Ehlers-Danlos National Foundation 2008 Conference in Houston

I just got back yesterday (late afternoon) from Houston where I attended the Ehlers-Danlos National Foundation 2008 Conference. I will be posting some of my notes as I have time and energy. I have a lot of the power point presentations that I can email to folks who want them. I really should ask the presenters for permission before posting them on the internet in a place where the whole world can get to them, you know. But you can email me at [my first name] AT christinasbookshelf DOT com--a little riddle for you to solve to try to keep the spammers out of my hair. Please include when you were diagnosed, why the doctor diagnosed you (based on what symptoms), and what your main symptoms are briefly [I know, I know, our medical histories could fill a 1000 pages each], and--ooooooh, list out your helpful hints for dealing with EDS problems--so I can weed out non-EDSers who just want to waste my time and who knows what they would do with the info. I will post anyone's helpful EDS hints--hints like using PenAgains and sleeping inside a nest of pillows to keep anything and everything in the right place. There were 2 sessions that had lots of practical tips, and I will be posting that info ASAP, because that is the stuff I am sure you would most like to learn about.

I had a GREAT time at the conference and I hope that those of you who also went to the conference get some good rest!

Bodies Revealed and other Kansas City reviews

On Tuesday, John and I went to see Bodies Revealed at Union Station. This is a controversial exhibit of plastinated bodies, because other plastination exhibits may or may not use bodies that were willingly donated. The cadavers in this exhibit are of Chinese people, and with the Chinese government's record of human rights abuses, I can certainly understand people's concerns. Since we did not pay to see the exhibit (the Kauffman Foundation had a private viewing for their associates and contractors), I didn't have as many qualms about it. (I know--whether I pay for it or someone else pays for it, should have no difference ethically, but they would have spent the same amount of money whether or not I went.)

Truly, after seeing this exhibit, I would say that it was respectful to the bodies. I feel justified in saying that because I would donate my own corpse to this company. It was a very educational experience, and a lot can be learned from the exhibit. I am in complete and utter awe of the technicians who did the dissections of these people. As someone who has done dissections on numerous animals, I know just how hard it is to dissect very small things. I was particularly amazed by an exhibit that showed every blood vessel in the arm--that caused the fact that there are so many tiny little capillaries in the human body to really sink in to my brain.

I would have to say that my favorite part of the exhibition was seeing the unborn baby gallery--they had the remains of miscarried babies from 20 days after conception to 20 weeks (they emphasized that they weren't aborted, and I believe them since an aborted baby would probably be mangled). A 20-day-old embryo is incredibly tiny (about the size of a thumbnail) and extremely baby-like. Only a fool could say that it is just a "blob of tissue;" even a small child would say that it is a baby when looking at it. This definitely supports the pro-life cause.

I would not recommend this exhibit for children (or adults) that cannot handle exposed male and female genitalia. (There are a lot of male genitalia in the exhibit; I think there were only two full-body female cadavers in the show.) I can just see some immature teenagers making idiots out of themselves when viewing naked bodies. (And I would hardly think it would have been respectful to just chop off the genitals for the sake of exhibition. What guy would want everyone seeing that his privates got lopped off?)

Before going to the Bodies Revealed exhibition, John and I went to Pierpont's with his coworker and his coworker's wife. Pierpont's is the upscale restaurant in Union Station (and the only one that has had stable ownership and management.) Be prepared to part with a large chunk of change when visiting the restaurant; this is not a place for tightwads. The food was very good! I got the Pierpont, a KC strip steak with blue cheese cream and balsamic reduction, baby green beans, and whipped potatoes for $33. The steak was the best I have had in a long time; I ordered it medium rare and it arrived crispy well-done on the outside and red on the inside, just the way I like it. There was a bit too much of the blue cheese sauce on top, so I scraped most of it off so that I could enjoy the beefy flavor with just a side note of blue cheese. The green beans were good; the potatoes were just okay. After I left, I realized that the potatoes would have been really good mixed with the blue cheese sauce, but it was too late then.

