I pre-ordered a DecadeBridge Sn (aka “Tin”) — a small desktop lo-fi FM drone synth. It’s kind of redundant and kind of not; obviously I have a great deal of FM capability among my hardware and software but this is a lo-fi example, with a couple of unique tricks. There is a small chance I’ll decide with this I don’t really need the Akemie’s Castle, but I’m not particularly counting on it. So this is probably just another flavor of that thing I like a lot.
MW now has banner ads. When SynthCube took over, they said they weren’t going to. As a Patreon supporter of the “Memorial Initiative” I was offered the new Power Wiggler status, which removes the ads but otherwise seems to be about the same. On my desktop I already don’t see them (thanks Adblock) and it’s a tiny strip on my phone. I’m not sure if I want to accept the new thing, continue as I was, or drop the Patreon. The proceeds were supposed to pay for a nice memorial gift for the McGrath family and also some kind of tchotchke for the supporters, but we haven’t heard anything about either yet. Kind of leaning toward dropping it. MW has been a helpful resource, and it’s also a pain at times, especially the way it tends to be administered.
Quite some time back, a reader of my blog recommended a book by Dr. John Sarno about back pain. I never did approve that post, because I looked into it and it seemed like quackery. The medical establishment pretty much thinks it’s bunk and the supposedly amazing results he’s gotten are a placebo/coincidence.
I saw another reference to it, and since my back was actively hurting at the time, I thought… OK, I’ll give it a shot. My thinking was: Qi Gong is not based on science at all, but the exercises feel pretty pleasant to do.
So the idea is, back pain (and a lot of other pain, fibromyalgia, etc.) are psychosomatic in nature. Real pain, but not mechanical damage. The physical cause is restriction of oxygen to certain muscle groups; the psychological cause is anxiety, anger, etc.
The book says both that (A) you should always see a doctor about pain in case it indicates a physical problem and (B) doctors don’t know what they’re talking about and will diagnose injuries that aren’t real, making your anxiety and thus your pain worse, and (C) if you have this “TMS” you should discontinue any physical treatment and just fix yourself by, essentially, being told that’s what’s wrong and telling your brain to stop it. The author is not a psychologist or psychiatrist and seems to be a fan of Freud, whose ideas are not terribly well respected today. And the book also keeps citing ulcers as a well-known and accepted example of psychosomatic effects, except oops, ulcers are caused by a bacterial infection. (This was proven before the book was published, but to be fair, the stress = ulcers thing had been believed by medical science and society as a whole and it took years for the new science to be widely accepted).
I’m not at all willing to discount the idea that the mind affects the body. Maybe a lot of cases of back pain are psychosomatic, and maybe by reading the book and thinking about it, that’ll help. I am not an entirely scientific, rational person and maybe this is magic that will work. I guess I’ll see.