here’s your regular reminder that if you consistently, regularly get headaches, you are almost certainly having migraines, not regular headaches.
MOST recurrent headaches are migraine headaches.
“migraine” does not mean “extremely painful headache.” it is a type and source of pain, not a degree of pain. migraines can also include some or all of the following: fatigue, sensitivity to light and sound, visual auras, nausea or vomiting, dizziness, cognitive impairment, etc. these symptoms can be mild or severe and it may actually be difficult to determine if you have them. (who wants a bright light in their eyes during a headache?? i thought that’s just how headaches were lmao.)
this is important because while aspirin, NSAIDs like ibuprofren, and other over-the-counter pain meds can effectively alleviate migraine pain, getting diagnosed with migraines allows for a wider range of treatments and preventatives.
it’s also important because, in my opinion, your average general practice doctor is not equipped to diagnose you with chronic migraine. don’t go to one expecting them to. a neurologist with migraine specialty is a better option, although a regular doctor can still be useful if they listen to you lol.
my life would be miserable and unmanageable without sumatriptan. and i never would have gotten a prescription for sumatriptan if i hadn’t gone to my GP and said, “i have migraines and want to try migraine medicine,” even though at the time i wasn’t 100% sure that was true.
if you have chronic headaches, they’re almost certainly migraines. if no one has said that to you before, let me be the first. start treating your migraines.
multiple times in my youth, i went to the doctor expecting them to figure out and tell me if i had migraines. each time, the doctor asked, “do you see an aura?” and when i said no, they determined i must not be getting migraines. no one ever told me that only 20% of migraine sufferers experience auras. that means 80% don’t, yet that is frequently used as important diagnostic criteria! what!
a book i recommend over and over is The Keeler Migraine Method by robert cowan. highly recommend if you’re trying to figure your migraine situation out.
Migraines don’t have to involve headaches! Turns out I’ve had migraines my whole life and I didn’t know, because it doesn’t cause headaches. Rather, I get
Extreme irritability
Photophobia
Sound sensitivity
Tingling and numbness
Inability to remember words
Trouble remembering
Trouble with basic arithmetic
Dizziness
Visual changes (stop being able to perceive depth)
Back and shoulder pain
Fatigue
I chalked a lot of this up to autism and overstimulation.
I saw a neurologist and now I have medicine to treat my migraines. What I have are called ocular migraines.
Please look into migraines without headaches. You may be totally unaware that you have migraines.
Migraines without headaches are called silent migraines, and they’re absolutely a thing. For me they’re even more frequent than painful ones.
Here’s a test which, while not infallible, has led to multiple of my friends realizing that they had migraines and didn’t know it: Do you feel nauseated? Confused? Like you pulled an all-night even though you didn’t? Or are you feeling just generally off in a way that’s hard to define? Go into a really dark room and shut the door behind you. If whatever weirdness you were experiencing gets suddenly better as soon as you’re sitting in the pitch-dark, you almost certainly are having a migraine.
I’ve mistaken migraines for food poisoning and car sickness. I’ve had friends who have mistaken them for everything from seizures, to covid, to a poor night of sleep, to even just having had too much alcohol to drink. The symptoms of migraines are extremely varied, and very few people have all of them - but light sensitivity is common and a bit of a dead giveaway. If you have light-sensitive anything, bring it up with a doctor as a possible migraine symptom.
I’ve talked about migraines as having an imp sitting in your nervous system who periodically rolls a D100 to invoke Chaos Magic, and it’s true.
Remember if you’re out at a store and someone says “This is a robbery” you can say “no it’s not” and then the robber will leave because theyre a robber and this is no longer a robbery .
You can not just say this without dropping the whole story
Ok so,
My dads coworker is at the front and this man comes Up and hands him a document.
The coworker took a Look at the document and while he couldn’t read the things written by Hand, because he wasn’t wearing his glases, he did notice the Logo of a different Bank so he’s like:
“Oh, sorry sir you can’t do that here! You have to go to the other Bank for this :)”
The man, visibly confused leaves, but dosen’t take the document with him.
