ASM220 Feminism, Sugar, and EMDR

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feminism sugar and emdr all that and more on this week's episode of ask sciencemike [Music] hi friends and welcome to ask science mike this is a weekly podcast where we believe that every sincere question deserves an honest and non-judgmental response i'm your host mike mccarg the science mic of the podcast title and it's so good to be talking with you this week i know that many of us are spending a lot more time at home right now and uh you know before long probably all of us will be spending a lot more time at home as our global culture adapts to a very dangerous global pandemic and so ask science mike is a space every week where we can have an evidence-based emotionally focused discussion about curiosity and uh you know the show has been a little more popular lately uh as people have been looking for information about the virus and so i'm gonna start adding a covid19 update to the program every week we'll do that right up top before we get into our questions because we also don't want to just talk about covid19 all the time our bodies and our brains also need a break from the constant anxiety on this pandemic on that note friends i have been doing so many new things to try to help us all navigate through this pandemic not only giving you uh my take on the science behind the pandemic and the recommendations that public health experts are recommending for us to protect ourselves and protect others from this pandemic but also to navigate the difficult feelings of greece greece not greece of grief and fear and loss i said greece because i combined greece and loss in my brain there on accident um we have so many difficult feelings right now and so to do that i've been doing a few things number one on both facebook and instagram you can find me at mike mccarg on both of those uh i've been doing most days a nightly check-in nightly will vary because i try to try pick different time zones night times to do that nightly check-in but it's a time when we sit and focus in the present we get out of guilt and shame and anxiety and sit in the moment and we just talk about whatever folks would like to talk about i've started to invite some of my friends who are in media and have public platforms to join me for those you never know who will show up and then also you show up i've been inviting you to come on screen with me as we process our feelings i've also launched three new weekly web series these are quick little topical check-ins we have encouragement mondays uh we have autism fridays and we have science wednesdays and those are on instagram tv on facebook and on my new youtube channel i've been making the youtubes now um so if you know if you want to hear more from me uh that's all available there for you so you can find me on youtube on instagram on facebook all those platforms i'll have links to those in the show notes this week if you'd like to check it out of course they're always available on asksciencemike.com and i've been really surprised how popular those are oh one other weekly series uh that we kicked off last week that ended up being the most popular at all and that sunday cocktail hour with mike and jenny jenny mccarg being my wife who you may know as the honey badger uh we make a couple of cocktails we turn on the camera and we see what happens last week was a ton of fun so we're going to do that again this week and uh maybe most weeks we'll see now to be clear i'm doing all this in ways that make sure i have plenty of emotional and mental energy if i get too tired to make a video one day i just don't so when i say these happen most days that is true and then i also want to let you know that in the very near future watch out uh hillary mcbride and i are going to launch a new live web show that will also be available as a podcast called how we feel and that's focused on our emotions and how we process those i'm really excited about it we've been working on it a long time and it is going to be a really really incredible experience as you would expect with anything involving dr hillary mcbride finally and this is a huge announcement you know i announced a book tour and then a week later we started getting shelter in place orders and so i said stay tuned more is coming about the book tour i'm not canceling it and you know what it's totally true i am not canceling my book tour but i am restructuring it and friends i am so so excited about this if you don't know that my book you're a miracle and a pain in the ass comes out april the 28th 2020 now you do and obviously it is dangerous and irresponsible to tour the country in person right now as we try to flatten the curve and combat covet 19 but that doesn't mean we can't be together i mean there's no question that social distancing saves lives but friends we are also social people who long to be together and no one understands that better than i do i explored those very contradictions between what we desire and what can be best for us moment by moment in my new book so i've been thinking with my team and my publicist and my publisher how can we both save lives through social distancing and have the social contact that we so desperately need to be well and the way i'm gonna do that is i am going to come to your living room virtually we're going to do an interactive webcast that's going to be delightful i'll talk to you about some of the content in the book and then we will open it up for interactive questions and the most amazing thing is we're still going to do this city by city so when you join this webcast you're going to be in a virtual room with other people who are in your community