Matters military
ddobbs | March 19, 2010
Cordyceps in glass, by glass artist Wesley Fleming -- a strange depiction of a rather horrid business. For more, do go to the source, the lovely Myrmecos Blog, which is all about bugs.
Now, the best of the week's gleanings. I'm going to categorize them from here out, and at least try to keep them from being from completely all over everywhere about everything.
Mind, brain, and body (including those gene things)
While reading Wolpert's review of Greenberg's book about depression (he didn't much like it), I found that the Guardian has a particularly rich trove of writings and resources on…
ddobbs | March 18, 2010
The sky before Katrina struck, from Rense.com Correction: I been snookered. As alert reader Alex Witze pointed out, these photos were taken by stormchaser Mike Hollingshead in Nebraska and Kansas in 2002 and 2004, and have passed around the net in other guises ever since. For more amazing storm photos, go to Hollingshead's site, extremeinstability.com. He has some doozies.
You may be shocked but not surprised to hear that Insurance Company Dropped Customers With HIV.
We knew this, but The World Needs More Vegetarians.
Robert Kaplan ponders the challenge that is Man Versus Afghanistan.
I…
ddobbs | January 14, 2010
This is a pretty big deal if it holds up in future trials. One caveat I've not had time to check out is whether the morphine was often applied as part of an more robust medical response in general, which itself might reduce later PTSD symptoms. I hope the DOD soon follows up with another, larger study, for as Ben Carey notes, the has some substantial implications if indeed it holds up.
via nytimes.com:
In the new study, researchers at the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego reviewed detailed medical records of 696 troops who had been wounded in Iraq between 2004 and 2006, determining…
ddobbs | November 12, 2009
Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, has asked the Pentagon for info on how many troops in war zones have been prescribed antidepressants while they were deployed. Cardin sent a letter Tuesday to US Department of Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressing concern about how antidepressants are being administered troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Cardin wants to determine if the Defense Department is prescribing antidepressants appropriately and is concerned about any connection between the meds and suicide rates among troops. In October, for instance, 16 active-duty US soldiers killed themselves,…
ddobbs | October 2, 2009Been a while, so these cover a span of reading.
I'm in the midst of my friend Adrienne Mayor's The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy, and can report that Mr. M is quite a poisonous but complicated handful -- a dark and deadly echo of his hero and model, Alexander -- and this reconstruction a splendid read.
A few weeks ago I finished Thomas Ricks' The Gamble, an excellent account of the surge in Iraq. Ricks -- who earlier wrote Fiasco, a devastating indictment of the run-up to the war, makes three things quite clear:
The surge was not about more soldiers…
ddobbs | September 1, 2009After a rather intense two months of long-form work, I'm so far behind on blogging I don't know where to start. Forget the last two months and move on? Probably the best move. But beforehand, I want to note a few developments along major lines of interest. I'll start with PTSD.
Amid the stagnation on combat PTSD, the summer brought news of new programs from the UK and US militaries aimed to answer the call for more effective treatment for rising rates reported in vets of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mind Hacks was one of several blogs to report and comment on a new Royal Marine program…
ddobbs | August 2, 2009
I just finished reading Erica Goode's Times story on the suicides of four soldiers who served together in a small North Carolina-based Guard unit in Iraq from 2006 to spring 2007. This is a witheringly painful story. Goode, who has done quite a bit of science writing as well as substantial reporting from Baghdad, tells it with an unusual freshness of perspective and clarity of vision.
She starts where I suppose she must:
On Dec. 9, 2007, Sergeant Blaylock, heavily intoxicated, lifted a 9-millimeter handgun to his head during an argument with his girlfriend and pulled the trigger. He was 26…
ddobbs | July 4, 2009Spencer Ackerman explores and explains the importance of eating the local food when fighting an insurgency:
One of the things that struck me when I embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is how little local food I ate. When I met some friends for drinks in April 2007 after coming a month in Baghdad and Mosul, one of the first questions I got was about local Iraqi delicacies. Man, I said, I ate king crab legs with a plastic fork on a huge base around the Baghdad airport, courtesy of KBR. Or rather I tried, since you can%u2019t eat king crab legs with a plastic fork.When I went…
ddobbs | June 25, 2009Much much much ado on the web this week, on the too-many fronts I try to visit. From my list of notables:
Carl Zimmer, who clearly doesn't sleep, writes up a nice post about a Nature paper announcing Limusaurus, a newly discovered fossil that is, Zimmer notes, is "not -- I repeat NOT -- the missing link between anything"-- but nevertheless sheds some light on how dinos may have turned into birds (more or less). Bonus: Great pictures of Carl holding up three fingers.
