For a touch of hilarity, see this post. Or just look at embedded tweets.
Men get policed about their parenting, too. This is not about gender. It’s about having a non-scary personality.
Vic is trying intermittent fasting. It sounds very interesting. Maybe I’ll try it. The best of luck to Vic!
What’s holding Mexico’s economy back?
This was all known back in the 1950s, for crissakes. There’s a poignant discussion of the effects of this treatment in Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, for instance.
San Francisco State has made a huge discovery: it’s easier to pass courses with no substance than those with substance. Shocking.
Better scientists smile more. Which is also kind of unsurprising.
It’s ridiculous to berate people for not being ready or willing to parent their parents. It’s a culmination of a long-standing dynamic between them that one can’t know from superficial observations.
Fact vs opinion quiz. It’s a little primitive but fun.
Clarissa's Blog 
Further proof that people with no medical background should not be giving “medical” advice! If a person has a normal, non-diabetic metabolism, his/her body stores enough glycogen to fast for UP TO THREE DAYS before sufficient ketosis develops to burn away body tissue — and ketosis burns away muscle as well as fat, unless the person fasting is consuming significant protein during meals.
As the first reference below the article states, this diet was created by two internationally-recognized medical professionals named David Zinczenko and Peter Moore. Zinczenko got his medical expertise by publishing magazines like “Men’s Health,” “Women’s Health,” and “Prevention.” Moore became an expert on nutrition while working at Microsoft to develop the fabulously successful Xbox Game console. NONE of the multiple references point to a single legitimate medical study that’s been confirmed by repeated studies to prove the initial study’s accuracy.
Anecdotal examples about how this worked for Jack here and Jill there don’t add up to an ounce of scientific evidence. For most of my working adult life, I ate one single meal a day (that translates into fasting 23 hours a day), and I lost exactly ZERO pounds, despite the fact that I was running 10 miles non-stop four times a week after work to burn off the accumulated energy of the workday. What does my personal experience as a physician prove? Absolutely nothing.
I realize that no one appointed me to be the medical police on this website, but as long a I’m allowed to comment here, I can’t let links to ridiculous medical claims by misguided laypersons to stand.
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Great comment!
And what about those who have gestational diabetes?
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A person who has gestational diabetes should be under the medical care of a physician who has specialized training in managing patients with that condition. Every patient has the right to ask her doctor absolutely ANY question that concerns her, including, “Hey, I read about an amazing ‘ketosis’ diet that’s supposed to…”
The doctor, assuming that he/she is competent in both medical knowledge and bedside manner, should give the patient a respectful and factual answer to all her questions, and state the proper course of treatment for her specific situation.
ALL patients are entitled to a second opinion if they doubt their primary doctor’s competence — but second opinions are often difficult to obtain under many insurance programs, and I don’t recommend that a patient spend her own money to seek alternate opinions from shady “experts” mentioned in non-professional online or magazine articles — and I CERTAINLY don’t recommend secretly disobeying your primary doctor and experimenting without his/her knowledge!
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That’s ok, I’m not particularly wedded to the method since I never tried it. But I like Vic and I’m happy this is working for him.
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On the parenting parents, it all has to do with what happens up to about age 5, I think. If you feel you were taken care of when really helpless, it is much easier to reverse roles later.
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To people who spent a lifetime parenting the parents, this might feel quite shattering. This person is talking without any understanding of the issue.
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“This person is talking without any understanding of the issue”
The general advice on how to deal with aged people with dementia seems very good, do you have a problem with that or the tone with which it was delivered (and what part of the tone bugs you)?
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It’s, expecting the person to know and yes, berating them. It is VERY freaky to have your parent not remember their life, it is as though they died, and then you also have to take care of them.
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I honestly didn’t think the tone was especially harsh, especially once it got to the “Try this instead” part (which seemed like very good advice – much better than both the parent and adult child reliving traumatic events on a daily basis).
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This is good advice for health workers. But family members can’t be expected to erase their entire lives and turn into an emotionally uninvolved unpaid health worker.
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Right. Can’t be expected to erase their entire lives, correct. This person is grieving both of their parents at this moment, and possibly also some level of earlier abandonment by them. Information about how the disease really works does help — it took me a long time to understand that my father will forget certain kinds of things no matter how many times he relearns them — but that isn’t really the issue in this post (although the writer thinks it is).
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The post’s author thinks that the only reason you can react this way is because you are stupid and lack understanding of how the disease works. As if people were machines who just need to be fed relevant information.
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I dunno, I looked at it more from a verbal self-defense viewpoint – if what you’re doing isn’t working very well for you or the other person, maybe try this strategy instead…
I think ultimately it’s what makes the carer feel more comfortable – yeah making your emotionally distant and sometimes verbally abusive dad relive his wife’s death every day or two ultimately doesn’t matter for dad (he just forgets anyway) but each confrontation at least gives the scorned child an emotional reason to go on…
People with better relationships might want to go with the ‘help keep them happy in the moment’ strategy.
https://polldaddy.com/js/rating/rating.js
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A person who chooses to take care of a parent with dementia will have to develop some kind of distance to keep the trauma in check and reliving past trauma several times a day on top of that seems like a poor strategy.
