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Thoughts on lots of things, especially education, psychology, culture, religion, and personal growth.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

We need a new label

Fundamentalists are people who are so right they're wrong.

We need a new label to add to the fundie camp: science fundamentalists. These are the people who reject ideas out of hand because they haven't been proved by science yet.

Like the gracious and sensitive person on the IFLS facebook page who posted this gem:

The caption read, "Unless you have been diagnosed with celiac disease, going gluten free will do *nothing* for your health. Image via Skepchick."

Seriously?  What a jerk. These folks deserve to be labeled.  I call them, science fundamentalists.

Just because science hasn't figured out the reasons yet, doesn't mean that a lot of people are not truly benefiting from going gluten free. Who is this person to say what will and will not help someone else with a problem no professional seems to know how to solve?

Sometimes, you have a problem that current science hasn't found an answer for yet, and you have to experiment on your own until you figure out what works. I don't appreciate the insinuation that I'm an idiot for that. (Not that I particularly care what other people think.)

My 6-year-old son is one who has found a LOT of relief by cutting out gluten. He had encopresis, which is a word I truly hope you don't know the meaning of. Picture this: You're going about your day, and suddenly there's poop in your pants.  You don't have sensation of having to go poop beforehand. It just comes whenever it wants to come, and you don't find out until it's already in your pants. Imagine being a child who has this problem.  Imagine being the mother of this child.

The only medical "solution" for this is laxatives. They say it's caused by the child holding in his poop, due to being distracted with other things, or whatever, and so the child gets constipated. In an effort to release the lump of hardened fecal matter stuck in the intestine, the body produces diarrhea, which flows around the lump, and exits the body without activating the normal alert system--the feeling of having to poop.  Lovely.

If this is how encopresis works, then laxatives should help.  Well, laxatives made him poop a lot alright, but they didn't help him regain his sensations of needing to go. And he still had accidents. The pediatrician also told me to put him on a schedule of sitting on the toilet for a certain amount of time every day.  Apparently my already-toilet-trained child had "forgotten" that when you feel like you're supposed to poop, you need to run to the toilet... so I was supposed to retrain him to do that. What?  OK...  Well, I'll give it a try...

The problem is, these interventions did not work.  The poor boy still had accidents every day.  The poor mother had to clean a lot of dirty laundry... and walls... and floors... and hands... Nasty!  I was desperate.  There had to be a cause. There had to be a cure.

Maybe it was a food allergy.  There are some people in my family who were lactose intolerant as children; maybe he's reacting to dairy.  We cut out dairy for 10 days.  No relief.  Well, maybe cutting out constipating foods would help.  We cut out chocolate and dairy for 10 days.  No relief.  Still an accident every day.  Finally I found this blog:
Mom's Guide to Encopresis 
Which said that one family had solved their daughter's problem of encopresis by cutting out gluten and adding probiotics.  Well, we were already doing probiotics, so it was a matter of trying gluten. 

But my stomach sank.  I had done a gluten-free diet for my ex husband several years ago, and it was a major annoyance.  I really hoped this wouldn't work... But of course, like I said, I was desperate.

Two days after going gluten free, my son became regular.  He could feel the sensation of needing to poop.  At first his BM was watery with chunks, but it solidified, and now he has normal daily bowel movements.

I thought maybe it was a coincidence, so two weeks after the bliss of living normally began, I let him eat gluten over the weekend.  He was constipated on Monday and had an accident on Tuesday.  So we went back to gluten-free.  Any time he accidentally gets gluten now, he has an accident the next day.

Placebo? Maybe. But neither I nor he wanted to cut out gluten, because it's such a huge annoyance to live that way, especially when you live in a small town with very few gluten-free substitutes at the grocery stores.. So you will never convince me that cutting out gluten helped him due to placebo; it helped him because it physically helped him. Plus, we tried several other dietary interventions that didn't work, so if placebo were going to work, it should have worked when we cut out dairy or chocolate. 

A recent study suggests that maybe it's the reduction in short-chain carbohydrates called "FODMAPs" that might be the "real" source of people's relief when they go on a gluten-free diet.  Maybe. The problem is, though, that my son's diet is literally exactly the same as it was before; we just swapped out wheat bread, pasta, and cereal, with gluten-free bread, pasta, and cereal.  We were already avoiding HFCS, artificial sweeteners, artificial colors, and most soy. We rarely eat beans. He eats apples regularly, as well as other foods with FODMAPs.  The gluten is the only thing that changed.

I'm not saying it has to be the gluten. Maybe it's something else in wheat, or a combination of factors. I'm not committed to a single position, except the position that I want my son to be able to function properly. I'm just saying, it's working... why are people rude enough to tell me it's not, when I see it with my own eyes?
 

For a science fundie to tell me that cutting out gluten will do nothing for my health because we don't have scientific studies to prove it, is the same as a Christian fundie saying that a Muslim or an Atheist can't possibly have a happy and fulfilled life because Jesus is the only source of fulfillment. It's the same attitude!  To maintain their position, these fundamentalists have to ignore the testimonials of millions of people.

