Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Monday, January 24, 2011

HCR -- "To live a year without a backache is abnormal."

By John Ballard


This message is short but not sweet. I heard it from an Army doctor over forty years ago and it has not changed a lot since.



To live a year without a backache is abnormal. Here, I am speaking of the commonest form of low back pain: the backache that bedevils working-age adults who are otherwise totally well. This is a pain that does not involve the legs, and that comes on suddenly, seemingly without cause. **


Low back pain is one of many recurring predicaments of life, like heartburn and heartache. To be well is not to be spared. To be well is to have the wherewithal to cope till the pain goes away, cope so well that the episode is not even memorable.



If you're not persuaded, then go read a four and a half thousand word post where you will discover how one device maker built a veritable empire on a synthetic substitute back disk with little or no efficacy  .
Don't blame the doctors. They have the best of good intentions.


...in truth, very few doctors who persist in ignoring clinical evidence are consciously trying to boost their incomes. Most remain committed to a procedure because this is how they always have addressed a particular medical problem. Habit, combined with a belief that if �I have always done it this way, it must be a good treatment,� can blind a doctor to medical evidence. No physician wants to believe that he has been giving his patients anything less than the very best advice. It can be extremely difficult to acknowledge that what you learned in medical school was simply wrong.

I'm coming to the point where I can add don't blame the device makers either.
They, too, honestly believe their product is all it is advertised it to be.


And so, too, do astrologers.


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**That part about "does not involve the legs" is important. Pain that extends beyond the back does not need to be endured without checking out why it is there. This is not medical advice, btw. I'm just an old guy blogging and claim no expertise beyond common sense.



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2 comments:

  1. KatJanuary 24, 2011 at 2:13 PM

    >> It can be extremely difficult to acknowledge that what you learned in medical school was simply wrong.
    Don't leave out the opthamologists. In order to get a prescription for glasses that fully corrected my vision, I had to email my opthamologist an article on the latest scientific showing that undercorrecting near-sighted vision causes the nearsigntedness to worsen over time.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Just JamesJanuary 24, 2011 at 3:38 PM

    The lower back is one of the weak points of human design, in evolutionary terms we've been walking upright only so long.

    ReplyDelete

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