Constipation Can Cause Pants-Wetting and Bed-Wetting

Back in Novem­ber 2011, I explained that chil­dren who “refuse” to have bow­el move­ments in the pot­ty or are “hold­ing” their stool for days on end aren’t mis­be­hav­ing, they’re con­sti­pat­ed. Recent­ly, I saw some pub­lished stud­ies (click here and here) that showed that con­sti­pa­tion can also cause pants-wet­ting and bed-wet­ting acci­dents. Those stud­ies showed that the prob­lem could often be solved by giv­ing the child lax­a­tives. A bet­ter solu­tion would be to feed the child a diet that would pre­vent con­sti­pa­tion to begin with: a plant-based diet with no dairy prod­ucts.

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Yet Another Silly Study About White Rice!

If you look at arti­cles about East Asian coun­tries in issues of Nation­al Geo­graph­ic from the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, you will notice two things. One is that many of the peo­ple in East Asia were eat­ing a lot of white rice. The oth­er is that only the rich peo­ple and the sumo wrestlers were over­weight. That’s because the rich peo­ple and the sumo wrestlers were eat­ing some­thing besides rice and veg­eta­bles.

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Why I Think the Paleo Diet Is Silly

Late­ly, many nutri­tion gurus have been pro­mot­ing what they call a “paleo” diet. The word “paleo” comes from Pale­olith­ic, which lit­er­al­ly means “ear­ly stone age.” They think that human beings ought to be eat­ing a diet like the diet that peo­ple ate dur­ing the ear­ly stone age. Per­son­al­ly, I think that the argu­ments in favor of the paleo diet are sil­ly, for sev­er­al rea­sons. I think that the appeal of the paleo diet is based on ado­les­cent male fan­tasies of being an unwashed, unshaven big game hunter who gets to spend time with a hot-look­ing maid­en in a fur or leather biki­ni. Real men don’t eat quiche. They eat bron­to­burg­ers:

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American Medicine Is Still Stuck in the 1950s!

In the musi­cal Guys and Dolls, the char­ac­ter named Ade­laide has a psy­cho­so­mat­ic cold. As she explained,

The aver­age unmar­ried female
basi­cal­ly inse­cure
due to some long frus­tra­tion may react
with psy­cho­so­mat­ic symp­toms
dif­fi­cult to endure
affect­ing the upper res­pi­ra­to­ry tract.

Guys and Dolls is a quaint arti­fact from the 1950s. Nev­er­the­less, the Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric Association’s Diag­nos­tic and Sta­tis­ti­cal Man­u­al still gives doc­tors per­mis­sion to say, “It’s all in your head” if they can’t imme­di­ate­ly fig­ure out what’s wrong with you. An arti­cle of mine that was pub­lished in the jour­nal Med­ical Hypothe­ses says that doc­tors can­not make that kind of diag­no­sis with­out mak­ing an error in rea­son­ing. For that rea­son, I argue that the APA should remove con­ver­sion dis­or­der and som­a­ti­za­tion dis­or­der from the DSM. The fifth edi­tion of the DSM (DSM-5) is due in 2013.

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