thisismyspitesong

[femsolid]

The dark side of mindfulness

This navel-gazing craze can be deadly.

Last month, the Daily Mail reported on the shocking case of 15-year-old Olivia Maunder, who was told by Frimley Park Hospital to try a mindfulness app to deal with her ‘indescribable agony’. It turned out she had a tumour in her pelvis. On one of the many occasions she was taken to A&E, she was told to ‘calm down’. On another, she was told that she was just ‘mirroring [her] mum’s pain as she had had back problems’. She and her mum were told it was all down to stress. By the time the tumour was discovered, it was so extensive that surgery was no longer an option. Olivia now has a few months to live. I had a personal experience of this some years ago, when a friend lost the use of her legs and was offered mindfulness classes rather than a mobility scooter. No doubt she was expected to use the power of her mind to teleport. I wonder if men are told to go away and be mindful as much as women are? I very much doubt it. We didn’t need the arrival of terms like ‘cervix-havers’ and ‘menstruators’ – but never ‘prostate-havers’ and ‘ejaculators’ – to know that the medical profession has always treated women differently. Women are 50 per cent less likely to be diagnosed after having a heart attack, are given less CPR than men, and are more likely to be given sedatives – rather than painkillers – for pain than men. While the NHS has been busy erasing such hate-speech terms as ‘mother’ and ‘breastfeeding’ from their public-information bulletins, NHS maternity negligence claims have doubled in the past decade. Last year, it was revealed that more than 200 babies and nine mothers had died due to bad care at the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust alone. Sadistic doctors no longer perform lobotomies on women as a cure for promiscuity, or diagnose any female behaviour unpleasing to men as ‘hysteria’, but as Caroline Criado-Perez’s 2019 book, Invisible Women, pointed out, the medical system is ‘from root to tip, systematically discriminating against women, leaving them chronically misunderstood, mistreated and misdiagnosed’. Women are still being told that extreme illnesses are all in their minds. Nicolette Baker, a woman from Cornwall, shrunk to three stone because her doctors insisted that she was anorexic, repeatedly sectioning her. She is dying of Superior Mesenteric Artery Syndrome. Kirsty Maxwell, from Perthshire, was repeatedly told she had an eating disorder and was given everything from Gaviscon to antidepressants. She had terminal cancer. Doctors certainly seem to know what a woman is when it suits them – someone you tell to ‘calm down, dear’. This is the most lethal kind of gaslighting. It needs to be tackled, not zhuzhed up with twaddle like mindfulness. It’s thought to be worth around $4 billion, taking in everything from meditation apps to the 60,000 books on Amazon including the word ‘mindfulness’ in their titles, including Mindful Finance, Mindful Leadership and Mindful Dog Owners. This is all despite the increasing evidence that too much navel-gazing can increase depression and decrease your ability to withstand pain – even though dealing with pain is precisely what mindfulness is often prescribed for.

[ivy-michaels]

Periodic reminder that you should never trust a chiropractor with your body under any circumstances

[ivy-michaels]

Chiropracty is a quack medicine in the extreme. It was invented by a guy in the 19th century who said a ghost taught it to him. It claims it can fix cirrhosis by cracking your spine. Chiropractors are one of the biggest groups keeping anti-vaccine fraud alive. Oh, and they can kill you doing a “routine adjustment”

Like I won’t go so far as to say “Ban chiropractors” because doing so would definitely backfire, but you should literally never ever under any circumstances seek their assistance for any health problem at all.

[ivy-michaels]

Since this is getting a few notes I may as well attempt to head off one of the inevitable objections that’ll show up if this gets far enough.

“If Chiropractic* doesn’t work, why does insurance cover it?”

Well, it’s very simple you see, insurance hates paying for things, and chiropractors are cheap as fuck.

Let’s say you injure your back scrubbing a toilet or something. You go to a real doctor, a good doctor who doesn’t blow you off. That doctor may tell you to take some Motrin and call them if it doesn’t get better, but they also might prescribe you a stronger anti-inflammatory, or a muscle relaxer. Your insurance has to pay out for the visit and the medicine.

