Hello, FDA?

Some may think the Food and Drug Administration is overly prescriptive in not allowing anyone to claim their product treats a medical condition unless it has undergone extensive testing.

But would we really rather be back in the era of snake oil salesmen, like the website for The Good Old Days Store is?

You are invited to "experience the benefits" of actual changes in cholesterol and blood pressure.  That, my friends, looks to me like a disease claim.


This is a good reminder that not all aspects of the good old days were actually good.  Tonics use to be not only expensive and ineffective, or but often actually toxic or a back door to alcoholism.  You never knew what was actually in them.

Thanks to current regulations we know this tonic is made of vinegar and culinary herbs and could be easily made at home for a few dollars should you happen to like the taste of it.  But if you need help controlling your blood pressure, I would strongly suggest looking elsewhere.

Thank you, Agmo & Ellingsen

Over the years I have heard the data repeated many times.  Based on a surveys men have more lifetime heterosexual sex partners than women.  For the United States it is reported as 12:3, for Norway 13:5 and for Britain 10:3.

Whenever this data is quote we are reminded that man are meant to want to spread their 'genome' as widely as possible, females are meant to try and bond a longer-term partner to get them to help raise the kids.

The only problem is that this data doesn't make sense.  As Agmo & Ellingsen (2003) writes "Under the condition that the population consists of 50% of each sex..." (which they established is largely the case) "...the number of partners must inevitably be exactly the same for men and women."

So we don't need 'just so' theories about why men have more sex (with women) than women have (with men)--because that flat out cannot have happened.

Of course there are lots of theories to be made about how they misremember, differently categorise and flat out lie about it... but that's a whole 'nother thing.

My Issue with "Rapunzel Syndrome"

I will concede that I am probably over thinking this, but I would argue that names are important.  The names of concepts are like the names of people.  They take the idea out into the word, identify and to some extent define or limit it.  And I have an issue with the name of the "Rapunzel Syndrome".

Sometime people suffering from anxiety eat things they really shouldn't, including hair.  When these foreign objects are found in the stomach they are called bezoars.  Hair bezoars can get very large and project beyond the stomach and into the intestines.  This is called Rapunzel Syndrome and it is most common in prepubertal girls.

But when you think about it Rapunzel is a parable of coping and emerging into adulthood.  A young girl is locked in a room with almost nothing to work with but her own body uses it to bring her prince to her.  Thus she eventually escaped her witch/foster mother and enters a new life as wife and mother.

In Rapunzel Syndrome the girl doesn't through her resources/hair out into the world to achieve adulthood, she draw it into herself to cause illness and even death.  I suppose I could consider the naming deeply ironic riff on a mythic trope, but it seems more likely that it is simply glib.  That someone took hair + girl and came up with = Rapunzel, without doing a lot of research.

Hence my irritation because I think, deeply and fundamentally, that girls should act boldly upon the world, that myths and fables should be respected, and that scientists should do their research.  And if they did and the destructive force of female 'failure to launch' is the very point of the name... I stand corrected.