John got the Lili, a filet mignon with brandy veal sauce, artichoke hearts, asparagus, and whipped potatoes for $30. I tried a bit of his steak and it was very good and the sauce was scrumptious! I forgot to try his artichoke hearts. (I have never had any asparagus I have liked; asparagus just tastes nasty to me, even grilled asparagus--despite the fact that wood smoke covers a variety of wrongs.)

Pierpont's has a small plates menu on Sunday evenings which I have wanted to try, ever since I learned of it over a year ago. They offer a four course meal for $29 a person and 5 courses for $44. These are mini versions of their specialties, so you can try little bit of everything. I can imagine it being very difficult to decide what to order, since they all sound delicious.

I also want to visit the Harvey House Diner, just because I love diners and the history of the Harvey House.

That's all for now, happy dreaming!

Lyme Disease Symptoms

As long promised, I am finally posting a list of Lyme Disease symptoms. This is an excerpt from the book Healing Lyme: Natural Healing and Prevention of Lyme Borreliosis and Its Coinfections, by Stephen Harrod Buhner, (c) 2005. Without further ado, here is Mr. Buhner's list:

erythema migrans (bull's eye rash) either single or multiple
acrodermatitis chronica atrophicans
borrelial lymphocytoma
continual low-grade fever
high fever, chills, or sweating (generally indicates bacterial coninfections)
general flu-like symptoms
frequent headaches, neck stiffness
regular mid-to-moderate muscle and joint pain
severe unremitting headache (generally indicates coinfections)
Bell's palsy
mental confusion or difficulty thinking
disorientation, getting lost, going to wrong places
lightheadedness, wooziness
mood swings, irritability, depression
disturbed sleep
fatigue, tiredness, poor stamina
blurry vision, floaters, and/or light sensitivity
feeling of pressure in the eyes
stiffness in joints or back
twitching of face or other muscles
neck creaks, cracks, stiffness, pain
tingling, numbness, burning or stabbing sensations, shooting pains
chest pain, palpitations
shortness of breath, cough
buzzing or ringing in ears, sound sensitivity
motion sickness, vertigo, poor balance
sudden hearing loss
tremors
weight gain or loss
swollen glands (can also be from coinfection)
menstrual irregularity
irritable bladder or bladder dysfunction
upset stomach and/or abdominal pain
galactorrhea

Many of these are, in addition, rather common symptoms or complications of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. Why? Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is a mutation of collagen (the glue-like protein that holds your body together) where the strands of collagen don't line up right and thus can't stick together properly. The Lyme Disease bacteria (Borrelia sp.) prefer to live in collagenous tissue, because they can push themselves into the strands of collagen where white blood cells (the immune cells that want to kill them) can't reach. When the bacteria worms its way into the collagen, the collagen can no longer function the way it is supposed to function.

The Lyme disease bacteria also love to live in nervous system tissue, like the brain, spinal cord, and nerves, because the white blood cells can't get to them there either. This causes the symptoms which resemble Chiari Malformation type 1 (and Chiari is much more common in people with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome than people without EDS, for more information click on the Conferences button on the video player on this page, then click on Ehlers-Danlos. Unfortunately, no peer-reviewed paper has been published yet. There was a presentation--The Spine and the Craniocervical Junction in Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome--given at the 2006 annual meeting of The American Society of Human Genetics that addressed the issue. And another presentation--Hereditary disorders of connective tissue may present with Chiari I malformation, occipitoatlantoaxial hypermobility, and functional cranial settling--was given at the 2007 annual meeting of The American Society of Human Genetics.)