Let’s say they do that and two weeks later your back still hurts. Your doctor orders an MRI. Your insurance now has to pay for an MRI, which can be a couple thousand dollars, well more than the premium you’ve paid this month, which means they’ve lost money on you.

So you’re lucky and the MRI comes back that you’re okay but you need physical therapy. That’s another couple grand that your insurance has to pay out.

But maybe you weren’t lucky. Maybe the MRI comes back and you have a herniated disc. You’re gonna need surgery and physical therapy, and now you’ve not only cost them more than your premiums bring in in a year, you’ve hit your annual maximum which means they have to pay everything from now on. They aren’t happy.

So let’s start back at the beginning. You injure your back, you instead go to a chiropractor. The chiropractor doesn’t have a decade of medical training, they have a certificate from a for-profit college that says they’re a chiropractor. They charge your insurance for an office visit, crack your back a bit, and send you on your merry way.

You might feel better for a while, because the placebo effect is more powerful than you think. But even if you do feel better, there’s still the chance that you’ve got damage. You may still need physical therapy, you may still have a herniated disc.

But if you keep going back to that chiropractor, they’re never gonna tell you that, and even if they do, it’ll be after 2-3 sessions, so 6-8 weeks at a minimum, during which time you’re putting more wear and tear on that injury, and eventually, you have to go to a real doctor.

But here’s where the magic happens. See, you injured your back in December. Now it’s February. Because your insurance put off sending you to a real doctor for two months, some actuary gets a big fat bonus for “reducing costs” in quarter 4. Meanwhile, your real doctor orders an MRI that shows that the damage is, in fact, much worse than it probably was to begin with. And there’s some evidence of injuries after the fact from the chiropractor. Oh, and by the way, there’s a chance you’re gonna be in pain for the rest of your life even with surgery.

But hey, your insurance managed to post a profit in Q4.

* “Chiropractic” is the “official” term for whatever the hell it is chiropractors do. I don’t respect it enough to use it unless I’m mocking someone who’s defending it.

[ivy-michaels]

Alright you guys can have this one back but I swear to god if anyone mentions a fucking podcast on it I’m committing arson.

[narrativerehearsal]

This goes double if you have any kind of joint hyper mobility or ehlers danlos etc.

Pretty sure @thebibliosphere mentioned getting fucked up by a chiropractor, and I don't have ehlers danlos but I am hypermobile. I went to a very well trained osteopath (theoretically better than chiropractors and, at least in the UK, more regulated but still use some of the same techniques) for a few years and while I would feel better after each appointment, nothing ever really got better and I now look back at the way he handled my neck (which was way, way less extreme than chiropractic work but again, still on the same kind of track) and cringe.

What did help me was finding a physio who specialised in hypermobility and who actually checked my strength and range of motion to figure out where my stability was the worst and give me stabilising exercises. My bad joints are always going to need work but at least with a decent physio I have a hope of strengthening them and reducing pain and damage rather than getting easy temporary relief and making things worse in the long run.

If nothing else convinces you, the fact that every single chiropractor on youtube listens to clients listing off wildly different issues and then does the exact same few adjustments on them no matter what should be a red flag.

[thebibliosphere]

I was, yeah. I did chiropractic care for years because it’s what my previous MD recommended and it was covered by my insurance. And it worked great for me, because, as it turned out, I had actual misalignments from my joints being out of the sockets from undiagnosed Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. They were literally popping my joints back into place and relieving a significant amount of my pain in the process.

It turns out the whole “your spine is out of alignment” thing is very convincing when your spine is literally out of alignment due to a subluxated tailbone, hip, shoulder, etc etc.

And then, again on a recommendation from an MD doctor for my chronic migraines, I got my neck adjusted, very gently I might add, and I ended up having to get an emergency MRI for a possible brain bleed because something in my neck tore.

