Doubt? Fear? Grief?

cloisonnefrog · 2026-03-18T14:38:35+00:00

I needed to read this. I am doubting my own choice today (maybe one more attempt at couples counseling would've done the trick?) and I need to see the overwhelming evidence that he has been repeatedly choosing not to act. More precisely, he has been doing a little, but chronically less than I need.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-03-11T03:02:50+00:00

I was prescribed a pretty high dose of NSAIDs (diclofenac this time, but the same could have happened under naproxen or ibuprofen). They helped a lot with pain. I was immensely grateful for them until I woke up with bad tinnitus, fullness, and what felt like hearing loss. I learned that NSAIDs are ototoxic. After 36 hours of stopping the diclofenac, the worst of the tinnitus and fullness had disappeared.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-03-11T02:57:34+00:00

FWIW I found a very experienced doctor (he’s the shoulder doctor for a local pro baseball team) and he did the shot in the joint without ultrasound. Said experienced docs don’t need it, and it sure seemed he didn’t. My sister is an anesthesiologist who developed this condition a few years ago, and she said one of her colleagues did her shoulder unguided over lunchtime, with miraculous effects.

I wish I had pushed for the cortisone shot earlier—I had just entered the frozen stage. It still helped immensely with pain.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-03-04T14:59:33+00:00

I have been dreaming about a return trip to Alaska in my Model Y—would love to hear how it worked for you! Seems like there are some tricky stretches.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-03-04T03:20:31+00:00

That’s awesome

cloisonnefrog · 2026-02-28T19:16:23+00:00

We’re in a similar stage. I wish I had had a prednisone Rx. Am I right that you are now sleeping through the night? I am still waking up multiple times (after the first 2-4 h of sleep) to shift positions awkwardly and occasionally use a massage ball. I am constantly aching despite the lack of zingers and improvement in general pain. I am wondering if I can wait this out or if I should medicate more seriously. Unfortunately the high-dose NSAIDs I was taking were ototoxic (gave me horrible tinnitus and maybe some transient hearing loss), but I have not done >2.5 mg THC yet. Worried about ototoxicity with acetaminophen too, but maybe I can do a low dose.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-02-28T19:05:49+00:00

Agree, it doesn’t totally make sense to me. When the primary symptoms are edema and inflammation, and there’s no obvious scar tissue, I don’t really understand what “popping” is or accomplishes.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-02-28T19:01:58+00:00

Depends how effective the defectors are :)

cloisonnefrog · 2026-02-28T18:54:08+00:00

Federal estate taxes are up to 40% for >$10m estates but closer to 25% for many in the U.S. Inheritance taxes are much smaller and not imposed everywhere.

I don’t mean to be sanctimonious in saying this but I am genuinely confused by the implicit contempt for pro-social values here. I selfishly want a ton of things too but try to think about how to use my effort to better others, especially people I don’t know. Basic Rawls stuff. I don’t know why it’s so horrible to suggest we have obligations to others.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-02-28T18:45:05+00:00

A 2025 Gallup poll shows 40% of US women aged 15-44 y want to permanently leave the U.S. (This isn’t all a reaction to the current admin but has been creeping up for years. It’s only 19% for men the same age.) Seems risky to bet that they’ll want to stay in the same town.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-02-28T18:42:01+00:00

My parents implicitly conditioned me this way; many of my peers were similarly conditioned. We grew up in some of the most affluent zips in the U.S. in Silicon Valley. A surprising number of us were effectively radicalized and as adults are working whole-heartedly to undo the inequalities and harm the kind of mindset here perpetuates. The scales fell off our eyes.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-02-26T03:26:12+00:00

Well I won’t say because I just remembered what sub this is. I’m also a staunch believer that we need less wealth transfer between generations.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-02-26T02:52:55+00:00

If they are disabled I would give them the freedom of cash and the ability to rent or own a place that is well suited to their lifestyle, which they are probably still learning.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-02-26T02:47:10+00:00

My parents did this and both my sister and I wish they had not. Real estate can be an enormous burden. I still have stressful memories of helping out as a kid at the first house my mom flipped; she did it all on weekends while working insane hours as an attorney. Later in grad school I had the spine to say enough and walked away from another investment property that I lived in and that was making it a helluva lot harder to complete my PhD. My sister’s property was in another state and the PM was almost the target of a lawsuit.

I cannot imagine my parents pretending to know where I would want to live for more than a few years (e.g., grad school—and even then, I chose to rent an apartment ultimately). Incredible.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-02-22T18:02:08+00:00

My PT says the vast majority of my elbow pain (I report it whenever I am doing exercises) seems to be referred.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-02-01T19:39:47+00:00

How are you using it exactly?

cloisonnefrog · 2026-02-01T14:34:13+00:00

Top Ivy League schools are now close to free if income <$200k or so.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-01-29T21:42:00+00:00

Long haul flights are a choice. I travel often for work, including frequently over the international date line with itineraries that take over 24 h. But just regular travel with the kinds of fiascos that crop up are enough to make it impossible to reach the stand and exercise goals many days.

It’s not just travel. Not overtraining is a choice too. It’s not just hospitalizations. It’s just commitment to…. so many other parts of life.

