Primrose Road

I was glad to see Obama win the presidency; for one thing, I felt that a Democrat was needed in the White House if the Republican Party is to have any hope of reforming itself and distancing itself from the Bush administration (several poli-sci friends will likely laugh and remind me that I'm an English major). I also feel that with Obama in the White House, there's a (somewhat) better chance that all children will get the same opportunities early-education-wise. (I'm not a critic of No Child Left Behind because of its testing program; rather, I am frustrated the backwardness of its testing program. As it stands now, schools with better test scores are rewarded, while schools with lower test scores are not, leaving administrators and teachers on their own to raise those scores. This -- perhaps purposefully? -- *leaves behind* underperforming schools in economically challenged areas and simply strengthens the status quo.) Ultimately, it will be nice to see people in office who don't think that socializing an institution or two within an otherwise-capitalist system means we've been defeated by the Reds. One concern about Obama's potential administration that has been circulating among pediatricians and science bloggers in the last two days: he's supposedly considering appointing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who published a wacky article at Salon.com about the "connection" between vaccines and autism, as the head of the EPA. The Respectful Insolence blog probably details the situation best. I hope Obama has some good science advisors on his side to let him know that the more the conspiracy theory about vaccines causing autism is spread, the more measles-mumps-rubella outbreaks we'll see in children in "First World" countries.

A friend of a friend told me at lunch the other day that he had been frustrated with a class he'd taken as an undergraduate because the prof repeatedly told them that Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge was all about "ways of knowing." Having actually read the assigned text, my friend's friend was quite confused by his teacher's claim that science is only one valid narrative. Just because there can be multiple valid narratives doesn't always mean that there are multiple valid narratives. It also certainly doesn't mean that *anything* one comes up with is valid (my argument that my dad wrote Shakespeare's plays is pretty damn convincing, I think); this is where the idea of "ways of knowing" gets into sounds-spiritual-and-New-Agey -but-we're-really-just-out-to-sell-you-crap territory that sounds forward-thinking, but, really, is just out to sell you crap. I explained it like this: two weeks ago, I read and discussed Charlotte Perkins' Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" with a class composed of many pre-med, pre-D.O., and PT/OT students who immediately noted that the story's narrator seems to be suffering from post-partum depression. I warned them of the problems with "diagnosing" fictional characters, but agreed that the narrator here does clearly have symptoms of post-partum depression; at one point, in fact, she even mentions that she has been unable to bond with her baby. Her depression develops into psychosis, something that my students tell me is unlikely because PPD and postpartum psychosis are different disorders, but it's nevertheless clear that the narrator seems to be suffering from what we today know to be an actual condition. Why, I asked them, might PPD have remained unidentified by doctors like the narrator's husband John, who is described as "practical in the extreme," having "no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures"? Perhaps, I suggested, people at the time simply couldn't imagine the possibility that having a child could make a woman physically ill, and certainly couldn't conceive of a disease that caused a woman to be unable to bond with her infant. Sociocultural factors, in other words, got in the way of medical research that might have saved lives and minds. What this doesn't suggest is that sociocultural factors are getting in the way of medical research related to, say, vaccines as a possible cause of autism, because the research has already been done. In fact, in this case too, sociocultural factors (specifically, the media's willingness to buy into Oprah and Jenny McCarthy?) may be limiting our access to reality; it's a different situation, however, from the one above. Finally, I held a fork near my friend's head so that it pointed down towards his left foot. "If I drop this fork on G.'s foot," I said, "it's going to accelerate towards his foot at a rate of approximately 9.8 m/s^2, and, more importantly, the fork is not going to fly upwards and get stuck in the ceiling." In other words, there are often sociocultural factors involved in *knowing*, but that doesn't mean that we don't know anything, and it certainly doesn't mean that *anything* one chooses to call "knowledge" is valid. And that, in turn, does not mean that there is no valid knowledge.

Just when I thought that no Facebook ad could possibly be creepier than "Neurosurgery Associates of Puerto Rico" (which has its own Facebook page where you can become a "fan"; if a doctor advertises on Facebook, s/he will never be my doctor), along comes C'elle, which, for $899 per year, will cryogenically preserve your menstrual blood. The idea is that your stem cells can help save you or your family members decades from now. If you order now, they'll send you

"everything needed for you to collect and send your C'elle menstrual stem cells for processing and preservation, including a menstrual cup, collection tubes, prepaid FedEx airbill for return shipment to Cryo-Cell, and comprehensive instructions for use."