Thankfully it wasn't a brain bleed and I wasn't about to die.

Unfortunately, they’d torn every inch of soft tissue on the right side of my neck from my upper trap muscles all the way around the right side of my skull. I could barely hold my head up for weeks. Everything was agony.

Its been several years and I’m still dealing with the damage.

The spinal specialist I saw during recovery was very adamant about never letting anyone touch your neck like that, no matter how gentle they are. He told me the majority of his patients used to come from motoring accidents, and now a good solid chunk of them were from people being irreparably harmed by chiropractors. From torn ligaments to strokes, he’d seen it all. All because chiro is cheaper than physical therapy.

When I was finally diagnosed with EDS and started getting proper help, the horror that went through every EDS-aware physical therapist when I told them the chiropractor story was palpable. One straight up told me I should be paralyzed.

And then we started working on stabilizing my joints and muscles so that they don’t dislocate/subluxate as much because while the chiro might have been putting my joints back in without knowing it, they weren’t actually doing anything to address the root cause or stabilize the area.

It was just a weekly stop-gap measure that was inadvertently helping my immediate pain but ultimately lengthening my long term recovery.

I SHOULD have been recommend physical therapy from the start, even before we knew I had EDS, but because chiropractic care is cheaper, that’s what my insurance agreed to cover.

And now my head sits at a slight angle from scar tissue at the base of my skull and sometimes my fingers feel a little numb.

Don’t let people adjust your neck. You might fucking die.

[liara-shadowsong]

Hey, reminder that if you *think* a chiropractor might be able to help you, you most likely should *actually* be seeing a physical therapist. Please don't go to a chiropractor. I have one in my extended family, so I've been aware they're quacks long before most people starting catching on to their shenanigans. Please go see a real doctor (or nurse practitioner, or physician's assistant) and then follow up with a physical therapist if situationally appropriate. Also, if a chiropractor tells you to buy an expensive supplement from their office or websits, follow some fad diet they've written a book about, or stop taking a prescription medication for a condition you currently have which is in fact being managed safely and effectively with that treatment, you should ignore them (or flip them the bird, whichever floats your boat).

[maaarine]

The Culture Conversation: Guru Jagat x Ayishat Akanbi

[soberscientistlife]

Please

[rtrixie]

Welcome to the future, where you don’t own anything and the stuff you rent stops working once your phone has no signal.

[rickjameskinkshame]

App powered car? 🤦‍♀️

[rtrixie]

I wish people remembered the age old wisdom that if something doesn’t absolutely require an Internet connection to function, it shouldn’t be connected to the internet - same goes for apps.

[rtrixie]

WHY IS A CATFOOD DISPENSER CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET

[eeveelutionsforequality]

Sometimes I’m glad that I’m too poor for my “cool future stuff” monkey brain to be set loose to buy stupid shit like this.

[solarpunkcast]

please please please do not buy into the Internet of Things. Digital displays for appliances are one thing, but you shouldn’t need the fucking internet to do your laundry or use the fridge.

[mornington-the-crescent]

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

“One thing I will never compromise on is my believe that feminism has to refocus so that women are at the centre of the movement. We cannot remain an afterthought in our own political project, and yet that is what we are right now.”

- Julie Bindel, Feminism for Women

[shirtsthatgohard]

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

“‘Gender’ - which feminists have always sought to abolish because it is the imposition of sex stereotypes on girls and women - is now dressed up and handed back to us as an immutable individual identity.”

- Julie Bindel, Feminism for Women

[killjoyfem-deactivated20250218]

“carceral feminism” is the stupidest term y’all ever came up with. women wanting their abusers/rapists/etc behind bars is common sense. we already live in a world where these people don’t get locked up for what they do lmao.

