#science yo

[noxinamillionyears]

Happy Autumnal Equinox eerybody

[abirddogmoment]

WILDLIFE IN MY BACKYARD*

*Sort of. Like down the street a bit but CLOSE ENOUGH

So I set up my cam every so often and I am never very lucky with it, either because the angle is wrong or it’s just set in a boring area. I went on a hunch and picked this specific area because Marlo was extremely interested in the smells. We just retrieved the cam today.

A smol rabbit. No wonder Marlo was so excited by the smells. I got to watch this little dude hop around eating vegetation for ~100 pictures over 9 nights

My bunny friend hanging out in the snow. Cool cool cool.

A fox!!!! Very cool, hope my bunny friend is okay.

Oh wait what is this???

A FISHER HOLY SHIT

AND MY BUNNY FRIEND IS STILL ALIVE!

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On the one hand, sometimes I get annoyed that I need to clarify or correct popscience neuropsych "facts" that pop up all over this site. Buuuuut on the other hand, I do really like talking about my field and getting to explain some science.... So you see my predicament.

[redevildevil]

Is science.

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never heard of the square cube law before, is that basically 'small (or light) cube takes less damage from the same fall than a large (or heavy) cube?'

basically, yeah! the square cube law states that if you increase something in size by two, it will weigh eight times as much as it did before, and if you scale something DOWN by half, it will weigh 1/8th what it did before. 

insects are hella small, especially compared to humans, and their relative weight/mass/volume is proportional to that. so because of their very light weight, air resistance is a pretty major factor to them when they fall. kind of like when a feather falls vs a bowling ball: when insects fall, they only reach about ~3-4 mph terminal free-fall velocity, whereas humans in free-fall will reach about oooooh 122 mph at terminal velocity. ants and other insects just aren’t falling fast enough when they hit the ground to actually inflict any damage on their exoskeleton. 

this principle is also why cats can handle falling from far greater heights than humans can! 

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science stuff? warm air rises, right? so why does air get colder the higher you get? i get that air cools down, by how does it cool down?

Climate and atmosphere isn’t really my specialty but there are a couple basic gaseous principles at play here! In general, yes, a mass of warm air will rise, which is why second floors of houses tend to be warmer than first floors. it rises because as air warms, it expands, becomes less dense than the surrounding air, and rises above it. but there’s a little more at play when we get to higher altitudes. 

so the first major factor is that gas actually cools as its pressure decreases (which its pressure decreases as it expands). so as the air is warmed, it expands and becomes less dense (causing it rise), but this expansion decreases the pressure of the air, causing it to cool off. 

the other major factor is the heat radiation from the earth itself. so when you’re closer to sea level, heat from the sun warms the earth and that heat bounces off the earth, upwards, and is trapped by an insulating layer of atmosphere, and is bounced back to earth, causing a warming effect (greenhouse effect). but the further away you get from sea level, the thinner the atmosphere gets, and the harder it is for that ground heat to be retained and cause a warming effect like it does at lower altitudes. eventually the atmosphere will start to lose heat towards space faster than it can retain the heat (either via the sun’s rays or from the heat radiating back off the earth). 

so higher altitudes tend to be colder that altitudes closer to sea level. 

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sources on the whole chiropractic thing? I've had nothing but fantastic results w/ the right chiropractors. My joints and all are so bad my leg will end up an inch shorter than the other bc of how my pelvis gets out of place and they were able to fix it. w/ regular visits i could sit up straight without my arms going numb again??? there's never been any damage, how else am i supposed to treat these things. yoga? mindfulness exercises?????? genuinely curious

Terribly sorry you had to wait so long for me to get to this. Had to drive like 6 hours to another city for work and I just got to the hotel and ate so I can finally get to your ask. I’m gunna try and explain this as best I can - I’m very tired though, so bear with me. (Also, this got long, so buckle up.)

I’m going to start this by saying that I’m glad you’ve had a pleasant experience. I am quite glad for that. But I very much want to emphasize, right off the bat, a concept that is extremely important to remember when it comes to science, medicine, and medical treatment: 

The plural of anecdote is not data. 

