How do we do drug treatment these days?

There was a time, not all that long ago, when drug treatment was simply a matter of someone telling you to pull yourself together. A little like the treatment of PTSD (or shell shock) in the First World War. Those who didn't buck up were malingerers and shot. Fortunately, as we've now learned a great deal more about stress and shock, so we have learned a great deal more about addictions and how we might cope with them.

Perhaps the most important breakthrough was to realise that it might not actually be addiction itself that was the problem. There might be some deeper problem of which addiction was only a symptom: thus the rise of dual diagnosis and the role of an interdisciplinary team in drug treatment. A side track from this point is that we also now recognise multiple addictions: which we again now tend to think are the result of one deeper problem manifesting itself in a variety of ways.

Running this dual diagnosis a close second for the great insight is that we now recognise that there is no one treatment that will work for everyone. Some will do best from therapy, others will find themselves most helped by medically led interventions. So we now think that drug treatment must be carried out in a holistic manner: looking at the entire patient. Working with them to see what works best for them. This in turn means that the treatment provider must be like the Pat Moore Foundation: an integrated one, able to offer the various different treatments from the one residential site as they are needed. Click through any of the links for more information.

The Canyon of Heroes

The Canyon of Heroes is not in fact a Canyon, nor is it full of heroes: well, not all the time that is.

The Canyon of Heroes is part of the route that traditionally ticker tape parades have taken through the City. The route, including that Canyon of Heroes, usually starts at Battery Place, then goes up Broadway towards Chambers Street and then to City Hall.

The heroes part is of course not just for the Yankees who will take this route on Friday starting at 11 am. This is also the same route that was taken by returning astronauts, just to give an example of other heroes who have been through the canyon.

Oh, and of course, Manhattan doesn't actually have canyons, the reference is to the way that the skyscrapers feel like, when you're at ground level, you're in a canyon. The heroes of course are also made, not natural, which is why the City welcomes them with such parades.

New Source for Katie Holmes News

Is that the sort of celebrity you are interested in? Katie Holmes and her husband, Tom Cruise?

If you are looking for celebrity news of this kind then you'll want to go over to this blog, dedicated to bringing you the news on Katie Holmes.

You know, if you want to know more about her marriage, about her committment to Scoentology, or the baby Suri, or, in fact, anything at all that you wanted to know about Katie Holmes, well, that's the place to go.

New Foods

No, I can't say that I dolike the idea ofthis supposednew health food.

Black chicken anyone?

It's a regular chicken, just that the bones and skin are black....as is the flesh. Supposed to be very good for the health but I don't think I'll be tryin it anytime soon really.

Bigging up Malta

Getting these things to scale is just too difficult:

When Malta adopts the euro next year, the tiny Mediterranean island will get an unexpected boost to its international stature.

New euro coins and notes show Malta to be much bigger than it actually is, The Times newspaper reported Monday, because the island is too small for the minting machines to show it on the same scale as other euro zone countries.

As a result Malta, which is only 27 km (17 miles) long, is shown to be as large as Corsica, which is 183 km (114 miles) long.

Malta adopts the euro on January 1, 2008.

One question though, what did they do with The Vatican (yes, they issue euro coins)?

Nice Ringtones Site

"Ringtones are undoubtedly one of the most popular features that somebody can download from the net. While searching for Ringtones I found a very cool site. GoldRingtone.com is the best site to download free ringtones without restrictions. The information mail I received from the site says that the database is enriched with new ringtones every week. I decided to test it and download some ringtones (Rihanna’s Unfaithull is cool) and it works just fine.

I have to notice that the site offers free free MP3 Ringtones, Real Tones, Midi Ringtones. Every carrier is available. Get free Cingular Ringtones and free Sprint Ringtones.

Besides the site has an informative blog for mobile phones and a page dedicated to the famous Mosquito Ringtones. Do you know what a mosquito ringtone is? It is the new, cool weapon that children use in order to receive a call or an sms without being noticeable from the adults. This is due to the fact that the adults can’t hear some high frequency sounds.

Well, I suppose that Goldringtone is the ideal site for someone who wants to download one or more free ringtones, easily.

Hotter, Smaller Sheep

Climate change is changing the size of sheep on a Scottish isle:

While every physics pupil knows that heat can usually be relied on to make objects expand, for the semi-wild sheep of the Outer Hebrides it appears to have the opposite effect.

Observations of Soay sheep on Hirta island have shown that the warmer temperatures associated with global warming allow more smaller animals to survive the winter. And with greater numbers of smaller sheep living through the cold months, the average size of the animals falls.

Research led by Imperial College London, published in the journal Science, is the first to establish a direct link between the genetic changes of an animal population and climate change. It indicates that mankind, on top of the ecological legacy of causing species to become extinct or vastly reduced in number, is leaving an evolutionary legacy by affecting natural selection.

On Hirta, the researchers used a combination of population data and field observations to track the size of individual sheep and how their survival rates influenced their numbers.

It's the mass to surface ratio there, smaller sheep just couldn't control their temperatures in the colder winters. So who says climate change is all bad then?

Wiki in the new OED

It's that time of year again and the new words are being welcomed into the OED. Wiki's made it:

THE OXFORD ENGLISH Dictionary has granted ‘wiki’ access to its hallowed ranks of words deemed acceptable.

‘Wiki wiki’ is actually a Hawaiian phrase that means ‘quick’ but ‘wiki’ earned global renown in a secondary meaning as a communally editable web page.

'Virtualize' is also there although the OED seems to think its recent upturn in usage comes from virtual reality rather than the techie business of making a computer act as many computers.

Members of think-tank Demos - and how much freedom to nip down the pub for a few hours brainstorming does that job suggest? - have thrown in the opinion that what is really needed is a web page that reflects the fast-moving change of today’s language. Yes, that’s really necessary.

What the fools at Demos think is really of no concern to any sentient being.