where do all these lead? To a species that is evolving to survive an increased hostile environment! The children born are “ready for battle” and instinctively know that danger lures behind every corner. The primary need for such a brain born ready for battle is to learn how to survive as fast as it can. Speed learning is the key for survival of the fittest when one is born without claws, fangs, and wings!
The Human Brain and its Learning Ability
The human brain is set to learn through the senses. With a priority to the senses of sight and hearing. These senses in the Neurotypical brain take a great deal of space and surface within the brain and use most of the brain’s processing capacity because they are 2-dimensional, while the surrounding environment is 3-dimensional. Each eye and ear sends information in the brain that needs to be processed and combined with an ability that we call Gestalt. The brain takes the data in receives from the eyes and ears that is 2-dimensional and turns them into 3-dimensional using the ability of Gestalt! This is a long and time consuming process, when it comes to a brain that is set for a constant battle with its environment.
The increased levels of adrenaline in the Autistic brain have the following effect. Instead of using the sense sight and hearing as the primary collectors of information and then processing this 2-dimentional information with Gestalt to produce a 3-dimensional image of the environment, the brain changes its primary sense for data collection to a more efficient one that does not need the Gestalt processing to turn info into 3-dimensional. From all our senses, there is one that is 3-dimensional WITHOUT THE NEED of Gestalt to make it such!
The sense of touch is the ONLY primary sense that is 3-dimensional without the need of processing, without the need of Gestalt. This sense offers a more direct and faster, much faster collector of data that tells the brain about the environment. The Autistic brain unlike the Neurotypical brain does NOT use the sense of sight and hearing as primary, but the SENSE OF TOUCH!!!!!!!
This sense of touch acts as a basis upon which ALL other 2-dimensional senses come to add details, such as images, sounds, tastes, and smells. There is one catch in this way of brain processing: The more the 3-dimensional sense of touch is underdeveloped (limited sensory integration) the more the supplementary 2-dimensional senses of sight, hearing, smell and taste cannot find enough or adequate space on this basis to stand upon therefore creating a sense of hypersensitivity, a brain overload that is due to this inadequate space.
The way I can describe this is like a limited patch of ground where an increasing amount of trees needs to grow, resulting in a sort of overgrown jungle, where all plants mingle so wildly that no one can tell where they begin and where they end.
This is why sensory integration is so important to the Autistic brain when it comes to aiding the other 2-dimensional senses that also assist the learning ability of the Autistic brain. A limited sensory integration is based on several factors:
- The mother’s increased stressful life and limited time to spend with baby/child. Mothers that used to breast feed until the child was 3 or 4 years old, had to also hold the child while breast feeding. Modern methods and the use of a bottle, has freed mothers from having to hold their children as long or as often that before. Unfortunately, this decrease in “holding time” has limited the child’s developing brain and its need for sensory integration through the sense of touch.
- The mother’s own sexual life has changed. More and more couples suffer from sexual problems that are based of the stress and increasing demands of society. These result to the following paradox. The less sexual satisfaction, the less love, and the less touch (sensory integration) the mother receives from her male partner, the less she will give to her child. The incorrect assumption that the female is capable to produce never-ending amounts of affection and love is a myth that is causing the human race great damage. The female is a vessel that needs to be filled with “love” in order to give love. The less love it receives from her environment the less it is able to give to her offspring.
- The male dominated society’s effect on women, and subsequently mothers, by turning them into carbon copies of their male counterparts in their battle for survival in a society whose norms are set by the male needs and abilities. The female intuition is ridiculed, the female emotional fluctuations and seemingly instability that results from the female monthly cycle of hormones is seen as a weakness instead of the strength it actually is, and the female need for respect and full equality in decision-making is still very limited compared to male’s.
- The mother’s own sexual life has changed. More and more couples suffer from sexual problems that are based of the stress and increasing demands of society. These result to the following paradox. The less sexual satisfaction, the less love, and the less touch (sensory integration) the mother receives from her male partner, the less she will give to her child. The incorrect assumption that the female is capable to produce never-ending amounts of affection and love is a myth that is causing the human race great damage. The female is a vessel that needs to be filled with “love” in order to give love. The less love it receives from her environment the less it is able to give to her offspring.
- The male dominated society’s effect on women, and subsequently mothers, by turning them into carbon copies of their male counterparts in their battle for survival in a society whose norms are set by the male needs and abilities. The female intuition is ridiculed, the female emotional fluctuations and seemingly instability that results from the female monthly cycle of hormones is seen as a weakness instead of the strength it actually is, and the female need for respect and full equality in decision-making is still very limited compared to male’s.
All of the above, construct a picture that Fraud once called the “refrigerator mother” yet, while it is not the female’s own fault but a result of the need for survival with a society that has rejected her specific abilities and needs, the result is the SAME!
Today’s women are less capable to give their child the kind of love that their child needs from them. The kind of love that involves lengthy amounts of touching, hugging, holding, embracing, caressing, etc. In the increasingly busy lives of women such lengthy processes of tactile and sensory diet are a sheer luxury and the choices these women have are shaped by the pressure they themselves receive from their HOSTILE environment. An environment that makes ever increasing demands on them, that allows their female nature less and less freedom and acceptance. This is environment that dictates the kind of evolution that is needed and will be set forth by each generation, to ensure that the next time round the tables are turned.
