I developed an amazingly severe dog allergy, through living with dogs nonstop for 17 years.  If I'm riding my bike and a car pulls up next to me with a dog in it, and the window's open, I'll get sick.  If I'm anywhere near a dog and I breathe any of the air around it, I get sick.  The allergist I see has an office in a building where dogs live, and people sometimes go through the door that opens into the rest of the building, although the door is usually shut.  When I go there, I have bad…

Like a lot of women I'm uncomfortable with legalized prostitution.  Mostly because a lot of prostitutes have a history of sexual abuse and being a prostitute seems degrading.

All the same, I think laws against prostitution and other victimless crimes have to go.  The laws against prostitution make it dangerous to be a prostitute and increase the power of pimps and probably help trap women in prostitution. 

The victimless-crime laws are perhaps a consequence of religion. …

I saw an interesting 2001 study that showed a benefit of nystatin vs placebo, for people with presumed "Candida" symptoms. 

The study subjects were selected from volunteers, because of their answers to 7 questions supposed to indicate a "Candida problem":

Have you, at any time in your life, taken ‘broad spectrum’ antibiotics?

Have you taken tetracycline or other broad spectrum antibiotics…

For a long time, alternative medicine doctors have told patients they have a "Candida overgrowth", sometimes based on a stool test, sometimes only a guess based on various symptoms that an excess of Candida is supposed to cause.  And they diagnose "dysbiosis", meaning the microorganisms in the person's gut are of the wrong kind.  They prescribe probiotics, prebiotics - which are substances like inulin and fructooligosaccharides that (hopefully) primarily feed good bacteria - they prescribe…

I found out something interesting recently:  that you can have IgE-mediated allergies to inhalants, even with negative skin and blood tests.  This is called "local allergic rhinitis".  The symptoms are similar to conventional allergies, and it's rather common:  about 25% of people with rhinitis had local allergic rhinitis, in one study. 

There's a…

Racism is connected to social anxiety.  People with a rare genetic disorder called Williams syndrome, which causes people to lack social anxiety, also lack racial biases.  These people are also vulnerable to attack because they don't have social fear; they don't pick up signals that someone may be about to attack them.  And the beta blocker propranolol, of all things,…

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