Post: #26

Quote:Dr. Case, investigating indicators of poor health, discovered that middle-aged people, unlike the young and unlike the elderly, were reporting more pain in recent years than in the past. A third in this group reported they had chronic joint pain over the years 2011 to 2013, and one in seven said they had sciatica. Those with the least education reported the most pain and the worst general health.

Low education levels would be consistent with higher-than-usual development of pain-related conditions. If you're not educated, you're probably working manual or unskilled jobs for much of your life. As you hit your forties, the body (if it hasn't already) starts to break down, either from overuse or a combination of manual work with shitty diet choices. This can also be true of women if they're working sedentary or long hours in data entry roles. Your body starts to pay you back with pain, so you go to a GP who prescribes painkillers. And the addiction starts. GPs are not the same as pain management specialists -- there are any number of tricks the latter have outside pharmaceuticals for blocking pain or reducing it, and it's not new-agey acupuncture type stuff, either.

Having said that, and it's a big post I plan to put up later on following a seminar I went to recently about brain chemistry and stress -- depression can actually cause physical pain, and is chronically maltreated across all medical areas. The surgeon I saw lecturing was quite frank that depression is dealt with unlike virtually every other form of physical ailment in that it's the one condition where we don't intervene or try to remedy it before it gets critically bad. This is resting on the idea that depression is essentially caused by a screamingly low level of neurotransmitters in the brain. Low neurotransmitter levels are also found where chronic pain is firing throughout the nervous system. That is, your pain can be exacerbated by, if not caused by, your depression.

Antidepressants are generally prescribed to try and address that low level of chemical in the brain. But as with cholesterol-lowering drugs, they typically don't work as a curative on their own. You have to engage in a number of lifestyle changes to get your neurotransmitter levels back up to normal.

And as I said, antidepressants are invariably prescribed at the last possible moment when it comes to treating depression clinically. Continuing with our cholesterol example, if you go to a doctor and your blood test reveals a raised cholesterol level, the doctor typically (if he has any brain) tell you to do something about your diet, lifestyle, and exercise right away and then come back in a couple of months to see if there's been a change. If you do those things and then come back and your cholesterol level is still elevated, then and only then does the doctor start prescribing medication.

Concordantly, no doctor in the world would says "Oh, your cholesterol's elevated? Tell you what, go away, continue doing what you were doing. We'll wait until it's completely clogging your veins and then we'll intervene." But this is exactly how depression in society is treated medically. Medicine generally does not intervene on depression until you have reached a critical, life-endangering point. And when it does, it usually just treats it pharmaceutically -- it doesn't tend to look at lifestyle or other factors.

Some of these figures, then, could well be untreated or undiagnosed depression at work. It's certainly consistent with the socioeconomic group, pain that cripples you making you unable to work and therefore lack purpose, the age group (serotonin and dopamine production start tapering off with age), self-medication via alcohol or drug abuse, and suicide.

As said, I want to do a big post on neurotransmitters and brain chemistry because this lecture blew my head off, but it's still an important point to note.

Post: #27

This study matches what I've observed myself in dealing with clients from the general public for 15 years.

To make a complex problem over-simplified, the government and the economic titans who run America made a conscious decision to re-shape the economy so that all the benefits went to the few, rather than to the many.

Destroying the manufacturing base, vulgarizing the culture, allowing moral decay, and focusing solely on defense spending were all part of the program.

These problems hit black communities first because those communities tended to be the poorest and most vulnerable. They were heavily dependent on America's manufacturing and industrial jobs, and when those went overseas, they suffered greatly.

Poor whites don't have it much better. In fact, in some respects, they may have it even worse.

Why? Because it is politically correct, and acceptable, to wring our hands and emote over the problems of the black community. It is far, far less acceptable to point out the sufferings of rural whites.

No one likes to admit this, but it is true, at least as I see it.

But the bottom line is that everyone nowadays seems to be struggling. It's not really a color or ethnic problem, it is an economic and cultural problem.

