Category Archives: COVID-19

The CPAP, not totally useless.

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CPAP machines (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure machines) are very commonly prescribed to prevent sleep apnea. They were originally prescribed to prevent heart attack, and despite minimal evidence that they help, they are still paid for by most insurance, including medicare. Sleep apnea is associated with snoring and with being overweight. The theory, supported by minimal evidence, was that stopping the apnea would prevent heart attack.

My C-PAP/ APAP. shown with distilled water

Five years ago, I found myself among those prescribed. CPAP, and found no evidence they extended life, or prevented any heart problem. I wrote this blog post, explaining what I thought was going on. I suspected some health risks, and found no obvious sleep benefit; I felt claustrophobic and woke with sniffles. I quickly stopped using the device.

Last month I retried my CPAP, now with a better fitting mask (nose only) and better humidification. I now find sleep benefits and no sniffles, but still see no sign of health benefits. “Even among participants with good CPAP adherence there was no significant reduction in cardiovascular risk in the two largest trials.2,3 ” There also appear to be some bad side effects. If the pressures are too high, the CPAP can cause inflammation and micro-tears in the lung. This is the same problem that killed people on ventilators during COVID. CPAP users show significantly increased inflammation markers, with higher inflammation the higher the pressure used. Lower pressure settings seems to result in fewer heart problems, too, see figure below. The number of cumulative adverse heart-events is lower for patients, randomly selected, who used a pressure below 7 cm H2O (lower than 0.1 psi). Most events happen in the first few months, and don’t know why. The researchers do not comment on this.

From the Lancet, Y. Peter et al, Volume 101, 105015, March 2024, with with results adjusted for age, sex, and BMI. Pressures below ≤7 cmH2O show fewer events. Most CPAPs are set to higher pressures, about 10cmH2O

I suspect that heart attack and stroke are mostly driven by BMI, lack of exercise, and by eating too much of the wrong foods (e.g. waffles, see here). I suspect the CPAP does nothing for this beyond improved sleep, and that, at the current pressure settings, it may be harmful.The health risks might have put me off the machine, except I like getting better sleep.

I figured I could try decreasing the pressure, hoping to get good sleep with fewer lung risks. I can’t reduce usage because healthcare pays for supplies only if you use the device 4+ hours per night, tracking your usage over the internet to make sure. I discovered that my device, an AirSense 10, was set to deliver pressures between 5 and 15 cmH2O resulting in an average delivery pressure of 10.2 cmH2O. I decreased the range to 4.6-12.4 cm, then further, to 5-9 cmH2O. So far, the machine shows no reduction in average pressure(?!) but my sleep is OK.

On a national level, I suspect that this device should not be prescribed as often as it is, and suspect that the set pressures should be lower. There is a replication crisis in science; drug statistics tend to be bogus, and food results too. If it were me I’d look for CPAP research to show real health benefits, I’d use linear regression with an r-squared test for significance, as here.

Robert Buxbaum, March 30, 2025.

Every food causes cancer, and cures it, research shows.

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Statistical analysis, misused, allows you to prove many things that are not true. This was long a feature of advertising: with our toothpaste you get 38% fewer cavities, etc. In the past such ‘studies’ were not published in respectable journals, and research supported by on such was not funded. Now it is published and it is funded, and no one much cares. For an academic, this is the only game in town. One result, well known, is the “crisis of replicability”– very few studies in medicine, psychology, or environment are replicable (see here for more).

In this post, I look at food health claims– studies that find foods cause cancer, or cure it. The analysis I present comes from two researchers, Schoenfeld and Ioannides, (read the original article here) who looked at the twenty most common ingredients in “The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book”. For each food, they used Pub-Med to look up the ten most recent medical articles that included the phrase, “risk factors”, the word “cancer”, and the name of the food in the title or abstract. For studies finding effect in the range of 10x risk factors to 1/10 risk factors, the results are plotted below for each of the 20 foods. Some studies showed factors beyond the end of the chart, but the chart gives a sense. It seems that most every food causes or cures cancer, often to a fairly extreme extent.