The more hostile the environment is, has become and will become for women and their specific, biological, sensory, and hormonal needs, the more their bodies will produce offspring that will be set to survive, conquer and change this seemingly hostile environment by having brains that evolved from a 2-dimentional learning mode and process to a 3-dimentional learning mode and process to ensure not only that their fronts are covered in their daily battle for survival, but also their BACKS!!!
The 3-Dimentional Autistic Brain and its Abilities and Disabilities
The Autistic brain freed from the extra load of Gestalt processing is now able to use it’s abilities in a way that is more efficient and energy-saving. A warrior that needs to survive in a hostile environment cannot waste neither time nor energy in trivial matters.
Thus, the Autistic brain by using the 3-dimensional sense of touch is able to expand its focus on other areas that offer better protection and more chances for survival. This expansion includes two areas. One is the area of systemizing, very well defined and explained by Dr. Baron-Cohen. This is the pure “male” brain function that helps to categorize the environment and label it accordingly as friendly or dangerous, enhancing the ability to recognize what patterns work better towards survival and which do not.
Besides this pure “male” brain, there is another function that is present. This function has been obscured, disregarded and discredited by science. This ability is that of the pure “female” brain, the ability to sense, using intuition, extraordinary sensitivity, even telepathy. This ability works almost as the sonar, that allows bats to fly safely in the darkness and hunt their equally flying prey of insects.
Autistics call this ability the “Tool” and works almost in the same fashion as a radio antenna picking up radio waves from the ether. The “Tool” is a sensation, a "voice" warning us and protecting us like a beam of light that “touches” and senses the space and time in front of us . Because our brain works in 3-dimensions, it is capable to handle time and space in a different way than the Neurotypical brain. Not in the linear 2-dimensional way that the Neurotypical mind does, but in a 3-dimensional way where time and space are endless and everlasting, encompassed within a sphere, the sphere of the universe, where nothing is wasted or lost and all exists eternally freed from the linear 2-dimensional way of thinking that holds the Neurotypical mind bonded in a linear past, present and future.
The abilities of the Autistic brain are not limitless. Unfortunately, while the 3-dimensional sense of touch, gives us certain abilities the other 4 senses lack in abilities in an equal way. Our vision and hearing suffer without the use of Gestalt and the information flows in our brain is fragmented and in myriads of pieces, exposing all details we see and hear in a flat 2-dimensional way that overloads our brain, as it tries to connect these 2-dimensional information not to each other as a brain that uses Gestalt would, but to the existing 3-dimensional basis of the sense of touch.
This automatically means that we have difficulty differentiating sounds that are near from sounds that are far, objects that are near and objects that are far, seeing depth requires Gestalt and our brains do not have that ability. That is why we are clumsy as infants and young children. It is not our body that is clumsy, but our body’s movement when it comes to its relationship to the objects we see and hear around us. It is more difficult for a child with Autism to learn the distance between our body and all other objects that surround it because our eyes are not able to see the depth of field in the same way as the eyes of Neurotypical child!
In some ways, this lack of depth of field makes us fearless because it does not arouse in our brains the typical response of fear as the same input would in a brain that operates mainly on the sense of vision and hearing. Our clumsiness of movement is the symptom of a brain that learns to relate as a WHOLE to its environment through the 3-dimensional sense of touch instead of the 2-dimensional (plus Gestalt) way that the Neurotypical brain uses. Once we learn to relate to distance, speed, movement through the sensation of OUR WHOLE BODY, through the input that enters our brain from the whole surface of our bodies, aided by the less able senses or sight and hearing, we learn to function within our environment as well as the Neurotypicals.
The ways we use to learn and master this ability also follows a different path than the Neurotypical brain. Through stereotypical movements of body, hands, head, and legs/feet, through the waving of hands in front of our eyes, through the rotation of objects within our visual field we teach our eyes to see and recognize the changes in depth of field that we cannot other wise see!
That is also why we do poorly in sports, we cannot catch a ball not because our body is clumsy or slow but because OUR EYES MISJUDGE THE DISTANCE between our hands and the ball!!! The reason we can’t separate sounds whether they are near or far, or whether they are the voice of a person standing next to us and a person in a room next door is based on the same principle and problem. Our brain takes the input from our eyes and ears as 2-dimensional and keeps in as such instead of turning it into a 3-dimensional. Without Gestalt our sight and hearing is as flat and linear as flat can be. We use the WHOLE body sensation to create the 3-dimensions we need out of these senses.
Many of us find ways to learn depth through different activities. I used to bounce a ball against a wall, for hours and hours until I could successfully coordinate my eyes to see the correct distance and tell my hands where to aim and catch the ball. Some others will use different sports or hobbies like origami, that takes a flat surface and creates a 3-D image teaching the eyes, through the movement of the hands (the 3-dimensional sense of touch) how to recognize and record the depth of field within space.