I see a lot of obvious attempts by the media to play the blacks and whites in America against each other. I suspect that this too is part of the plan by the elites to prevent us from waking up, and realizing that we're all getting screwed.

Blacks and whites need to joint together and realize that the real enemy is not each other, but the corrupt plutocrats at the top who have sold us both out.

I just hope I live long enough to see them pay for what they've done to us.

Post: #28

I fail to see how Hispanic Americans are outliving both white Americans and Black Americans combined.

Has anybody seen the Hispanic diet? Its horrible! Tacos, tortas, carnitas, re-fried beans (as if having fried once is bad enough), sugary drinks, etc...

Post: #29

(11-05-2015 01:08 PM)EL CHAPO Wrote:  I fail to see how Hispanic Americans are outliving both white Americans and Black Americans combined.

Has anybody seen the Hispanic diet? Its horrible! Tacos, tortas, carnitas, re-fried beans (as if having fried once is bad enough), sugary drinks, etc...

I have a strong suspicion that we have developed to adapt to our natural food sources. Which means that might be unhealthy for some isn't for others.

Northern Euro scientists were always baffled at how the French and Medi people were so healthy despite eating a lot of carbs and fat. Here's something to consider, if you look at genome in Europe, you see that Southern Europeans have a lot more of what is called EEF - or Early European Farmer, who immigrated from the Levant. Northern Euros on the other hand have significantly higher Western Hunter Gatherer (WHG) DNA.

It wouldn't be a long shot to think this could influence health and dietary concerns.

Northern Euros should probably eat less farmed food, particularly carbs and eat more wild meat, fish and eggs, along with herbs and such. Paleo in other words, very popular with, you guessed it: Northern Euros.

I believe there are actually companies making diets from genetic testing, but no idea if it is a scam or legit.

Post: #30

Seems like this specific study is based on what others have stated:



Those drugs incl. all anti-depressants are not only highly dangerous and toxic, they are also useless.

Kosko is also somewhat right, that part of the problem is the tranformation that hit the black males in the 1970s-80s.

Also in this case I might add that life expectancy is not rising - it has been falling the last 15-20 years, but it does not affect the 45-55 crowd aside from massively rising cancer rates.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23126814

And no - the cancer rates are rising for all age groups - in the 1950s child cancer was ridiculously rare - MDs flew all over the country to see one kid with cancer, now it's everywhere. There are multiple reasons for that and we can go into detail on why this is happening, but it does not concern the topic of the thread.

Painkillers and anti-depressants are given out like candy, while they are mostly useless crap and should be used at best very very short term - frankly even then I would not recommend them at all. A morphine addiction is easier to kick than a painkiller one.

Post: #31

I get the prescription pain-killers issue here and I think its correct. However, neither the NYT article nor non of you in here are saying anything about WHY more people in their 40's (and presumably their 30's) are on these meds.

the argument that manual labor causes pain by the time one is in their 40's does not hold water because more people did manual labor 40 years ago than they do now. Psychological explanations do not hold water either as they are, how should I say it, airy and ethereal and hence bogus.

Again, the basic question is why more people are experiencing physiological pain today than they did 30-40 years ago.

Could this be the vaccine (Thimerosal) and statin drug medical holocaust?

Post: #32

(11-06-2015 03:17 PM)Abelard Lindsey Wrote:  Could this be the vaccine (Thimerosal) and statin drug medical holocaust?

No. The rise in the death rate is in poorly-educated whites, not across the board. Vaccines and statins being administered universally, there is no corresponding rise in death rates across the board.

Depression and pain are not solely psychological. The body's neurotransmitter levels, including serotonin, are biologically based. As is the brain's plasticity, its ability to rewire itself -- read "The Brain That Changes Itself". Phantom limb syndrome, for example, is a direct consequence of this biological fact; the way the brain rewires itself after an injury has a lot to do with pain management strategies and indeed ongoing pain itself.

Post: #33

America is a country where people are increasingly overworked, overstressed, and underpaid. It's no surprise that this is turning out numbers like this.

