Wimbledon Winner Novak Djokovic’s Diet Secret for Success

It's called "Applied Kinesiology" and it as bunk as it comes,

The concepts of applied kinesiology do not conform to scientific facts about the causes or treatment of disease. Controlled studies have found no difference between the results with test substances and with placebos. Differences from one test to another may be due to suggestibility, distraction, variations in the amount of force or leverage involved, and/or muscle fatigue. If you encounter a practitioner who relies on AK muscle-testing for diagnosis, head for the nearest exit. Meanwhile, it would help if science-based kinesiologists would stop referring to what they do as "applied kinesiology."

The obvious book promotion aside, why or how is a world class athlete falling for this garbage:

“THIS IS A TEST THAT WILL help us see if your body is sensitive to certain foods,” Dr. Cetojevic told me.

We were not in a hospital or lab or doctor’s office. He was not drawing blood. There were no scanning devices or big, scary pieces of medical equipment. It was July 2010, at a tournament in Croatia, and Igor Cetojevic, M.D., a holistic practitioner from my native Serbia, was explaining to me that he thought he knew why I’d fallen apart so many times in the past, and how I could change my diet, my body, and my life for the better. Then he had me do something very strange.

He had me place my left hand on my belly, and put my right arm straight out to the side.

“I want you to resist the pressure,” he said as he pushed down on my right arm. After a moment, he stopped. “This is what your body should feel like,” he said.

Then, he gave me a slice of bread. Should I eat it?

“No,” he said, and laughed. “Hold it against your stomach, and put your right arm out again.” Once more, he pushed down on my arm, explaining to me that this crude test would tell me whether or not I was sensitive to gluten, the protein in wheat, barley, rye, and other common bread grains.

Wimbledon Winner Novak  Djokovic’s Diet Secret for Success

Mad Science: The Treatment of Mental Illness Fails to Progress [Excerpt] - Scientific American

As civilized human beings, we like to console ourselves with visions of progress, illusory as that concept often proves to be. Perhaps we have not seen progress in the realms of literature and art (though some would dispute that claim), but surely science moves forward, and medicine too, insofar as it is a science rather than an art. In the developed world, at least, we now enjoy longer, and certainly more materially abundant if not culturally richer and happier lives. Except if we are mad, that is. Modern psychiatry and its potions notwithstanding, one of the more sobering realities about serious mental illness in the twenty-first century is that its sufferers not only die at a much younger age on average than the rest of us (as much as twenty-five years sooner), but also that the incidence of serious illness and mortality in this population has accelerated in recent decades. On this most basic of levels we seem to be regressing.

Psychiatry seems to be in trouble too. The neo-Kraepelinian approach it adopted when DSM III was published in 1980 at first served it well. The reliability and replicability of psychiatric diagnoses increased, and embarrassing disputes about what was wrong with a particular patient receded into the past. Freudians lost the internecine professional war decisively, and psychiatrists embraced once more a biological account of mental disorders that superficially made sense to their medical brethren, however schematic it remained. And the new approach proved extraordinarily attractive to the drug companies, who underwrote the psychiatric research enterprise, and as the years went by, increasingly influenced the very terms in which mental illness was discussed, even the categories of illness that purportedly exist in the world.

Each successive edition of the manual, the revised third edition (III R) of 1987, the fourth edition (IV of 1994) and its ‘text revision’ (IV TR of 2000), adhered to the fundamental approach psychiatry had adopted in 1980, though new ‘illnesses’ were added on each occasion, the definitions of psychopathology were tweaked and the page count mounted. But as ‘illnesses’ proliferated in each revision, and the criteria for assigning a particular diagnosis were loosened, the very problem that had led to the invention of the new versions of the DSM recurred, and major new threats to psychiatric legitimacy surfaced.

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Those put in charge of the enterprise announced that the logic that had underpinned the two previous editions was deeply flawed, and they would fix things. Drawing on the findings of neuroscience and genetics, they would move away from the symptom-based system that they now acknowledged was inadequate, and build a manual that linked mental disorders to brain function. They would also take account of the fact that mental disorder is a dimensional, not a categorical kind of thing: a matter of being more or less sane, not a black and white world with sanity in this corner and mental illness in that. It was a grand ambition. The only problem was that it was an ambition impossible to fulfill. Having thrashed about in pursuit of this chimera, those running the project were ultimately forced to concede defeat, and by 2009 they were back to tinkering with the descriptive approach.

Mad Science: The Treatment of Mental Illness Fails to Progress [Excerpt] - Scientific American

The stubborn myth of the Christian country: Why the U.S. has always been “one nation, under gods” - Salon.com

Yes, another book to add to my list. What intrigues me is the overall premise behind the book, the "a city upon a hill" reference. Although I was aware of this metaphor, I never considered the ramifications in regards to the "Christian Nation" push by the Reich; especially in regards to their love of all things Puritan. It is definitely something to explore,,,

 See also: We are not a Christian nation: Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy and the eternal lie of the “city upon a hill” - An excerpt from "One Nation Under Gods: A New American History"

As Peter Manseau, author of “One Nation, Under Gods: A New American History,” would have it, nothing has done more damage to the ideal of American religious pluralism than the “stubborn persistence of words spoken more than a century before the United States was a nation at all.” Those words are “a city upon a hill,” preached by the Puritan John Winthrop to his fellow colonists as they prepared to leave their ship at Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Most strenuously invoked by Ronald Reagan, the city on the hill, according to Manseau, has for the past 50 years “dominated presidential rhetoric about the nation’s self-understanding, causing an image borrowed from the Gospels to become a tenet of faith in America’s civil religion.”

