(no subject)

[conuly]

Social bees have kept their gut microbes for 80 million years

The Enduring Legacy of the Pocahontas Myth

The Genius of Pinheads: When Little Brains Rule​

The 1920s Women Who Fought For the Right to Travel Under Their Own Names

Cats found to like humans more than thought (Seems to me that anybody who has ever had a pet cat would've known this, but at least it's Backed By Science now.)

Beauty and the Beast: A cautionary tale about smart homes

Canadians Adopted Refugee Families for a Year. Then Came ‘Month 13.’

Germany Is Taking Away Kindergarteners' Toys to Curb Future Addiction

The High Price of Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Life

Accidental therapists: For insect detectives, the trickiest cases involve the bugs that aren’t really there. (I really, really hope the two comments to this article are trolling.)

Frogpocalypse Now

Trump tells NBC to stop covering Russia story

How Right-Wing Media Saved Obamacare

We’re unprepared for the next flu pandemic. A near-future speculation by a top epidemiologist explains the risk we’ve tacitly permitted.

It wasn’t just hate. Fascism offered robust social welfare

ICE Is Arresting People When They Show Up to Apply For Green Cards Now (Okay, seriously, some things should be off limits. Not at school, not at fucking hospitals, not during worship services, not in court or police stations - and not when they're trying to apply for fucking green cards! It's not about whether undocumented immigrants are in the right or not, it's about having a bare minimum standard of civility and fair play.)

Scientists made a detailed “roadmap” for meeting the Paris climate goals. It’s eye-opening.

Disabled, or just desperate?

After 12 Rejections, Apple Accepts App That Tracks U.S. Drone Strikes

Inside Alabama’s Auto Jobs Boom: Cheap Wages, Little Training, Crushed Limbs

Comments

[siderea]

Accidental therapists: For insect detectives, the trickiest cases involve the bugs that aren’t really there.

Argh. Believing your house is infested with noxious bugs is a delusion. Feeling your skin is infested with noxious bugs that tickle, itch, or bite is a hallucination. It isn't (unless accompanied by the former) delusional parasitosis, it's formication. Trying to convince someone with a hallucination that they are delusional will never, ever work, because you're contradicting the evidence of their senses. You have to actually explain that the sensations are real but the cause is not actually bugs. And you can legit tell someone that an antipsychotic medication will make the itching better.

Most disturbing of all is that the patients' belief in the bugs is arresting treaters' attention, to the exclusion of the possibility of hallucination. And that's really bad because the psychiatric symptom of formication can be a sign of a number of medical conditions. You aren't going to detect mercury poisoning or cocaine dependence from sticking a skin sample on a microscope slide and looking for topical infectious agents.

[conuly]

Thank you. That's useful information that I bet most entomologists weren't taught at entomology school - and I know the journalists weren't!

Though I don't know what excuse the doctors are giving....

[siderea]

I did some more digging and it turns out one of the entomologists they interviewed knows perfectly well the relationship of formication and delusional parasitosis, having written a paper on it for a psychiatric journal. One of her points was that way, way more cases are presenting to entomologists than the psychiatrists know about, so their prevalance estimates are very off, just counting the number of cases a survey of entomologists report.

I'm worried that this is actually a story of how when a patient presents to their GP with a psychiatric symptom, like hallucinating the sensation of bugs, the GP says "psychiatric problem!" and washes their hands of the patient, instead of considering it as, you know, evidence of a possible actual medical problem. The psychiatrist, even if you could get the patient to see one, isn't in any position to test for, e.g., pesticide poisoning; that's the GP's job.

This is a problem I've encountered, and have a bit of a rant about.

ETA: Also, she made the distinction between mere formication (and other bug-related hallucinations) and full-on delusional parasitosis, to make clear that what she's seeing in her office is overwhelmingly the latter. I figure people who feel like they're being bitten by bugs but not irrationally wedded to the idea they're infected never wind up in an entomologist's office.

[conuly]

This is a problem I've encountered, and have a bit of a rant about.

It seems very plausible to me. Some people don't want to do their jobs.