you will meet faces that as we get through the pandemic you may be able to meet in person and in the meantime we're going to be creating private online meeting spaces for all of you to connect with each other during social distancing it is going to be wonderful something i'm also really excited about is we're doing this in partnership with some of the most amazing independent bookstores in the country at a time that they need it most so that's what we're going to do for the you're a miracle in home tour of course when you grab your ticket you're going to get a personalized copy of the book it's really cool you still get a signed copy we'll still going to handle all of that fulfillment and listen we know that right now people are facing all kinds of financial uncertainties so we also want you to know that unlimited scholarship tickets will be available for each tour stop if you have are out of work if you're facing income uncertainty don't worry you can still attend this event the way it works is you would grab a ticket either paid or free you'll get a link that goes to a website that lets you start reading the first three chapters of the book today you get to start reading immediately you'll get access to a private facebook group dedicated to people in your area you'll find a link to the live event itself and you'll find a form that lets you request your personalized inscription those will be book plates that can be stuck in the book if you are going to one of our reseller tours in leg one with independent bookstores that will be a postcard if you do one of the events that uh i fulfill all the logistics for in other cities we want to do something special for our independent booksellers you'll get your book within a few days of the event shipped directly to your home and then if you've worked with one of our independent booksellers in the first leg of the tour which will be launch week you'll also get a personalized book plate that you can pick up from the bookstore once local officials allow the store to open again and if you go to one of the second leg of the tour events that i'm hosting in a lot of cities then you will get a postcard that comes with your book and friends i just can't wait to see you in this tour and i will see you there will be an opportunity for you to see me face to face so we are kicking this tour off the launch week of the book with leg one april 27th will still be atlanta georgia with acapella books april 28th will still be nashville tennessee with parnassus books april 29th will still be minneapolis minnesota with uh maegers and quinn april 30th will be seattle washington with our friends at third place books and may 8th will be los angeles california with vrolman's bookstore those events are still happening at the advertised dates and times uh we'll also still have portland oregon the first week although tickets won't be on sale for that until next week when we also put uh ticket sales on a bunch of other cities so far for this first two legs of the tour we're going to do 21 cities and we will add more over time as well especially when we see how this works and we work all the kinks out i'm telling you it's going to be wonderful we're all at home so why not get together anyway and in doing so we can not only get a book i'm really excited about that i think will be helpful and useful to you at this time during a pandemic but also support our independent bookstores at a time that they really need it i can't wait to see you you can learn more by going to asksciencemike.com and tapping on the events button and every week we'll start the program with a coveted 19 update and there are two pertinent pieces of information i'd love to share with you that seem timely and important the first thing i'd like to talk about is masks there's so much confusion about if we should be wearing masks and what masks do if we wear them and then there's different kinds of masks you've probably heard that there's homemade and cloth masks you've heard that they're surgical masks and then you've heard there's something called n95 masks and all these masks serve different purposes uh the big thing to know is that none of these masks other than n95 will protect you from getting covet 19. and n95 masks aren't perfectly able to protect you although they are they do offer some assistance in avoiding catching the virus from someone else who has it but the reason there's been such confusing messaging is now that our hospitals are being overloaded with covet 19 patients we just don't have a lot of supplies that hospitals and medical practitioners need so we've encouraged people not to wear masks and not to buy masks and that guidance still holds if you have surgical masks or n95 masks the best thing you can do with those is donate them to a hospital where they are desperately needed while we tried to secure and manufacture more of those masks but we also know that covid19 gets spread through aerosol particles so when you cough or when you sneeze or when you speak you release tiny little droplets of saliva and the covet 19 virus can sit in those droplets and it seems in some studies can sit in those droplets for some time and so uh one thing we're finding that can help it's an additional tool alongside social distancing and case isolation and all the other protocols that we're keeping in place is for people to cover their faces with something it does not have to be a medical mask it should not be a medical mask again hospitals need all of those but a face covering as opposed to a mask can start catching those droplets you release and if you're asymptomatic meaning you have coveted 19 but you don't have any symptoms wearing a face