How about a new joke?
If a tree falls in the forest, and a group of peasants hears it land, did it actually make a sound? A science fundamentalist would say, "not unless there's a scientist with a decibel meter there to tell us how loud the impact was."

This isn't to say that science doesn't work. I have a very high respect for science. I'm just saying that science hasn't figured EVERYTHING out yet, and pooh pooh-ing something that is working for a lot of people just because there's some study that says "that shouldn't work" or "there's no study that shows how it works" is arrogant and closed-minded. Science fundamentalists are going against the exploratory spirit of science, itself, by committing themselves unshakably to a position and dismissing or attacking anyone who holds a different position. 
The world is vast! 
There's so much more to learn!  
You can be wrong!

Thursday, May 8, 2014

transition

I'm moving at the end of this month.  Moving out— that I know— but I don't know where TO yet.  It depends on if someone hires me.  The backup plan is to move back in with Mom.  Back in.

If that happens, it'll be three and a half years since moving out from Mom's, and I won't have made any progress.  A giant 3-1/2 year circle.  But maybe something good will happen, and that won't be necessary. One must retain hope.  I'm smart, educated, detail-oriented, passionate and a team player, right? I bring a lot of value. Companies are foolish to overlook me.  Dear God, I'm starting to believe my own cover letters.

I'm not a huge fan of this decrepit old house, but it has served us decently well the past few years, despite the plumbing backing up constantly, the lack of closets, the gaping holes in the windows, and the cracks in the paper-thin walls.  I know and appreciate that I'm lucky to have running water, electricity, and a roof.  I'm not complaining, really I'm not.  I have genuinely enjoyed trying to wrestle this rectangular squat into something resembling pretty and livable.

I'm just fighting the feelings of nostalgia trying to grab me as I envision saying goodbye to the old place.  Why would I miss this dumpy disaster of architectural indifference?  There's surely something better for me out there to go to, somewhere to call home that deserves such a title. (Or maybe not. Life has no guarantees.)

"Don't feel. Just pack.  One step at a time, that's all you can do."

And then, as I pull out some books from my disheveled bookshelf, a CD pops into view.  His CD.  The one I bought from him 11 years ago and listened to until I'd memorized the songs, absorbed the timbres, and conformed to the textures. The one I'd listened to whenever the ache for him became unbearable (but I felt forbidden to do anything about it, like, oh, ask him out.)  The forms, rhythms, chord progressions, and concepts were well-conceived, and the perfectly-placed sarcasm was charming and hilarious... but he sure needed some voice lessons. But that detail only barely mattered. A raspy, scooping assault on the auditory sensibilities can't hold a candle to the power of love.

Love's way of sneaking into your soul and infiltrating the little crevices of your consciousness, sabotaging your critical powers, and blurring the sharp edges of your discernment, is truly diabolical.  That you could want someone, so badly, whom you also both fear and spurn, whom you disagree with so strongly, whom you logically worry would turn out to be a bad match anyway, should be illegal.

And a decade after buying the CD, after my transformation, he was suddenly no longer forbidden, I disagreed with him much less, and he was available (kind of).  It could have worked, surely.  Were the timing different, had I been more suave, had I not tripped over myself... or something... I don't actually know why it didn't work.  He didn't feel the same way, apparently.  Does there need to be any other explanation?

Anyway, I thought I was SO over it, moving on, putting the jerkface in the past. I even have a new forbidden crush now. (How original, my idiotic heart, how original.) But now. Now this CD is burning my hands, and as I throw it away from me as sharply as if it were a scorpion, the ache bursts out from my core, all over again. And despite my attempts not to feel, a strange, choking, crying sound hits my ears, and I realize it's mine.  I have to hold a tissue to my eyes the entire time while reading bedtime stories to my children.

Gone. He's gone forever... but still alive. I could bump into him accidentally some day.  It's worse than if he were dead, because there's still a possibility of seeing him.  We could both end up on the same airplane, or visiting the same museum. What would I do then?  Maybe he'll become a famous musician, and I'll hear him on the radio or something, and have to endure people talking about going to his concerts. Why do I care?  Why did I ever care in the first place? He's a jerk, that's what I have to tell myself to make any kind of sense of what happened.

Maybe I don't really care.  Maybe I'm more over him than I feel tonight.  Maybe this event is just a trigger for the broader feelings of anxiety, loneliness, and uncertainty I'm facing as I move into a very dark and murky future.  Maybe it's easier to think that I'm crying about a past loss than to admit that I'm illogically emotional about a present in which my emotions have no say, whatsoever, in the outcome. Maybe crying about the past allows me to feel more powerful, somehow. To tell myself that maybe I COULD have had a different outcome, if only I were better at dealing with men, or didn't have children, or... something..., than to own up to the fact that the outcome for the future feels completely out of my control, and that makes me feel very vulnerable.

Or maybe it really is how it feels, and I'm just feeling wounded from thinking about him, all over again.

The CD is in the trash.  Such a waste.  But I'd rather listen to the Gaither Band on infinite repeat than that beautiful-odd thing one more time.

Damn these feelings.  Don't feel.  Just pack.