RFK Jr. And Elon Musk: Two Great Dicks That Taste Like Sh*t!

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sure has come a long way from 2014, when he angered fossil fuel lobbyists by saying that climate change deniers should be jailed. Or maybe not such a long way; by 2005 he was already spreading the anti-vax gospel and falsely claiming that childhood vaccines cause autism. And now he’s running for president and everyone is reminding you what a complete freakass whackaloon he is.

We’ll do our part. Hey, remember that long-ago time in 2022 when he said, of COVID vaccine mandates, that at least in Nazi Germany “you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”

Kennedy did his part to help out that educational endeavor Monday night by sitting down with chief Twitter troll Elon Musk, who seems to love conspiratorial bullshit nearly as much as Kennedy does. He started out by thanking Musk for ending all the terrible “censorship” on the platform — by making it a free-for all for COVID and vaccine disinformation, not to mention for Nazis, far-Right conspiracy theories, and rampant hatred of transgender people, but also by actually censoring people on behalf of authoritarian governments. Kennedy also explained that in 2021, “the government pressured Mark Zuckerberg” to ban him from Instagram, although now his account has been restored because he’s running for president. Talk about ineffective censorship!

Rolling Stone reports that for the first 40 minutes of the Twitter Spaces chat, Kennedy barely talked about his candidacy, because he and Musk were too busy telling each other how much they admired each other for being courageous and shit, which is honestly what free speech is for.

At one point, Kennedy asked where Musk got the courage to be like one of America’s Founders by being “willing to take this huge, massive, unspeakable economic hit on behalf of a principle for a country in which you weren’t even born?” Musk, who does kind of have US citizenship after all, replied, “I should say I do very much consider myself an American.” Musk also acknowledged that advertisers had deserted the platform because he was so very committed to democracy, at least for people who think he’s cool, so it’s been “frankly a struggle to break even” (he is not breaking even) and then everyone with an $8 blue checkmark felt very warm that they had done their part to save America and/or Twitter.

After they both agreed that free speech is the very best, and that they both really love free speech the most, Kennedy bemoaned the sad fact that “we’re no longer living in a democratic system,” because Big Pharma controls the government and silences brave advocates of medical disinformation, which would explain why we only hear from anti-vaxxers everywhere on social media but not yet in (most) doctors’ offices.

Among other great trolls, Musk and Kennedy were joined by Tulsi Gabbard and Michael Shellenberger, author of books about how environmentalism is bad for everyone and global warming is happening but is honestly no big deal, yeesh, calm down. UPDATE/CORRECTION: I initially had a brain fart and confused Shellenberger with a different “contrarian” dipshit, Alex Berenson, formerly of the New York Times. Wonkette regrets the error.

Kennedy and Musk agreed that America shouldn’t be supporting the Ukrainian government, since as Kennedy put it, the Ukrainian people are “almost equally” victimized by America as by Russians. Musk added that the war was kind of our fault anyway, since “We are sending the flower of Ukrainian youth and Russian youth to die in the trenches, and it’s morally reprehensible,” and when you think about it, we probably shouldn’t be ordering Russia’s youth flowers around like that, how would we like it huh?

The conversation got even more sane when Gabbard added that

the U.S. had turned Ukraine into a “slaughterhouse” and blamed the conflict on an “elitist cabal of war-mongers” who had seized control of the Democratic Party.
Those war-mongers, Kennedy warned, hadn’t just taken control of the Democratic party: They were in control of the Deep State as well.

He recalled being told by Donald Trump’s former CIA Director Mike Pompeo that the “top layer of that agency is made up almost entirely of people who do not believe in the American institutions of democracy,” which is pretty rich coming from a top guy in the Trump administration.

Kennedy also said he opposed an assault weapons ban, because the Second Amendment is pretty awesome, and anyway, the problem isn’t guns, it’s antidepressant meds, which turn people into mass shooters, explaining that

“prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events in our country. […] The one thing that we have, it’s different than anybody in the world, is the amount of psychiatric drugs our children are taking.” He then alleged that the National Institutes of Health won’t research the supposed link between these drugs and shootings “because they’re working with the pharmaceutical industry.”

It’s pretty convincing until you remember that antidepressants are prescribed worldwide, but in countries where there aren’t more guns than people, there aren’t a bunch of school shootings. Also, maybe someone could have pointed out that only about a quarter of mass shooters use antidepressants, while 100 percent of them use firearms, albeit not usually with a doctor’s prescription.

Along the way, Kennedy also insisted that COVID was a “bioweapon,” lied that after the passage of the Affordable Care Act the “Democrats were getting more money from pharma than Republicans” (it’s the other way around, according to STAT News, but then STAT News believes vaccines work), and promised to go to the US-Mexico border to “try to formulate policies that will seal the border permanently,” so he really sounds like the mainstream Democrat that everyone on the far Right has been looking for, the end and OPEN THREAD.

