Herbal therapy for treating rheumatoid arthritis (review)

Background Herbal medicine interventions have been identified as having potential benefit in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Objectives To update an existing systematic (Cochrane) review of herbal therapies in RA. Search methods We searched electronic databases Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (The Cochrane Library), MEDLINE, EMBASE, AMED, CINAHL, Web of Science, Dissertation Abstracts (1996 to 2009), unrestricted by language, and the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform in October 2010. Selection criteria Randomised controlled trials of herbal interventions compared with placebo or active controls in RA. Data collection and analysis Two authors selected trials for inclusion, assessed risk of bias and extracted data. Main results Twelve new studies were added to the update, a total of 22 studies were included. Evidence from seven studies indicate potential benefits of gamma linolenic acid (GLA) from evening primrose oil, borage seed oil, or blackcurrent seed oil, in terms of reduced pain intensity (mean difference (MD) ‐32.83 points, 95% confidence interval (CI) ‐56.25 to ‐9.42,100 point pain scale); improved disability (MD ‐15.75% 95% CI ‐27.06 to ‐4.44%); and an increase in adverse events (GLA 20% versus placebo 3%), that was not statistically different (relative risk 4.24, 95% CI 0.78 to 22.99). Three studies compared Tripterygium wilfordii (thunder god vine) to placebo and one to sulfasalazine and indicated improvements in some outcomes, but data could not be pooled due to differing interventions, comparisons and outcomes. One study reported serious side effects with oral Tripterygium wilfordii Hook F. In the follow‐up studies, all side effects were mild to moderate and resolved after the intervention ceased. Two studies compared Phytodolor® N to placebo but poor reporting limited data extraction. The remaining studies each considered differing herbal interventions. Authors' conclusions Several herbal interventions are inadequately justified by single studies or non‐comparable studies in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. There is moderate evidence that oils containing GLA (evening primrose, borage, or blackcurrant seed oil) afford some benefit in relieving symptoms for RA, while evidence for Phytodolor® N is less convincing.Tripterygium wilfordii products may reduce some RA symptoms, however, oral use may be associated with several side effects. Many trials of herbal therapies are hampered by research design flaws and inadequate reporting. Further investigation of each herbal therapy is warranted, particularly via well designed, fully powered, confirmatory clinical trials that use American College of Rheumatology improvement criteria to measure outcomes and report results according to CONSORT guidelines

Cultural philanthropy, gypsies, and interdisciplinary scholars: dream of a common language

Reproduced with permission of the publisher.Although he was a major force in fin-de-siecle cultural philanthropy in both North America and Britain, Charles Godfrey Leland is today known mainly through Occult websites on the Internet. This essay retrieves his research on the gypsies, revealing an unexplored source of Victorian philanthropy, and scrutinizes it from the perspectives of disciplines different from his own, philology: history, demography, ethnic studies, ethics, and politics. The essay is in four parts: I. Victorian Cultural Philanthropy: People Making People, and Some People Making Things II. Gypsy Lorists: The Non-Christian Roots of Philanthropy, III. Philanthropy's Other: The Persecution of the Gypsies, IV. Interdisciplinarity as Collectivity

Introduction: boundaries in theory and history

Introduction to special issue on Victorian boundaries. Reproduced with permission of the publisher. © 2004 Cambridge University Press.WHEN ANGELIQUE RICHARDSON AND I began collecting the essays included here, we were interested to see how recent theorists of boundaries like Audre Lorde (hyphenated identities), Gloria Anzaldua (borderlands), Donna Haraway (cyborg), J-F Lyotard (the in-between), or Jacques Derrida (deconstruction) fared in relation to classic theorists of boundaries like Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin. We found that while the field of Victorian Studies has absorbed the theory, current practitioners may refer little to past or present theoretical masters. Rather they describe which boundaries were salient to the Victorians and why; when they were permeable and how; and who enforced them and to what ends. The essays in this volume focus on specific boundaries and amass a wealth of detailed knowledge about them. They include the boundaries or boundlessness of London and her suburbs (Parrinder, Cunningham); transnational or deterritorialized boundaries of empire (Spear and Meduri); psychological boundaries (Rylance, Trotter); boundaries between body and soul (Moran) and living and dead (Robson); generic boundaries (Barzilai, Howsam, Small, Toker); boundaries of popular representation between art and politics (Ledger, Livesey); and boundaries between humans, animals, and machines (Joseph and Sussman). The essays here interrogate boundaries historically and pragmatically, with a high tolerance of the in-between or queer, to which I shall return below

Alien Registration- Gagnier, Maria (Lewiston, Androscoggin County)

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The construction and assumptions made about Egyptian women by development organizations

Since the inception of international human rights, some activists have argued for a universal framework and this framework has encountered resistance. International feminism is a space where the concept of universal truth begins to unravel. Feminists from the First World, purporting to speak on behalf of all women, essentialized the international woman’s experience and set an agenda based on their First World experience. Third World women critiqued the systematic exclusion of their voices from the dominant feminist discourse. The international human rights agenda shares many goals with economic development. Economic development can be a vehicle through which universal human rights are created in the Third World. More importantly, economic development shapes and describes an economy. Women, viewed by economic development, are consumers and producers of future consumers and future economic sectors. They are both shaped by and define the economy. In order to properly understand the intersection of the Third and First World, it is helpful to look at how the powerful actors, such as economic development agencies, construct women. In order to explore the relationship between economic development and Third World women, this paper will analyze World Bank development reports from Egypt. The reports date from the moment Egypt became an object of development in the 1950s to the present. The analysis will demonstrate the World Bank’s construction of Egyptian women. While throughout history, the locus of women’s oppression has been complex and changing, the World Bank has failed to understand Egyptian women as having agency over their own lives. Egyptian women are seen as being helpless victims, needing international intervention to act on their behalf