Effect estimates by ingredient. From Schoenfeld and Ioannides. Is everything we eat associated with cancer? Am J. Clin. Nutrition 97 (2013) 127-34. (I was alerted to this by Dr. Jeremy Brown, here)

A risk factor of 2 indicates that you double your chance of getting cancer if you eat this food. Buy contrast, as risk factor of 0.5 suggests that you halve your cancer risk. Some foods, like onion seem to reduce your chance of cancer to 1/10, though another study say 1/100th. This food is essentially a cancer cure, assuming you believe the study (I do not).

Only 19% of the studies found no statistically significant cancer effect of the particular food. The other 81% found that the food was significantly cancer-causing, or cancer preventing, generally of p=0.05 to 0.05. Between the many studies done, most foods did both. Some of these were meta studies (studies that combine other studies). These studies found slightly smaller average risk factors, but claimed more statistical significance in saying that the food caused or cured cancer.

0.1 0.2. 0.5 1. 2 5 10
Relative risk

The most common type of cancer caused is Gastrointestinal. The most common cancer cured is breast. Other cancers feature prominently, though: head, neck, genetilia-urinary, lung. The more cancers a researcher considers the higher the chance of showing significant effects from eating the food. If you look at ten cancers, each at the standard of one-tailed significance, you have a high chance of finding that one of these is cured or caused to the standard of p=0.05.

In each case the comparison was between a high-dose cohort and a low-dose cohort, but there was no consistency in determining the cut-offs for the cohort. Sometimes it was the top and bottom quartile, in others the quintile, in yet others the top 1/3 vs the bottom 1/3. Dose might be times eaten per week, or grams of food total. Having this flexibility increases a researcher’s chance of finding something. All of this is illegitimate, IMHO. I like to see a complete dose-response curve that shows an R2 factor pf 90+% or so. To be believable, you need to combine this R2 with a low p value, and demonstrate the same behaviors in men and woman. I showed this when looking at the curative properties of coffee. None of the food studies above did this.

From Yang, Youyou and Uzzi, 2020. Studies that failed replication are cited as often as those that passed replication. Folks don’t care.

Of course, better statistics will not protect you from outright lying, as with the decades long, faked work on the cause of Alzheimers. But the most remarkable part is how few people seem to care.

People want to see their favorite food or molecule as a poison or cure and will cite anything that says so. Irreplicable studies are cited at the same rate as replicated studies, as shown in this 2020 study by Yang Yang, Wu Youyou, and Brian Uzzi. We don’t stop prescribing bad heart medicines, or praising irreplaceable studies on foods. Does pomegranate juice really help? red wine? there was a study, but I doubt it replicated. We’ve repeatedly shown that aspirin helps your heart, but it isn’t prescribed much. Generally, we prefer more expensive blood thinners that may not help. Concerning the pandemic. It seems our lockdowns made things worse. We knew this two years ago, but kept doing it.

As Schoenfeld and Ioannides state: “Thousands of nutritional epidemiology studies are conducted and published annually in the quest to identify dietary factors that affect major health outcomes, including cancer risk. These studies influence dietary guidelines and at times public health policy… [However] Randomized trials have repeatedly failed to find treatment effects for nutrients in which observational studies had previously proposed strong associations.” My translation: take all these food studies with a grain of salt.

Robert Buxbaum, April 4, 2023

Vaccines barely worked, lockdowns seem to have made it worse.

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The first 15 months of the pandemic were grim periods of lockdown, except in Sweden where the health minister declared that lockdowns would not do anything except delay the inevitable. They chose to protect only the most vulnerable, and kept everything else open. By May, 2021, it looked like that was a mistake. Sweden had a seen a sickness and death rate that was fairly average for the world, but high compared to more locked down nordic countries, like Norway, Finland, and Germany. And now vaccines were here that were supposed to be 100% effective, both at stopping the sickness and the spread. We were at the end, opening up, and Sweden had blundered. They had ‘ignored the science,’ as Fauci put it.