Ok, off the Chiari Malformation rabbit trail. There are two competing philosophies regarding Lyme Disease: one is that chronic (or antibiotic-resistant) Lyme Disease does not exist, and the other is that it does exist and is rather common. Most of the allopathic, Western medical associations (such as the American Medical Association) are of the first opinion (that chronic Lyme Disease does not exist.) This should not be surprising because this is a group of doctors that discounts any symptom or disease that cannot be measured objectively by a machine or a test or something "scientific" like that. These are the doctors that poo-poo the existence of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome*, Fibromyalgia*, and similar problems. There is no machine that can be hooked up to a person to measure fatigue, pain, dizziness, malaise, etc. Since these symptoms cannot be measured "scientifically," these doctors prefer to believe it is "all in the patient's head" and refer these patients to psychiatrists. Anyone complaining of these symptoms is accused of malingering or psychosomatic illness. This is both laziness and stupidity. If everything in medicine is purely logical and objective, then it would be far better for computers and robots to completely replace doctors. There is a reason why it is called medical arts--medicine is supposed to require creative and intuitive thinking alongside the rational and objective!

This is why patients with Lyme Disease (and Ehlers-Danlos) need doctors who think "outside the box." This is one of the reasons why I get so angry at the healthcare system in the United States today. And this is why you should ignore most of what the "medical establishment" has to say about Lyme Disease--because their starting assumption is false. (Let me clarify. I think that their starting assumption is that what they consider "science" is the end-all, be-all of medicine, and everyone should bow down at the altar of science and reason, while forsaking the false gods of alternative medicine, semi-metaphorically speaking.) You should visit the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society's website or the Lyme Disease Association's website or the Lyme Disease Network's website if you want accurate information on Lyme Disease.

*It has been hypothesized that fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome are usually undiagnosed Lyme Disease, though I know of no attempt to prove this hypothesis.

The Storms Last Night

Kansas City had several tornadoes come through the area last night. We escaped unscathed basically. Only twigs, pollen, and tree buds on the ground.

This was a very odd storm that hit around 2 AM. There was continuous lightning and thunder--before one bolt was finished, another had started. It was like giant strobes in the sky and rather bright outside from all that light. The thunder wasn't very loud at our house so I knew it wasn't too close, but it sounded like a muted roar. That might have been the sound of a tornado or straight line wind or whatever it was hitting just a mile or two north of our house. I didn't hear any hail hitting our house, so we must have escaped that as well.

In the morning I barely managed to get up because Katie got scared and climbed into bed with us and kept me up for a while. But we got out of the house and Joey and I went on his field trip to the zoo. The zoo did not appear to suffer any damage, though there was quite a lot of mud and standing water. It was a lot of walking and my feet hurt quite a bit now. I do not recommend the Kansas City zoo. I think it might be the largest zoo in the United States in terms of acreage, but that is not a good thing. Stuff is so far spread out that you wonder if anyone planned anything.

I wish they would arrange the layout of the zoo like the layout of the Kansas City airport. The airport has three circular terminals where the planes take up wedges of space around the terminals. I think that this design would be perfect for a zoo too, so that the animals could have plenty of space to roam, but humans wouldn't have to walk so much. The Kansas City zoo just sprawls and sprawls and, even with all of that space, quite a few animals look rather cramped. They have lots of "green space" with trees and shrubs smack dab in the middle of the zoo between exhibits. It is not an efficient use of space.

On the positive side, the zoo has two very cute animals: river otters and meerkats. They are both very fun to watch. Another fun thing to do is attend the lorikeet feedings. We did this last year and got to go inside and feed the lorikeets. That was really memorable because they land on your arms and hands (and head) and they will eat out of your hands.

Next week I will be going to the Topeka Zoo with Katie's class and I think that I will like that zoo better. (I have never been there before.)

A Solution for the Identity Theft Crisis

I am blogging from my basement because there is a tornado warning and the warning sirens are blaring and the sky is yellow. My weather alarm radio has not gone off though, and that's weird.

Anyway, this morning in the shower I had a great idea. The government should completely ban the use of Social Security numbers for any purpose other than government business. (I have thought that for a long time, though.) Right now a Social Security number is basically the password that allows anyone to open a credit account. My new idea is that what should happen instead is that credit bureaus should assign their own numbers to individuals and have consumers password-protect their accounts and maybe a PIN too. (That would be one account per major credit bureau, of which there are three.) Yes, it would be a hassle for consumers wanting credit, but credit shouldn't be as easy to get as it is now. The credit bureaus would have to create more comprehensive histories of the people they are monitoring (like your parents' names and birthdates, your spouse's name and birthdate, your childrens' names and birthdates, every address you have ever had, yadda, yadda.) Anyone who wants to have their credit report used by a creditor would first have to supply much of that information to authenticate their identity.