covering can help lower the chance that you spread the virus to someone else so what we're asking people to do it's already mandatory in los angeles but everyone should be doing this everywhere is to wear a face covering whenever you leave your home that can be a scarf that can be um you know something you sew yourself uh it can be literally anything cloth that you can put over your mouth and nose and still breathe when you are out of uh your home uh for those of you who live in cold climates you probably have a lot of this stuff really readily available anyone anywhere probably has a scarf or something like that that you can kind of wrap around your nose and your mouth and it's really simple it does two things one it does catch some of those particles when you cough or when you sneeze or when you talk but it also really helps you remember not to touch your face so a lot of us have noticed that we have a hard time not touching our face during this pandemic and it's a nice reminder when you reach up and you touch cloth instead of skin it's like oh wow i'm not supposed to do that so it's really helpful when you're out in public situations the second thing for this week's coven 19 update is to talk about curves friends we are watching some really terrifying numbers happen in terms of the total number of new cases every day of covet 19 in the u.s and the death every day and we expect those numbers will continue to rise in most places for a few weeks because even after you put social distancing in place it takes time for the curve to respond because so many people are asymptomatic it'll take them time for those cases they've already spread to you know manifest themselves and then for those people to need medical care uh but here's the good news it should be in a few weeks we see the highest number of new cases and and you know shortly after that the highest number of deaths per day and then that will start to decline and in places where the curve came on quickly it'll also probably decline relatively quickly now in most cities we will continue to see cases and continuously deaths every single day for months and unfortunately that's that's kind of baked into all the models but if people really do social distancing and our data is telling us that not everyone is doing a good job social distancing folks if you gosh if you are disregarding this order uh because you just can't be bothered to stay at home and watch netflix or something uh you are killing people and it's not okay i i hate to sound impatient and i hate to sound sharp but you need to keep your butt at home unless you work for a hospital or a grocery store or some other essential sector that keeps people alive and fed and in their homes everybody else keep your butt at home no dinner parties no coffee dates no visiting with friends you will kill people stop it but assuming we are doing that and as more people's social distance we're going to see the curve flatten and then decline and then we will reach the most critical point in the pandemic so far because at this point many of us will have been at our homes three to five weeks some people just a couple of weeks so far and we'll see that curve go down and we'll say great now is the time that i can go back outside and see all my friends and go back to work and no you may not i'm preparing you now ahead of time to know that people will be stir crazy and they will see a low number of new cases and they'll think they can go outside and if people do that on mass guess what happens the curve comes right back so friends continue to social distance even as we see the curve flatten and decline i'm telling you these conversations are coming our inpatient president when he sees the numbers go down we'll want to open the country back up and that is a terrible idea it is a terrible idea and can result in millions of deaths covet 19 is highly contagious and highly deadly that's a bad combination so we're going to have to work carefully with public health experts and virologists and epidemiologists to figure out how to structure our society for the next maybe 12 to 18 months wow does that sound scary i know but it's what we're going to have to do or else the loss of life is going to be staggering and a staggering loss of life guess what we'll wreck the economy anyway so we're going to have to protect lives and then we have to work together to figure out how to structure our economy in a way that makes sure that we don't face a mass homelessness problem that people can still eat there's a lot of work ahead of us right now in this period how do we help we stay home and we social distance as we get used to that then we will start looking at ways of reviving the economy because we see already it's so tragic marginalized people are already being hit the hardest by the economic collapse we're already seeing that and so we're going to have to take serious steps of intervention to protect people's basic standard of living it's going to be necessary it's going to be essential and we're going to have to continue social distancing so this week i'm reminding you one cover your face when you go outside it really does help flatten the curve two continue social distancing and three as we see these infection and death curves flatten and decline don't get antsy and rush back outside or else we'll be right back in this situation again hello science mike um i have a question about feminism um i recently got into a debate with a male friend about feminism and i am a feminist woman and he is a male who claims that the ideology of feminism is harmful to men and women which i found to be really strange for example he argued that feminists believe that women