The incessant citation of Winthrop’s metaphor — which envisioned the fledgling colony as a shining example set up to inspire the world but also to invite its comprehensive moral scrutiny — keeps reinforcing the assumption that the United States is fundamentally Christian. There’s more behind that stubborn belief than just rhetoric, of course, but when even ostensibly pluralistic presidents like John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama conjure up Winthrop’s biblical metaphor, it starts to take on the aura of an unquestioned truth.

Well, Manseau certainly questions it with “One Nation, Under Gods,” an unusual work of history meant to revive the idea that the U.S. is a “land shaped and informed by internal religious diversity — some of it obvious, some of it hidden.” Most key points in our national narrative involve a non-Christian element if you look closely, he maintains. “One Nation, Under Gods” is less a continuous narrative itself than a series of isolated snapshots, each chapter telling the story of a person considered a heretic, blasphemer, atheist or heathen, who nevertheless helped in some way to shape the course of American history.

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Some of the stories in “One Nation, Under Gods” are more surprising. “It is perhaps the greatest of forgotten influences on American life and culture,” Manseau writes, that some 20 percent or more of Africans living in America around the time of the Revolutionary War were Muslims, a quantity that “dwarfed the number of Roman Catholics or Jews.” The majority of enslaved Africans did practice such Western African religions as Yoruba and Obeah, all of which contributed to the distinctive customs of African-American Christianity. But we also have a handful of stories of African Muslims abducted to the U.S., where, as in the case of one Omar ibn Said, they astonished the natives by writing fluently in a strange alphabet (Arabic) and impressed, if also bewildered, everyone with their abstemious piety.

The stubborn myth of the Christian country: Why the U.S. has always been “one nation, under gods” - Salon.com

AA and Rehab Culture Have Shockingly Low Success Rates | Alternet

Alcoholics Anonymous is a part of our nation’s fabric. In the seventy-six years since AA was created, 12-step programs have expanded to include over three hundred different organizations, focusing on such diverse issues as smoking, shoplifting, social phobia, debt, recovery from incest, even vulgarity. All told, more than five million people recite the Serenity Prayer at meetings across the United States every year.

Twelve-step programs hold a privileged place in our culture as well. The legions of “anonymous” members who comprise these groups are helped in their proselytizing mission by hit TV shows such as "Intervention," which preaches the gospel of recovery. “Going to rehab” is likewise a common refrain in music and fi lm, where it is almost always uncritically presented as the one true hope for beating addiction. AA and rehab have even been codified into our legal system: court-mandated attendance, which began in the late 1980s, is today a staple of drug-crime policy. Every year, our state and federal governments spend over $15 billion on substance-abuse treatment for addicts, the vast majority of which are based on 12-step programs. There is only one problem: these programs almost always fail.

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Any substantive conversation about treatment in this country must reckon with the toll levied when a culture encourages one approach to the exclusion of all others, especially when that culture limits the treatment options for suffering people, ignores advances in understanding addiction, and excludes and even shames the great majority of people who fail in the sanctioned approach.

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In other words, the program doesn’t fail; you fail.

Imagine if similar claims were made in defense of an ineffective antibiotic. Imagine dismissing millions of people who did not respond to a new form of chemotherapy as “constitutionally incapable” of properly receiving the drug. Of course, no researchers would make such claims in scientific circles—if they did, they would risk losing their standing. In professional medicine, if a treatment doesn’t work, it’s the treatment that must be scrutinized, not the patient. Not so for Alcoholics Anonymous.



AA and Rehab Culture Have Shockingly Low Success Rates | Alternet

That’s not autism: It’s simply a brainy, introverted boy - Salon.com

For me, William’s imaginativeness, as well as the emotional give-and-take in our pretend play interactions, was proof positive that it was folly to consider him autistic in any way.

Fast-forward to the present. William is now a high school student who is very active in student government. He is quite at ease with other teenagers who share his level of intellect. He continues to demonstrate the same thirst for knowledge that he had as a toddler. When classroom subjects interest him, his academic performance is stellar. When they don’t, William’s grades suffer. His report cards often contain peaks and valleys of As and Fs, which is immensely frustrating for his parents. His interests are not highly obscure and detail oriented, characteristic of autism, such as memorizing the names of dinosaurs or the serial numbers on Ford trucks. He is an abstract thinker who labors to understand issues more deeply. For instance, he has a complex understanding of different forms of government, and he is able to articulate the arguments for and against democratic, fascist, and oligarchical arrangements. This conceptual, philosophical way of acquiring knowledge tends not to be autism-friendly.

Granted, William is far more comfortable isolating himself and studying political geography and rock-and-roll memorabilia than he is hanging out at the mall. In addition, he can still explode emotionally when he is forced to switch activities, such as applying himself to his homework rather than researching Fender guitars or the geography of Iceland on the Internet. Moreover, he’ll only incorporate new food items into his diet when he has tried them at a fancy restaurant that doesn’t have kiddie foods such as pizza, hot dogs, or peanut butter sandwiches on the menu. However, these traits and behaviors don’t mean that he’s autism spectrum disordered. They reveal William to be a brainy, somewhat introverted, individualistically minded boy whose overexcitement for ideas and need for control cause problems with parents and peers.

That’s not autism: It’s simply a brainy, introverted boy - Salon.com