Live while you are alive
Music is so effective at relieving pain that patients should be allowed to listen to it before, during and after surgery, researchers have recommended. A study published in The Lancet found that pain levels fell when patients were played their favourite songs, even under general anaesthetic. “Music is a non-invasive, safe, cheap intervention that should …
Amid all the gloom, doubt and uncertainty let me quote Shakespeare: “All other doubts, by time let them be clear’d: Fortune brings in some boats that are not steer’d.” (Cymbeline Act IV, Scene iv) Epicureans prefer to be positive.
Apparently, Big Pharma stopped researching memory loss because they tried but lost a load of money doing so. Everyone knows alzheimers is up there as a major health issue, but the big companies have been waiting for one, brilliant breakthrough before piling in there. Have two such breakthroughs actually occurred, and will they prove effective? …
The government of Finland is hoping to kick-start its stagnant economy by investing €20bn in a two-year trial, involving 100,000 people, for a system known as “universal basic income”, or UBI. Instead of the current complicated and bureaucratic system, fraught with rules, means tests and alleged opportunities to cheat the system, the government plans to simply …
Continue reading ‘Should we scrap the present benefits system?’ »
It was the philosophers, Aristippus the Older and Aristippus the Younger, who lived in Cyrenaica, who first suggested that hedonism was the right waty to conduct a good life. That basic idea, modified of course, was adopted by Epicurus, and later was misinterpreted by the early Christians to mean a life of total self-indulgence, eating, and …