should be happy with only a career and that feminists condemn people who value interpersonal relationships and i don't know what books he's read but that's not the feminism that i subscribe to and not the feminism that i've researched pretty thoroughly i think um and in fact it to me it sounds a bit like a patriarchal perversion of the true concept of feminism and of female empowerment so my question is uh what made you become a feminist um since you are a man of science you call yourself an empiricist what is it um about the evidence of the positive effects of feminism uh that appealed to you and ultimately made you call yourself a feminist are there any feminist ideologies that you reject and if so what are those i'd really like to have like a civil discussion with my friend about this issue but i don't know how to explain the layers of understanding to get him to understand my point of view i'm a woman of color so the concepts make sense to me on a personal level i'm curious about how a person finds feminism as you did being a white male from the south which is fascinating to me how can i explain this to a man who has not personally experienced the damaging effects of patriarchy i know this was a really long question but i wanted to give you some context to work with thank you so much for your podcast it's been amazing to me and uh i hope you can answer my question bye well what a wonderful question that i get to answer thank you um i jus i'm literally smiling i love to talk about why i love feminism thank you for the invitation that feels great i mean the first thing i would say is it sounds to me like so often happens is your friend who is a man is fighting a straw man argument of feminism a caricature of feminism instead of actual feminism because of course that's actually easier if we mischaracterize as feminists uh as hating men or dismissing families or any of the other characters that come from folks that in most extreme iterations would call feminist feminazis or something like that um then that's much easier than actually taking feminism on its substance on the substance feminism is just the radical notion that women are every bit as much people as men and deserve all of the same rights feminism at its heart is simply a naming of egalitarianism there's nothing in feminism that says women are superior to men and men because they have been indoctrinated by the system of patriarchy are so often defensive against that notion because patriarchy sets up men in a position so above women that equality suddenly feels like a demotion and so of course there's a tremendous amount of social energy and economic interest is you know invested in maintaining the system of patriarchy as you well know i don't say that to lecture you i say that to catch up everyone listening to our conversation right now now you i'll start with something that you um asked and is that is there anything in feminism that i reject and no there is not anything in feminism that i reject but we also don't want to paint feminism as a monolith there is a great number of feminist ideas and feminist movements these are sometimes called waves in feminism and so there's an ongoing discussion and debate about what is feminism and what feminism means and i listen to that and i pay attention with much excitement and as a man i keep my mouth shut about it so i'm not gonna like start critiquing some specific stances and quote feminism unquote because that's just not a thing when i talk about feminism i'm talking about the notion that women are people and all people deserve equal rights all people deserve equal rights so feminism is a part of my egalitarianism and an essential part i will say i found i find feminism to be most useful and most beneficial when it is informed by womanism which is a women's of color movement around critiquing and clarifying white feminism's failure to recognize intersections of identity as well as trans rights i can be troubled by any form of feminism that excludes trans women so i'm a very inclusive feminist i think my feminism always incorporates women of color and trans women so i don't reject feminism or any tenets of feminism so much as i view it as a large movement with a lot of scholarship and any part of that movement i believe is incomplete when it doesn't acknowledge the intersections of identity that uh women of color trans women and disabled women face now in terms of the science of why i'm a feminist gosh there is so much there is just so much i decided to just go with like three big obvious amazing things i have seen in the research number one whenever women are educated and empowered economically the culture that does that sees poverty rates decrease wow really we can fight poverty just by educating and economically empowering women yeah we can that shows up in the data two and this should be particularly interest to many people who say they're against feminism we find that unwanted pregnancies and teenage pregnancies decline whenever women have access to education and economic empowerment meaning they have the right to go to college and they have the right to hold a job and make their own income so for people who would say be pro-life who are often anti-feminist isn't it strange that you actually have fewer teen pregnancies fewer unwanted pregnancies and therefore fewer abortions when women have access to education and economic empowerment and number three we have found consistently that rates of domestic violence against women and against men decrease when women have access to education and economic empowerment it seems over and over and over that the benefits to society and the people in society including men including