Patient readers, what follows was thrown over the transom, doubtless from an ally in the Atlanta area. I don’t know who, and that’s probably a good thing. –lambert
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report / September 31, 2023 / 43(7);37124-19.
On September 24, 2023, this report was posted online as an MMWR Satirical Release.
Bud Abbott, PhD1; Louis Costello, MD1; Jacques Tati, MD1; Desiree Armfeldt, PhD1; Fredrik Egerman, MPH1; Emmett Kelly, DVM1; William Kempe, PhD1; Mikhail Nikolayevich Rumyantsev, PhD1; Oliver Hardy, DPT1; Stan Laurel, MD1; John W. Gacy, PhD1; Violent J, MD (VIEW AUTHOR AFFILIATIONS)
Summary
What is already known about this topic?
Some diseases attach the pysche and cannot be traced to any physical agent (Herbert, et al.) Among these are brainworms.
What is added by this report?
To prevent epistemologically significant brainworm infestations, persons must understand their risk, take steps to protect themselves and others with careful media consumption and critical thinking, and media fast for ≥5 days if infested.
What are the implications for public health practice?
Epistemologically significant brainworm infestations must be minimized to protect persons at high risk for severe illness. Importantly, it is not only others who may be infested, but one’s self.
A brainworm has been defined as “a persistent delusion or obsession; a deeply-ingrained or unquestioned idea”; brainworms have been compared to earworms (songs or melodies that keep playing inside one’s mind). Each are cases of involuntary cognition; brainworms, however, also affect speech and often behavior (e.g., frequent handwashing, sometimes continuing for a quarter of an hour, while unmasked). The term may have originated in the lyrics of Pink Floyd’s Hey You.
Understanding Risk. Brainworms can be detected in others through behavior (see above) but more importantly through linguistic cues. In a hospital settings, phrases like “it’s just a cold,” “learn to live with it,” “mild,” “endemic,” “follow the science,” “herd immunity,” “we’re all in this together,” “let me see your smile,” and “evidence-based medicine” are all signs of brainworms, especially when cumulative and occurring regularly. Any or all of these phrases, if repeated, can lead to infestation.
Self-Protection. If in a risky environment, you may choose passive measures, either spatially (leave the area) or attentionally (earbuds). You may also address the infestation by expressing critical thinking, but that carries its own risks (ostracism). Finally, you may wish to observe the media consumed by the infested subject, and avoid it.
If Infested. Cure can be difficult. A media fast, at a minimum, is indicated, for at least a working week. If a relapse occurs, consider excercising critical thinking skills in a group setting.
Brainworms Prevention Strategies
We have discussed preventing brainworm infestation in individual persons above, at “Self Protection.” Preventing brainworm infestation at the community level can be more challenging, since superspreading index patients are most likely to occur at the top of social and institutional heirarchies, and not below. It may be individuals protecting each other is the way forward here (“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has”). More research is needed. As for health care systems, remedies can only come externally by alterting incentives, as with regulation, legislation (and in some cases, prosecution).
Discussion
The social determinants of brainworms are unknown, but are thought to include the accumulation of social and symbolic capital through excessive deference to authority figures in professional settings. More research is needed here as well. Further, one must take great care to ensure that one is not one’s self undergoing an infestation, especially if one is challenging others (in the vulgate: “high on my own supply”). The exercise of critical thinking, ideally in a group setting, is indicated here, along with regular doses of humility.
Brain Worms Emergency Response Team.
1 All authors have completed and submitted the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors form for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.
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Upon reading the title of the post, I immediately thought that the kind of infestation described here was becoming so common that guidelines “for individual persons, communities, and healthcare systems” were already required.
Somehow, I do not feel as relieved as I wished; in addition, that aforementioned article helpfully notes that “The worm, Ophidascaris robertsi, is not the only type of worm that can infect human brains” — so whichever sort of brainworm is at play, we are beleaguered.
Just so long as we do not start getting zombied by Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, I will stay more worried about mind, not brain, worms.
This is An Excellence! Thanks to the secret sharer and to LS for passing it along.