Post: #34

The pill epidemic is purely created by doctors. Instead of actually fixing the problem, they just write up a prescription. Besides, more money in someone in pain taking pills, than someone with no more pain taking no pills.

Post: #35

(11-07-2015 03:55 AM)spokepoker Wrote:  The pill epidemic is purely created by doctors. Instead of actually fixing the problem, they just write up a prescription. Besides, more money in someone in pain taking pills, than someone with no more pain taking no pills.

Doctors have just been bribed by big pharma, who pay off the FDA as well.

Post: #36

(11-06-2015 07:03 PM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

(11-06-2015 03:17 PM)Abelard Lindsey Wrote:  Could this be the vaccine (Thimerosal) and statin drug medical holocaust?

No. The rise in the death rate is in poorly-educated whites, not across the board. Vaccines and statins being administered universally, there is no corresponding rise in death rates across the board.

Depression and pain are not solely psychological. The body's neurotransmitter levels, including serotonin, are biologically based.

All this science stuff is great, but doing and reading original research takes work. I think the conspiracy theories about vaccines are more fun.

Wait I'm supposed to be DOING that research... oh well... back to work....

Post: #37

The .001% may not consciously THINK about the masses and say, "Hey, you're not in the 1-3% I can use to increase my billions, I don't care if you live or die."

That just ACT that way, and gradually and systematically make life less and less tolerable for the bottom 40-60%.

Post: #38

"the goal of capitalism is to reduce all human interaction to the cash nexus." Leon Day.

I think there's a link to the rise of single person households. Not having a girlfriend for most of my life has defininitely shortened my life span I'd say. We're not meant to live alone.

The .01% may not consciously THINK about the masses and say, "Hey, you're not in the 1-3% I can use to increase my billions, I don't care if you live or die or reproduce."

That just ACT that way, and gradually and systematically make life less and less tolerable for the bottom 40-60%.

Post: #39

(11-06-2015 03:17 PM)Abelard Lindsey Wrote:  I get the prescription pain-killers issue here and I think its correct. However, neither the NYT article nor non of you in here are saying anything about WHY more people in their 40's (and presumably their 30's) are on these meds.

There are a few things going on:

-- The reason that more people are being prescribed painkillers has to do with the proliferation of office injuries, essentially postural injuries that result from people (especially in a class that used to predominantly do manual labor) instead spending much of their day in front of a computer or otherwise in a seated position. These office injuries are exacerbated by obesity, and more recently by the added burden of phone injuries, postural problems caused by maintaining the forward and downward disposed postures that are required to use a smartphone.

These office and phone injuries are a frequent cause of chronic pain, especially hip, back, and neck pain. And more so in people who are otherwise overweight, in poor shape and do not move around a lot.

-- Further, there has been an explosion of surgeries for incorrectly attributed and misdiagnosed "disc" pain -- pain which is in reality caused by knotty connective tissue and soft tissue injury, primarily the postural and office injuries described above. People who complain of significant chronic pain from these postural problems get sent up for an MRI, and the MRI as often as not will show some disc artifacts that are completely unrelated to the pain (meaning, these artifacts are observed just as frequently in healthy patients who have no pain whatsoever). Moderate chronic pain maltreated and exacerbated by excessive and unnecessary surgeries will over time become severe enough that real drugs like Oxy are required to mitigate it.

-- In parts of the US, the overprescription of these painkillers has lead to an epidemic of addiction that has taken on a life of its own, as drug epidemics do. Meaning that even people that were not prescribed these pills in the first place are able to obtain them and start using them purely as a drug. In towns in Appalachia they can be bought cheaply or obtained from corrupt docs. In addition there has been explosion of "pain clinics" centered (of course) in Florida, which exist solely for the purpose of providing addicts unfettered access to these pills. Many a Kentuckian and West Virginian obese prole has made the proud journey to a Florida "pain clinic" to get their weekly or monthly supply of Oxy.

(11-05-2015 03:18 PM)Zelcorpion Wrote:  And no - the cancer rates are rising for all age groups - in the 1950s child cancer was ridiculously rare - MDs flew all over the country to see one kid with cancer, now it's everywhere. There are multiple reasons for that and we can go into detail on why this is happening, but it does not concern the topic of the thread.