children including families are there when we treat women as equal members of society i think the data-driven case is wildly conclusive and that is not why i'm a feminist not at all you know i grew up evangelical and i was a complementarian and a complementarianism is a fancy word for people who would say i think men and women are equal they just have different roles now where have we heard that before we're the same but we should just occupy different spaces i think we had a civil rights movement to push back against that notion but somehow we snuck that in the back door in uh in protestant christianity i suppose to some degree catholic christianity as well um and and sadly this is a situation that actually isn't unique to white christianity uh the christianity of folks of all shades and tones of melanin have struggled with and i don't ascribe that anymore i was always hesitant with complementarianism and the reason was i just knew too many smart competent and capable women who knew the bible you know my mom has always been a profound spiritual mentor and leader in my life my grandmother was a profound spiritual leader and mentor in my life those two seem to know more about the bible and more about prayer than any of the men i knew including the people who preached from the pulpit on sunday morning and as i became an adult and i entered into an adult sunday school class of before i got married and then after my sunday school teacher was a woman named kathy who was an exceptional bible teacher just really really good bible teacher and was also an egalitarian and seeing her approach to life and to christianity really made me struggle with a complementarianism i didn't like in the first place and then of course if you know my story you know i lost my faith and became an atheist as an atheist it just made no sense this whole complimentary thing uh complimentarian i just realized this is ridiculous and i am a feminist and so i started speaking as a feminist before i began admitting i was an atheist and then when i sort of came back to a different form of a science-informed mysticism my feminism continued and has only gotten more intense and more radical with time as i've gotten more and more and more frustrated with the way that patriarchy hurts women and gosh it hurts men too one of the major parts of my next book is talking about the ways that patriarchy hurts women and hurts men we have in the research so clearly that it's not just that women are fighting for their liberation when they are feminists they are fighting for everyone's liberation there's something called the man box that was funded by believe it or not axe body spray in part but it's real credible research that i first learned of as you can probably expect from my good friend dr hillary mcbride and it basically is the set of social expectations that are placed on men about self-sufficiency and being tough and being attractive but not working too hard at it and being very manly and not doing women's work and never being gay and always thinking of from pursuing sex and sexual domination and winning and taking control of others and the ways that that leads to perpetual isolation and mental health crisis we find over and over and over that when men attain what they want when they become dominant in their career field when they have a family that serves them a wife and children who are submissive they don't have the relationship skills to be close to others they have acquaintances that they work with and as they get later in their career and retire they get depressed and they get lonely and i think patriarchy is the reason middle-aged white men are one of the most at risk groups to die by suicide of anyone in the united states feminism is not just about liberating women what i have found is being a man who is a feminist is i get freed so much from the social expectations of what relationship should look like that i am free to be present in my feelings in relationships with people of all gender identities that i no longer have to view others through the lens of domination or sexual conquest but can approach people as people instead of objects to use for my fulfillment i'm a feminist not just because i believe it's right or good or necessary or that one of my most deeply held values is the fact that all people should be equal in the eyes of both law and humanity but also because pursuing feminism liberates me as well as feminism can also help liberate men everywhere as it also liberates women [Music] well here we are social distancing we're in our homes and we've never had more strain on our mental health than we do right now and that's why i'm so excited that betterhelp is a sponsor of ask sciencemike because betterhelp is an online counseling service that can meet you in your home via text chat phone calls or video chat it's affordable private online counseling available anytime anywhere with what licensed therapist who specialize in a range of mental health challenges i'm a subscriber of better health myself i've got a better health counselor that i talk to regularly and you can get 10 off your first month if you go to betterhelp.com sciencemike they're going to do that just for my listeners but you know what this is a time of great economic uncertainty and so if you have faced income loss betterhelp also offers financial aid packages and a sliding scale for fees and rates based on income so this is a company that's proactive about trying to get mental health out to everyone who can benefit from it so if you'd like help dealing with grief or anxiety or the feelings that you have right now related to this pandemic please visit betterhelp.com sciencemic today where