Attention animal lovers/peaceniks/all humans of good will. Israel intends to resume regular, ritual blood sacrifice- cutting the throats and spilling the blood of thousands of animals, on the sacrificial altar; an alter in the Temple with a ramp large enough to lead cattle up and onto it. Apparently, this ancient Old Testament, practice will please god and purify humanity. The unfolding plan (right now) may result in a war that kills billions of us. (you, me, kids, grand-kids, friends, neighbors…….)
But What If I Don’t Want the Sacrifices of the Temple to Return?
(The Temple refers to the proposed, Third Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount. It’s construction will require the bulldozing of The Al Aqsa Mosque, which is sacred to both Shia AND Sunni Muslims)
https://aish.com/but-what-if-i-dont-want-the-sacrifices-of-the-temple-to-return/
“My stomach always got queasy thinking about the sight and sounds of the animals being slaughtered, and the blood being slathered all over the alter.
I am also extremely sensitive to odors, so imagining the smells of blood and slaughtered animals and burning flesh only added to my nausea. It was beyond me to imagine all of that being “a pleasing smell to the Lord.”
….What if… what you saw wasn’t intestines and blood but the living Presence of God hovering over the alter……..”
The Temple Institute
https://templeinstitute.org/
“Remember: Helping to make HaShem’s dream of a Sanctuary in which His Presence can dwell amongst us, is the work of the Temple Institute! Join us in our efforts!”
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu Jerusalem wgah’nagl fhtagn
(“In his house at Jerusalem, dread Cthulhu waits dreaming”).
“a pleasing smell to the Lord.”
C’mon, everybody loves barbecue.
Not the victims.
Whew…when I saw the headline I thought it might be actual an actual worm infestation going around.
It’s the times…
There are probably lots of worm infestations going around. I mean, the Biden administration’s official public health policy on everything is “if we don’t do any testing then we will have very few cases.”
I wonder where they got that line?
Some say Covid is first and foremost a brain virus.
I have heard that about neoliberal economics as well.
And Politics is most definitely an inflammatory response.
> an inflammatory response
Perhaps literally. Since I believe our consciousness is so constructed as to make understanding consciousness impossible (given that the world is not a “laboratory setting”), and yet at the same time am a materialist (nothing supernatural) the level of abstraction to approach constructions such as this one is a puzzlement!
Stormy Daniels will save the Republic, and Michael Avenatti is returning for a The Walls Are Closing In nostalgia tour: worm on, baby!
> Stormy Daniels will save the Republic
In all heterosexual scandals involving professional services, the (female) service provider is always the only level-headed and insightful source to be found.
Uh, Toxoplasm Ghondii anyone?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3035534/
There is more to crazy cat ladies than meets the eye.
The association with schizophrenia is especially interesting.
Seriously though, it’s all just another putative explanation (really nothing new here, except perhaps a catchy new name) for propagandistic mechanisms which surround us in all manner of circumstances, especially in the advertising industry, to keep it at the amygldya or below.
Van Der Kolk sums it up some of the mechanisms nicely.
Mesmer. Houdini. Bernays. Chompsky. Satir. Even maybe Chopra or Winfree.
Same thing, different packaging.
Just turn on your local news station for 10 min to get the same effect. Watch a truck commercial. A beer commercial. A tropical resort commercial.
Repetition. Intonation. Pacing. Alliteration. Just watch some old speeches from Jesse Jackson or MLK to see the rhetorical skill set to create the trance. Those guys were masters of it.
Are attitudes and moods infectious? Different question yet elated to topic
I remember once at a movie several years ago, I think it was the first Austin Powers movie, I sat in a packed house on opening night in the center of the theater. Something struck me as hysterically funny, and I had a protracted laughing paroxysm for about 45 seconds.
A few people besides me chuckled.
It was rather embarrassing, in that I was trying very hard to suppress my own laughter, but it kept leaking out at about 30 second intervals.
Waves of subsequent laughter broke out, at first around the few people in front and to the sides, then further down the row, like larger pebbles in a pond, every 30 seconds or so.
After about 8 min, the entire theater was laughing, after my inciting laugh, in a wave like manner.
Totally embarrassing, but what great fun.