Excess mortality January 26 2020 to March 1, 2023, from Our World in Data. I focus on excess deaths here, rather than COVID specifically, because death is a metric that is hard to fudge.

Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that the vaccines were far less than 100% effective. The current estimate is that 2 shots are 24% effective at preventing the disease and 0% effective at preventing the spread. This is a problem in much of medical science these days: successful results tend to be irreproducible, I discuss the reason here. The disease had evolved, and somehow the experiments had not noticed. What’s more they had side-effects (all drugs do). People were dying at a faster rate than before in the US, and in many European countries (see graph below). There was no flattening of the curve suggesting that the vaccine didn’t work. By last year, I had noticed that US COVID deaths did not decrease with the advent of vaccines. Strangely, deaths did not increase as fast in Sweden. By 2022, Sweden was doing better than its lock-down peers. As of today, it’s doing much better. So, what have we learned?

The results of the 6 month Pfizer trial already suggested there might be a problem -that perhaps the vaccine did more harm than good. The above were the results in the Biologics Licence Application (BLA) report (page 23), submitted to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to apply for vaccine approval, November, 2021. The vaccine decreased COVID but increased other cause death even more. Suspicious.

The fact that the death rate did generally not go down when a majority were vaccinated and the most vulnerable were already dead suggests that vaccination does not help much. That excess death increased in some countries (Norway, Finland, Germany) suggests that either the side-effects of the vaccine are worse than the disease itself or that some other aspect of the treatment (lockdowns?) were worse than the disease. The vaccine still may be shown to have helped, but it doesn’t look like it helped much. The fact that lock-down countries are doing worse than Sweden suggests that lockdowns actually hurt. This is significant. One thing to learn is that you have a right to not trust medical science: you have a right to be wrong. Mr Spock never trusted Bones’s medicine. You have a particularly strong right to doubt when you have evidence as strong as the map below (excess deaths in Europe as it stood in December 2021). Already Sweden was doing well and the experts were looking very wrong.

A map of excess deaths in Europe as of December 2021. Already many countries had passed Sweden. Eastern and Southern Europe were particularly hard hit.

I can now speculate on the mechanism; why might lockdowns hurt or kill? I suggested it’s loneliness. Perhaps it’s inaction, or mental distress. People would rather get an electric shock than sit a think without doing anything. It might be that lockdowns prevented other medical treatment. Whatever the mechanism, you’d think that our government would have acknowledged, by early 2022, that lockdowns were not working. Instead virtually every state continued lockdowns through a good chunk of 2022 with school closures, limited seating, etc.

I suspect that “long COVID” may be a form of lock-down depression plus associated noxious behaviors: increased drug and alcohol use, lack of exercise, and avoiding treatment for health problems. I suggested iodine hand wash (and gargle) to stop the disease spread (I imagine it’s on surfaces), and still think it’s a good idea. Iodine is cheap and it definitely kills all germs. Other anti-isolation nostrums include exercise, lithium, aspirin, letters, and hydroxycholoroquine. There was reasonable statistical evidence for several of these things helping, though Fauci denied it. Perhaps they only helped via ‘the placebo effect’. But placebo cures are real, especially for mental problems.

Robert Buxbaum, March 30, 2023. As an add-on (April 2, 2013), I’d like to show the decline in life-expectancy in the US compared to other countries. Isolation is a killer. A lot of the blame goes to Fauci for continuing to push socially isolating solutions as “the science”, while blasting any who say otherwise. We’ve lost 3 years of life-span in 3 years — preventably avoided — when other countries have lost zero or one. There could be no greater inditement of the health management.

This is from the Financial Times. The US is doing worst of all in terms of lives lost to the pandemic and it continues. Isolating people is torture. We then blame them for feeling distrust. I blame Biden and Fauci.

Use iodine against Bad breath, Bad beer, Flu, RSV, COVID, monkeypox….

