Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1 July 1818 – 13 August 1865) was a Hungarian-born German physician who noticed that the doctors in the Vienna General Hospital‘s First Obstetrical Clinic had three times the morality rate for recently delivered mothers compared to the women who gave birth with a midwife in attendance. The women under the doctors’… Read more Semmelweis and Sinning Against the Paradigm
Sometimes people ask me why I am so weirdly persnickety about my eldest daughter’s food intake. Why can’t I just let the poor kid have a piece of birthday cake? It’s one thing to cut back on sugar, but why don’t I lighten up on my Sherman-through-Georgia attitude toward wheat and artificial food colors? Why… Read more Asperger’s, Microbiota, and Food
I have a good friend in great distress. Her sister’s ex-husband and his new wife, whom I shall call Nimrod and Bandersnatch, have decided to fat-shame and torment my friend’s niece because they think she is ‘out of shape’. The little girl is only ten years old. Although she is not overweight or obese in… Read more Fat Shaming Preteen Girls Harms Them For Life
My eldest daughter, Blossom, loves me to tell her stories of things I did when I was a little girl her age. When she turned ten years old yesterday, she asked me to tell her stories of what SHE was like as a little girl, since she was now a mature pre-woman in the double… Read more Back in the Day
One of the slut shamed queens my new book focuses on is Catherine the Great of Russia, whose mythical sex life has gone to extremes. For instance, have you heard the titillating historical trivia about Catherine the Great? You know, the one about how she had a special sling to hold up her horse while… Read more Catherine the Great
Let me start off by pointing out that I am not one to follow the “party line” vis-à-vis healthy and safety. I was trained as a medical anthropologist and I know plenty about paradigm shifting, assumptions, and authoritative knowledge. I don’t eat GMO foods because no one has proved they are safe and several European… Read more The vaccination debate
Doctors were expensive and hard to come by for the average person in the Tudor era. Most of the nitty-gritty healthcare and healing came from women. Armed only with herbs and folklore, women – especially older married women — acted as de facto nurse practioners for their communities. These skills were taught via informal apprenticeship… Read more Ollie Petite Morgan Blakely, Wise Woman
I and several other people I know have experienced health benefits when we went “gluten free”. My eldest daughter had a significant reduction in her autistic behaviors when we took her off gluten. A gluten-free and/or casein free diet has been shown to help kids with autism, according to studies done in Europe and in… Read more Call it “wheat free” instead of “gluten free”
As someone with Asperger’s syndrome, I am frequently baffled when facts are contested by denial ( “I don’t believe that” instead of “I want to see if the methodology is flawed”) rather than potentially countering facts and even more confused when facts are greeted with an angry response. Why do facts, things that are theoretically… Read more Cognitive Dissonance versus Cognitive Flexibility
The idea that what you eat can affect your mental health and emotional responses has been widely accepted among parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder for years. Many of us have made modifications of our children’s diets (and sometimes our diets) accordingly. Some of the things ASD parents have restricted include gluten, GMO foods,… Read more A Gut Feeling