My other idea is that anyone applying for credit at any business (that uses a credit bureau to decide whether to extend credit) should be required to acquire fingerprints of the applicant. If the application is being sent in by mail, then the applicant should go to a notary public and fingerprint the application in their presence.

For those that say that such measures are an invasion of privacy, then they should not be applying for a credit card! The credit bureaus already collect nearly everything but the fingerprints. Living off the grid means not using banks, not getting a birth certificate from the government, not getting a Social Security card, etc., etc. For the rest of us, if we haven't already had our identity stolen, then it will happen soon if nothing is done to stop this mess.

John and I had our identities stolen (either by our neighbor or a friend of that neighbor) and it was a huge mess to get cleaned up. And none of the stores that lost lots of money (because they accepted forged checks and forged credit card payments) even attempted to investigate the crime or press charges against the the thieves. These criminals applied for credit in our names at local stores (after our credit reports had been flagged as being attacked by identity thieves) and the stores did not have them arrested them on the spot. Granted, the stores don't process the application on the spot, but I think they ought to check for fraud before the applicant leaves. Most identity thieves hit the same merchants over and over again with different identities and each time a thief goes to prison, it should work out to costing less in employee time to identify the crooks than the amount that they have stolen from that business. Somehow businesses haven't figured out that out yet.

And why don't businesses require photo identification to be provided before extending credit? Like a driver's license or other state-issued photo id or passport? Why not require a notary public to certify the identity on mailed-in applications?

Well, those are my thoughts on the subject.

We Graduated from FastTrac!!!!!!!!

John and I have finished FastTrac! Woooohooooo! As plagiarized from their website, "FastTrac is a practical, hands-on business development program designed to help entrepreneurs hone the skills needed to create, manage and grow a successful business. FastTrac participants don't just learn about business, they live it. They work on their own business ideas or ventures throughout the course - moving their ventures to reality or new levels of growth."

FastTrac is sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation (disclosure: this is one of my husband's clients.) You can take the FastTrac program at over 300 locations scattered all over the United States (there is at least 1 in every state) and also in Australia and Russia. Over 350,000 people have graduated from a FastTrac program. Not everyone who graduates from FastTrac starts their own business (some of our classmates have decided not to implement their business plans) and not everyone who completes the course creates a successful business, but FastTrac will definitely help you get started on the right foot (or help you grow your business).

I would definitely recommend taking a FastTrac course, such as NewVenture or GrowthVenture, if you are contemplating starting a business or already have started a business. By taking the class, you get access to very useful tools (like step-by-step instruction on how to write a business plan and a financial plan, and methods to forecast sales and see how many sales you need to make a profit), you get advice from successful entrepreneurs, and you get to network with other entrepreneurs. (We plan to purchase supplies and services from a few of the people that we met at FastTrac, and my husband has picked up new IT clients.)

A Movie Review for You

I just got back from the movie theater--we saw Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I loved it and would recommend the movie to anyone, but especially those of us who believe that "disabilities" are really opportunities for growth.

When Ben Stein walks through the concentration camp talking about how taking Darwinism to its logical conclusion led to the deaths of many people with health challenges, it was moving. Survival of the fittest means to many people that I should not live, and definitely not reproduce, because I am dragging down humanity with my gimpy body and wasting precious medical resources on myself when there is no hope for a cure. I am also dragging down humanity by insisting on believing in a God, when humanity should have moved beyond childish superstitions like this. Well, I reject that foolishness!