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We’re surrounded by undesired bacteria, molds, and viruses. Some are annoying, making our feet smell, our teeth rot, and our wine sour. Others are killers, particularly for the middle aged and older. Despite little evidence, the US government keeps pushing masks and inoculations with semi-active vaccine that does nothing to stop the spread. Among the few things one can do to stop the spread of disease, and protect yourself, is to kill the bacteria, molds and viruses with iodine. Iodine is cheap, effective even at very low doses, 0.1% to 10 parts per million, and it lasts a lot longer than alcohol. Dilute iodine will not dye your skin, and it does not sting. A gargle of iodine will kill COVID and other germs (e.g. thrush) and it has even been shown to be a protective, stopping COVID 19 and flu even if used before exposure. On a more practical level. I also use it to cleanse my barrels before making beer — It’s cheaper than the Camden they sell in stores.

Iodine is effective when used on surfaces, and most viruses spread by surfaces. A sick person coughs. Droplets end up on door knobs, counters, or in your throat, leaving virus particles that do not die in air. You touch the surface, and transfer the virus to your eyes and nose. Here’s a video I made. A mask doesn’t help because you rub your eyes around the mask. But iodine kills the virus on the surface, and on your hands, and lasts there far longer than alcohol does. Vaccines always come with side-effects, but there are no negative side effects to sanitization with dilute iodine. Here is a video I did some years ago on the chemistry of iodine.

Robert Buxbaum, February 1, 2023. I don’t mean to say that all bacteria and fungi are bad, it’s just that most of them are smelly. Even the good ones that give us yogurt, beer, blue cheese, and sour kraut tend to be smelly. They have the annoying tendency to causing your wine to taste and smell like sour kraut or cheese, and they cause your breath and feet to smell the same. If you’re local, I’ll give you some free iodine solution. Otherwise, you’ll have to buy it through REB Research.

Birth dearth in China => collapse? war?

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China passed us in life-expectancy in 2022, and also in fertility, going the other way. In China lifespan at birth increased to 77.3 years. In the US it dropped an additional 0.9 years, to 76.8. US lifespans suffered from continuing COVID and an increase in accidents, heart disease, suicide, drugs, and alcohol abuse. Black men were hit particularly hard, so that today, a black man in the US has the same life expectancy as he would in Rwanda. China seems to have avoided this, but should expect problems due to declining fertility and birth rates.

China passed us in life expectancy in 2022.

Fertility rates will eventually burden the US too, as US fertility is only slightly greater than in China, 1.78 children per woman, lifetime, compared to 1.702 in China. But China has far fewer people of childbearing ages, relatively, and only 47% are women. Three decades of one child policy resulted in few young adults and a tendency to abort girls. Currently, the birthrate in China is barely more than half ours: 6.77 per 1000, compared to 12.01 per 1000. And the proportion of the aged keeps rising. China will soon face a severe shortage of care-givers, and an excess of housing.

Years of low birthrate preceded the “Lost decades” of financial crisis in Japan and the USSR. Between 1990 and 2011, business stagnated and house prices dropped. China faces the same; few workers and more need for care: it’s not a good recipe.

Beginning about 1991, Japan saw a major financial collapse with banks failing, and home values falling. China seems over-due.

Few children also signals a psychic lack of confidence in the country, and suggests that, going forward, there will be a lack of something to work for. Already Chinese citizens don’t trust the state to allow them to raise healthy children. They have stopped getting married, especially in the cities, and look more to have fun.

Affluent women claim they can’t find a good man to marry: one who’s manly, who will love them, and who will reliably raise their standard of life. Women seem less picky in China’s rural areas, or perhaps they find better men there. However it goes, urban women get married late and have few children, both in China and here. China produces great, sappy, soap operas though: a country girl or secretary in a high-power job meets a manly, urban manager who lovers her intensely. A fine example is “The Eternal Love” (watch it here). It involves time travel, and a noble romance from the past. Japan produced similar fiction before the crisis. And a crisis seems to be coming.