A symbiological approach to sex, gender, and desire in the Anthropocene

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this record.The first part of this essay describes a symbiological approach to gender and sexuality; the second, a symbiological approach to world literatures and some examples of gender and sexuality in symbiological literatures. Both are intended to provide more intimate accounts of the Anthropocene than the typical big pictures of global warming and climate change. While grand and world-historical, to be sure, the Anthropocene also affects the most intimate aspects of our lives. Both sex and gender should be understood as the outcomes of developmental processes more or less stabilised by a wide variety of more or less variable factors in the loop of nature, culture, and technology. Understanding the nature of these processes and their social, biological, and technological causes is essential for comprehending the nature of gender, sex, and sexuality, and the extent to which these are mutable. The essay concludes with some reflections on love in the Anthropocene. Recent developments in molecular biology imply that classic distinctions between nature and nurture or biology and culture are not applicable to the human ecological niche. Research in epigenetics shows that the effects of culture on nature go all the way down to the gene and up to the stratosphere, and the effects of biology on culture are similarly inextricable (Gilbert; Griffiths; Meloni). Living systems almost invariably involve the interaction of many kinds of organisms with a diversity of technologies. The Anthropocene—the age of human cultures and technologies impacting on natural environments—changes rapidly, and to understand and manage its functioning requires perspectives from each domain. Symbiology is the study of such relations-in-process. The kinds of relations we study include mutualism, parasitism, domination, recognition, separation, solubility, symmetric mutuality (relations among equals in power or status), asymmetric mutuality (relations among unequals--parents/offspring, teacher/pupil, human/nonhuman animals), reciprocity, alienation, isolation, autonomy, and so forth, and these relations are discernible throughout nature and all cultures, implying a politics.1 The first part of this essay will describe a symbiological approach to gender and sexuality; the second, a symbiological approach to literature and some examples of gender and sexuality in symbiological literature. Both are intended to provide more intimate accounts of the Anthropocene than the typical big pictures of global warming and climate change. While grand and world-historical, to be sure, the Anthropocene also affects the most intimate aspects of our lives

The Mystery of Section 253(b)

In 2014, Elon Musk, the renowned and socially-minded CEO of Tesla Motors, Inc., posted a blog on Tesla’s website that stated the company would be freeing up many of its patents involved in the creation of the company’s electric cars to any interested party. Yet again, Musk astounded the public by choosing the betterment of society over corporate profits—stirring up a more positive image than any other corporate personality. But there are numerous questions that Musk’s positive PR have drowned out: Where can you access the patents?; How did freeing up the patents get past the other executive officers and the shareholders?; and Why even free up the patents in the first place? The last question has the easiest answer on its face: for the betterment of mankind. However, such an answer is doubtful to have swayed an entire board of directors as well as any shareholder, and Tesla is not well known for turning a profit. Tesla giving up its patents does not appear to be a reasonable business decision, unless there was an ulterior motive for doing so; say, it would be reasonable if Tesla did so to protect itself from something else. Indeed, by freeing up its patents, Tesla is able to avoid liability for possible antitrust accusations down the line. How it manages to do this is not entirely clear and may end up causing Tesla more headaches down the road, but one avenue to this current situation, known as a “dedicat[ion] to the public,” is found within the Patent Act.4 Located within the current section 253(b), dedications to the public allow a patent-holder to relinquish their rights in a patent in order to allow any third-party to utilize said patent and to avoid any potential liability from having rights in the same. Doing so grants protections to both patentees and patent-holders and may be considered to expand the prior art for the betterment of all, dependent on your point of view. Regardless, section 253(b) is one possible avenue that Tesla may have taken to give up its patents under the guise of benevolence. Again, there are the problems with gaining the votes of the board of directors and keeping shareholders happy. In comes section 253(b), which, instead of being used simply out of the goodness of a patent-holder’s heart, may be used as a defense against antitrust prosecution. How a dedication to the public can be used to prevent antitrust adjudication is not immediately clear from the language of the statute, and unfortunately, there is no case law that outlines how section 253(b) can be used to protect a patent-holder. Instead, legislative intent is the lens through which we can determine the true purpose of section 253(b) and dedication to the public at its inception. Additionally, with the incredible expansion of many companies and embrace of vertical integration tactics, a discussion of the shift from section 253(b)’s shift from being an antitrust shield to an antitrust weapon for the benefit of a plaintiff is relevant to show how dedication to the public should become more relevant moving forward. This comment will discuss these topics, beginning with an examination of the language of the subsection as well as its changes through an examination of legislative history. Part I will also include the historical relevance of the antitrust discussion going on during the section’s birth. Next, Part II will discuss how section 253(b) is used as an antitrust shield and whether it should shift to become an antitrust remedy for plaintiffs instead. In that vein, Part II will also discuss the current state of patent monopolies and the context of contemporary society in determining the necessities of a legal shift

A Symbiological Approach to Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Anthropocene

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Routledge via the link in this recor

Alien Registration- Gagnier, Olivier (Saint John Plantation, Aroostook County)

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