[ivy-michaels]

Periodic reminder that you should never trust a chiropractor with your body under any circumstances

[ivy-michaels]

Chiropracty is a quack medicine in the extreme. It was invented by a guy in the 19th century who said a ghost taught it to him. It claims it can fix cirrhosis by cracking your spine. Chiropractors are one of the biggest groups keeping anti-vaccine fraud alive. Oh, and they can kill you doing a “routine adjustment”

Like I won’t go so far as to say “Ban chiropractors” because doing so would definitely backfire, but you should literally never ever under any circumstances seek their assistance for any health problem at all.

[ivy-michaels]

Since this is getting a few notes I may as well attempt to head off one of the inevitable objections that’ll show up if this gets far enough.

“If Chiropractic* doesn’t work, why does insurance cover it?”

Well, it’s very simple you see, insurance hates paying for things, and chiropractors are cheap as fuck.

Let’s say you injure your back scrubbing a toilet or something. You go to a real doctor, a good doctor who doesn’t blow you off. That doctor may tell you to take some Motrin and call them if it doesn’t get better, but they also might prescribe you a stronger anti-inflammatory, or a muscle relaxer. Your insurance has to pay out for the visit and the medicine.

Let’s say they do that and two weeks later your back still hurts. Your doctor orders an MRI. Your insurance now has to pay for an MRI, which can be a couple thousand dollars, well more than the premium you’ve paid this month, which means they’ve lost money on you.

So you’re lucky and the MRI comes back that you’re okay but you need physical therapy. That’s another couple grand that your insurance has to pay out.

But maybe you weren’t lucky. Maybe the MRI comes back and you have a herniated disc. You’re gonna need surgery and physical therapy, and now you’ve not only cost them more than your premiums bring in in a year, you’ve hit your annual maximum which means they have to pay everything from now on. They aren’t happy.

So let’s start back at the beginning. You injure your back, you instead go to a chiropractor. The chiropractor doesn’t have a decade of medical training, they have a certificate from a for-profit college that says they’re a chiropractor. They charge your insurance for an office visit, crack your back a bit, and send you on your merry way.

You might feel better for a while, because the placebo effect is more powerful than you think. But even if you do feel better, there’s still the chance that you’ve got damage. You may still need physical therapy, you may still have a herniated disc.

But if you keep going back to that chiropractor, they’re never gonna tell you that, and even if they do, it’ll be after 2-3 sessions, so 6-8 weeks at a minimum, during which time you’re putting more wear and tear on that injury, and eventually, you have to go to a real doctor.

But here’s where the magic happens. See, you injured your back in December. Now it’s February. Because your insurance put off sending you to a real doctor for two months, some actuary gets a big fat bonus for “reducing costs” in quarter 4. Meanwhile, your real doctor orders an MRI that shows that the damage is, in fact, much worse than it probably was to begin with. And there’s some evidence of injuries after the fact from the chiropractor. Oh, and by the way, there’s a chance you’re gonna be in pain for the rest of your life even with surgery.

But hey, your insurance managed to post a profit in Q4.

* “Chiropractic” is the “official” term for whatever the hell it is chiropractors do. I don’t respect it enough to use it unless I’m mocking someone who’s defending it.

[ivy-michaels]

Alright you guys can have this one back but I swear to god if anyone mentions a fucking podcast on it I’m committing arson.

[narrativerehearsal]

This goes double if you have any kind of joint hyper mobility or ehlers danlos etc.

Pretty sure @thebibliosphere mentioned getting fucked up by a chiropractor, and I don't have ehlers danlos but I am hypermobile. I went to a very well trained osteopath (theoretically better than chiropractors and, at least in the UK, more regulated but still use some of the same techniques) for a few years and while I would feel better after each appointment, nothing ever really got better and I now look back at the way he handled my neck (which was way, way less extreme than chiropractic work but again, still on the same kind of track) and cringe.

What did help me was finding a physio who specialised in hypermobility and who actually checked my strength and range of motion to figure out where my stability was the worst and give me stabilising exercises. My bad joints are always going to need work but at least with a decent physio I have a hope of strengthening them and reducing pain and damage rather than getting easy temporary relief and making things worse in the long run.