While Japan and Korea responded quietly to crisis and “the lost decades,” allowing banks to fail and home values to fall, Russia’s response was more violent. It went to war with Chechnya, then with Belarus and Ukraine, and now with NATO. I fear that China will go to war too — with Taiwan, Japan, and the US. It’s a scary thought; China is a much tougher enemy than Russia. There is already trouble brewing over new islands that they are building.

Robert Buxbaum January 25, 2023. If you want to see a Korean soap opera on the Secretary – manager theme, watch: “What’s wrong with Secretary Kim”. (I credit my wife with the research here.) I suspect that Americans too would like sappy shows like this.

Fauci, freedom, and the right to be wrong.

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Doctor Anthony Fauci has been giving graduate addresses at colleges around the country for the past few months, telling students about his struggles and successes in the medical research world, hammering a moral point that they should expect the unexpected and have no tolerance for “the normalization of untruth”, and for “egregious twisting and lies” as were leveled against his approach to COVID (and global warming, it seems). Untruths, racism, and lies spread by “some elected officials”, presumably his exboss. Here is his speech to the Princeton graduates, or see a brief summary of his talk st the University of Michigan.

Dr. Fauci may have the best intentions in criticizing others and deputizing students to enforce the truth.He certainly seems sure that his truth and intentions are 100% pure, but what if Fauci wasn’t quite right, or what if you thought his cure to the pandemic was less than marvelous. His truth may mot be real truth, or real truth for everyone. Beyond that, even if he were always 100% right on science, I believe that people have a fundamental right to make mistakes. “I have a right to be wrong,” as Joss Stone says (see music video). Freedom from imposed righteousness is a fundamental good. Even assuming that Fauci’s lockdowns were the height of righteousness, we have a right to take risks and to act against our own best interests, in my opinion. Consider a saint who really knows what’s right and only wants to do only what’s right. I doubt that even the saint wants a jailer to force it upon him and remove his free will. And the right of the rest of us may not want to do what’s ideal and healthy. We like ice cream even thought we know it’s fattening, and we should have the right to smoke too.

This right to our mistakes is something we deserve, even assuming that Fauci knows the truth for everyone, and that everyone has the same truth, and that all of his rules were for the best. But different people are different, and people’s preferences are different. “A sadist is a masochist who follows the golden rule,” as the saying goes, and Fauci may have been out-and-out wrong.

Humor from a time when one could tolerate hearing that their truths might not be true.

Concerning COVID, I’ve noted that, despite Fauci’s lockdowns and mask mandates, The US did worse than Sweden, and my home state of Michigan did worse than Sweden — worse in terms of deaths, and far worse economically. Michigan has the same size population as Sweden and the same climate and population density so it’s a good comparison. Florida did better than we did too, though they too didn’t close the schools or have mask mandates. Their economy did better too, and children’s education.

Was Fauci right to shut K-12 schools, or to send college students home? Maybe he was only half-right, or totally wrong and blinded by politics. The more Fauci and friends deny having political interests, the more they seem political. Many Fauci’s emails have become public, and he seems highly political, and very often wrong. He also does not take seriously the economic or mental or educational problems caused to the workers that he now blames on his critics. He also seems takes it as a given that those pushing hydroxychloroquine or surface disinfection were liars, despite scientific opinion on the other side.

Fauci’s push for masks went with his claim that surfaces were not major spreaders. I think the opposite is true, and used my blog and YouTube to push iodine as a surface sanitizer and hand wash. Most diseases are spread by surfaces, and I see no reason for COVID to be different. Iodine is known to kill COVID virus, and all virus, fungus, and bacteria. It’s far more lang-lasting than alcohol, too. Maybe I’m wrong, but maybe I’m right, and I have a right to express my science without fear of censure from Fauci’s deputies. As I see it, when an infected person coughs out-spews big droplets and small droplets. The big drops contain far more virus particles. They fall quickly and dry, ready to be picked up by someone who touches the residue. As for the smaller drops, some are certainly locked by masks, but these have fewer virus particles. Besides, the mask just becomes a new surface; you’ll touch your mask to adjust it or take it off. Unless you disinfect your hands with something strong like iodine the virus on your hands will go to your eyes or nose. Trump favored Chlorox for surfaces, and was skewered for it by Fauci and his experts. I think that was wrong, made worse by claims that he was not telling you to inject the Clorox.

