I Speak of Dreams

End the Bullying: Grassroots Activism

There are two groups of students who are routinely bullied in k-12 classrooms: children with learning disabilities (including autism and ADHD) and students who do not conform to gender norms (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (GLBTQ).

There's a new effort, End the Bullying

End the Bullying uses this blog, a Facebook page, and Twitter to build a grassroots base of a grassroots base of people who are willing to provide support and insight for children who experience bullying and for their parents. Our hope is to provide resources via the Internet and, when needed, locally, for children and families who are experiencing bullying, especially when the authorities are not handling the situation as they should.

In news stories about bullying, especially when it has led to suicide, parents note that they repeatedly tried to contact school administrators or other authorities, only to be ignored. Many families whose stories do not make the news also attest to this cycle of nonresponsiveness. End the Bullying focuses on identifying people across the United States who can serve as contacts and facilitators for parents and children whose complaints are not being heard.

If you use twitter, you can follow @endbullying1 for updates.

Huzzah! The History of Vaccines Site is live!

The "History of Vaccines" is a project of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. I've been reading the History of Vaccines blog for a while--it's always interesting.  The blog was a precursor of the whole site, which has the following purpose: 

The College has created The History of Vaccines to provide a living, changing chronicle of the compelling history of vaccination, from pre-Jennerian variolation practices, to the defeat of polio in the Western Hemisphere, to cutting-edge approaches to novel vaccines and vaccine delivery. The site aims to increase public knowledge and understanding of the ways in which vaccines, toxoids, and passive immunization work, how they have been developed, and the role they have played in the improvement of human health.

The site will also discuss some of the controversies about vaccination and some of the challenges, difficulties, and tragic events that have occurred in the use of vaccines.

What you will find at the History of Vaccines site:

• Timelines
• Activities
• Articles
• Gallery

And if you should happen to be in Philadelphia, visit the Mutter Museum.

http://www.historyofvaccines.org/blog

You're Doing It Wrong: Chiropractic Marketing Edition

T'other day I was riffling through Twitter, which I do on Tweetdeck.  I have a column for chiropractic and noticed this run of virtually identical tweets:

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What? Then I noticed this one:

 

Clicking on the link took me to this webpage

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Here's the same content, different chiropractor, done correctly

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So what's the story here?  Obviously, these 40+ identical tweets and identical blog posts are the product of some kind of chiropractic practice-building service.  The chiropractor is given a tweet and a blog post with a few blanks to be filled in with the chiropractor's own name name and home town.

Do they work?  Well, it certainly generates revenue for the practice-building consultant.

Dynamic Chiropractic is part of a stable of print and online publishing enterprises serving the "alternative health and wellness industry."  Christopher Kent, who is an attorney and chiropractor, recently published a column there entitled "Is There An Oversupply of D.C.s?"  My short answer is yes; Kent's is that chiropractors need to branch out into providing non-evidence-based services.  In other words, increase the quackery.

The article is discussed at Chirotalk: The Skeptical Chiropractic Discussion Forum ". One participant who went to chiropractic school as a mid-life career change wrote:

Since I had several other college degrees, I realized quickly that chiropractic school is not like other professional schools. It's basically a trade school run by profit-motivated administrators. Each school is a discreet entity eyeing the others suspiciously as competition. The common good of the profession isn't an issue.

You are quite right about medical schools limiting their enrollment based on the number of MDs expected to leave the profession through retirement, death, or attrition each year. Did you know that this is done in every profession I can think of except chiropractic? As long as chiropractic schools operate from the mindset of proprietary trade schools, that will never change.

The trade-school mentality grew naturally out of our exclusion (some of it self-imposed) from traditional university settings. (We used the academic title "doctor" long before we were really academics.) Many of our predecessors had very limited education, but a strong entrepreneurial spirit. That can-do, make-a-buck way of looking at the world, coupled with rejection of and by the academic establishment, made for training arenas that looked more like beauty colleges than institutes of higher learning. The federal student loan programs made money available, and the exemplars cashing in on the high-dollar days of insurance parity brought in students in droves.

The balloon is deflating now, of course. The growth of the profession is being regulated - by harsh reality! Hundreds of new grads are waiting tables and tending bar, and mountainous student loans in deferment and on the Ford plan grow unrecognized as the bad debts that they really are.

 

As Steven Barrett MD points out, income for chiropractors has been falling for 20 years and there is no sign it will improve.

Skip This Post If You Don't Want To Read A Mom Burbling On About Her Child

So Jumper Girl used to have long hair:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But she cut it short and made it darker

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why? So she could do this

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Result? (Well, and of training fairly hard all summer, too)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh and this?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also champion last weekend.