If nothing else convinces you, the fact that every single chiropractor on youtube listens to clients listing off wildly different issues and then does the exact same few adjustments on them no matter what should be a red flag.

[thebibliosphere]

I was, yeah. I did chiropractic care for years because it’s what my previous MD recommended and it was covered by my insurance. And it worked great for me, because, as it turned out, I had actual misalignments from my joints being out of the sockets from undiagnosed Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. They were literally popping my joints back into place and relieving a significant amount of my pain in the process.

It turns out the whole “your spine is out of alignment” thing is very convincing when your spine is literally out of alignment due to a subluxated tailbone, hip, shoulder, etc etc.

And then, again on a recommendation from an MD doctor for my chronic migraines, I got my neck adjusted, very gently I might add, and I ended up having to get an emergency MRI for a possible brain bleed because something in my neck tore.

Thankfully it wasn't a brain bleed and I wasn't about to die.

Unfortunately, they’d torn every inch of soft tissue on the right side of my neck from my upper trap muscles all the way around the right side of my skull. I could barely hold my head up for weeks. Everything was agony.

Its been several years and I’m still dealing with the damage.

The spinal specialist I saw during recovery was very adamant about never letting anyone touch your neck like that, no matter how gentle they are. He told me the majority of his patients used to come from motoring accidents, and now a good solid chunk of them were from people being irreparably harmed by chiropractors. From torn ligaments to strokes, he’d seen it all. All because chiro is cheaper than physical therapy.

When I was finally diagnosed with EDS and started getting proper help, the horror that went through every EDS-aware physical therapist when I told them the chiropractor story was palpable. One straight up told me I should be paralyzed.

And then we started working on stabilizing my joints and muscles so that they don’t dislocate/subluxate as much because while the chiro might have been putting my joints back in without knowing it, they weren’t actually doing anything to address the root cause or stabilize the area.

It was just a weekly stop-gap measure that was inadvertently helping my immediate pain but ultimately lengthening my long term recovery.

I SHOULD have been recommend physical therapy from the start, even before we knew I had EDS, but because chiropractic care is cheaper, that’s what my insurance agreed to cover.

And now my head sits at a slight angle from scar tissue at the base of my skull and sometimes my fingers feel a little numb.

Don’t let people adjust your neck. You might fucking die.

[stjohnstarling]

That is, in fact, exactly how influential guitarist Robbie Basho died. Don’t go to the chiropractor.

[rad-claid-plaid]

What a shock.

[rad-claid-plaid]

Of fucking course it got deleted between last night and now.

[rad-claid-plaid]

I commented on it being taken down and the OP messaged me. She got banned, and attributed it to the fact that half of the TwoX mods are male. That tracks.

[neopetdestroyer]

She got banned for this??? Geez. Here’s the link she posted

Sexual Assault Perpetrators’ Justifications for Their Actions: Relationships to Rape Supportive Attitudes, Incident Characteristics, and Fut

Perpetrators use rape supportive attitudes and sexual assault incident characteristics to justify forcing sex on their victims. Perpetrators

[evvergreen]

funny how women being in their "masculine energy" is just them acting like independent adults and not both an insecure teenager and an adult man's mommy at the same time. and how that's seen as a bad thing/from trauma. 🤔🤔🤔🤭

literally saw assertiveness, persuasiveness, effectiveness, high ambition, need to be in control, and "lack of self-care" (ie no makeup/skincare) as a sign a woman is in too much of her masculine energy, whatever the hell that means

[rubyspeaks]

Here's the patriarchal brainwashing strategy: Take the qualities of a self-actualized, intelligent, capable person => Describe those qualities as "masculine," with the term "masculine" understood as "belonging to men" => When women take on these roles, you accuse her of being "masculine" and "acting like a man" and you insist that this is a bad thing because she isn't "living within her nature as a woman" => Use this subtle linguistic shaming to keep women from embodying traits that would lead to empowerment and liberation