If the parent-child relationship is so bad that a person feels a parent with dementia is erasing their life then they probably shouldn’t attempt to care for them (if there is any other option whatsoever – which often there isn’t, which sucks).
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You are absolutely right. This is the situation where all of the pain is going to surface like crazy.
My great grandmother had dementia. She was never anything but amazing to me and I have no trauma from her. But it was confusing and terrifying and I was not a good caretaker at all. I was a teenager so of course it would be different right now. But many people don’t progress beyond the emotional age of a teenager, so I can’t blame them for freaking out.
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Saddling a teenager with that is beyond awful, that you were in a culture not noted for interpersonal finesse (to put it mildly) makes it even worse. I’m lucky enough to never have had that situation.
I remember some years ago I was visiting a close friend in the US who’d reconnected with extended family (parents had divorced when she was a kid and she hadn’t known one side of her family).
On one visit to them I ended up sitting next to her very talkative grandmother for a long old time. She didn’t have dementia but she had trouble keeping stories straight and a story about a horse getting out of its pen would morph into someone’s birthday party and that old house where the porch fell in and then Buddy got married…. (you get the idea).
I settled into nodding and making vague agreeable comments which bothered my friend – she was worried that the ‘real’ stories were getting distorted and would be lost before she get get to them.
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She had moments when she’d think I was her daughter (my grandmother). And that’s when I discovered many things I didn’t want to know. She was trying to convince me not to marry my grandfather because she despised him (he was from a working class family.) I never reminded her that grandma was dead but it wasn’t pleasant. She’d get violent and oh God. It was bad. None of the adults tried to seek medical help or find any solution beyond making me visit every day for years. As you say, it’s a weird culture.
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Related — there’s now a story all over the Internet about a man with advanced Alzheimer’s disease who forgot he was married to his wife, proposed to her, and then remembered proposing and the date they had set for the re-wedding.
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I am so sorry this happened to you. Being made a caretaker for a relative with dementia at such a young age is horrible. I was in my early twenties when my grandmother got dementia, and I by no means had to take care of her daily, except for a month or so after my grandfather died, until we managed to find home care for her.
She’d often take me for my mother, too, and I kept correcting her (which really didn’t help, and she’d just get confused). Seeing that post at first made me wonder about whether I hadn’t been unnecessarily pushy to her about this, but you’re right in saying that achieving that level of emotional distance from such a situation won’t be available for many people – it certainly wasn’t available for me back then, after all.
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I think it makes no sense to judge people in these situations unless they are being abusive.
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1/ [E]ach confrontation at least gives the scorned child an emotional reason to go on…
2/ People with better relationships might want to go with the ‘help keep them happy in the moment’ strategy.
Actually, the point is that the person, whether their situation is #1 or #2, needs time to grieve themself: not just understand the situation so they can be a better caregiver. The confrontations in #1 aren’t revenge, they’re an attempt to hold onto the family. This person still needs their parents and needs to talk to them.
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“The confrontations in #1 aren’t revenge, they’re an attempt to hold onto the family. This person still needs their parents and needs to talk to them.”
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I was shocked by the following bit:
\ Drugs that are successfully used to chemically castrate sex offenders, which have been shown to lower IQ as much as ten points in children taking them for precocious puberty, are now being prescribed off-label to kids in Tanner II who don’t want to suffer what Winters describes as “irreversible disfiguration from incongruent puberty.”
Guess I would be a horrible parent for some kids since only over my dead body I would turn my kid into a mentally challenged one. 10 IQ points is a large difference. Whether you think IQ is stupid or not, it is a sign something changes in the brain and not for better.
I am surprised sex changing treatments were discussed in Cancer Ward.
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There is NO legitimate medical diagnosis for “incongruent puberty,” and the idea that some medical professionals today are actually allowed to EXPERIMENT on confused, developing adolescent children who have no idea what their ultimate feelings on their own gender will be — and in the process permanently damage the children’s intellect as measured by I.Q., while simultaneously malforming their developing genitals into non-functional organs incapable of reproduction or orgasm —
This makes me glad that as a retired physician and retired psychiatrist, I don’t have to deal with such madness in today’s medical community!
I don’t get angry over political opinions, no matter how idiotic, because political opinions are just words that can be ignored or quickly overruled. But medical actions that cause permanent physical harm and psychological damage to children, and are currently being practiced with little or no effective restraints, literally turn my stomach.
(Well, it’s very late in Arizona, and I’ve said enough. Goodnight!)
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Exactly. This is beyond irresponsible and immoral. I find the whole thing to be revolting.
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It wasn’t a sex-changing treatment in Cancer Ward. Cross-hormonal therapy is used for cancer patients. That’s the original use.
And no, you wouldn’t be a horrible parent but a responsible one. Horrible parents are the ones who disfigure their kids because they can’t be bothered to parent.
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I’m curious as to how you would handle this situation. The commenters are all pissed. I think that if it’s inappropriate to turn your kid into a political billboard, other adults shouldn’t try to do that to your kid either. Of course, I went to schools in which the dress code prohibited slogans or logos on clothing so this wasn’t an issue.
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She’s lying to get Twitter likes. The story is as fake as Trump’s tan.
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Assuming this story is true, what would you do in her situation? [Besides not posting it on Twitter.]
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The kid is 10. I’d let her wear whatever she wanted and not give it a second thought.
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