All that phrase means is that you having a good experience or even benefiting from the treatment is just an anecdote, and anecdotes do not equate to scientifically valid data about the efficacy (effectiveness) of the treatment. A shit ton of people have anecdotally had great experiences with snake oil treatments! But the science has shown that snake oil isn’t an effective treatment for…anything. Just because Joe Blow has had a great experience with snake oil, and it cured all his ailments, doesn’t mean snake oil is actually beneficial. The same can be said about chiropractic treatments (I won’t call them medicine, btw). 

Just because patients are happy doesn’t mean the treatment is actually making them better. Satisfaction doesn’t equate to effectiveness of treatment. Please, please remember that when approaching and considering any kind of treatment. 

(Also, without knowing your actual condition, or the type of treatment your chiro is giving you, I can’t actually respond to your question of how else you should be treating it. You could be receiving literally any number of treatments from your chiro as they do not actually have many standards of care - you could be receiving spinal adjustments, you could be receiving massage therapy, you could be receiving ballistic stretching, etc… (Massage and ballistic stretching, by the way, are elements of physical therapy and not chiropractic practice. Physical therapy is a legitimate practice with verified results in patient improvement. Many chiropractors actually practice physical therapy, rather than chiropractic care, and many who claim good results from chiropractors have actually just received physical therapy rather than chiropractic treatment. It’s an important distinction to make.))

You want sources? Google is a thing, if you’re ever curious. I’m not saying that sarcastically either - because all it would take is a quick google search and you’d find all the information you want. There is literally an abundance of sources on the controversies and scientific criticisms of chiropractic treatment. There is an entire wikipedia page about it because chiropractic care is so hotly contested by most people in the scientific community. There is so much unfounded nonsense in chiropractic doctrine that I’m not even going to cover it all here, I’m going to let you do some reading on your own as well. 

But it’s important to note that the entire core of chiropractic doctrine (that of the chiropractic vertebral subluxation/misalignments that cause bodily disease and require spinal adjustments) is not based in sound, solid science. The crux of chiropractors’ practice is unfounded and unscientific. 

The core treatment of spinal manipulation has not been shown to be an effective treatment of really…anything… Especially not random bodily diseases. 

However, I will note that there is a very small amount of lukewarm evidence that SMT might be an okay-ish treatment for low back pain BUT this is really the only area where effectiveness has even been moderately shown, and the effectiveness is…. faint, to say the least. Manipulation therapy has also been repeatedly shown to be no better than other treatments - and studying it is limited, and placebo effect cannot be ruled out most of the time. To quote one of the sources I link below: the overall scientific consensus about the effectiveness of manipulation therapy (for low back, not getting to the neck yet, I’ll talk about that later) is that it’s: “…meh…”

Note: orthopedic subluxations, IE dislocation or displacement of bones, are not the same as the ‘subluxations’ found in chiropractic dogma - chiropractic dogma has actually caused a lot of confusion about the term. But orthopedic subluxations are legitimate dislocations and can happen in the spine (or any bones in the body) - but they typically require surgery to repair (which is actually my field), and cannot be manually, externally repositioned, which is what chiropractors claim to do with external spinal manipulation. The entire concept of chiropractic subluxations is that your bones just kind of wiggle out of place sometimes and make it so that your nerves can’t properly supply your organs (which is a nonsense statement to begin with), leading to organic diseases of the body - there is no evidence of this, these theories have been tested, and have been disproven in properly controlled studies, and the entire doctrine runs contrary to what we actually know about orthopedic anatomy. 

But enough about the basic shit, let’s get into the serious quackery, because chiropractic doctrine, and chiropractors, are full of it. 

Neck Adjustments and the Inherent Risk of Them: Cervical neck adjustments are one of the most common treatments you can get from a chiropractor, they also have serious risk. To sum it up briefly:  in your neck, there are vertebrobasilar arteries that perfuse blood to the brain. Adjustment of the cervical spine poses a risk of injuring those arteries, leading to stroke, brain damage, or even death. And there are documented cases of this following neck adjustments.

