INTERESTING TIMES

I mean, I AM allowed to just go off about what I think, right? That seems to be what the majority of moralizing politicians do these days. It amazes me how surely the devil will assume high moral ground and dictate from it. The adjectives are awesome. Misguided. Dangerous. Wrongheaded. That last one is a particular favorite of mine. Did Shrub invent that word?

But seriously now. People seem to think that if something FEELS right then it is right. What if it feels right and is wrong? What if your gut is misguided? What if your certainty is wrongheaded? When do we begin to resort to intelligent consideration of trends and patterns, not just impressions based on isolated facts?

Lately I keep hearing people talk about what they "resonate with". It is how people choose their spiritual paths. "The Lakota (path) is the one I find I resonate best with." And it is how many in complementary medicine decide which modalities to practice. An intelligent and lovely young woman "resonates" with UNDA numbers and believes that homeopathic "drainage" is how she should practice medicine. She would take a patient off a proven medicine to give them what she resonates with. A charismatic professor "resonates" with muscle testing and so uses it to decide what medicines to give.

I take issue with this. If we rely on psychological resonance to help us make decisions, what are they really based on? The attractiveness of the proposition to our subconscious mind? The degree to which it fits with what we already believe? This method for making decisions about important matters is unscientific and terribly dangerous. It might be appropriate for chosing a metaphysical practice, but is it really suitable for making decisions about how to practice medicine? I think NOT. Intuition has its place, but it cannot and should not completely replace rational thought. Unconscious competence comes only after years of conscious education.

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/howitworks/
This is the coolest thing for word nerds.

The other day I was musing about the sexist assumption of a neighbor of mine that I am going to medical school to be a nurse. I was caught once by the riddle about the boy's doctor who turns out to be his mother when in my mind the doctor was quite male. I am sexist too, in that I assign roles to people based on gender. It has happened again. A girlfriend told me that she is involved with a married couple. In my mind I saw a man and a woman. But the picture didn't work in my head, because my friend is a lesbian who just doesn't get physically close to men. Never has, doesn't want to. So I couldn't understand how she was hooking up with a married couple, until I saw a picture of the couple, and there they were, a couple of lesbians. Oh. OK, here in Oregon, and in California at least, I guess I'd better stop seeing marriage as a man and a woman. Because I confess, until now, I have. Who gets the word "marriage"? If we were being fairer than fair, we'd share the word too.

I have been thinking this for some time. It started when I realized that "naturopath" means "nature disease" and that is a crappy name for the profession that I would like to espouse. So what are we going to call ourselves? We being the people who attend CNME accredited schools, belong to the AANP, are getting extensive medical training. Behind the cut, Ken Winston Cain's articulate arguments as to why we need to embrace two classes of naturopathic doctors, the "traditional" naturopaths and the medically trained ones. Any attempt to claim the title "naturopath" just for ourselves results in a backlash from a great number of people who have been using that title longer than us and don't have in depth medical training. So by trying to take away the title of a less-trained group, we are taking on the cloud of quackery that surrounds their practices, and invoking their outright and justifiable rebellion. So we must stop it. Cain suggests adding words such as "integrative" or "medical" to our title. Integrative Medical Doctor sounds better to me, just drop the word "naturopath" entirely. What do you think? Time is of the essence. We need to ensure that all future licensure bills have recognition of the existing natural medicine practitioners without trying to steal their name or pretend that they don't exist. We need a name.
( the article )

"Through mantra, we no longer cling to the reality of the speech and sound encountered in life, but experience it as essentially empty. Then confusion of the speech aspect of our being is transformed into enlightened awareness." -Kalu Rinpoche
( more )

OK, here's how it works. Behind the cut there is a word (or phrase). After you click the cut and read the word, open a comment window and write down your first few thoughts or associations and send them back to me. Nothing is too weird; it doesn't have to make any sense at all. Just the first thing you think of, and more if you want.
OK, what is the first thing to come to mind:
( cut )