The coworker, now just as confused as the Guy actually Takes Out his glases and reads the hand written part:
This is a robbery
Can you imagine trying to rob a god damn bank and the teller just cheerfully tells you to go rob the competition instead
I worked as a bank teller for several years and a few things you should know, bank robberies happen far more frequently than you might think and they come in waves. When a bank gets robbed a notification with photos goes to all banks in the area to be on the lookout. And there are two kinds of robbery, the pass the note and the takeover (what you see in movies).
So our branch had had a big takeover robbery as well as a note one. We also had a teller that had transferred to our branch after having been through a robbery. She was sweet as apple pie, hair up to the ceiling, southern lady who had just been through multiple robberies.
A guy comes in and hands her a folded note. Her immediate thought was “this guy needs to learn you don’t hand bank tellers notes. I am just not going to read that.” So how the conversation goes:
Her: how can I help you today?
Him: I’m here to get money
Her: great *hands him a withdrawal slip*
Him: all the information is on the paper
Her: to process the transaction I need you to put it on my piece of paper
SO HE FILLS OUT A WITHDRAWAL SLIP. Meanwhile another coworker is looking at her latest robbery notification email thinking the guy at the window looks a lot like him but the teller is calm and seems to be following standard transaction.
Back at the window the teller notices his name on the withdrawal slip doesn’t match the name on the account so she asks for his ID. He once again tells her all the relevant info is on the folded note but also gives her his ID and says it is his dad’s account. She tells him he will need a check from his dad to get cash. He grabs the note and leaves.
ONE HOUR LATER
Two new robbery notifications hit our emails, both branches within a mile. It is our guy. Teller goes over to the manager and sheepishly informs them he was here and the time. Security department is notified as are local police and the FBI. The FBI comes over believing that these poor tellers had been robbed for the 3rd time in a month and take her statement. She is completely embarrassed telling them how everything went down and he kept signaling to the note and telling her to read it but she was just done.
To which this FBI agent of 40 years who has been to the scene of many bank robberies (several at this branch in recent weeks) says: Ok. Let me see if I got this right, he came in fully intending to rob you. He gave you the note and you just…refused to read it? So he left and went to the bank literally across the street, handed them the exact same note, and they just handed him five grand? Do I have that correct?”
Her: I am so embarrassed
FBI: this is best thing I have ever heard. He even handed you his ID! Holy-
Her: I feel so dumb!
FBI: don’t! This is the best thing I have ever heard. This is going to be in training courses. (He sat there giddy for at least 5 more minutes)
I have a similar story from my friend Fred, who is a great human and I like him lots.
He was working at a 7-11 that got robbed a lot, working nights. And he was bored and read though his entire contract and learned if you’re shot at work you get $200,000. Also, he hated his boss and the job.
So when a guy came in to rob him at gunpoint he got excited and was able to hatch the plan he had been pondering while dealing with a Shitty Boring Job.
“Dude. Shoot me in the leg. Right here- it’ll go through and not hit anything vital and I’ll be able to quit this fucking job. I’ll give you fifty fucking grand to shoot me in the leg then you can take everything in the register.”
This ended with him chasing the weeping attempted burglar out of his store screaming “SHOOT ME YOU FUCKING COWARD I WANT THE MONEY”.
One of my uncles was a branch manager at a local bank when I was a kid. His branch had the dubious honor of being one of- if not the- most robbed bank in the area. There was a bullet hole in the wall behind his desk where he’d been shot at once.
One day, this guy came in and announced he was there to rob the place. This man was smoking a cigar with one hand and had a gun in the other.
My uncle pointed at the “No Smoking” sign and told him in no uncertain terms, “Put that cigar out, or finish it outside first.”
This guy, bless his heart, went back outside to finish his cigar.
My uncle locked the door behind him and waited for the cops to show up.