Autism and Neurotypicality, the two Human Species
Autism and Neurotypicality, the two Human Species
Unlike all other species we believe that humans are all the same. They are not. Our lives have once been spread out over wide open spaces, allowing each of the two kinds to roam free and live in peace and harmony with the other. In many cases we used each other’s specific abilities to our benefit, by recognizing that some of us had abilities others did not have, recognizing that some could see possibilities where the others could not!
The two species now live piled up together in closed spaces, in over-populated areas and within a system of laws and rules that does not take into consideration our specific differences. We are like the two sides of a coin that is now lying flat on one side, hiding the other. The hidden side is what was diagnosed many years ago as Autism. Autism is not a dysfunction of the brain, nor it is an abnormality of the human development. It is a basic but fundamental difference. A difference of how our brains is built and how it functions.
The Autistics, as they have been labeled, think in 3-dimensions using as primary sense the sense of touch and the tactile input we receive.Our other senses like that sense of sight and hearing function less well because our brain does not use Gestalt (or if it does, it uses it in a very limited and almost dysfunctional way). Thus, our brain sees the forest, with its 3-D basis and then engages our other 2-dimensional senses to see the details and add them to that basis. This allows us to notice details more easily, see tiny differences that would otherwise go unnoticed, disengage parts for better and deeper learning. Our brains need to do this microscopic observation because they are set to function in a hostile environment and even the tiny difference can be proven lethal.
The Neurotypicals, as the Autistics have labeled those who labeled them, think in 2-dimensions using as primary senses the sense of sight and hearing, adding to these the sense of touch, which is the basis of Gestalt since the tactile input creates the holographic or holistic connection of all the 2-dimensional input coming into the brain from the eyes and ears. This means that the Neurotypical brain sees the details first and then combines them together to see the whole. Seeing the forest instead of engaging in the details of trees allows the Neurotypical brain to gather a different set of information about its environment, and relate to it in a different way. The Neurotypical brain it is set to function in a non-hostile environment, and see and recognize safety as a given.
The Neurotypicals, as the Autistics have labeled those who labeled them, think in 2-dimensions using as primary senses the sense of sight and hearing, adding to these the sense of touch, which is the basis of Gestalt since the tactile input creates the holographic or holistic connection of all the 2-dimensional input coming into the brain from the eyes and ears. This means that the Neurotypical brain sees the details first and then combines them together to see the whole. Seeing the forest instead of engaging in the details of trees allows the Neurotypical brain to gather a different set of information about its environment, and relate to it in a different way. The Neurotypical brain it is set to function in a non-hostile environment, and see and recognize safety as a given.
I call this difference the difference between the hunter and the herd.
The Autistic brain is that of the hunter, set to recognize differences that will help it seek out and “contact” the ones it sees as fit for its survival. We stand aside and observe, seeking to find specific traits in the others around us, before we seek contact. A good hunter knows when to “attack” and when not. A wrong move can result to an injury that can render the hunter useless, and unable to hunt any longer. This will lead to a certain death. Eventhough we hunt, we do not hunt to kill. We hunt to connect.
We seek and search to find others similar to us, or with traits complimentary to us, to connect and add these traits to ours. More traits, equals more tools, and more tools equals better survival. We are the hunters of fellowship, of friendship and of human contact. We do not herd, we co-operate as an equal with an equal. That is why we are very selective with whom we will co-operate and create a collective of traits and tools, of abilities and interests. This co-operation MUST have a solid basis on equality and respect between the parts that form it. Only under such circumstances can a co-operation be in perfect balance!
The Neurotypical is that of the herd that finds safety in groups, in numbers, in uniformity, ignoring (willingly or not the differences) to ensure homogeneity within the group it belongs. Within the homogenous group, the Neurotypicals also seek traits of similarities and differences. Here the reason is very different. In a herd, not all members can be equal. The Neurotypical brain seeks the 3-dimentionality within the 2-dimentional herd, by creating a hierarchy within the group. The way the Neurotypical herding brain connect is not that of equality but of dominance, of levels and castes.
This model has shaped our existing society and has become the primary way of acceptable behavior. In a homogenous group, hierarchy is based on details that show each other the position of the person on the hierarchy ladder. Wealth and possessions, objects of luxury, fashionable clothes, a fancy car, attributes equally important as the intellectual markings of degrees, titles, positions, and the respect these bring. All these are the necessary attributes that mark the hierarchical position of the holder and separete him from the rest of the herd.
To the Autistic brain such attributes seem trivial and useless, while for the Neurotypical brain the behaviors we need to develop our brains seem stereotypical and equally useless. The two kinds of the Human species have turned their backs to each other, and are dominating one the other. What is normal has been established by the ones who hold the hierarchy, leaving the other, the Autistics at their mercy, while they are no less abnormal than the Neurotypicals the Autistics are now used as prey to feed the herds ever increasing hunger for wealth, domination, and power. The herd has now become a pack of hyenas and the hunters lonely lions at the mercy of the hyenas' feeding frenzy. For how long more?
Perla Messina, one of the Autistics who is tired of the wrong picture Science has of us.
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