Daily OpusEverything I write is freely rebloggable. Just keep the source and tell people about my books :D [Until I decide otherwise, my pronouns are Ze/Hir/Hirself. As in "Ze went to the shops to get hir medication hirself". Thank you for the respect.]
Her name is Katalin Karikó. Hungarian. Daughter of a butcher. Her thesis work became the basis of the mRNA vaccine technology. Read the article here.
My favorite bits from the article include how Dr. Kariko celebrated the fact that the vaccines that used her mRNA research worked
“On Nov. 8, the first results of the Pfizer-BioNTech study came in, showing that the mRNA vaccine offered powerful immunity to the new virus. Dr. Kariko turned to her husband. “Oh, it works,” she said. “I thought so.”
To celebrate, she ate an entire box of Goobers chocolate-covered peanuts. By herself.”
B: Don’t threaten me with a good time – Anon Guest
Sap had screamed for five solid minutes because he thought he had lost Lachasse forever. The fact that there were babies and children screaming at the same time was almost lost to him. The instant he saw his favourite Cleric, he had almost collapsed from relief. Thereafter, he hadn’t left Lachasse’s side. Desperately helping more desperate souls than his own debatable one.
It took weeks for everything to be sorted to a point of stability. Lachasse took residence in the nearest temple, making it her own. Sap tagged along and stayed close. In those few first weeks, she was too exhausted to make note of where he slept. On the floor, at her feet, like any loyal pet.
They were both too exhausted to change anything during that first month after the Unwanted’s Exile. It was the second month, when things were achieving a state of normalcy that she noticed. They had done everything for the day and she was changing for bed behind the screen Sap had made for her modesty. She came out in her night shift, and noticed the lack of his bedding.
There was a post circulating a while back that told you how to fight your insurance company when they refused to cover medication or a procedure. You have to ask for Some Specific Information that they usually can’t give without revealing an untrained intern or automated system is the one who made the call.
I reblogged at the time but didn’t save, cuz I’d never had to fight my insurance company for anything… WELP, the time has come!
Does anyone remember this post or know the Sekrit Bureaucratic Handshake that I can use to get them to cover my new meds? I don’t want to go back to metformin 😱
If it’s specifically to get them to cover meds, you want to talk to your doctor about having Prior Authorization agreement. Basically your doctor can appeal to the insurance company that no other substitute is a good fit for you, and you need XYZ drug.
I know when I tried to get my doc to do this, they insurance company Insisted I try lots of cheaper meds first. I’m still fighting them over it, but it’s worth a shot cause sometimes they relent.
I believe it was the HIPAA compliance officer mentioned in the post OP talked about. But @thebibliosphere has also given good information here.
It was to ask for the HIPAA compliance officer and then ask for a list of all the people who accessed your account to make the rejection decision. The idea is to argue the medical qualifications of those people, but the I durante usually won’t let it get that far.
Yes, that’s it. In this case it’s probably better to try the doctor first (which is what worked for me when chemo drug #1 almost killed me; I was warned by a nurse that I might have to write a letter to the insurance, but the doctor’s information was enough to get the much more expensive drug approved).
So for anyone looking for their insurance to cover a certain medication, getting their doctor to write a letter of Prior Authorization is the most reliable method of ensuring they are listened to. Sometimes you may need to chase them up over the PA, as it seems the OP did in the notes, but asking for the Hippa Compliance Officer is likely going to be met with confusion or rejection.
why caffeine works for some of us, but not all, and even then it often depends on the way you take it and the dosage
how come all of us have gastrointestinal problems?
addendum to the above: what exactly are our gastrointestinal problems? are we genetically more likely to have autism be comorbid with gluten sensitivity/colitis/IBS/lactose intolerance/whatever else or is it something completely different? is it psychosomatic? the fuck
okay but how does being sensory-seeking work. and what does stimming do to your brain. what neurological function are we facilitating with flapping hands and rocking back and forth and spinning? wouldn’t it be great if we had a serious long-term study of the brain on stimming?
are you more likely to be autistic and LGBT?
what are things we do better than neurotypicals?
but no it’s always “how do we train the animals to be something they’re not” or “but what made you this way??” or “Time To Find A Cure”
why do we all have sleep disorders
what’s up with the joint problems
and the faceblindness
what are the communication patterns here? how come I can meet one autistic person and immediately grok how they communicate, and be confused by another, but all neurotypicals are confusing? what’s going on with that?
how much of what we currently recognise as ‘autistic symptoms’ are actually ptsd symptoms? or autistic ptsd symptoms?