It was so funny watching the evolutionists try to explain how life started! Stuff about crystals and aliens. (Yes, real scientists actually do believe in crazy things like that, just to avoid believing in God! I had a chemistry professor who honestly believed life came from another planet.) But you can't get evolutionists to agree on anything about evolution, except maybe that God or any other being wasn't involved in it at all...but then again there are a few people out there who claim to be Christian evolutionists or Jewish evolutionists who believe that God used evolution to create mankind...but then again, that is still believing in Creation, so we are back at our starting point.

The other part of the movie that was moving was when the Darwinist professor said that he planned to commit suicide when his brain tumor comes back, because life would no longer be worth living. (And Darwinism states that inferior people like him are not beneficial to the advancement of the human species.) He had watched his brother die from ALS, and really wished for euthanasia. That makes me so sad, because life is worth living, even with all this crap we have to dig through in this life! Get a better doctor! Get to know us survivors! Let us show you that even though the rest of the world says, "If you have your health, you have everything!" that we who are lacking in health do not have nothing! We have humor, we have hope, we have love, we have God, we have everything that matters!

What I found interesting was that they didn't mention how Darwinism (survival of the fittest) and environmentalism are contradictory. Only the most fit will survive pollution. The dinosaurs didn't survive the ice age, and how is that bad for our world? Don't most pollutants encourage mutations, which could lead to a revolutionary mutation that could make life on earth amazingly better? What if global warming leads to the evolution of something like dinosaurs, so that giant lizards could walk the earth again and not freeze their little tushies? How thick was the polar ice cap during the time of the dinosaurs, and why didn't they drown in all the water that must have been in the ocean and not bound up in the polar ice caps?

So many questions to answer. Meanwhile, why don't you go see Expelled in a theater near you?

My Favorite Food

I was just going through my photos using Picasa and I found this pic. This is a picture of some of my favorite foods. My mouth is watering just thinking of them. Yum! I took this picture at the Bread Basket restaurant in Newton, Kansas. I highly recommend their "German" Buffet on Friday and Saturday evenings, where you can dine on delicious German/Russian Mennonite dishes like these. Perhaps you would like an explanation of the menu? (Let me just warn you that there are no standardized spellings of Mennonite foods, because Plattdeutsch, the low German dialect my grandparents and other ancestors spoke, was not a written language until the late 1900s.)

On the dinner plate, there are verenike, "German" sausage, and cucumbers in a creamy sauce. Verenike (pronounced vah-reh-nih-kuh) is a dish derived from the Ukrainian varenyky, but Mennonites always make it with a cottage-cheese filling wrapped in dough like a pierogi or ravioli, boiled and then fried, and then topped with a cream gravy with diced ham. I think it might be an aquired taste, but I adore it. "German" sausage is what Kansans call the Mennonite version of a pork sausage flavored with salt, pepper, and a bit of garlic and smoked. It comes as a several foot long cylinder that is coiled against itself and is often cooked in a crock-pot without any water added, or it is baked like a roast. It is very mild and porky and I buy pounds and pounds of it frozen and hoard it for days when I need some comfort food. Cucumbers with a dill-cream sauce fit in well with traditional Mennonite food--rich in dairy.

In the soup bowl on the right is my favorite soup--green bean soup. My grandma made it a lot in the winter and it reminds me of her. It starts with a ham broth to which green beans and ham chunks and summer savory are added, it cooks until hot and flavors are mingled, and then it is finished off with cream. Many Eastern Europeans make soup like this. In the soup bowl above that is Mennonite-style borscht, which never contains beets, but instead has cabbage, potatoes, meat, onions, spices, and maybe tomatoes.

Cherry Moos (pronounced mose) is in the bowl on the left. When I describe it as cherry soup, people say, "Ew, gross." If I describe it as cherry pudding, people say, "Yum." It can be thin and runny and hot or thick and cold, but it always has cherries, water, sugar, and cream. How can you go wrong with a combo like that?

