Linky Links

You have probably noticed the acute lack of normal science blogging lately. I'm distracted by many things at the moment, including this. I'll be back to normalish soon, probably when I finish my lit review presentation with 3 papers.

1) Eloquence.

2) Admirable. Though as a Mad Scientist I admit that the only one who worries me is Angle Grinder Man, and at that barely. I'm more concerned with Hermitage. And Superbarrio is awesome.

3) Foolish sentimentality.

4) Jazz.

5) Better jazz.

6) Whiny whiners.

7) Poseur.

The War Intensifies

It would appear that I have made a grave mistake in underestimating the absolute sinister capacity of Hermitage. Either she is far more wicked than my initial intelligence reports led me to estimate, or I have divulged too many of my personal weaknesses on this blog and she has unscrupulously taken advantage of them.

In either event, what she has done is so...so...fundamentally despicable that I feel a bitter moral vomit rising, although that could just be my wounded ego. For what it's worth, even if it was heinous of her, I have no choice to admire her deft cunning.

What has Hermitage done?


She CAPTURED me! Like a motherfucking flag!

I fully admit that her evil brilliance coincided with unusual foolishness on my part, but in my defense it should be noted that one can't help their fundamental constitution. Cookies are to me like mashing is to potatoes, like bacon is to beans, like LB broth is to E. coli K12. Hermitage knew this, and she took advantage of this. I can't blame her.

You see, she made a cookie and put it in my daily pathways on a PEDESTAL! A pedestal! As a cookie connoisseur, I can't very well pass such a thing up. I fell right into her trap as she lay in hiding, waiting with a baseball bat. She waited until I was distracted by the cookie, then snuck up and BLAMMO! with the baseball bat on my oversized noggin (she could hardly have missed if she'd tried to).

But that's not the worse of it. I didn't even get the cookie before being knocked out because she GLUED IT DOWN!

I woke up strapped into a chair with a headache and a haircut (srsly, WTF, Hermie?) in an OPEN GRAVE.

But it wasn't just an open grave, it was really a giant 2% agarose gel. And she was stomping around in the background, I could just make her out through the agarose walls. She backed a tumbler truck up to the well and promptly flooded it with 1X TAE. She was going to electrophorese me, but being a compassonate megalomaniac, she granted me one last request*.

Naturally, I asked for a cookie.

She had no choice but to oblige.

So I sneaky-like crumbled the cookie up and spit it into the TAE buffer. This saved my life because when she flipped the switch the salt concentrations of the buffer were so screwed up that nothing happened. You see, I know from what Hermitage has revealed on her blog that she is a terrible cook and limited to Ramen and as such there was a 50% chance that she'd mix up the sugar and the salt. Luckily for me, she did. Also luckily for me, nylon rope frays in TAE buffer and I was able to escape.

Revenge will be sweet. Oh, so sweet indeed.

*Regardless of compassion, she was required to as set forth in Section 7.29 of The Nerd Accords.

The Ozarks

Ever since I've moved northward to Michigan, this is about the time of the year that I feel homesick. Michigan starts to bloom anemically and I'm reminded of home, somehow. Maybe it's because the snow is gone and so is the wintery bluster, and the watery warmth here echoes of the deep, bone-wrapping cicada heat of the Ozarks summertime. I don't regret moving away, but that doesn't mean I don't miss it.

Figure A: Downtown in the area I grew up. That's the defunct train station. That year the flooding got up to the eaves. When I was in 7th grade I stood on the riverbank and watched the bridge in the background blow up. The area just behind this photograph hasn't been changed since the 1850s--it's still cobblestones and cisterns.

I hold the Ozarks in my mind with a certain tension. On the one hand, there was the simplicity, the friendliness, the summer, the storms. But on the other hand, there was the ignorance, the sprawl, the racism, and the glaring lack of opportunities.

Michiganders always seem taken aback by friendliness, which I don't entirely understand. It's like they just want you out of their way so they can get on with their business. Ozarkians generally seemed to be more cheerful and outgoing, even in tiny one-stoplight towns like Fredericktown, Missouri (population 462 and one old nut, according to the sign welcoming visitors off of Route 67). Of course, this means that Michigan has its advantages for introverts like me, but then again there're also times that you just have to wonder how you managed to run all of your errands without speaking a single word to anyone whereas if an Ozarkian sees you buying something unusual at the grocery store (which in the Ozarks means a leek or anything curry) they're going to ask you what you intend to make with it. Gas stations had delis and tackle shops served delicious breakfast hashbrowns. And of course you could buy anything from a new tactical knife to a horse at a sale barn. At least the Michigan town I live in has a farmers' market; that helps, although I have yet to see livestock for sale there.