On climate too, we do students a disservice by closing the discussion. It’s clear that Gore’s inconvenient truth isn’t completely true, nor are his remedies beneficial, in my opinion. To stop someone’s ability to make mistakes is to wrong him, and limit him. The same applies to many things; the fellow in power always thinks he’s right, and will always have allies to back him. When Robespierre was the enforced virtue and truth during the French Revolution, everyone agreed, but we now think he was wrong. Robespierre removed the head of France’s greatest scientist, Lavoisier. It would take another generation to grow another head like that.

In terms of interesting speeches to the graduates, As Marx said (Groucho), “I thought my razor was dull, till I heard his speech.” There here’s a speech against something.

Freedom is the right to be wrong, and stubborn, like Groucho. Now that’s a graduation speech!

Robert Buxbaum, October 28, 2022

Hypochondriacs anonymous: the first step is admitting you don’t have a disease.

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I’m writing a book about reverse psychology; please don’t buy it.

This one’s not by Rappaport

The judge said I had to keep 6 feet away from my ex-wife. So I buried her under the patio.

Robert Buxbaum: the above 3 jokes are from Jack Rappaport — He sometimes sells jokes. April 13, 2022. The ones below are from Gahan Wilson, and the one at right, I don’t know.

These last two are from Gahan Wilson

Vaccines have not decreased the US COVID death rate

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I’m not sure why this is, but a quick look at the death statistics shows that it is no lower today than it was a year ago. Vaccines seem to help the individual, but they don’t seem to do much for society as a whole.

Johns Hopkins data. COVID 19 death rate in the USA.

That the death rates are the same as last November is bad, especially since one major effect of COVID has been to wipe out nearly all our old folks, decreasing the lifespan of US men by 2-3 years. With a 70% vaccination rate (adults, 60% overall), and few old people, you ‘d expect our death rate this year would be lower than last.

Currently, at least, the trend-line looks positive, but that’s likely a mirage. It is common to add more deaths to the tally, retroactively a few weeks out as many deaths take weeks to report and more weeks to be counted as COVID. For what it’s worth, I’m vaccinated, two shots and a booster. I also take aspirin, and have gotten a pneumonia shot. I think it helps. What do I know?

Robert Buxbaum, November 18, 2021

Deadly incurable viruses abound: The plagues to come.

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As we discuss the effectiveness of the various COIVD vaccines, and ask if we will need another booster in a year, this time for the delta variant, or epsilon, it’s worth noticing that none of these is that deadly, especially if you’ve had a previous version. There are far worse viruses out there, like Ebola-Zaire, for example. This virus kills 60-90% of the people infected, typically by causing the body’s connective tissue to dissolve. Now that’s a deadly virus; imagine an ebola pandemic.

We live surrounded by many really deadly viruses, most of them incurable. In general our protection from them is that they usually show a slow infection rate or a slow progress to death. Drug resistant leprosy is one of these. Here’s the beginnings of a list of deadly viruses we could worry about: Lassa, Rift Vally, Oropouche, Rocio Q Guanarito, VEE, Marburg, Herpes B, Monkey Pox, Dengue, Chikunguanya, Hantavirus, Machupo, Junin, Rabies-like Mokola, drug-resistant leprosy, Duvenhage, LeDantec, Kyasanur, Forest Brain virus, HIV-AIDs, Simliki, Crimean-Congo virus, Sindbis, O’nyongnyong, Sao Paulo, SARS, Ebola Sudan, Ebola Zaire, Ebola Reston, Mid-East Respiratory (MERS), Zika, Delta-COVID. (I got 2/3 of this list from a 1993 book called “The Hot Zone” about the first US outbreak of Ebola — Washington DC in 1989 — a good book, worth a read).