This is tangential to the thread, but cancer rates are not rising so much as cancer detection rates are. We simply have far more sensitive detection and diagnosis tools than ever before, which makes it seem as though there are more cancers than ever before. But that is not really the case.

In addition, while detection rates are indeed rising for all groups, cancer remains primarily a disease of the old, and because we have more old people than ever before (since life spans are, in fact, increasing) we will also see a greater overall incidence of cancer cases. But the age-adjusted true incidence of cancer (as distinct from more sensitive detection and a greater proportion of the population being old) is likely approximately stable, with perhaps growing true incidence of some subtypes and shrinking true incidence of others due to changes in various complex lifestyle factors and environmental exposures.

Post: #40

(11-03-2015 09:32 AM)CleanSlate Wrote:  The graph above shows that only American white male deaths are increasing, while other Western countries show decreases across the board. Cultural decline can't explain that. What can?

I thought it would be just males too, but I emailed the author of the study and he replied saying it was equal to women and men.

But yes, this is specifically a white american problem aged 45-54.

Post: #41

Middle-aged Americans are suffering from spiritual lethargy, just like those Dubai oil sheikhs.

They've benefited from the greatest opportunities and consumption power ever in human history. Their fathers had to storm Normandy or Iwo Jima to earn that cheap education and suburban mortgage. They didn't. Instead, they've embraced worthless consumption even more. Now, the modern American stereotype consists of MacDonald's, Starbucks, Nike, obesity and Apple - all exaggerated products of gluttony, greed and pride. Instead of filling that spiritual hollow, they've settled to prescription drugs, cheap carbohydrates, mindless entertainment and activism for pet causes. The Roman bread and circuses just emerges again and again.

It's too late for them to realize just how powerful the federal government and business elite have become. When the federal government let businesses offshore jobs, they reveled at the cheap prices. When the federal government created comfortable jobs plus pension, they grinned and ignored the economic consequences of future debt. Now when their millennial kids are unemployed, enslaved by these elite financial institutions and pillaged by the federal government, they've partially realized that their kids have inherited their spiritual emptiness, but not the economic opportunity part.

But they're not awake. They're fighting illegal immigration now only because it threatens their pension and Social Security availability. They entered the world with a bang and will leave with a whimper.

Nature is fair. Our primitive brains will always love short-term pleasure over long-term gain. The only problem is that this generation handed immense power to Big Daddy government without thinking twice for short-term pleasure. And it has fucked us all. We cannot follow in their footsteps.

Post: #42

I saw this article today in the English language edition of Aljazeera. I'll quote it in full, and provide the link:

_______________________________

The death rate among white middle-aged Americans is rising at an alarming rate, even as death rates for all other Americans are falling. The increase is concentrated among whites with meager educations and is “largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis,” according to two Princeton University scholars, one of whom was just awarded the Nobel in economics.

Their findings should awaken Americans to the price we pay for pursuing economic policies that enrich the few at the expense of the many.

Drug and alcohol use that results in death from either poisoning or chronic disease, as well as increased self-extermination, point to social pathologies fostered by government policies that favor moving jobs offshore, reducing wages, restricting access to health care and enabling age discrimination in hiring.

Macabre data

There is good reason to think worsening economic conditions are at the heart of what the Princeton economists — Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the new Nobel laureate — found by simply analyzing published mortality data.

Case and Deaton, who are married, found “declines in self-reported health, mental health and ability to work, increased reports of pain, and deteriorating measures of liver function all point to increasing midlife distress,” according to their paper published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

We’ll return to that in a moment, but first, let’s get a handle on the enormity of this macabre trend among middle-aged white Americans.

Every 75 minutes, a white middle-aged American dies who would be alive had the United States simply maintained the mortality level of that group in 1998. That’s about 7,000 unnecessary deaths per year.

Worse, every 16 minutes, a white middle-aged American dies who would be alive had the trend of falling death rates from 1979 through 1998 continued its downward trajectory for the next 15 years.