And whenever I'm farther south in Michigan where it is just flat plains and swamp, I find myself missing the bluffs and hollers of the Ozarks.

Figure B: Like that. The haze you see here is not morning fog. It's summer noon heat and humidity.

My little brother and I used to do something we'd call "bluff running". In retrospect it was really stupid. Basically we'd find a climbable bluff, race each other to the top, and then race back down skidding along the slick dead leaves and dodging boulders and trees to the bottom. Then we'd find another one and do it again.

And the storms were fucking incredible. Today's storm here in Michigan involved some gray clouds and distant thunder, and a couple outbursts of rain. Compared to Ozark storms (pissed off, sleep-deprived bears), Michigan's are barely-awake fluffy kittens. The Weather Channel talks about supercells in the context of storm formation, basically as powerful little knots of low pressure, but that doesn't translate into seeing a bank of individual supercells breaking over a bluff and crashing down through the holler. That doesn't translate into rain so hard it hurts hitting your skin and wind that whips road signs back and forth. It doesn't translate into writhing arcs of lighting crackling across the horizon, so sharp and constant that you can smell it coming (like scorched copper) and the constant rolling of thunder or the pounding of hail against the windows. Most of all, it doesn't translate into that greenish-orange hue of the clouds or the breakneck train sound of a tornado. I miss these things. Hearing the house pop in the pressure differentials even though windows were cracked open as the driving sound of rain hitting rain hitting puddles leaking in along with the steady growling of thunder are, to me, peace.

And the summertime heat, 40C with 80%+ humidity so thick that it wraps your bones like a warm mud towel, oozing through your pores and back out again. Michigan's summers seem watery and distant, although the cold here has a similar bone-pervading quality (not in a pleasant way, though).

But at the same time, the Ozarks were so deeply anti-intellectual, so intolerant, so absolutely incurious and, well, lazy. These are most of the reasons I packed up and got out at the second opportunity to do so. Driving down backroads it was common to see a stretch of several well-maintained houses, and then one that had burned down or collapsed and just sat there for years. There is only one major research university in the entire Ozarks, Washington University in Saint Louis, and it's a private institution. And at the same time, it was the absolute intolerance and social stratification that stubbornly persisted there that got to me. People would casually drop racial epithets around so often that I grew up not knowing that many of these terms were offensive (e.g., I had believed that "porch monkey" just meant a lazy person until I saw Clerks II), even naming several things with them (there is a rather colorful and deeply offensive term for Brazil nuts used there; I'm not going to repeat it here). And that intolerance didn't end with terms. I distinctly remember my step-mother going into absolute raging hysterics--red-faced screaming, dangerously high blood pressure--when she found out that I was dating an African-American girl in high school, even banning her from the house and from calling (none of which stopped me, of course). Thankfully she'd learned that I was immune to her biases by the time I came back from college for Thanksgiving with a co-habitating African-American girlfriend and kept her mouth shut. But the ignorance wasn't just limited to her, it was also in the evening news with reports of interracial couples' homes being sprayed with violent graffiti and the only mosque in the area being firebombed after Sept. 11th, 2001.

So sometimes I'm torn between the nostalgia of my childhood and the more liberal attitudes of my little corner of Michigan (although perhaps local cracker women should note that trying to flirt with me when I am clearly on a date with a woman of a different race than myself is not cool and doesn't fly, seriously: what the fuck?). But then I have to remember that every good experience of the Ozarks was either internal or within a close-knit group of family and friends whereas most negative experiences were from wider Ozark society. I'm glad I moved for the much greater educational opportunities, but sometimes I miss cornmeal-fried crappie and okra. Here in Michigan you can only find okra served in Indian restaurants, and that's just not the same.

Proof

In case any of you doubt the awesome hotness of the science I have done this week, gaze upon the picture above and be unimpressed (taken today on an Olympus upright fluorescent microscope). Then click on it to kick it out into a new tab or window much bigger and you'll see just how sweaty-palmed hot this science is.

Don't see it?

Look to the resolution.

See?

OHHH YEEEEEEAH!

This was done using special capillary slides and a Microprobe apparatus and an abbreviated incubation timeschedule. Despite my custom Megablocking Buffer working wonderfully in other micrograph fields, this particular chunk had particularly high background so it's scientifically useless. Still beautiful, though.