ALL. OF. THIS.
OK, so I decided to check out which of these had been researched and what they found.
Caffeine - not much, but this study looks interesting. It suggests that if you’re not a regular caffeine consumer, caffeine might temporarily make you act less autistic.
Oh, hey, this study has a potential answer to both caffeine response and sleep problems! There’s apparently an enzyme that affects both caffeine and melatonin metabolism.
GI issues - this study didn’t find a link. The rate of GI issues was 9% for both autistic and NT children. The most common GI issues for both groups were food intolerance, usually lactose intolerance.
This study found a much higher prevalence of GI issues in autistic kids (17%), although they didn’t compare them with NTs. They also suggest that there may be a link between regression and GI issues, and confirm yet again that the MMR vaccine has nothing to do with autism. The most common GI issue they found was constipation, followed by diarrhea and food allergies.
This study compared GI issues between autistic kids and NT siblings. They found that 83% of the autistic sample and 28% of their siblings had at least one possibly-GI-related symptom. They also give data on specific GI symptoms, such as gaseousness (54% of autistics and 19% of siblings), abdominal discomfort (44% of autistics and 9% of siblings), and so forth. They found 20% of autistics and 2% of siblings had three or more poops per day, 32% of autistics and 2% of siblings had consistently watery poops, and 23% of autistics and none of their siblings had large changes in consistency. Also, apparently parents felt that 49% of the autistics and none of the siblings had particularly foul-smelling poops. And another for the sleep question - this study found 51% of autistics and 7% of siblings had sleep problems, with sleep problems being more common in autistic kids with GI issues.
Stimming and Sensory-Seeking - I couldn’t find much. This study I found is interesting, but it’s about more OCD-like compulsions, not actually stimming.
Oh, here’s something. A big detailed review of neurophysiological findings of sensory processing in autism.
LGBT - I’ve written up stuff about this elsewhere, but in short, autistic people, especially AFAB autistics, are definitely more likely to be asexual, bisexual, kinky and trans. Some relevant studies here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, and there’s plenty more to be found.
Autistic Strengths - Well, Laurent Mottron and his team, including autistic rights advocate Michelle Dawson, have done a lot of research on what they term ‘enhanced perceptual functioning’, which they theorize explains the Block Design peak sometimes seen in autistic people. (Block Design is one of the subtests of the Weschler’s IQ test, and autistic people often show a relative strength on this test relative to other subtests on this test.) In general, I highly recommend looking at their research. It really shows what can happen when an autistic person gets involved in autism research.
This study by a different research team finds that children gifted in realistic still-life drawing have higher rates of repetitive behavior typical of autism (though none of their sample were actually autistic), and show similar visuospatial profiles to autistic kids.
This study finds that perfect pitch is associated with autistic traits. On the AQ, musicians with perfect pitch scored higher on the imagination and attention-switching subscales than musicians without perfect pitch and non-musicians. This study found a subset of autistic kids have extremely good pitch perception, with no relationship to musical training.
People in STEM fields are more likely to be autistic or have autistic relatives, especially mathematicians. (Which probably comes as no surprise to anyone who’s spent time in the math department of any university.) This study also finds that autistic kids tend to be better at math.
Sleep - as a couple studies above mentioned, sleep issues in autism could be related to melatonin metabolism or GI issues. This study found that 53% of autistic kids, 46% of kids with intellectual disabilities and 32% of NT kids have sleep problems. Autistic kids are both slower to fall asleep and more likely to wake up early than NT kids.