That comes to a half million extra deaths among middle-aged white Americans from 1999 to 2013.

Many of these added deaths stem from drug and alcohol poisoning and diseases from chronic use, the data show.

The use of prescription painkillers, as well as illegal drugs such as heroin that tamp down emotional pain, is on the rise, especially in states where limited educations are common.

In Alabama, among the poorest states, doctors wrote 143 prescriptions for opioids such as Oxycontin for every 100 residents in 2012 — the highest rate in the nation. Tennessee doctors write such prescriptions at more than 21 times the rate of Minnesota doctors.

Social pathologies

That the death rate for middle-aged American whites, especially those with meager educations, started rising at the turn of the century fits the economic data that I have been analyzing for years. The harsh reality is that our economy is in many ways stuck in 1998 and that for poorly educated Americans, the economy has become a living nightmare with no expectation of a brighter tomorrow.

The rise in drug and alcohol poisonings as well as the rising tide of suicides should not surprise. But these trends should disturb.
In a society based on paid work, long-term unemployment can be devastating to self-esteem, social attachment and life planning. Joblessness and uncertain work promote despair and alcohol abuse.

Alcohol dependence is worst among the unemployed and is higher among those with a high school education or less than among those with a college degree or more, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.

Suicide is the 10th-leading cause of death in America and accounts for a large portion of the rising death toll among middle-aged whites. In 2013, CDC data show, more than 41,000 people took their own lives, more than 32,000 of them men. Suicide is far more common among white men than black men.

While people commit suicide for many reasons, suicides are a canary-in-the-mineshaft indicator of societal pathologies. Economic shocks, especially the loss of reliable income, can result in a significant increase in suicides, as Russian society experienced soon after the collapse of the Soviet empire.

The wages of inequality

For the vast majority of Americans, economic and social conditions have been in decline for years.

The median wage, adjusted for inflation, has been stuck at about $550 a week since 1999. The pretax incomes reported on 90 percent of tax returns in 2013 were in real terms about the same as way back in 1966, up just $191, or six-tenths of 1 percent, after 47 years.

The big income gains were among the top 1 percent, especially the upper reaches of that group. Among the top hundredth of 1 percent, average real income soared from $5.5 million to $25 million over those 47 years.

That’s a growth rate 590 times greater than what the bottom 90 percent experienced, a disparity made even greater because those at the top saw their federal income tax burdens fall by about three times as much as the bottom 90 percent.

The Congressional Research Service looked at people who had been out of work for two years or more in 2013 and found they were more likely to be male and older. Among the unemployed, 8.2 percent of workers under age 35 had spent two years or more without a job. For workers age 45 or older, that rate more than doubled, to 18.2 percent.

Here is an even more disturbing fact: Long-term unemployment rates were essentially the same for those with a high school diploma and those with a four-year college degree.

Through those we elect, we have chosen to create a society in which there are not enough jobs and many of those in middle age find themselves forced into lower status and uncertain employment or are unable to find any work, even with advanced education.

The rise in drug and alcohol poisonings and in fatalities from diseases related to chronic drug and alcohol abuse, as well as the rising tide of suicides, should not surprise. But these trends should disturb.

Hopefully, we will be so disturbed that we will choose to change, electing politicians who will jettison our failed policies for the rich at the expense of everyone else so that, among other benefits, far fewer of us die prematurely because life is too miserable to carry on.

_______________________________

[Here is the link: http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/20...mmentsDiv]

It's pretty clear that no one cares about poor whites. The government doesn't care, and the media doesn't care. Their plight is not a SJW cause celebre, unlike the struggles of other ethnic groups.

Post: #43

Paul Krugman comments on the study in the NYT:

Quote:A couple of weeks ago President Obama mocked Republicans who are “down on America,” and reinforced his message by doing a pretty good Grumpy Cat impression. He had a point: With job growth at rates not seen since the 1990s, with the percentage of Americans covered by health insurance hitting record highs, the doom-and-gloom predictions of his political enemies look ever more at odds with reality.