This is the Bugs Bunny school of robbery reaction.
This is the EXACT equivalent of interrupting the coyote who’s chasing you with a DMV office where he has to wait in line and fill out a form.
But with the added bonus of You Walked Into A Bank, Sir, Did You Not Expect To Have To Do Bank Things?
283,000 likes………giant meteor strike the earth rn holy shit. oh my god.
“maybe it’s not your pussy” is such a funny phrase and also correct. People wonder why chores are so hard and it’s like, friends we used to have a whole intergenerational team on this and now Grandma is locked in a beige box. Cooking is hard.
“My hormones and general health improved once I stopped being overworked.” No fucking shit, Sherlock.
A fun thing about computer skills is that as you have more of them, the number of computer problems you have doesn’t go down.
This is because as a beginner, you have troubles because you don’t have much knowledge.
But then you learn a bunch more, and now you’ve got the skills to do a bunch of stuff, so you run into a lot of problems because you’re doing so much stuff, and only an expert could figure them out.
But then one day you are an expert. You can reprogram everything and build new hardware! You understand all the various layers of tech!
And your problems are now legendary. You are trying things no one else has ever tried. You Google them and get zero results, or at best one forum post from 1997. You discover bugs in the silicon of obscure processors. You crash your compiler. Your software gets cited in academic papers because you accidently discovered a new mathematical proof while trying to remote control a vibrator. You can’t use the wifi on your main laptop because you wrote your own uefi implementation and Intel has a bug in their firmware that they haven’t fixed yet, no matter how much you email them. You post on mastodon about your technical issue and the most common replies are names of psychiatric medications. You have written your own OS but there arent many programs for it because no one else understands how they have to write apps as a small federation of coroutine-based microservices. You ask for help and get Pagliacci’d, constantly.
But this is the natural of computer skills: as you know more, your problems don’t get easier, they just get weirder.
you know you’ve made it when you’re googling problems and ending up with 0-9 results
me, untangling pea vines off each other so I can weave them into the trellis instead: Let go, you codependent little bastards. You’ll find no support from each other. Accept professional help.
the cognitive dissonance from people who want the products of modern medicine but get weird about animal research. like im sorry but this is necessary for the survival of the society we currently live in. and the scientists who work on these things are not evil cackling psychopaths. anyone you talk to in animal research has incredibly complex feelings about their work and incredibly complex relationships to the animals in their care. there are regulations and oversight and penalties in place to make the work as humane as possible and scientists are overwhelmingly the ones enforcing and advocating for better care.
@velvetdemon I’m doing a full reply because I want to give this question the time and space it deserves, and I really do appreciate your curiosity about this.
The short answer: It is deeply unethical. There are nowhere near enough willing patients in the world to be able to do this, and it would be criminal to put them through this.
The long answer: The one side of the equation you’re focusing on is: how much of a drug is too much, to the point where it will cause negative side effects or even death? And this is crucial to know. But it’s not just a matter of finding out the lethal dosage of a heart cholesterol medication, you need to know that it can actually lower the cholesterol of any living thing. There is no way to know this without giving it first to…a living thing.
But beyond this, I need to emphasize: The goal of a drug trial is to effectively cure people who are already suffering from disease, who are living on limited time.
Drug trials don’t just happen on any member of the public, they need to happen specifically on people affected by the disease you’re trying to treat. There is at any time a very limited and very marginalized population of the world affected by early onset, familial Parkinson’s disease. Because you cannot ethically induce disease in a human being, you are working with, speaking with, and helping patients and their families who are hopeful and desperate for a cure.
If you were to jump straight to human trials from petri dishes, not knowing absolutely anything about how the drug functions in a living, breathing animal body, it would look like this:
We didn’t know that minute quantities of the drug interact lethally with x, y, z medication that people are commonly also taking. X number of patients have died as a result.
We didn’t know that the drug is fatal to people with [common variant] in their genetics. X more patients have died.