you can get 10 off your first month's membership [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads science mike could you weigh in on your thoughts in regards to transgender women competing in sports do they really have an advantage over cis women should it even matter thanks you know i open this program with this statement every sincere question deserves an honest and non-judgmental response i've been saying it every week for weeks now and this question has made me repeat that phrase over and over and over in my head because gosh i wanted to skip this one for two reasons number one i am wildly pro trans rights i just if there's a situation involving trans rights with the deep marginalization that community faces you're going to see me get in their corner very consistently and number two i just don't like sports i mean of all the you know if you've been to one of my live shows you know i i'm a student i study so many things all the time and so almost any question someone asks me i have a base of knowledge and things i've read that i can recall to to meaningfully respond to a question and i just don't follow sports at all when people gauge how little i know about sports i will right now name every nba team i can think of chicago bulls la lakers i think the clippers are nba they might be nfl i and i think they're in la the cubs i feel like are a baseball team not a bit not a basketball team this is there's no performance in what i just did that's not a joke that was a sincere effort to name literally every nba team i can think of and you can try any sport you want and my answer's gonna be comparable i don't know about football baseball basketball tennis golf hockey curling track and field you name a sport and i can i can i can stun you with immediate and profound ignorance about that sport so i just feel both unqualified to speak into this question and wildly biased because what am i going to say in most situations trans people are so deeply marginalized in our society what is the concern here and i you know i just know people get really mad as i say that that's okay you get to be mad at me for saying that i acknowledge and i honor your feelings um so i tried to learn more and i googled and my google skills are so limited because now we're talking about sports and i just don't know about sports i did find a piece on the hill.com titled do transgender athletes have an unfair advantage that i thought did a good job of summarizing the science as i understand it regarding transgender women competing in sports it's so interesting me by the way that the debate is about trans women and not trans men have we noticed that it's almost like trans women are often uh marginalized in ways that are unique to trans men both of whom are wildly marginalized and basically what this piece breaks down is that when we're talking about most of us are talking about sporting events for children and adolescents and how there aren't really serious musculoskeletal sex differences before pubery and as puberty happens when children begin a transition and they undergo hormone therapy within about a year we see their musculoskeletal differences begin to go away and they begin to look like the gender they identify as in terms of their performance potential now obviously there's not like a ton of research here this is all really new stuff but it is interesting we already allow and encourage some degree of difference in sports this article used a really great analogy or example it's not an analogy that you know in wrestling there's weight classes because you don't want a 210 pound person wrestling 119 pound person that doesn't seem fair and yet on the basketball court we're totally cool with someone five fours on the same court as someone seven feet tall so we already allow some kind of physical difference in variation in our athletics events so i think we should also admit that some of the lines we place here are arbitrary they're already not based in science and they're simply based on how we can enjoy a given event so really short answer i know you'd like more i know you'd like me to go deeper i just i i know so much more about uh trans issues trans rights about the medical science behind trans identity and trans folks uh but i just don't know anything about sports and uh i spent 40 minutes trying to build up enough of a base of knowledge to competently address the questions so i'll just tell you in my opinion you wanted my thoughts i absolutely of course think that trans women should be included in women's sports um yeah i just do [Music] hi science mike my name is clara why is sugar bad for you well clara thanks for such a timely question you know i've been at home a lot lately uh because you know we're all spending time at home right now and i've been eating a lot of sugar and i had been eating less sugar and because i'm home and i'm anxious and i'm bored i keep eating sugar and your question was a really good reminder to me that i need to be more careful about what i eat but the first thing i'd like to tell you is that there's actually nothing wrong with sugar sugar by itself isn't bad or more accurately sugar not by itself isn't bad sugar naturally occurs in lots of foods that we eat like fruits and vegetables things like apples have sugar but things like carrots have sugar too and as part of our diet these kind of fruits and vegetables that have sugar in them are perfectly fine they're even good for us sugar is only potentially harmful when it's refined or added to foods so when we eat things like cereal that have a lot of added sugar or candy or cakes or other kinds of food that would really surprise you all kinds of foods that you don't