The ward where I lived constituted 10% of the land area of the entire city, but it was not possible to buy a tomato except at the one-day-a-week farmer’s market in the summer.
Last spring, I bought my first car. Because I had walked and bused everywhere but I didn’t formally exercise, I assumed I would gain weight rapidly upon switching to car transportation. Not so—I lost about 15 pounds really quickly. Before long, I had to buy new pants. I still wasn’t exercising, but being able to reach beyond the North City food desert for food access caused me to lose weight without trying. Scary.
I live in Detroit now. Food access is varied here. There are no major chain big box groceries inside the city, but we have a number of medium box stores ranging from horrible to good, as well as a number of smaller ethnic and specialty stores. We also have one of the largest, oldest farmer’s markets in the country, where at 2am I watched friends buy bushels of beautiful raspberry-red heirloom tomatoes for canning. It really runs the gamut. I say Detroit is not a food desert, but in the likely event that my very broken car quits in the next month or two…. Ask me what I think about Detroit food access then. And then help me look for my old, bigger pants.

— rustbelt commenting on The Hierarchy Of Food Needs

Bruce Alexander is best known - though deserves to be much better known - for the ‘Rat Park’ experiments he conducted in 1981. As an addiction psychologist, much of the data with which he worked was drawn from laboratory trials with rats and monkeys: the ‘addictiveness’ of drugs such as opiates and cocaine was established by observing how frequently caged animals would push levers to obtain doses. But Alexander’s observations of addicts at the clinic where he worked in Vancouver suggested powerfully to him that the root cause of addiction was not so much the pharmacology of these particular drugs as the environmental stressors with which his addicts were trying to cope.
To test his hunch he designed Rat Park, an alternative laboratory environment constructed around the need of the subjects rather than the experimenters. A colony of rats, who are naturally gregarious, were allowed to roam together in a large vivarium enriched with wheels, balls and other playthings, on a deep bed of aromatic cedar shavings and with plenty of space for breeding and private interactions. Pleasant woodland vistas were even painted on the surrounding walls. In this situation, the rats’ responses to drugs such as opiates were transformed. They no longer showed interest in pressing levers for rewards of morphine: even if forcibly addicted, they would suffer withdrawals rather than maintaining their dependence. Even a sugar solution could not tempt them to the morphine water (though they would choose this if naloxone was added to block the opiate effects). It seemed that the standard experiments were measuring not the addictiveness of opiates but the cruelty of the stresses inflicted on lab rats caged in solitary confinement, shaved, catheterised and with probes inserted into their median forebrain bundles.

— The globalisation of addiction

One of our senior colleagues recently reflected, somewhat ruefully, that anthropology has lost control over its two most basic terms, culture and ethnography; that, in the age of deconstruction and critical postmodernism, we have entered a conceptual free-for-all in which our disciplinary quest has no terrain of its own anymore. Our tropes have been taken over, our signs seized.

— John and Jean Comaroff, Preface, Ethnoraphy and the Historic Imagination. [via]

We believe that the radical possibilities of total liberation from authority are far more transformative and intoxicating than any steps to a revolution as prescribed by any so-called revolutionary chairman. Take their stance on Arizona as an example, one of their demands “No more troops! Demilitarize the border!”, this is not only a conservative stance amongst revolutionaries, but it shows that once again the people are ahead of their revolutionary “leaders.” The RCP, like many on the left, are afraid to state the obvious, that millions of people have already disregarded the legitimacy of the border line, they have to move across it every day, regardless of the law. Further more, by solely opposing the militarization of the borderlands they join in a colonial tradition that attacks the indigenous people of these occupied lands, as tribes are indeed separated by the border wall. By holding the legitimacy of the state over those of the individuals and communities struggling to preserve their ways of life, the RCP become de facto ideological enforcers of the border.

— The “Revolution” we really, really DON’T Need…

Defining janitors with 401K’s as “capitalists” is a kind of social promotion comparable to the elevation by progressives like Teixeira and Abramowitz of shoe-store clerks who dropped out of college into the “mass upper middle class.” Genuine capitalists derive most of their income from the return on their investments or savings, not from labor. By this definition, there are hardly any capitalists in the U.S. Most of the rich are the “working rich,” who derive most of their income from wages or professional fees, not from investments. We are a nation of wage earners, some paid well and others poorly.

— The fantasy of a vast upper middle class [via]

Quick — what is the “paradigm” of medicine, to which my correspondents claim to be alternative? Give up? Good for you, because there isn’t one. People are complicated and there are all sorts of entirely different things that can go wrong. Physicians don’t fall back on a paradigm to fix everything, they do whatever is likely to work. Antibiotics, surgical excision of tumors, hormonal therapy, receptor blockers, physical therapy, nutrition, prostheses, cancer chemotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, social support, surgical repair of joint trauma, monoclonal antibodies, antivirals, vaccinations, and so on and so forth, are all specific ways of addressing various, often entirely unrelated problems.
The only “paradigm” physicians worry about is whether something works or not. The way you find that out is to subject it to rigorous testing. It’s often helpful to understand as much as possible about the underlying biological processes that are making a person sick. It can help guide an efficient search for new therapies, and help select the right one for a particular case. But it isn’t always necessary — some remedies are just “empirical,” as they say, i.e. they are known to work but people aren’t sure why. Doctors aren’t above using these, even if they’d generally prefer to know what’s going on.

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Alternative Healing Paradigms

tip: paradigms (like privilege!) may be hard to see when you are immersed in them.

I find it truly bizarre when I talk to people (okay if we’re being real the only people that really rile me up when they do this are MDs/med students) who are convinced that there is not cultural/moral/social influence on biomedicine, but rather all truth/behavior/procedure/therapies are derived from pure empirical research. Why aren’t y’all reading Kuhn?