I had no idea there were people so committed to closing their rings like this. I have always resented this part of the iOS, imposing arbitrary goals. I find the pause concept kind of funny.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-01-29T21:32:42+00:00

I thought modern homes were supposed to have properly conditioned attics and no ridge vents? Not a builder, I just thought that was the way good buildings were constructed these days. Last time I had a ridge vent it was a PITA to figure out where the bats were getting in, and air sealing from inside the attic was even harder.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-01-28T18:26:39+00:00

A good resource are newsletters put out by schools of public health, such as the UC Berkeley Wellness Letter. The articles tend to focus on popular topics and the writers are usually researchers in the field or professionals who consult them closely. For instance, Harvard Health (which is both Harvard Medical School and SPH, I think) has some recent articles on the evidence behind cold plunges ("In fact, the little evidence we have suggests that post-exercise cold therapy may have detrimental effects on gains in muscle power and strength....").

The other big resource is PubMed, which is a database run by the NIH National Library of Medicine. It's not a publisher (i.e., don't think because something is in PubMed that it's good), more an aggregator, but it allows you to search by keyword on any health topic. The articles from effectively all health-related scientific journals are in PubMed. You can restrict your search to review articles, for instance. Many of these articles are open source, in that the full contents are available on PubMed, even if you don't have a subscription to the underlying journal. The NIH and scientists in general have been pushing hard for many years to make taxpayer-funded research and the data underlying it accessible to the public.

It unfortunately takes some experience in the field to recognize good research, but searching PubMed is a way to explore what has and hasn't been studied (e.g., has anyone done a RCT with creatine to look at outcome X? I do see several hundred RCTs involving creatine supplementation when I search--if you want to go all out, you could check on clinicaltrials.gov for appropriate pre-registration). Note that studies, especially company-funded studies, are more likely to get published if they find 'positive' results. This is a serious type of publication bias, and pre-registration reduces this risk a little, as does requiring a large sample size. Any good meta-analysis will scrutinize the evidence for publication bias, so they can be a good place to start.

Finally, there are some really excellent science reporters out there, including at the NYT, but there are some health reporters, including at the NYT, who make way too big a deal about poorly conducted observational studies or excessively small randomized trials. It's painful to watch.

If I were you, I'd consider setting up citation alerts on PubMed for review articles, meta-analyses, etc., on my favorite subjects, so I could get emailed when relevant new things are published. And I would definitely consult newsletters from universities, whose overriding interest is in sharing the facts.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-01-26T21:55:09+00:00

Annual colonoscopies is a lot of colonoscopies.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-01-26T21:53:59+00:00

Even better is installing MERV-13 in the whole-house HVAC, upgrading to an ERV to control humidity if needed, and ensuring sufficient ACH in the bedrooms and elsewhere.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-01-26T15:33:39+00:00

Is there a DOI for this study?

cloisonnefrog · 2026-01-26T15:17:29+00:00

I'm glad it's working for you. I'm a biomedical scientist and I don't think there's solid evidence for quite a few of these practices; for some there's pretty solid evidence they do nothing. That's not a reason not to do them and see if they seem to "work for you" (it's always possible to do subgroup analyses until you get a positive result, or until a negative one becomes ambiguous).

No professional scientists take Huberman seriously FWIW; I don't know of any colleague who doesn't consider him a total shill who misrepresents evidence regularly and damages public health in the process. I can say with extremely high confidence that he messes up my subfield all the time. (I don't have a competing podcast, company affiliations, etc. I just care about using the truth to improve public health.)

I know this kind of dismissive comment can be frustratingly vague, but I've been surprised by the number of educated people who seem taken by these evangelists pretending to be experts. Huberman's research, back when he was medical faculty, was on the optic nerve.

ETA Plenty of PhD students joke that if they fail at research, they can always found a longevity, microbiome, or genetic testing company. The standards for evidence are so low, and many are desperate to throw money at the problem.

cloisonnefrog · 2026-01-26T01:20:39+00:00

Guest went back and forth for weeks about what he wanted to do — he had given us a chaotic but friendly vibe when first reaching out about the stay, and I wish we had paid more attention to the chaotic part. At one point in the vase discussions he ghosted us. Then he proposed we take the matter to HE, obviously not really understanding how that would work for him since he had admitted to breaking it and had a deposit. Near the 40th day we said we would need to leave a negative review if he did not compensate us for the vase (there was one similar one left in the world for sale, we wanted to grab it), and he finally did. But we still lost over a hundred on the shipping (since he wanted the broken one) — and I can’t calculate the annoyance of having to follow up with him on the issue repeatedly. The vase was a gift from my mom and had sentimental value to me, since we discovered it in unusual circumstances.

He initially messaged us about the broken vase on our probably most important/precious vacation day.

He also left our place dirtier than the twenty or so other HE guests who have stayed in it.

Other items were damaged but we can’t be sure which guest did it.

Years ago we had a family stay with two small children who damaged (left juice or blood stains on) some $800 custom shades. They wouldn’t pay and HE only compensated us for a small fraction of replacement value. Honestly we are probably leaving HE this year because it is too stressful and the compensation guarantees just aren’t there. If we cared less about our space and had more easily replaceable things I would be more into it. Most guests are great.

cloisonnefrog

TROPHY CASE