Post Script - Toaster has finally gotten a toaster. I've been without a toaster for 8 months, and I've been quite aware of the irony of me, Toaster, not actually having a toaster and being forced to make toast with a skillet or the oven. But this one has 4 slots, and each one is big enough for a grilled cheese!

Nerd Frame 2: The Continuance

7415 3n71r3 p057 w1ll b3 wr1773n 3n 13375p34|<.

4c7u4lly, 1 d0n'7 h4v3 7h3 p4t93nc3 70 d0 7h47, 7h3r34: 4p0l0G135

To those of you who could easily read the above 2 lines: congratulations, you're a nerd. That isn't to say that everyone else who couldn't read them isn't a nerd, just that they've different specialties.

One of the tensions between intellectuals and wider society is that society prescribes a single nerd frame to all nerds irrespective of our diversity. This allows society to get away with marginalizing us stereotypically as unhygienic, cerebral, and weak while we feel unfairly smashed into ill-fitting frames. This dysfunctional dynamic perpetuates nerd isolation and insulation.

In my previous post on this subject, the commentators suggested that nerds are socially isolated because we are unable to climb out of the deep wells of our minds.

But what if the problem is not internal with us, but rather external in that we have no where to climb to?

As nerds we are accused of being insular and having wolf-pack social dynamics (small groups of like-minded nerds with clear hierarchies [who's the PI? who's the most 1337?]). We're also accused of being aloof eggheads with no communication skills. Both of these are true to at least some extent.

Since society is depend upon us nerds for technology, science, medicine, and George Lucas' box office success, why is the onus upon us to make ourselves understandable? It it probably overly idealistic, but I don't think it's unreasonable for society to at least meet us halfway and learn some of our scientific dogma. We as scientists are charged with creating knowledge and disseminating it to the public (which we do to varying degrees of success), but there comes a point at which the knowledge we create simply cannot be watered down any more*. But when we fail to communicate the relevance of what we do to a lazy society, we're just labeled as nerds in the derogatory sense and written off to our labs and equipment.

This is frustrating, and I am frustrated. I want so badly to be able to educate the public, to inspire critical thinking, to share the depth with which I view the world**, at least see questions deeper than "Uh, like, boogers!". But in the end I can't escape my own nerdness. I lack a socially normal frame through which to communicate. I don't have a way to relate to wider society. Save a few well-placed strong blows to my head, I can't un-educate myself and that education has tempered my thinking.

But when coming back to whose frame is best, nerds' or society's, it now boils down to education. If more people were more educated, society's mean frame would move closer to the nerd frame. Then we, as nerds doing science, would be able to keep the flow of information and dialogue going less one-sidedly. It'd be a net bonus.

However, this brings up another question that I'm going to pose to you: does education increase nerdness or is nerdness an inherent and immutable personality trait?

*This is where alternative medicine pseudoscientific quackery is conceived and born.
**Or at least as I like to think so.

Verbing Words Fragment

I'd really like to see "science" become a proper verb.

It just seems right. Currently we have to say things such as "I was in the lab all day" or "I researched it quite thoroughly" when we could instead be saying "I was Sciencing all day" or "I Scienced the crap out of it!".

Dearest Nerdy Hordes, let us make it so.

Humbly Seeking Advice

OK, so by now it's probably become more or less obvious that I don't blog much about my personal life at all. For all any of you know, I could be the garden gnome in your yard, sneaking in to bang away at your keyboard while you slumber. This isn't because I'm just a brain on a stick, although I'll admit that at times it is nice to retreat into that mode and cavort about in a marshmallow buttercup landscape of knowledge. Rather, I tend to be more of a stubborn introvert like Prof-like Substance, Science Bear, and (my Giga-Nefarious Mega-Archenemy) Hermitage. I'm not comfortable spreading myself out there in public like Dr. Isis and Juniper Shoemaker; it makes me nervous and jittery, although I can turn on the charm as needed and doing so has gotten me out of many scrapes. As such, writing this is somewhat difficult.