Ed Yong, who seems to be drinking the same strength coffee as Carl Zimmer lately, looks at an interesting correlation: Hidden…
ddobbs | June 15, 2009
Photo: Tyler Hicks, via Scientific American
What if you could predict which troops are most likely to get PTSD from combat exposure -- and takes steps to either bolster them mentally or keep them out of combat situations? A new study suggests we could make a start on that right now -- and cut combat PTSD rates in half by simply keeping the least mentally and physically fit soldiers away from combat zones.
The study was part of the Millenium Study, huge, prospective study in which US Department of Defense researchers have been tracking the physical and mental health of nearly 100,000 service…
ddobbs | June 3, 2009Forgive my recent blogopause. i was fishing, and then traveling, and then writing rather head-down intensely -- all activities I have trouble mixing with blogging and social media such as Twitter, which I've also left idle these last days.
So what gives with all that? I often find it awkward to switch between blogging or twittering and engaging deeply immersive physical activities. This hiatus, for instance, started when I went fishing last Tuesday on Lake Champlain for salmon -- a piscatorial retreat before a highly engaging work trip to NY, DC, and environs to talk to scientists and see my…
ddobbs | May 18, 2009A few weeks ago, when I posted that "Uh-oh: POW benefit claimants exceed recorded POWs, one reader wrote saying the post made her wonder whether I have "a problem with veterans." As one reader noted, a concern with bogus POWs suggests I have a problem with -- well, bogus POWs. Should it not bother us when people masquerading as POWs are collecting benefits and kudos and sympathies they didn't earn â and which others earned through rather excruciating means?
Now it's bothered a couple members of Congress who served in the military, as the press release from Rep. Mike Coffman, R-CO, describes…
ddobbs | April 24, 2009
via Nicholson cartoons
Veteran, author, and blogger Kelly Williams, who was there, ponders what torture does to the torturers:
There have been lots of questions raised -- about the history and effectiveness of these techniques, the impact on those tortured, the larger foreign policy implications -- all of which are important considerations. There is, however, one aspect of the conversation that I believe has been neglected: What does this do to those committing the acts?
[snip]
Some of those who participated in the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment (please check out that site -- it is totally…
ddobbs | April 22, 2009
As the comments and correspondence about my PTSD story and posts accrue, I've been pondering ways to pull out some of the most interesting, powerful, and affecting. I finally decided to just start posting some, sometimes with commentary, sometimes without. This is a story of many different colors and textures.
I'll start with this excerpt from a long, eloquent blog response to my story about PTSD at Scientific American by Kayla Williams, a vet of the Iraq War who blogs at VetVoice. Williams is accumulating quite a strong run of posts there, including posts on torture, being a woman veteran…
ddobbs | April 20, 2009Ed Yong examines how a simple writing exercise helps break vicious cycle that holds back black students.
The Questionable Authority considers The Torture Memos, Medical "Professionals", and the Hippocratic Oath.
Jessica Palmer, in a healthy display of online media's corrective power, tries to make clear that For the last time: that "Twitter is Evil" paper is not about Twitter!.
Zimmer takes a tour of assisted migration.
Effect measure argues the lack of universal health care in the US is morally and fiscally bankrupt.
ddobbs | April 20, 2009Who stands most at risk of PTSD? A new study of PTSD in US veterans of the current Iraq and Afghanistan wars suggests that you can identify the most vulnerable -- soldiers who stand 2 to 3 times the risk of their peers -- with fairly simple measures of mental and physical health.
The study, conducted by the U.S. Navy's Tyler Smith and collegues, is part of an ongoing longitudinal study of over 150,000 U.S. soldiers. The Millennium Cohort Study began collected comprehensive health data on U.S. soldiers in 2001. This study draws on that data to compare health status before deployment to Iraq…
ddobbs | April 18, 2009Vaughn Bell, looking at the recent reports on torture, finds unsettling information about the participation of psychologists and physicians:
The Washington Post has an article exploring recently released 'war on terror' interrogation memos, showing that "psychologists, physicians and other health officials" played a key part in interrogations widely condemned as torture.
It's an interesting revelation because during the long debates, and some say heal-dragging, over whether the American Psychological Association should ban its members from participation, one of their main arguments was that…
ddobbs | April 13, 2009One hopes there's a good explanation for this somewhere: According to this AP story, the number of people collecting VA benefits for being POWs exceeds -- by hundreds -- the number of actual POWs ever held (much less still alive). From the AP:
Prisoners of war suffer in ways most veterans don't, enduring humiliating forced marches, torture or other trauma that may haunt them long afterward. In partial recompense, the government extends them special benefits, from free parking and tax breaks to priority in medical treatment.
Trouble is, some of the much-admired recipients of these benefits…