Ebola is a string-like virus with loops. It causes your body to dissolve and bleed out from every pore. The strings form crystals that are virtually immortal.

As an ilk, these viruses are far older than we are, older than the first cellular creatures, and far tougher. They are neither dead nor alive, and can last for years generally without air, water or food if the temperature is right. Though they do not move on their own, nor eat in any normal sense, they do reproduce, and they do so with a vengeance. They also manage to evolve by an ingenious sexual mechanism. In a sense, they are the immune system of the earth, protecting the earth from man or any other invasive life form. We humans have only survived the virus for 100,000 years or so. Long term, the viruses are likely to win.

Zika is a ball-shaped virus. Incurable, it causes encephala. Ball-viruses are not as immortal as string viruses. COVID is a ball virus with spikes, a crown virus.

Some viruses are string shaped; Marburg and Ebola are examples. Such viruses can crystalize and live virtually forever on dry surfaces. Other viruses are ball-shaped, COVID and Zika, for example. These are more easily attacked on surfaces, e.g. by iodine. They become inactive after just a few minutes in air– and are killed instantly by iodine, alcohol, bleach, or peroxide.

Most viruses enter by cuts and body fluids. This is the case with AIDS and herpes. Others, like measles, shingles, and Zika, enter by way of surfaces and the hands. Virus-laden droplets collect on surfaces and are brought to a new host when the surface is touched and hand-transported to the nose or eyes. A few viruses, like SARS, Ebola, and COVID-19 can enter the body by breathing too. I’ve collected some evidence in favor of Iodine as a surface wipe, a hand wipe and as mouthwash in this previous essay.

Dr. Robert E. Buxbaum, November 3, 2021. The US has three facilities where they deal with the most deadly, contagious viruses. One is in Washington DC; they had leak in 1989, a part of the ebola outbreak. China has only one such facility, in Wuhan, China. It’s one block from where the COVID-19 outbreak supposedly originated. Have a nice day.

People would rather get electric shocks than think for 15 minutes.

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A review of some studies on the difficulty of sitting in one’s own thoughts.

There is a joke: what is the opposite of speaking?

It’s waiting to speak.

Most people find it uncomfortable to sit still and be quiet. Even listening is a pain. People sit brewing in their thoughts of what they are going to say. Silence is uncomfortable enough that solitary confinement for a few days is torture.

But what about a few minutes. Almost everyone can sit still and listen for 15 minutes as their friend drones on, especially if they are paid for it. Still, it’s uncomfortable, and a study set out to understand how uncomfortable. It turns out that a majority of men, 67% would rather give themselves electric shocks than sit and think or listen. Women, too find it unpleasant; some 25% of women preferred to give themselves electric shocks rather than sit and think. You’ll find a brief review of this and similar work copied above, or you can read the full study: Wilson et al 2014, “The challenge of the disengaged mind“.

The effect of the COVID-19 lockdowns was to remove virtually every bit of agreeableness, extroversion, conscientiousness, and openness, while fueling neuroticism. Data for 2020.

The effect of the COVID-19 lockdowns has been massive. Those involved in government discussions don’t seem to realize how massive, perhaps because they’re in constant contact with people, speaking and being spoken too. Most of us were not so lucky. We experienced partial isolation. A recent study suggests that almost every measure of happiness disappeared during the summer months of 2020: US agreeableness, extroversion, conscientiousness, and openness all declined dramatically, see data above. Decisiveness too; a lingering effect is an inability to make decisions. My hope is that government officials can resist the temptation for more lockdowns and mandates; mental health is health too.

If lockdowns do come, or if you are depressed for any other reason, you might consider exercise, or lithium, or counseling. At least decide to wake up at a fixed time every morning. Under COVID watch conditions, depression is the new normal. Here’s a joke on marriage counseling.

Robert Buxbaum, October 27, 2021