(Sea) Lions and dolphins and bombs, oh my! The Navy's newest "seals" Every once in a while, an item I see or read prompts me to write about things that are almost completely unrelated to medicine or politics - yet are just so interesting and mind-boggling that I have to devote some ink to them. Fair warning: The next two Daily Doses you'll read (today's, and the following edition) contain lead features of this type. The story that spurred me to write about the topic of the next 2 "dose days" is an Associated Press article from a couple of months ago. It's about how the U.S. Navy is gearing up to deploy some new soldiers in the ongoing war against terrorism (or the war FOR international energy domination, depending on how you look at it)… Dolphins and sea lions! According to the article, Navy animal trainers have taught these sea-going friends to do some pretty incredible things. Camera-saddled dolphins, for instance, have been taught to detect and scan underwater mines without detonating them (in 2003, they actually performed this function under combat conditions in Iraq's Umm Qasr harbor). They've also been trained to use their ultra-sensitive sonar to detect terrorist divers, then drop a beacon that Special Forces soldiers can follow to intercept the suspicious swimmers. But perhaps the wildest trick belongs to the sea lions. Navy animal experts have trained these outsized seals to intercept and attach a rope-equipped ANKLE-CUFF to potential bomb-toting suicide swimmers. After this, sailors in boats can then literally reel them in like fish for questioning or detonation… Or they could just troll for sharks with them. The AP piece reports that these martial mammals may soon be deployed in Washington state to guard and patrol Kitsap-Bangor Naval Base on Puget Sound - a submarine and laboratory facility that's especially vulnerable to small-scale water-borne terrorist attacks. Also according to the article, the Navy has been training and using marine mammals to help keep America safe since as far back as the 1960s. But as I semi-alluded to earlier, there's an even more bizarre true story of animal soldiery lurking in the annals of American history. It's amazing and disturbing and incredible all at once. I'll clue you in on it in the next Daily Dose… My own "disorder" finally exposed Folks, I have a confession to make. Apparently, I have a "disorder." I recognized it from its description in a recent New York Times article. It's called trichotillomania, a rare and poorly understood condition whose main symptom is a tendency to pull one's own hair out… Mainstream treatments include behavioral therapy and (of course), most commonly, prescription antidepressants - although the article notes that these drugs help trichotillomania patients LESS THAN 5% OF THE TIME. And as I've said to you many times in the past, I often pull my hair out in little tufts. It's just that until now, I thought it was because of my frustration with mainstream medicine's tendency to over-diagnose "disorders" and over-medicate them with drugs that don't help anyway… | 
