babble

The good news is that it’s Friday, and that means it’s Official Almost The Weekend Day. I totally approve of weekends.

The bad news is that i am SO not awake, have already been up since 4am, my coffee still hasn’t kicked in yet, and already my feed reader has a number of things that are helping me further develop that involuntary twitch under my left eye. Yay for helpful! And because Sharing Is Caring, i’m going to post some links. Hopefully i’ve given enough “holy crap i am cranky right now” caveats, so on with the rantybits.

First up is a page from BBC Health: Fibromyalgia. It’s a fact sheet with some relatively common information about the condition. I read through the entire thing, and didn’t get eye-twitchy until i read this bit:

Around one in 100 people develops fibromyalgia at some point in their lives, most often during middle age. The majority of those affected are women, although men and children can be affected.

One of my pet peeves about reporting on fibromyalgia is the pushing of the idea that it’s something that mostly affects middle-aged women. A decade ago, it was commonly referred to as a “wastebasket diagnosis” at best, and an excuse for lazy, whining middle-aged housewives at worst. Since the symptoms of fibromyalgia are so varied and bizarre, there is a relatively long list of other conditions that need to be ruled out before a decent physician should give a diagnosis of fibromyalgia. Therefore, some people go for years (in some cases, decades) before finding out that fibro is what’s going on with them - so IME/IMO it’s not that it primarily affects middle-aged women, but rather that it’s frequently not until middle age that someone hears the fibro diagnosis. I can recall fibro symptoms as early as 5 or 6, but didn’t get a diagnosis until i was in my 20s.

This next bit might seem like a minor detail: on other BBC Health pages, the picture at the top of the page seems to be at least partially representative of the people most affected by the conditions or treatments for the condition. The allergies page has a kid waiting to get allergy tests; on the cancer page is a slew of people of a wide variety of ages and nationalities; on the muscle pain you’ve got a picture of a dude getting a massage, while the asthma page shows someone using an inhaler. On the fibromyalgia page is a grey-haired woman with an expression that would curdle fresh milk. *facepalm*

Moving right along…

Okay, i really don’t want this next part to be misinterpreted, so i’m going to try to state something up front: i am not glad this person died, nor am i snarking them specifically. Rather, i am snarking the idea of “lose weight for a longer life” bit of woohah. From the NYT we have the following article: Sidney Craig, 76, a Founder of Jenny Craig, Dies. Gee, isn’t 76 rather young, all things considered? Yeah, i’m going to hell, i’m a bad person, etc etc. So many tasteless jokes, so little time.

In other news, we hop back over to the other side of the pond to read that BBC has decided to revisit the “fat friends make you fat” crap. The particular angle in this article comes down to fat people being a bunch of enablers who, by being fat, give “permission” to the people around them to eat more.

The first thing that came to mind is that little game that people play when we go out to eat with someone else or a group of someone else’s. You can always tell who’s going to play it because they want to make sure they order last - they have to hear what everyone else is eating, because if everyone else orders a salad, it’s an OMFG HUGE CATASTROPHE if they order a cheeseburger. Never mind if everyone else ordered a salad because that’s what they genuinely wanted to eat (because a good salad is just fucking delish), there’s usually someone who wants to make sure no one is going to judge them based on what they’re eating.

Now, given that, i’d almost be inclined to believe them if it weren’t for that whole “don’t know how to make a thin person fat any more than we know how to make a fat person thing” thing. That and the wacky “correllation does not equal causation” bit. Minor things, really.