ariaste:

thebibliosphere:

Every time someone well-meaning suggests I see a chiropractor for my migraines, I have this little moment of “ah, you’re new here. You weren’t here prior to 2018 when a chiropractor very gently adjusted my neck for my migraines, and I ended up having to get an emergency MRI because the ensuing symptoms were indicative of a brain bleed.”

It wasn’t a brain bleed. The muscles on the entire right side of my neck “just” tore (Spoiler there is nothing “just” about that kind of traumatic injury. I am still in physical rehab for it), and I couldn’t hold my head up, see straight, walk or do any of the things I’d previously taken for granted until several weeks later when the area finally started to heal.

This was before I knew I had Ehlers Danlos, btw. But this is true even for people who don’t have a connective tissue disorder: Don’t let chiropractors touch your neck.

There are a lot of vital nerves and blood vessels there, and even gentle adjustments of the area can have life-threatening consequences.

I know chiropractic care can be pain relieving–I still get it for my lower back and hips because I work with a chiropractor who knows about Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, and sometimes my hips need to be popped back in at short notice, and it’s easier to hop walk in and see her than wait for physical therapy–but it is a short-term relief that doesn’t actually correct why something is happening.

If you can afford it, physical therapy will likely help more in the long term. I know not everyone can afford it, and that’s why chiropractors have such a booming trade in the US, but please, I’m begging you, don’t get your neck adjusted.

The spinal cord specialist I saw after my injury told me the number one reason he used to see people for traumatic brain injuries was car wrecks, followed by other major roadside injuries. He said those numbers were still the highest, but after that, the majority of his patients were survivors of chiropractic injury.

Do Not Get Your Neck Adjusted.

It’s been over 5 years, and I still can’t move my neck properly on my right side. I still struggle to eat and drink because my muscles will randomly seize up. It feels like my skull no longer fits on top of my spine because of the scar tissue. Please. I just want people to be safe.

And if you are a chiropractor reading this and thinking, “Well, I’ve never injured anyone, skill issue.” No. You Have Gotten Lucky. Rethink how you apply your trade. Please, you can still help people while recommending safer options for specific body parts. Learn to do pressure point release and acupressure. Teach patients how to stretch and relax the area safely. Just fucking stop cracking people’s necks like pop rock candy.

Seconding this. I was having some muscle spasms in my neck last year, I tried a chiropractor to see if it helped. It did, temporarily, but then I started having double-vision. I told my chiropractor this, and he said it was just dehydration. After another couple appointments, one day my vision went totally black for a solid 20 seconds or so, and when it came back, I had blooms of color across my vision that made reading almost impossible. I spent four days in the hospital while they ran tests to try to figure out what was going on (including a CAT scan and two MRIs), and then another four days later in the summer when the eye specialist was concerned that I might lose my visual acuity permanently and sent me to see the neurologists in Boston. I was told by one of the doctors in the ER that one of my neck arteries was partially torn and that it was “consistent with too-aggressive chiropractic neck adjustments.” I was also later told that I have something called a Chiari malformation (which is a birth defect where a bit of your brain stem pokes down into your spinal column), which I had never known about – the best theory the doctors had for me was that the neck adjustments had pulled on it, which pulled on my brain, which put strain on my ocular nerve, which caused my vision problems.

It has been over a year and I only healed to about 98% of what my vision was before. While I still occasionally get a bit of double vision, mostly it manifests as text not looking as clear as it once did. I’ve adapted so that I don’t notice it as much unless I’m paying attention (like right now while i’m talking about it).

Do not let a chiropractor adjust your neck (unless specifically ordered by your doctor, and in that case presumably they will have done all the scans to determine that it won’t hurt you further, and it will be done in supervised lab conditions where they can keep an eye on you in case anything goes wrong – BECAUSE IT CAN GO VERY WRONG).

derinthescarletpescatarian:

getvalentined:

ALT

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[source]

So, in spite of suing multiple other companies with the assertion that scraping user content for generative AI training is illegal, Long Rodent has decided that the dead bird is going to do the same thing! Natively! On-platform! To train his own new generative AI engine!

With this in mind, I cannot impress this vehemently enough:

If you are on Twitter as a creator of any kind, it’s time to pack up your work and GET THE HELL OUT.

nonasuch:

ms-demeanor:

ryebreadgf:

You’re on a train in the alps with a beautiful boy,

not for long you aren’t

mooncheese3:

requests from twt :DDD (content in tags, in order !!)

Keep reading

abluerowan:

So the James Webb telescope took a picture of a infant star!!

The small glowing blob is protostar L1527! Caught in the glow of its sunrise-like creation the baby is only 100,00 years old! It can take up to 50 million years for a star to reach the size of our sun. This infant has a long time to go.

Located 460 light years away this is one hell of a childhood photo!

shinobicyrus:

purlturtle:

quasi-normalcy:

quasi-normalcy:

All useful things turn to shit when you privatize them.

Basically, any politician talking about privatization of any public service should be taken as a glowing neon sign reading “I’M CORRUPT AND I WANT TO MAKE MY CRONIES RICHER AT YOUR EXPENSE”

“In order to improve performance and lighten the load on the public coffers, I propose to privatize-” [gunshot]

This is gonna be a very American-centric rant, sorry, but any politician who says that government should be run “more like a business” should be immediately barred from serving in public office, because they’re either an idiot who doesn’t know how government works or they’re a grifter who is planning on ripping the copper wiring out of the walls of public infrastructure and selling it to their rich friends. Possibly both. Probably both.