It has become starkly apparent that it would be prudent for me to start looking for another job. This isn't due to problems within the lab or with my boss, we all generally get along quite swimmingly and do some really awesome science and I have been lucky enough to get the responsibility to plan, coordinate, execute, and quantify some rather complex experiments. Unfortunately our science doesn't yield publishable results very quickly, and because of this (at least in part) we're not sure how much longer we can keep the lab open. We've been waiting with panicky, bated breath to hear back about the latest grant applications. We're still waiting. I've been nervously checking our reagent stocks and material supplies, questioning whether we really need something at that very moment. Every experiment I have been planning has been as cheap as possible, and I've been afraid to start new projects because I fear wasting precious reagents if it doesn't work. Despite this I have learned a LOT in this job, not least of which has been how to clean up and reorganize the lab's legacy of messy pack rats.

But my boss pulled me into her office today to let me know that, since we've yet to hear about current grant applications, it might be in my best interests to start looking for another job.

I'm hopeful that, what with ARRA and the NIH getting more funds for challenge grants, people will be hiring again. I'm fortunate to live in a town with lots of biotech, both academic and industrial, which is rare enough in the Midwest. Nonetheless, I'm still somewhat at a loss. I mean, I've been looking at the postings, trying to reassure myself at the slightly increased rate of local postings, but still: I really like the work I've been getting to do*. But liking what I've been doing doesn't buy food or pay for rent.

So how best to move forward? Nothing is set in stone here, it's all risk management. But how can I formulate my resume or format my experiences to make then extra shiny? I know that I should personalize the objective in my resume when possible (most internal institution job postings do not include a PI or lab name). But what else can I do? Essentially, how best can I sell my skills and potential to PIs hungry for data?

Let me know what you think, if you'd be so kind. I'd really appreciate it.

*It helps to have an early bird boss who understands that I'm irredeemably a night owl.

Tongue Twister of Doom!

[Warning: There is no intellectual content in this post.]

I saw this today and it made me happy. As such, I thought I might share it with all of you to help spread the happiness around.



Well? You happier?

Allergy Inaccuracy (Toaster Burns Bullshit #3)

I need to stop reading anything that appears on the Huffington Post or else I fear the vein running through my right temple will cease merely throbbing and commence with exploding all messy-like everywhere. I sent them some email expressing my anger and disgust over the absolutely abysmal science/medicine reporting standards they apparently have, as have many others in the sciency blogosphere. Apparently they're being reactionary, recidivist bastards because the shit just keeps getting deeper and worse and more stupid that I had believed possible. It is as though Toaster's Stupidity Scale, tempered by the rhetorical vomit and denialist vehemence of the last 8 years, has had to redefine a new Absolute Zero for this kind of stuff.

Not only has the Huffington Post run a poorly informed and incredibly biased article by Jim Carrey (much better known as The Mask and Ace Ventura than a medical expert) on the autism-vaccine link, they're also pimping a link to some site called Intent with an article entitled "The Self Against the Self: Deal With Seasonal Allergies Naturally and Cheaply". The Sciborgs Orac, Abel Pharmboy, and PalMD have ably knocked the wind out of the "ZOMGVAXXIENZ!" argument cloud fogging Mr. Carrey's brain. So I will be burning the latter article.

"The Self Against the Self: Deal With Seasonal Allergies Naturally and Cheaply" contains some vague mystical advice about how to use Zen and Detoxification to get rid of allergy symptoms. It was written by one Debbie Mandel (website), author of several spiritual self-help books, and whose Intent bio says she will help you build immunity to feeling bad. Note that she is not an immunologist, nor even a biologist, but she'll tell you how to build immunity anyway. I wouldn't have a problem with this claim because building immunity can, sometimes, have a different connotation of inuring one against something unfavorable IF she hadn't actually tried, and failed epically, to invoke actual immunology.

Your response to allergens correlates to how balanced you are regarding: eating, exercising, sleeping and stress-management. Allergies are actually an auto-immune response which translates into: the self against the self. [boldface hers]

First the less egregious problem about homeostatic health and allergies: No, allergen responses don't much depend on whether you're stressed out about work or not. Just ask someone with an acute peanut allergy. Allergic responses are, however, modulated through general systemic inflammation if it exists, but this isn't much relevant unless you're morbidly obese (excess fat can increase inflammation).

This second claim, though, is either sheer stupidity or inability to do research. Allergies and autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis are NOT the same thing. Some cases of autoimmunity may have similar underlying immune responses as allergy, but this does not mean they are alike. It is true that allergies are an abnormal immune response, but not against the self. Allergens are strictly defined as harmless environmental substances that evoke an immune response as if they were harmful. Or, as a professor once put it, allergens are nonharmful nonself being treated by the immune system as though they are harmful nonself.