realize have sugar in them because they don't taste sweet they have sugar added as they're processed and food manufacturers do that because it makes it more tasty and it makes us buy more of it and that's because our bodies crave sugar when we eat because it really is a potent source of calories when we eat sugar our bodies and our brains say wow that was good do that again because in the natural world sugar is really hard to come by but in our world where we can put food on shelves and in boxes sugar is too easy to get and when we eat too much sugar our bodies release a hormone called insulin now we always release insulin when we eat but we release more when we eat lots of sugar in order to control the amount of sugar in our bloodstream and to help us use that sugar that's in our bloodstream and when our bodies make too much insulin too often we can develop conditions like diabetes which are bad for our health so what we know is that when we eat less sugar and when we don't eat added or processed sugars it changes the ways that we taste food when i don't eat cookies and when i don't eat sugar cereal something like an apple or a carrot can taste exquisitely wonderful such an intense sensation for something that compared to a sugary snack tastes pretty dull and plain and so what we've learned through science is when we eat less sugar not only are our bodies more healthy it also makes it easier for us to eat more healthy foods more often so again sugar isn't bad but sugar when it's refined into an additive in food or is added to foods can change the way that we taste things and change the way our bodies work in ways that make us unhealthy and that's why we try to avoid sugar [Music] our next question comes in via email and it reads i've been in therapy for several years a couple years ago my therapist suggested trying emdr for my ptsd from childhood sexual trauma and i agreed to try it even though it felt a little woo to me i was surprised to find it to be the single most effective therapy i've experienced can you tell me what is going on in the brain during emdr and how it differs from regular talk therapy well i think i've answered an emdr question before but there is a little more data since i answered that i think it's been a year or more since i've weighed in on amdr first of all emdr stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing it's something that can be done by a trained therapist and it works by having you look at a pointer or an object that moves across the midline of your vision while you focus on feelings or memories and the theory is that by moving your eyes in this way and encourages activity and coordination between the two hemispheres of the brain and encourages us to neurologically reprocess traumatic experiences emdr is pretty new and there's limited research on it so far the research that we do have tends to involve very small sample sizes and so there is genuine disagreements on the efficacy of emdr and total and when compared to other more conventional approach like talk therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy so i just want to say that uh and i i love amdr i've done it myself i've had really great experiences with emdr especially when it's a part of a more comprehensive treatment strategy including trauma therapy treatment program emdr alone doesn't seem to be nearly as effective as emdr as a part of a larger relationship with a professional therapist the theory the hypothesis i would even say generally is this thing about forcing activity uh with the two brains hemispheres that is unique and different from talking therapy but some some studies have shown emdr to be more effective than talking therapy and some studies have shown to be about as effective as talking therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy so we just don't have final answers on that stuff yet i would say that if you're doing emdr with a therapist who is trained in it it won't hurt you and it can help you it won't hurt and it can help but you should be doing it with a trained therapist someone who is not a licensed therapist should not be uh doing emdr for anyone and you should not allow them to try emdr techniques with you unless they are a licensed therapist i've seen life coaches and spiritual gurus and other people trying emdr that's not okay that's not safe do emdr only with a licensed therapist and it can be an effective part of a treatment program [Music] you know i so love talking with you every week on ask science mike and i'd love for you to participate in the future you can do that by going to asksciencemike.com where you can send me a voicemail or an email question for inclusion in the program and of course the people who pick the questions on the show are my patrons on patreon folks i need you more than ever uh on patreon i've lost something like 80 of my income in the last three weeks and i know a lot of us are but for those of you who still have income and are still working if you find it in your hearts to go to ask sciencemike.com and tap that patreon button believe me when i say every little bit helps this is a very challenging time for those of us who are media creators and uh there's not any other work i can approach or try right now while i am in home confinement uh because i'm in california with a stay-at-home order and uh i gotta stay home so if you'd love to help i'd sure take it you can go to ask sciencemike.com and join us on patreon ask science mike is brought to you by the single most wonderful team in all of media greg nordine is our producer and sound designer who has always make the show sound so great caitlyn 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