Yet there is a darkness spreading over part of our society. And we don’t really understand why.

There has been a lot of comment, and rightly so, over a new paper by the economists Angus Deaton (who just won a Nobel) and Anne Case, showing that mortality among middle-aged white Americans has been rising since 1999. This deterioration took place while death rates were falling steadily both in other countries and among other groups in our own nation.

Even more striking are the proximate causes of rising mortality. Basically, white Americans are, in increasing numbers, killing themselves, directly or indirectly. Suicide is way up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and the chronic liver disease that excessive drinking can cause. We’ve seen this kind of thing in other times and places – for example, in the plunging life expectancy that afflicted Russia after the fall of Communism. But it’s a shock to see it, even in an attenuated form, in America.

Yet the Deaton-Case findings fit into a well-established pattern. There have been a number of studies showing that life expectancy for less-educated whites is falling across much of the nation. Rising suicides and overuse of opioids are known problems. And while popular culture may focus more on meth than on prescription painkillers or good old alcohol, it’s not really news that there’s a drug problem in the heartland.

But what’s causing this epidemic of self-destructive behavior?

If you believe the usual suspects on the right, it’s all the fault of liberals. Generous social programs, they insist, have created a culture of dependency and despair, while secular humanists have undermined traditional values. But (surprise!) this view is very much at odds with the evidence.

For one thing, rising mortality is a uniquely American phenomenon – yet America has both a much weaker welfare state and a much stronger role for traditional religion and values than any other advanced country. Sweden gives its poor far more aid than we do, and a majority of Swedish children are now born out of wedlock, yet Sweden’s middle-aged mortality rate is only half of white America’s.

You see a somewhat similar pattern across regions within the United States. Life expectancy is high and rising in the Northeast and California, where social benefits are highest and traditional values weakest. Meanwhile, low and stagnant or declining life expectancy is concentrated in the Bible Belt.

What about a materialist explanation? Is rising mortality a consequence of rising inequality and the hollowing out of the middle class?

Well, it’s not that simple. We are, after all, talking about the consequences of behavior, and culture clearly matters a great deal. Most notably, Hispanic Americans are considerably poorer than whites, but have much lower mortality. It’s probably worth noting, in this context, that international comparisons consistently find that Latin Americans have higher subjective well-being than you would expect, given their incomes.

So what is going on? In a recent interview Mr. Deaton suggested that middle-aged whites have “lost the narrative of their lives.” That is, their economic setbacks have hit hard because they expected better. Or to put it a bit differently, we’re looking at people who were raised to believe in the American Dream, and are coping badly with its failure to come true.

That sounds like a plausible hypothesis to me, but the truth is that we don’t really know why despair appears to be spreading across Middle America. But it clearly is, with troubling consequences for our society as a whole.

In particular, I know I’m not the only observer who sees a link between the despair reflected in those mortality numbers and the volatility of right-wing politics. Some people who feel left behind by the American story turn self-destructive; others turn on the elites they feel have betrayed them. No, deporting immigrants and wearing baseball caps bearing slogans won’t solve their problems, but neither will cutting taxes on capital gains. So you can understand why some voters have rallied around politicians who at least seem to feel their pain.

At this point you probably expect me to offer a solution. But while universal health care, higher minimum wages, aid to education, and so on would do a lot to help Americans in trouble, I’m not sure whether they’re enough to cure existential despair.

Long story short, Paul´s confused and has no clue. He just doesn´t understand why this is happening, except some ambiguous, vague feeling of "despair".
It´s difficult when that which is turns out to be so different from that which ought to be.

Post: #44

Fuck Paul Krugman. This is a condescending piece of shit article that basically equates the mentally ill with Trump voters. Even in the face of a major mental health crisis in one demographic group, he just cannot help himself from hitting the "volatility of right wing politics" button. The shithead has no idea of the voting demographics of those killing themselves and he has the sheer gall to basically say "If you're a Trump voter you're suicidal."

Post: #45

Sounds like this is nothing new... The same old view of coastal elites towards the middle of the country. "What's the matter with Kansas?"