Last but not least, we move to the small plate which has zwiebach (pronounced zwee-bock by almost everyone, or tvay-bock if you are a purist). This is a wheat roll made with lots of fat, which could be butter, lard, margarine (yuck!), coconut oil (I used that when John couldn't eat dairy), or any other yummy form of grease. Proper etiquette states that zwiebach must not be spread with butter, for fear of insulting the hostess by insinuating that she didn't use enough butter when making her zwiebach. As in the picture, the two halves of the bun are pulled apart and spread with jelly or jam--a local specialty is sand hill plum jelly--and then squished back together. Zwiebach may also be made into a sandwich with lunch meat and sliced cheese and served at faspa, which is a traditional Mennonite light lunch.

The only major Mennonite food not represented by this picture is bierrocks. Beer-rocks? How could that be delicious? Well, I have absolutely no idea how they got their name. Bierrocks have a filling of cooked ground beef and cabbage that is wrapped in a yeast dough so that it looks like a bun and then baked. It is my husband's favorite food, though I think that varenike and Mennonite sausage are just ahead of bierrocks on my favorite foods list. They make great picnic and on-the-go foods. There is a restaurant in Wichita that serves only bierrocks and side dishes--they are pretty good, but not as good as the ones I make. Other people (namely those weird people in Nebraska) call bierrocks "runzas" but they make them rectangular instead of round/square and they often put cheese in them. There is a chain of fast food restaurants that sell Runzas, but I never have eaten there. Maybe the next time I go to Lawrence (the nearest location), I will visit.

I will end with a short history of Mennonites, which will help explain the food. The first Mennonite was Menno Simons who lived in the 1500s in the Netherlands and got disgusted with the Catholic Church. He and his followers were despised because they were pacifists and were forced to move to the lowlands, where they reclaimed land from the sea. Eventually most Mennonites were kicked out and many moved to Danzig (Gdańsk), another marsh, which at the time was a German state. Of course, they soon ran afoul of the government for refusing to join the army. Some of them emigrated to North America and some to what was then called South Russia (now called Ukraine). Most of the Mennonites left Russia/Ukraine before or during the Communist Revolution; most of the ones that stayed were killed by Lenin and Stalin. At this time in history, you can find Mennonite communities in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, Paraguay, and a few other countries.

Parents Freaked Out by Their Autistic Kids and Vaccinations

I just read an article about the supposed autism-thimerosal link. The author has the audacity to claim that the government admits that thimerosal and other forms of mercury cause autism, which anyone who reads what the responsible government officials said will find is patently ridiculous. These officials clearly state that they believe the vaccines likely caused harm by aggravating an underlying mitochondrial disorder (a mitochondrial disease can lie dormant until an infection causes them to become active, and a vaccine causes the immune system to think it is being infected and create white blood cells to prevent whatever disease is being vaccinated against.) The activated mitochondrial disorder caused brain damage, though whether all of the girl's symptoms are caused by the mitochondrial disorder or by autism (which could have also been pre-existing and caused by defective genes from 1 or both parents) is unknown.

The main problem, as I see it, is that most parents and society view autistic people as inferior and defective (and if you could actually persuade them to admit the truth, they would say that autistic people aren't quite fully human or fully a person, with all rights and responsibilities thereof). These people are angry that they (or a family member or friend) have given birth to child that is very different than them. The parents and grandparents do not want to admit that they might have a genetic mutation and they are the cause of their child's problems! (Just ask any person diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome who told their parents that one or more of them passed on a bad gene. The parent could have every symptom of EDS ever listed in a book, and will still strenuously deny that he or she is a carrier of a mutant gene!!!)

These parents, willing to do anything to avoid the blame for having "defective" children, will jump on any bandwagon. Never mind that the symptoms of autism and the symptoms of mercury poisoning are radically different. (Has anyone ever claimed that autistic children have poor peripheral vision, peripheral neuropathy, desquamation, acrodynia, tremors, paresthesia, or any other of the known symptoms of mercury poisoning other than mental retardation? And would anyone consider a person with Asperger's to be mentally retarded?) Never mind that chelation (standard treatment for mercury poisoning) has never been proven to eliminate or ease symptoms of autism.