This study found a correlation between autistic traits and sleep problems in autistic kids. Repetitive behavior is related with being slower to get to sleep and not getting as many hours of sleep per night; communication problems are related to being slower to get to sleep, not getting as much sleep, and parasomnias (night terrors, restless leg syndrome, etc); and social differences are related to being slower to get to sleep, not getting as much sleep, waking up at night, parasomnias and breathing problems while sleeping.
This study found a strong correlation between sleep problems and sensory hypersensitivity among autistic kids. And this study found that autistic and/or intellectually disabled kids showed strong correlations between poor sleep, anxiety and behavior problems.
And this study found that 67.9% of autistic kids have sleep problems, and parents of kids with sleep problems were under more stress. Boys and younger children had more sleep problems.
Joint problems - This study found that people with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that causes joint hypermobility, were more likely to be autistic. (And also to have mood disorders and attempt suicide.)
This study suggests that people with joint hypermobility have larger amygdala and various other brain structural differences, which was correlated with anxiety and higher sensitivity to internal body sensations. And this study found that 31.5% of people with ADHD and 13.9% of NTs have benign joint hypermobility syndrome.
Faceblindness - This study confirms that prosopagnosia (faceblindness) is more common among autistic people, with 67% having some degree of facial recognition difficulties.
This study reviews three theories about why autistic people have prosopagnosia, and concludes that the most likely of the three theories is the idea that avoiding eye contact impairs face recognition.
This study found that autistic people are slower to notice faces in scenes, and pay less attention to faces.
The last two questions I’m not really sure where to start.
On the communication question, this recent study found that when people were told a story and asked to tell it to another person, and another, etc, basically in a game of telephone, the chains made up of all-autistic and all-NT people performed similarly, but the chains that alternated autistic/NT performed worse than either of them, indicating that autistic people communicate with each other just as well as NT people communicate with each other, but both sides are bad at communicating with the other. The people in homogeneous chains also felt they had better rapport with the people before and after them in the chain than the people in the heterogeneous chains.
This small qualitative study by one of the same lead authors (Catherine Crompton, you might want to keep an eye on her) talked to a small group of autistic adults about their social interactions and found that they are more comfortable around other autistic people and feel that other autistic people understand them more easily than NT people, whereas when they spend time with NT people they feel they have to conform to NT standards.
[clutches my pearls]Trans people in 1921?!??! But I thought trans people were trendof today’s youth!
I’d like to add my great great aunt Flora!
Y'all wanna know why we don’t see or hear about trans people from that era?
That’s because that picture was taken at what is known in its native language as Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, it is the place where the first trans healthcare was developed, where the term transsexual was coined.
Do you want to know what happened to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft?
It was the victim of the very first Nazi book burning. Their teachings were outlawed and their books destroyed. Their leaders - such as Magnus Hirschfeld - were criminalized and exiled, if not outright murdered.
The fascists exterminated not just a generation of trans people, but they erased our history from the books almost entirely. It took us almost a century to get back to where we are now.
We’ve always been here, but our future is not guaranteed. We have to fight for our survival, because it’s happening again.
My sister, who I live with, thought she couldn’t get the vaccine because she doesn’t have insurance.
We’re not really used to “free”…. spread the word.
It depends where you go too. I tried to sign up at CVS and it said “free with insurance”
In the US they are not allowed to charge an individual for this vaccine. They are allowed to bill your insurance. Whether you have insurance or not, you will not pay anything.
THERE WILL BE A QUESTION ON THE REGISTRATION ABOUT INSURANCE YOU DO NOT NEED TO FILL IT OUT.
When I registered there was a page for insurance information. We were instructed just to put “no insurance” and keep going.
![socialistexan:
“emdots:
“thattallnerdybean:
“[clutches my pearls] Trans people in 1921?!??! But I thought trans people were trend of today’s youth!
”
I’d like to add my great great aunt Flora!
”
Y'all wanna know why we don’t see or hear about trans...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/995b65701b7602bc1e4061c13204950c/tumblr_ot75q086AK1s9c6nao1_500.jpg)