The human body, and its immune cells, come into daily contact with millions of nonself molecules and doesn't have an allergic reaction to them. The immune system is generally quite good at distinguishing between what can harm us and what cannot. Allergies arise when the immune system mistakes something that is harmless, like pollen, as harmful and reacts to it.

Here's how allergies basically work (my explanation):

1) Dendritic cells present antigen in MHCII to CD4+ T-cells all the time without much caring what they're presenting. Sometimes harmless antigen gets presented.
2) Some naive CD4+ T-cells are, by virtue of the recombination and mutagenesis that occur as the T-cell receptors are being formed, naturally reactive against that harmless antigen.
3) Harmless antigen-reactive CD4+ T-cells proliferate and usually differentiate into a TH2-type response. The TH2 T-cell phenotype is characterized by secretion of IL-4.
4) TH2 T-cells talk to B-cells and get them to make antibodies against the harmless antigen, now an allergen. Allergen-specific antibodies are usually of the IgE isotype.
5) IgE gets made and secreted into the plasma, where it can become the receptor for mast cells and basophils. Eosinophils get involved in this, too.
6) When an allergen binds mast cell-IgE, it signals the mast cell to release allergy symptom-causing histamines, prostaglandins, and leukotrienes. These chemicals are generally what allergy medications try to work against.
7) Some allergen-reactive TH2 T-cells and their corresponding B-cells will become memory cells, ready to spring back into action at the drop of their allergen.

At no point in this is the immune system reacting against host antigens. In fact, the immune system tries very hard to kill all host-reactive T-cells as they're being made (this results in >99% of all developing T-cells being killed off). If Debbie Mandel had done her research before making up the above assertion, she'd have known better. This is irresponsible, dishonest, and lazy. Although I guess the immune system reacting against harmless environmental substances just isn't as fear-inducing as a self-reactive immune system.

Your response to allergens correlates to how balanced you are regarding: eating, exercising, sleeping and stress-management. Allergies are actually an auto-immune response which translates into: the self against the self. So, it makes absolute sense that when you are intact and whole, your allergies will dissipate and no longer bother you; your immune system will be more vigilant. I present myself as a test case.

It only makes sense if you're poorly informed. Memory immune cells last for many many many years, or else vaccines wouldn't work at all. Presenting herself as a test case is also stupid. How many times do we need to tell people that anecdotes do not equal evidence!?

For years I was an allergy sufferer. My sinus headaches, dizziness, itchy eyes and occasional tiredness always arrived with spring. Every morning I woke up to coffee and Allegra D 180 mg. However, in the past few years I rarely have any symptoms except for the occasional itchy eye and more important, no more killer headaches and sinus pressure!

What has changed? I stopped taking the medication five years ago, ate more fruits and vegetables and basically stopped fighting Mother Nature; I vowed to get along with her no matter what the weather. Brazenly, I went out to my garden, in the trenches, fertilizing, weeding, mulching and pruning without the fear or the expectation of an allergic reaction. I made up my mind not to have any symptoms and oh yes, I almost forgot, I managed my stress.

Note that she doesn't mention how long it took her to stop having symptoms. In all probability, she was quite miserable for the first couple years. What she did here was not Mystical Woo Magic, it was a clumsy and messy version of hyposensitization treatment. In clinical hyposensitization treatment, patients with allergies are inoculated with progressively greater doses of purified allergens. Hyposensitization does not exactly cure allergies, but it does relieve symptoms by skewing the immune response away from a TH2 IgE to a TH1 IgG, which doesn't rely on the mast cells or basophils that can mediate allergic rhinoconjunctivitis. Ms. Mandel would have gotten the same results clinically (but that would have meant vaccine-like injections, which might contain Teh Mercury and Teh Aluminumz! ZOMGs!).

Ultimately, this might have been an interesting and useful article if Debbie Mandel had done their research properly. As it is, her failure to do so has made her writing as flimsy as her detoxicification and Teh Evil Sugarz screeds.

Post Script: Please note that I do not have a problem with people writing about the immune system in the popular media. In fact, I support the information and principles getting more exposure because I think the immune system is The Awesome Eleventy Coolness. If I could, I'd pass out the DC-->T-cell-->B-cell-->antibody dogma in tasty ladlefuls on the street corners if it could be made into a pudding. However, I have a big problem with non-scientists who are completely unqualified trying to assume professional authority and opine about the mechanics of the immune system, or any science for that matter, when they have not done the research thoroughly. That's just irresponsible.