We didn’t know the drug exacerbates x, y, z chronic illnesses. X number of people have acquired permanent, lifelong disabilities.
We didn’t know the best way to deliver the drug, so we tried multiple ways: the people who received it intravenously are now suffering from a painful, costly, and debilitating condition that did not happen with the ingested form.
I could go on, and on, and on.
The vast majority of these problems can be nearly or almost entirely averted by testing other animals first.
These are all people who possibly could have waited for the normal progression from animal testing to human testing and thus received better outcomes. Some people will pass away in the time it takes to get to that point, and that’s heartbreaking, and we all wish science could be faster.
But the cost of expediting science could mean a life of profoundly greater suffering or an even shorter life than the one where no intervention happens at all. And at that point, you have completely exhausted your trust, your goodwill, and your patients’ hope, after you’ve failed to do anything or even worsened the lives of people who are already deeply suffering.
hi, i’m an animal research professional. making sure laboratory animals stay alive, healthy, and enriched has been my full-time job for several years now.
animal research is not the mad scientist wild west that PETA wants you to think it is. there are extremely strict federal laws in place to protect the well being of these animals. animal welfare organizations like AAALAC ensure that lab animals are treated with dignity & respect and are given enough specialized care & enrichment to be happy and content in captivity, just like AZA accreditation with zoos.
not a single animal from a zebrafish to a mouse to a dog to a macaque goes unaccounted for. if an animal gets moved to a new cage, paired for breeding, has a procedure performed on it, gives birth, gets sick or injured, dies, etc. it is legally required that this information is recorded and kept on file for the US federal government to access. failing to record & retain this information is very much punishable by US federal law.
let me tell you - if you abuse or kill an animal, even a mouse - you are almost certainly getting both fired & blacklisted from the industry. if you abuse or kill a more ‘advanced’ animal, such as a dog or monkey, you will likely face criminal charges. killing a monkey is as serious and disastrous as a nuclear meltdown. you are expected to reasonably explain every illness, injury, or death of an animal under your care. you must record all of this information. animals that are clearly suffering with low QOL are required to be euthanized according to AVMA guidelines.
research animals are highly expensive. yes, even the “lesser” animals like mice. the cheapest mice will run you a few hundred $ per individual, with some of the most expensive mice i’ve cared for being $25,000 per individual. in research we have the “three Rs” - reduction (reduce amount of necessary animals to a minimum), refinement (refine processes to ensure research is accurate and animals feel no pain or distress), and replacement (replace animals with non-living research models as they become available). i can assure you no proper research team is wasting animals (*do not* say “b-b-but elon musk–” his research team is actively being investigated for animal abuse by the government).
research methods that do not require live animals are currently being looked into & efforts spearheaded by - you guessed it - the animal research industry itself (notice how the animal rights people are strangely silent & unhelpful when it comes to this?) but current technology is rudimentary and does not compare to live animal models.
some research animal fun facts (US edition):
all species of animals are only allowed to have one single major surgery performed on them in their entire lifetime.
institutions with nonhuman primates must have a behavior program in place (run by knowledgeable primate specialists) to ensure that they are happy and receiving enough daily enrichment and social interaction.
institutions with dogs are required to have physical exercise programs in place. this means every individual dog gets a substantial amount of leashed AND free-roaming exercise daily, including playgroups with other dogs.
a majority of nonhuman primates get to retire to sanctuaries like peaceable primate sanctuary, and almost all dogs get retired and adopted out by organizations like homes for animal heroes. some institutions will also adopt out unneeded young rabbits, guinea pigs, rats, etc.
some strains of mice glow neon green (or orange or blue) under UV light. this is not harmful to them and is commonly seen in cancer research.
so yes, you can rest knowing that laboratory animals are treated with the utmost respect by their caretakers. and you can stop this awful, ignorant talk of human experimentation that will only end in the abuse of nonwhite people, LGBT people, disabled people, indigenous people, and so many others. please just take a look at this wikipedia page if you think “ethical” human experimentation can exist.