> Repetition. Intonation. Pacing. Alliteration. Just watch some old speeches from Jesse Jackson or MLK to see the rhetorical skill set to create the trance. Those guys were masters of it.
Yes, you see the point!
I am not familiar with all the names that you mention. However, the extraordinary quantity and layering of bullshit from, say, the War on Terror onward convinces me that we need a genuine account of these
“trance”-producing mechanisms. That was the subtext of my “Do I Sleep or Wake” post — we rarely ask ourselves whether we are really awake (or even conscious). And we should.
When I say “genuine account” I mean something on the order of one of those aerosol transmission epidemiological studies with a seating chart and a diagram or the airflow.* (I don’t think works like Hate, Inc. do that. I won’t say they’re lazy, but I don’t think they come to grips with the problem. There’s no mechanism.)
The extraordinary and successful effort to suppress the truth that #CovidIsAirborne, and to make the most obvious, cheapest, and clearly proven non-pharmaceutical intervention an object of ridicule and scorn leads me to conclude that people, very much including me, have far less freedom of action than we think. (And when we get freedom, we don’t know what to do with it, having so little experience with it.)
Hard to practice or even watch politics in such a degraded environment. Bourdieu says that sociology is one of the martial arts. If so, we can use it to train people to protect themselves, because they sure need it.
NOTE * I don’t mean nonsenses like “woke mind virus” or “mass formation.” These are memes or slogans attempting to occupy the space that a “genuine account” would occupy. To be fair, those slogans are from the conservatives. On the left, “ideology” and “culture” are more serious, but they still fail — demonstrably have failed — to bring the left’s project, control of the means of production by the working class, forward.
> After about 8 min, the entire theater was laughing, after my inciting laugh, in a wave like manner.
The first time I saw The Gods Must Be Crazy, decades ago, it was in a small theater, probably an art film theater, with maybe 100 other viewers. Starting not long after the opening, the entire room was laughing, IIRC almost continuously, for practically the entire rest of the film. It was a delightful experience.
Years later, viewing the film in a home setting, I found it pleasantly amusing but not nearly as hilarious as it had seemed in the group setting.
—
I suppose that one of the advantages of a multi-polar world is that it facilitates criticism, from outside one’s largest-scale group, of one’s group-think.
Jesse Jackson and MLK? What about our more recent master of the trade of mesmerising the public by means of cadence, intonation, modulation, etc.—-our one and only latest rhetorical wonder: OB. Obama’s ‘style’ always struck me as a caricature of blustering white and black ‘preacher men’, however much their content—OB’s blustering had content?–may vary. The power of the pulpit on the American psyche, you might call it.
I shouldn’t be so dismissive of it. I think recent events have led me to become too skeptical of the literature.
I have great respect for some of the authors, their skills and contributions, and should read what they say more carefully. They may have a point.
> I have great respect for some of the authors
Bud Abbott?
Shouldn’t Doctor Tati properly be a “PsyD?”
> Shouldn’t Doctor Tati properly be a “PsyD?”
Finally! Somebody noticed!!
It occurs to me that an important “voice” in this field is missing among the list of distinguished authors: The esteemed Dr. Mae West.
She gives the cure:
“Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.”
Ahhh yes. My little chickadee.
Is Dr. Gacy in charge at the CDC?
Satire needs to be in the title or “for amusement purposes only”. This article could have an interesting trajectory as it makes the rounds, knowing that there are literalist amongst us, combined with the fact that there are parasitic worms that get into the brain…. now that I write this, we could only hope that might be the reason, for then it could be treated.
I prefer the dogmatic, closed minded, and delusional (& likely others) in describing my obstreperous political opposites. Not that they would consider my label valid, but as a means to see them as human. Be aware, we’re all vulnerable to these qualities/behaviors.
> Satire needs to be in the title or “for amusement purposes only”.
That would be true, were our current situation not beyond satire. In any case, read the post: “…posted online as an MMWR Satirical Release.”
This is precisely what I would disclose if I were a brainworm.
> This is precisely what I would disclose if I were a brainworm.
My bad. Perhaps I should have written: “Many conflicts of interest were not disclosed.”
For the CDC, this is amazingly clear, coherent, and free of jargon.
[lambert blushes modestly]