My hypothesis is that there are two reasons for dramatically increased autism rate: a higher percentage of autistic people getting accurate diagnoses, and a higher percentage of people with an autism-spectrum disorder having children.

The reason for the higher percentage of diagnoses is that when I was child, people who behaved like an autistic person were considered eccentric and just plain weird. Nowadays, eccentricity is much less acceptable to teachers and parents. When Johnny doesn't want to play with other children or behaves in an odd manner, the parents or the teachers haul the child to the doctor and ask why and ask for a fix.

The other reason for the "epidemic" is that more people with Asperger's or other mild/moderate forms autism are having children. Before, geeky or nerdy people who didn't excel in school had to settle for whatever job they could get (and keep.) In today's technology-centered world, geeks are essential and get handsome salaries, people with autism-spectrum disorders are excellent IT techs, and thus, many autistics are achieving economic success. Economic success leads to the American dream, which includes a spouse and a family. The people most likely to tolerate quirks are people with their own quirks and you end up with one person on the autism spectrum marrying another person on the spectrum. Genetic mutations get amplified and some very smart, financially-successful parents want to know what went wrong.

There is another factor in all the hubbub over thimerosal--"super-natural" people--people who have gotten fed up with technology and are trying to avoid it at all costs. These are people who only eat organic, buy local and fair trade, try to be "green," and would love to live in a cabin recreating the 19th century. While I have some sympathy for some of their positions (I don't think mercury should be in vaccines, I despise the overuse of antibiotics, and I do use herbs, etc.), these people love to throw the baby out with the bath water and are frequently irrational. For example, because asbestos in the air causes serious health problems, they say asbestos should be completely banned and if there is some, say buried in the bowels of a building, it must be removed--even if it's not exposed--at a huge cost. And they ignore the fact that there is no fire-retardant that works as well and all replacements are more toxic! The most environmentally-friendly power source we can use is nuclear power, but these "super-natural" people are terrified of radioactivity. Wind power is also environmentally friendly, but it looks ugly and supposedly kills birds, so environmentalists say "not in my backyard!" (Um, glass windows kill birds, but do these people remove windows from their houses? Hawks kill pretty songbirds, but are environmentalists trying to eradicate these and other obligate carnivores? I digress...)

These Luddites want to abolish many technological advances, except when abolishing them affects them personally. Modern medicine is bad, until I get very ill. SUVs are bad, until I want to be "safe" or I want to haul around a soccer team once a year. (Don't get me started on how unsafe large vehicles really are!) Coal-fired power plants are bad, until I want electricity to power my electric car or my gadgets. Vaccines are bad, until my child dies of measles or my baby is born with birth defects because I got measles while pregnant.

I think the problem is that hypocrites get on my nerves, and people who think that differences in physical or mental ability are bad also get on my nerves. Maybe I should start a rumor that chemicals in diapers (including cloth ones) or jarred baby food (including organic) or even viruses transmitted in doctor's offices cause autism. All of these autistic kids were exposed to these things, weren't they? Maybe parents overeager to potty train cause autism, because autism symptoms become obvious at the same age that parents start thinking about potty-training (or when grandparents start talking about every kid 50 years ago potty training at age 18 months.) Maybe autism is infectious, just like RSV. Surely I can play devil's advocate. :) Can I convince anybody that any of these ridiculous ideas are true? I doubt it, but there are lots of gullible people out there.

Google likes my pictures

Check this out: Google Search for atrophic cigarette paper scar and Google image search for high arched palate. My blog is the first result! Woot! I think Google likes me just because I use Blogger...though maybe it is because I host my domain name's email using the paid Gmail email hosting. Would they really give preference to people who pay them money? I don't think my results are so high because lots of people visit my blog. I think in the blogosphere popularity contest, I come in at #999999999999, but it may actually be a little lower than that. ;) Maybe I should be posting more often, but, unlike a lot of other bloggers, I actually have some semblance of a life. hahaha!

Perhaps I should post some more images relating to EDS, but I am not sure what pictures to post next. Any reader have some suggestions?