[Rolling Stone / Insider / NYT]

Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please give $5 or $10 a month so we can keep this little mommyblog going!

Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons.

Source link

#RFK #Elon #Musk #Great #Dicks #Taste #Sht

Editor’s Note: Get inspired by a weekly roundup on living well, made simple. Sign up for CNN’s Life, But Better newsletter for information and tools designed to improve your well-being.

CNN
—

Around one-third of people globally live with chronic pain — pain experienced for more than three months — and millions of people are prescribed antidepressants to relieve the condition.

However, a new review of prior research published Tuesday has found that most antidepressants used to relieve chronic pain are being prescribed without sufficient reliable evidence of their effectiveness. What’s more, potential harms haven’t been well studied.

A two-year study by the nonprofit group Cochrane found that only one antidepressant, duloxetine, was effective for short-term pain relief based on the available evidence. Cochrane is an international collaboration of researchers that produces the Cochrane Library, which includes a database of systematic summaries addressing key questions in health care.

Sold under the brand names Irenka and Cymbalta, duloxetine is a serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, or SNRI, and also boosts levels of the feel-good neurochemical dopamine.

“This is a global public health concern,” said lead author Tamar Pincus, a professor and chronic pain researcher at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.

“Chronic pain is a problem for millions who are prescribed antidepressants without sufficient scientific proof they help, nor an understanding of the long-term impact on health.”

The review included 176 studies with a total of 28,664 participants and looked at 25 different antidepressants. The studies mainly investigated three types of chronic pain: fibromyalgia, nerve pain and musculoskeletal pain.

The average length of the study was 10 weeks, and the studies were randomized controlled trials — regarded as the gold standard in medical research. Seventy-two of the studies were funded by pharmaceutical companies.

The most commonly prescribed antidepressant for chronic pain globally was amitriptyline, the study said. Sold in the United States under the brand names Elavil and Vanatrip, the antidepressant was approved in 1961 by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat depression in adults. The medication has significant side effects, so it is not commonly used for depression, but is prescribed to treat migraines and chronic pain such as diabetic neuropathy.

However, the authors found most of the studies on amitriptyline’s effectiveness were small and the evidence was not reliable.

Milnacipran, which is approved by the FDA for fibromyalgia, was also effective at reducing pain, the review found, but the scientists were not as confident about this drug compared with duloxetine due to limited studies with few people.

Anyone taking antidepressants for chronic pain relief should speak to their doctor before stopping their medication due to concerns over the new report, the authors stressed.

Antidepressants are thought to help with pain because the bodily systems that regulate mood and pain overlap, explained Ryan Patel, a research fellow studying chronic pain at the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases at King’s College London.

He said the key question for researchers to answer was not whether antidepressant drugs were effective for treating pain but “for whom are antidepressants effective?”

“Even when the cause of chronic pain is the same, the biological changes that occur in the nervous system are varied and so it is no surprise that pain presents differently from person to person, and not everyone will respond to the same drugs,” said Patel, who wasn’t involved in the review.

“What this comprehensive analysis demonstrates is that when clinical trials are designed poorly under the assumption that everyone’s experience of pain is uniform, most antidepressants appear to have limited use for treating chronic pain,” Patel added in a statement.

Even for the antidepressant duloxetine, there was no research looking at long-term use of the drug, the review found.

“Though we did find that duloxetine provided short-term pain relief for patients we studied, we remain concerned about its possible long-term harm due to the gaps in current evidence,” Pincus said.

The report said future research should address any unwanted effects of using antidepressants for chronic pain, noting that the existing data on this was “poor.”

“It (duloxetine) does look really good at the moment for short term pain relief, but I want to emphasize that patients aren’t prescribed duloxetine or any antidepressant for three weeks, four weeks, six weeks, they’re prescribed it for six months. So it’s really shocking that we don’t have any evidence for long term use of even duloxetine,” Pincus said.

Dr. Cathy Stannard, the clinical lead for the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guideline for chronic pain, and a pain specialist for NHS Gloucestershire’s Integrated Care Board in the UK, said that it was important to emphasize the social and psychological influences on how people experience pain and the importance of a patient’s relationship with their doctor.

“There is good evidence that for people with pain, compassionate and consistent relationships with clinicians remain the foundations of successful care,” Stannard, who wasn’t involved in the research, said in a statement.

“Research shows that what people want most is a strong, empathic relationship with their care provider. They want time to discuss what matters to them and they want easy access to support and to be partners in their care.”

Non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as support with mobility, debt management, trauma and social isolation, were also likely to help people living with pain, she added.

Source link

#Millions #people #prescribed #antidepressants #chronic #pain #work #CNN

Zittrex Store

Cart

Cart

Tag: antidepressants

RFK Jr. And Elon Musk: Two Great Dicks That Taste Like Sh*t!

Millions of people are prescribed antidepressants for chronic pain. Do they work? | CNN