Intuitive Medicine (Toaster Burns Bullshit #2)

[Please note that any and all italics or boldface added to quoted text are my additions.]

What the fuck is with new-age looney motherfuckers and their chakra bullshit? Chakras this, chakras that, align your chakras, cleanse your chakras...on and on and on until you want to stab them in the eye with the nearest stick of incense. Unfortunately, chakras are no longer solely the domain of spiritualism or granola crunchers. No, if the Huffington Post is to be believed, then chakras are apparently moving into the mainstream medical establishment under the flimsy disguise of "intuitive medical scanning".

So what is intuitive scanning? Let's allow Huffington Post to explain:

Intuitive body scanning is a technique that can be used to determine medical or health blockages in people and animals. Medical intuitives, professionals who seek to complement traditional medical procedures with this technique, locate body parts that are blocked or in turmoil in order to expedite the healing process...Just as an X-ray machine scans a body in order to gain specific medical details, an intuitive scan works to provide an energetic portrait of the client. The premise is that the physical body has an energy blueprint and so the intuitive scan will look for energy blockages and areas of stress. Good health is, in general, considered to be clear flows of energy between all the chakras and easy, free functioning of all organs and body systems. Because this is an intuitive technique, scans can be done in person or from a distance with equal accuracy.

See a pattern between the bolded text?

Look closely. What do all of the bolded terms have in common?

They're MAGIC! Unquantifiable, unfalsifiable, ephemeral, mystical, MAGIC!!!^eleventy

And intuitive medical scanning can even be done from a distance! Holy fuck it must be real if it's that magic! Let's be clear here: the Internet works over long distances. So do rockets. However, spooky energies from the human mind do not exert influence over either immediate or distant states of being, energies, events, or other qualia.

But Huffington Post isn't content to just tell us about the new phenomenon of intuitive medical scanning. No, being the paragon of responsible medical reporting that they are, they also tell us, average Joes and Janes, how to do it at home! Whoopee!

So how does one do an intuitive medical scan?

...perform a scan using inner vision...This technique can be highly accurate, but a bit uncomfortable for anyone who is highly empathic, which is the ability to feel what others are feeling and sensing.

My empathic inner vision is telling me that my stomach chakra wants black olives and cheese, or perhaps a cinnamon raisin bagel with peanut butter. Or a burrito. Maybe my stomach chakra is confused?

Look for knots, dark spots, tension, pain or any area that seems to stand out to you during the scan. Note the spot and then go back and zero in for more detail if you are able. At this point, people who have some medical training can have an advantage because they can sometimes more accurately interpret what organ or system is blocked.

OK, so now it's apparent that my gall bladder is burgeoning with bile salts and stomach acids, that poblano barbecue sauce from last night is chilling in my duodenum, and I'm detecting some major ghrelin production in my stomach lining and...holy fuck it's binding to GHS-R on my arcuate nucleus in my motherfucking hypothalamus!!! Oh, oh, the pain! This must be empathic discomfort...

How do we get rid of this discomfort? Huffington Post is good enough to interview 2 practicioners of intuitive medical scanning for some inside tips and tricks.

My favorite is the Helmet technique. You get a name, city, age, and place a "helmet" of their head on your own. It is a quickie way inside their body. From there, I scan. I can see it in light contrast. I can feel the pain inside me, or the anxiety, or whatever.

I can very quickly (I hate feeling their stuff in me) clear it with breath induced energy spurts. When I feel the release, I know they do. I then remove the helmet, give it back to their body, and physically clear the space around me..especially my head...to regain my Self.

Ah, spurts of energy! Of course! Wait...that sounds rather gross and come to think of it that entire sentence is laden with far too much inneundo for me to stomach (and what the fuck is up with this Helmet shit?). Even more nauseating, however, is that this practicioner can't even keep her mysticism straight:

I will also use a technique where I hold a major chakra, usually foot, to connect (either in person or from a distance) and send a flow of energy from my hands.

Here's a chart of the traditional Indian chakras:


Nothing in the foot.

Of course, logically, this means that they're such a good medical intuitive that they have discovered/invented an entirely new chakra! Holy crapdiddles, she must be great at this.

There is much more, much, much, much more in the original article if you care to slog through it. However, I think I just ran out of sarcasm. To give credit where it is due, however, the author of this piece did include a disclaimer:

Of course, none of this is meant to substitute for traditional medical professional consultations and advice.

Thank you for that much, author. I know that you couldn't help pen such bullshit, for this kind of crazy can only write itself.