The “cure-all” claim of chiropractic: This is something that goes back to the core doctrine behind chiropractic care. The core doctrine is that spinal misalignments lead to fucked up nerves and that fucked up nerves can cause literally any and every organic disease you can think of from typhoid fever to asthma to deafness to fucking cancer. You would be hard pressed to find a disease chiropractors claim they can’t cure with spinal manipulation - the founder, DD Palmer, even insists he cured a friend’s deafness by adjusting him. 

It should be noted, however, that chiropractors today are actually quite divided on this. Many more progressive chiropractors (who I applaud), who are seeking to actually legitimize their field with good science, are trying to move away from this doctrine. And perhaps, if chiropractic as a whole would abandon this notion, their core doctrine of unscientific “subluxations” and their supposed effects, chiropractic care could become a more valid treatment option. But as it stands right now, chiropractic as a whole is riddled with this nonsense.

Adjustment of children, and even newborn babies. Many chiropractors insist (because this is what they teach in chiropractor school, by the way) that everyone is born misaligned and that both children and infants need to be adjusted. Infants whose spines are literally not even developed yet. Spinal manipulation of children and infants is irresponsible at best, and dangerous, even deadly, at worst. 

My own grandfather is a chiropractor and would frequently give me adjustments when I was a kid, prior to my knowledge of the care, or my knowledge of the risks. Irresponsible, and I’m still not happy with him about that. 

Exposure to unnecessary radiation: Chiropractors frequently use and overuse xray even when the patient has complaints that would not warrant radiological exams. Use of radiology is especially concerning given that chiropractic subluxations (if they were legitimate, which again, there is no evidence for them) would not be detectable by xrays. Unnecessary exposure to radiation is harmful to the patient and increases cancer risks for the patient. Overuse of xray can actively harm patients, and chiropractors are pretty notorious for doing so. 

The salesman model of continuous treatment: Most chiropractors operate on a “repeated treatment” model. Your ask actually mentions that as well - that with regular, continued treatments, you can manage your symptoms. Again, I don’t know your condition, and I don’t know exactly what treatments you are receiving from your chiro. But the majority of chiropractors operate on a basis of continuous treatment to ‘manage symptoms’ but not to actually improve the disorder. Go to any chiropractor and they will tell you that even healthy people should regularly be adjusted. It’s a business model: deal with the symptom, but not the root cause, ensure continuous treatment. (Not that they could actually fix the root cause it in the first place, but my point remains.) 

Chiropractors have historically been anti-vaccine, and many continue to be anti-vax today. Likely because the primary doctrine of chiropractic medicine that I went over earlier states that all disease is caused by spinal misalignments - and since chiropractors believe that diseases trace back to spinal issues, vaccines to them are unnecessary. American Chiropractic Associations still push anti-vax messages.

DD Palmer - the “inventor” of chiropractic - was an absolute loon

The long and short of this is that chiropractic care has not been shown to be an objectively effective treatment. People’s personal anecdotes about the benefits do not equate to evidence of effective treatment. Chiropractors’ methods and treatments often run against modern science and against the treatment doctrine of “Do No Harm”. And unlike other medical practitioners, chiropractors often do not disclose the inherent harm the treatment can cause like stroke, death, etc… Chiropractic is riddled with bullshit, pseudoscience, and quackery. And until it abandons some of its unfounded, nonsensical core doctrines, it likely won’t progress or legitimize itself as an effective form of physical therapy. 

And to add - yes, you’ll find plenty of healthcare professionals (docs, nurses, etc…) here in the US who are uninformed of just how much bullshit there is to chiropractic care, which was the inspiration for my original post on this matter. 

Sources below:

SourceSourceSourceSourceSourceSourceSourceSourceSourceSourceSourceSource (this source, by the way, contains literally tons of studies, breaks them down, and explains them in lay terms - which is very beneficial, because many chiropractors argue that “there are studies supporting chiropractic treatment as being effective” - but many of those studies they cite are often extremely biased and flawed, leading to inaccurate or skewed results, and those are things the general public likely would not know to look for in research. This source is good at breaking those down for the layperson.)

Honestly, these are just a few sources - and the reason I chose them was for their thoroughness and the fact that many have additional sources and research within them. But you can google for yourself and find plenty more if you’re interested in it. 

This was long, but I hope this explained everything okay for you. 

[generaldeliciousness]