“Distant Galaxies”, a deep rich mix of purples and black. I dyed a batch of twenty on sock yarn for @wonderwoolwales but they are also available online. I’ve spent an hour trying to think of something sparklingly brilliant to say that will ensure folk engage but I am drawing a blank so image two is a review kindly posted by a lovely customer. I know beautiful photos aren’t enough these days but I really just care about yarn and people, not copywriting.
When you say you're anti-CAM what does that mean? Like what does CAM mean in that context? I genuinely haven't seen that acronym before and I'm assuming you aren't anti-camming as in like the form of sex work
I am capable of turning off my inner annoying atheist, I am incapable of turning off my inner annoying quackwatcher.
I have had real life fights with people I genuinely love about this and I do not regret it. I will absolutely not regret shitting all over someone’s $500 herbalist certification.
Warding spells are real, if you want me to stay far away from you forever tell me that you practice reiki.
The nice thing is that I will probably never bring this kind of thing up. I’m never going to go out of my way to figure out if the people around me are, like, really into homeopathy. The less nice thing is that if you bring it up with me I am never, ever, ever going to shut up about it and if you attempt to show me a *study* on the healing power of prayer or the use of chiropractic to treat asthma we are forever enemies and I probably won’t talk to you again but I will use the several hours of furious debunking that I did after our conversation to make arguments against your beliefs in the future. You are already a lost cause to me but other people are less stupid about the way that ice crystals form and I can work with them.
I *loathe* medical woo, it kills people and the people who engage in it are shitty human beings who are hurting other human beings.
RE: Herbalism
I don’t think that there’s a proponent of science-based medicine alive who doesn’t understand that plant compounds are important in medicine and it is important to research them. We *DO* get a lot of medicine from plants.
But “medicine from plants” and “herbalism” are not the same.
The example that most people like to bring up is aspirin and willow bark tea. You can use willow bark as a painkiller, you can collect your own and brew it up when you’ve got a headache.
What you can’t do is control the dose. You can’t do this for a number of reasons, including having little control over the conditions the tree grew in and variations in preparation technique. If you’re measuring very exactly you can control for some of these things, but even if you were in charge of the willow tree you collected the bark from it’s not going to be the same at different places on the trunk or in different seasons.
That’s not a huge deal if you’re using aspirin for a headache, it can be a much bigger deal if you’re using aspirin as a bloodthinner.
And the example that people LIKE to use is aspirin because it *isn’t* a big deal. The example they *don’t* like to use is foxglove (digitalis, which produced digitoxin, which can be used to treat heart failure) because that’s a medicine from a plant that you can’t fuck around with using herbalism, it needs extremely careful extraction and preparation because if it’s done wrong it’ll just straight kill you.
And then you get into herbal treatments that are generally safe and largely not harmful even if they may not do anything, and it can feel totally reasonable to recommend red raspberry leaf tea to a friend who is having cramps. As long as that friend isn’t diabetic because red raspberry leaf interacts with insulin. And as long as your friend isn’t on an anticoagulant because red raspberry leaf can ALSO act as an anticoagulant.
And those are just examples of what can happen if you know you are actually getting the plant that you think that you are getting and that it is unadulterated with fillers and uncontaminated with anything else and is properly prepared (or is prepared the same way as the last batch you bought and so it can be dosed the same way).
There are two ways that Kava Kava can be prepared; do you know which of those two ways is associated with more deaths and liver transplants? Do you know not to take Kava if you have a history of liver issues or if you are on antidepressants? (ctrl+f for “Hema Ketha” for the study from that overview that goes in depth on that; for whatever reason you can read the whole article in the overview but if you click on the link you only get the abstract)
One of my big, big problems with CAM - including herbalism - is that people turn to it because they think it is safer than “allopathic” medicine. They think “it’s better to drink raspberry leaf tea than it is to take midol because midol is full of chemicals and raspberry leaf tea is just tea.” But midol doesn’t interact with insulin, and most people are *aware* they’re taking a blood thinner when they take NSAIDs.
There’s this tea shop I go to that has maybe a hundred different kinds of herbal teas, some of which are clearly supposed to be medicinal, but the one that always stands out to me is the St. John’s Wort tea that has “NOT FOR PREGNANT” on the label. It’s good that they’re recommending that pregnant people don’t select that tea, but that tea is also not for people on antidepressants, triptans, birth control, warfarin, stantins, protease inhibitors, or people who have had solid organ transplants.
But it’s just tea. And what could just tea do, right?
