Monthly Archives: October 2012

Photography: Amazingly Beautiful Vegetable MRIs

Laurie says:

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while.

Over at the blog Inside, Insides, Andy Ellison of Boston University Medical School has been throwing the entire produce aisle inside a Philips 3 Tesla MRI, revealing the otherworldly realms that dwell inside common foods. Here’s but a small sampling of his many see-through delicacies, immortalized as GIFs — my favorite is the broccoli explosion.  i09 We Come From The Future –  Cyriaque Lama  (This is the better link for seeing the images.) The series of slices flow through interior to exterior views.
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Tomato

 

These MRI moving pictures of vegetables are amazing. I know that a trip to the vegetable market is often an aesthetic experience for me.  I have been known to buy beautiful vegetables simply to admire.  For me these black and white visions in motion are totally unexpected in their  beauty.
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Artichoke

The still images are beautiful but  the moving MRI’s are an entirely different experience.
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corn

Also check out the high res still images on Inside, Insides.

 

Doomed If You Do, Doomed If You Don’t: Scientists Attribute Endometriosis to “Attractiveness”

Laurie and Debbie say:

A recent Italian study claims that women with the most severe form of endometriosis happen to be unusually attractive.”

The women also completed a questionnaire about their sexual history, and the results showed that women with severe endometriosis were more likely to have had sexual intercourse before age 18. This could be a result of these women being more attractive, even during adolescence, the researchers said.

So many things are wrong with this that we had trouble figuring out where to start, until we caught the most important point. Patriarchal/kyriarchal society has spent millennia punishing women for any kind of attractiveness or sexuality, while also punishing us for being unattractive and/or sexually unavailable. This punishment specifically includes the belief that the Judeo-Christian god requires women to suffer pain in childbirth. This page has several examples of women punished for transgressing that belief, including:

In 1591 in Scotland, Euphanie Macalyane used a remedy to reduce delivery pains. For bypassing the Biblical curse of Genesis 3:16 – where God cursed Eve (and thus, women) with pain during childbirth – the devout King James VI had her burnt at the stake.

The researchers in the endometriosis study are more 21st century and less draconian–all they want to do is make sure that “attractive” (i.e., conventionally attractive to the four researchers who assessed women for the study) understand that their attractiveness puts them at risk, even while it makes them “more likely to have sexual intercourse before age 18.”

That’s the next problem. Any woman knows, and anyone who has ever paid attention to women’s sexuality should know, that conventional attractiveness is completely unrelated to when a woman first has sex. Some conventionally beautiful women have sex young; some don’t. Some conventionally unattractive women have sex young; some don’t. Some of the vast group of women in the middle have sex young; some don’t.

That begs the question of what defines attractive–in this case, two men and two women with a questionnaire. Or the question of how endometriosis can be most common in conventionally attractive women when there are endless studies, such as this one, that say that fat women (and especially women who were fat as children) are at the greatest risk. Don’t trust those studies any more than you trust this one, by the way–any study that blames fat is immediately suspect.

But you begin to see the jaws the researchers are putting women in: be conventionally attractive? You’re at higher risk for endometriosis. Be fat? You’re at higher risk for endometriosis.

In case that’s not enough, a few more points:

The study consisted of 300 women, 1/3 with severe rectovaginal endometriosis, 1/3 with less severe endometriosis, and 1/3 who were in gynecological treatment for “other reasons.” We’ve seen smaller studies, but this not a large one, and because the women were all in treatment in the same area, diversity is likely to have been very low. The evaluati0n of attractiveness was largely subjective. The sexual histories were based on a questionnaire, and questionnaires about sexuality are known to be deeply unreliable.

Evaluation of people’s medical and internal physiological characteristics based on appearance has been disproved since the early 20th century, when Lombroso‘s theories that you could recognize murderers and other criminals based on their facial characteristics were disproved.

And, finally, can you imagine anyone, anywhere, defining a male disease based on the man’s looks, as in “We’ve noticed that men who work out young and get really buffed muscles are more likely to have an enlarged prostate gland”? We can’t. But then, men aren’t guilty of the sins of Eve.

Thanks to Stef for the original link.