[icefemsanonymous]

The subject of maternal regret is so taboo but it's crucial that feminists tackle this subject and make it known to girls and young women that even though they are constantly scaremongered with "if you don't have kids you might regret it!" the opposite is equally true. Maternal regret is a real and silent epidemic. And if you ask me it is better to regret not having kids than to regret having kids. At least if you regret not having kids that regret and pain is yours and yours alone. When you regret having children you have dragged a whole other life into it and made it their pain too. Children aren't stupid, they can tell when their mother doesn't fully want to be a mother, and this is a cycle of pain and trauma for both mother and child.

"Regretting Motherhood: a study" by Orna Donath should be added to every single feminist reading list. It should be required reading for all girls and young women. It needs to be widely known that despite all the myths it is possible to regret having children and wish you could go back in time and undo the decision to become a mother.

But I believe the subject of maternal regret is kept taboo for the same reason conservatives always want to limit access to birth control and abortion. The rich and powerful want women to keep popping out babies to feed the world's economies and militaries. If a young woman knows that it's possible that she might regret having a child she might think twice. If however she is fed myths that any child she births she will unconditionally want and love and never regret she will be more likely to go through with becoming a mother even when she's unsure if that's what she actually wants. Sorry to get dark but if that was actually true why would dumpster babies be a thing?

Go read "Regretting Motherhood: a study" by Orna Donath. Talk to other girls and women about maternal regret. Make it known that maternal regret is real and more common than anybody would like to think. Make sure it's known that even though some women might regret not having kids the opposite is equally true and far more damaging.

[haggishlyhagging]

Two quotes, the first from 1983 and the second from 2019.

The value of a female life is determined by its reproductive value. What will happen to all the women who are not altogether necessary because their children in particular are not altogether desirable? The old women starving in poverty are starving because their reproductive lives are over and they are worth nothing. The old women incarcerated in cruel nursing homes are there because their reproductive lives are over and they are worth nothing. The women who are too poor or too black or brown and who have too many children are starved and threatened and degraded and slowly killed through state-sponsored neglect because they are having children, because they reproduce too much, because the value put on their reproducing is negative and characterized by annihilating disregard. The women who are kept in line now, millions upon millions of them each year, through the judicious application of mood-altering drugs, are kept chemically happy, calm, tranquil, or energetic so that they will hang in there, have and raise the children and keep house for their husbands even though their lives fill them with distress and addiction is what keeps them conforming. They too are part of a throwaway population of females: because their own well-being is viciously subordinated to a predetermined standard of what a woman is and what a woman does and what a woman needs to be a woman (she needs to keep doing female things, whether she wants to or not). What are the lives of all these women worth? Is there anything in the way they are viewed or valued that upholds their human dignity as individuals? They already matter very little. They are treated with cruelty or callous indifference. They have already been thrown away.

-Andrea Dworkin, Right Wing Women

For millennia, medicine has functioned on the assumption that male bodies can represent humanity as a whole. As a result, we have a huge historical data gap when it comes to female bodies, and this is a data gap that is continuing to grow as researchers carry on ignoring the pressing ethical need to include female cells, animals and humans, in their research. That this is still going on in the twenty-first century is a scandal. It should be the subject of newspaper headlines worldwide. Women are dying, and the medical world is complicit. It needs to wake up.

-Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women

[deadlysunlight]

what i'm learning from this book about artificial intelligence is that computers are not intelligent but men desperately wish they were so they hype it up every time an advancement is made and capitalists are happy to replace expensive humans with cheap machines no matter how many humans suffer as a result.

it's telling that so many men are dreaming of having the power to create intelligent life that can learn, speak and understand. artificial intelligence is a (mostly) male attempt to craft human-like intelligence because that's as close as they can get to creating intelligent life. womb envy much?

[catmask]

'you wouldn't pirate a-' i would steal anything from any company. anything in the world. i dont even want it i just hate you

[anas-tas-ia-deactivated20240216]