(It could make your anti-rejection meds so weak that it kills you. That’s what just tea can do. But maybe one cup of older tea, or one cup that is more leaf than flower, or one cup that wasn’t steeped as long doesn’t hurt, so you drink it and you think it’s fine, it’s not a problem, and it isn’t a problem until it is but you don’t know the difference between one cup of tea and the next because this shit is impossible to dose)
This is also why I’m extremely leery of the “you can try CAM as long as you are using it alongside your doctor’s care and you do what the doctors say” thing because that is relying on:
Doctors being aware of all of these possible interactions (which is a stretch; pharmacists are likely to have a better handle on it but even then, there are all kinds of supplements being labeled all kinds of things all the time; medical woo scammers LOVE to rebrand their supplements)
So long story short I’m not particularly bothered if you try herbalism on yourself after looking into things that you think will help you. I do have a problem with people who *recommend* herbal treatments without A) a full medical background understanding of the person they recommend the treatment to and B) comprehensive knowledge of whether the thing that you’re recommending will interact with any medications they might be taking or exacerbate any conditions that they might have and C) some kind of accountability mechanism in place - like a malpractice suit or the loss of license - like a doctor might if they prescribed a medication that was dangerous to their patient.
Because that’s the other infuriating thing - CAM practitioners often aren’t held to the same standards as medical professionals. Patients who trust CAM practitioners often think of them like doctors, but they don’t have the same protection from CAM practitioners like they would from doctors. If your herbalist tells you to treat your cancer with apricot pits or black salve - even if that’s in addition to chemotherapy - it could end up seriously injuring you and they’re not committing malpractice because there’s no legal standard for their practice. Nobody can remove their license because there’s no such thing as an herbalist license, so whatever harm they did to you can be done to other people after you with no professional consequences.
If you want to replace your elderly parent’s NSAID painkillers with clove oil, fuck you.
If you want to replace your elderly parent’s NSAID painkillers with clove oil, fuck you.
As someone who ended up with multiple dead teeth and an abundance of scar tissue inside my mouth in my teens because I was only allowed to medicate my sore teeth with clove oil because it was “natural” (yes, it’s an analgesic, but it also burns soft tissue and can damage the dental pulp if used too frequently or at too high a dosage. It should also never ever be used on children or infants), I second the fuck you.
A young boy says to his father “Dad, our maths teacher is asking to see you."
"What happened?” The father asks.
“Well, she asked me, ‘how much is 7 * 9?’ I answered '63’ , then she asked, 'and 9 * 7?’ So I asked 'what’s the fucking difference?’
"Indeed, what is the difference?” asks the father. “Sure, I’ll go.”
The next day, the boy comes home from school and says, “Dad, have you gone by the school?”
“Not yet.”
“Well when you do, come and see the gym teacher also.”
“Why?” asks the father.
“Well we had a gym class today, and he asked me to raise my left arm, I did. Then my right arm, I also raised it. Then he asked me to lift my right leg, so I did. 'Now,’ he says, 'lift your left leg,’ so I asked, 'What, am I suppose to stand on…. my cock??’”
“Exactly,” says the father. “Alright, I’ll come.”
The next day, the boy asks his father “Did you go to the school?” “No, not yet.”
“Don’t bother, I got expelled.”
Surprised, the father asks “Why did you get expelled?”
“Well, they summoned me to the principal’s office, and sitting there were the math teacher, the gym teacher, and the art teacher.”
“The fuck was the art teacher doing there!?” asks the father.
new trope idea: Innocent/naive character who is notoriously trusting of people who’s trust gets broken and is hurt so many times that they’re no longer very trusting but they pretend to be so they don’t put their friends through the pain of seeing them change
I keep seeing people online say that any job offering unlimited PTO is a “scam”, because it’s reverse psychology and you’ll actually take less than normal, or that the manager still has to approve it and won’t actually allow more than a few weeks.
I’m sure this can happen, but it’s not at all a given! My husband’s job offers unlimited PTO and he takes a cumulative average of 6-8 weeks off every year. Management is totally cool with it because he’s a good worker who gets his projects done on time, and he’s considerate by not taking off during the few weeks of the year that his team crunches for deadlines.
Don’t scare people into avoiding jobs that offer good benefits in case they might not pay out. Instead, teach them to ask the right questions during interviews so they can gauge accessibility:
What are common reasons a PTO request may be denied? What’s the criteria to be approved?
What’s the average amount of time your teammates take off every year? (This will tell you how realistically you will get to take off)
How often do you (the interviewer) take advantage of the PTO policy?
Are there any exceptions to the “unlimited” policy, such as certain weeks of the business year, or length of consecutive PTO days taken at once?
How long does a new employee have to work for the company before the unlimited PTO policy kicks in for them?
Remember, you’re allowed to ask questions during interviews! Use it to your advantage. And don’t avoid jobs just because someone told you the benefits are too good to be true.