Governments are not businesses. A business’s number one goal is to make a profit. That’s it. A government’s role is, ideally, to collect an amount of resources that its citizens collectively decided was fair, then use those resources (usually taxes) to provide services the People decided was necessary. Water, roads, electricity, busses, trains, libraries, education, and (if you’re not American) medical care.

Public services are exactly that: a service. Their sole mission is to provide said service to the public. Full stop. Profit isn’t a factor because their goal (ideally) isn’t to make money, it’s simply to provide the service for which they were created.

The post office is not a business. The library is not a business. Public transportation is not a business. K-12 schools are not a business. Any money you pay them outside what is given to them by taxes is to help cover costs. That’s why using the printers at a public library is cheaper than printing the same amount of pages at a for-profit print-shop. It’s why there are some places in the United States, such as communities in Alaska, where private companies like DHL, UPS, and Fedex simply refuse to make deliveries because it makes zero business sense to ship parcels at great expense to isolated, low-population areas.

The Post Office however, has a Constitution Mandate that every American is entitled to mail service. It is, in the parlance of conservatives, a God-Given Right. Thus, they are the only ones that deliver things out to those isolated communities. When you take profit motive out of the equation and focus purely on the service it was created to provide, you have a system that is built to work for everyone.

Are these institutions perfect? No, of course not. They’re large, bulky, aged, bureaucratic behemoths that are constantly underfunded and are making due with the bare minimum of resources to stay functional.

There’s a reason that the United States Postal Service for years has been actively sabotaged by conservatives who had a financial interest in private package carrier companies and are hostile to the idea of mail-in voting. There’s a reason that libraries and schools for years have been struggling for funding, and why they’re now targets of “culture war” fanatics who think privately run but tax-funded schools should teach kids more about Jesus and librarians offering free books to children is “grooming”

There’s a reason Americans pay the most for healthcare but have some of the worst healthcare outcomes of any western country.

School cafeteria workers used to be unionized, directly-hired employees of a school district. My best friend’s mom raised three kids and could afford a house on the salary she used to make doing that job. Now most cafeteria workers are contractors that get paid much less to do the same work, serving lower-quality food. Your taxes still pay for it, but their employer - the private third-party service company - is the one pocketing the difference. Janitors and cleaning staff are also a heavily “outsourced” occupation.

Taxation is theft? No, taking public infrastructure that was built by unionized employees and paid for by public tax revenue only to sell it off to private corporations so they do a shittier job, pay the workers less, and charge us all more for the privilege is fucking theft.

“Just run it like a business,” says the businessman who didn’t build it, never used it, doesn’t depend on it, and will make money from dismantling and selling it.

picturesque-about-it:

B Dylan Hollis’s cookbook was delivered today and it’s lovely! As a baker, it’s laid out very nice. Lots of pictures, full index by decade and ABC. I haven’t seen any recipes split on two pages, they all seem to be single page instructions. I’ve seen most of the good ones he’s made videos for, a lot of new recipes, and a short section of the worst.

arrows-for-pens:

allsadnshit:

I will never get over how weird it feels to have tragic and emotional chapters of your life where you just also still go to work, and the grocery store, and see funny videos online all while feeling such paralyzing fear and heartache

life just goes on no matter what

thefandomcache:

thefandomcache:

featherfur:

No okay I’m thinking about the 13/16 year gap between Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng again and how far away they are and not because of the siege. No instead it’s because Jiang Cheng grew up and Wei Wuxian wasn’t there.

Wei Wuxian is 13/16 years behind the man who Jiang Cheng has become. There’s some things that haven’t changed, Jiang Cheng still names his pets the fluffiest names, he still chows down like a maniac whenever he sees anything citrus, he won’t touch water chestnuts, he likes using two swords for training both hands equally, all things that Wei Wuxian remembers.

But there’s so much he never had the chance to learn.

He doesn’t know that Jiang Cheng now takes sweet tea with lemon cakes under a pavilion at exactly noon every day. He doesn’t know Jiang Cheng thinks the word “cork” is the funniest thing because of one joke Chao Bolin said. He doesn’t know that Jiang Cheng now guards his right more heavily and forgets to guard his left because he’s so used to moving in a three man team of him and his senior disciples. He doesn’t know that Jiang Cheng let’s himself be bullied by the disciples into having parties. He doesn’t know that Jiang Cheng is willing to wield two swords and trust another disciple with Zidian. He doesn’t know that Jiang Cheng tried and failed to learn how to paint fans and Jin Ling definitely has them hidden away for laughs.

Wei Wuxian wasn’t there to learn those things. He has so much catching up to do but first he needs to learn that his shidi isn’t his shidi anymore. Wei Wuxian knows his little brother who grew up beside him but now that spot he stood in has been taken by Jiang disciples who guard it jealously.

Wei Wuxian gets struck by surprise when he sees Jiang Cheng actually smile at a joke that a junior makes. He chokes on tea when Jiang Cheng very carefully lifts up a bottle of wine that almost fell off the table and passes it to another disciple to pour on someone’s head and smirks at the fake outrage. He nearly has a heart attack when some merchant storms in and starts screaming and Jiang Cheng doesn’t panic, doesn’t yell back, doesn’t look to him for support like the Jiang Cheng Wei Wuxian remembers would. He simply blinks and calms the merchant down in seconds and starts working on the problem.

The anxious new leader, the socially awkward baby brother, the angry shidi, the lonesome man that Wei Wuxian once knew inside and out… Now stands before him completely different, in a second life that Wei Wuxian only now gets a chance to be a part of and he doesn’t know if there’s room.