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I just want to underscore: Chiropractic is a pseudoscience and injures more people than it helps. I have heard too many stories of injuries and paralysis. It's a huge shame that our society allows these frauds to practice and advertize the whole sham as a respectable profession. It is not evidence-based, it's a total sham.

So why does every NFL and MLB team have a chiropractor on staff and why does the US Olympic team also hire them specifically (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_chiropractic)? If it’s a sham, why would these athletes and their organizations take a risk, especially when money is on the line? Also from what I am reading, serious injuries from chiropractic practice is very rare, and so your claim of “injures more than it helps” seems off, or at least misleading.

It seems to me that your depiction of chiropractors isn’t the whole story. A practice may be framed as a pseudoscience but still be effective or worthwhile, perhaps?

The whole point of scams is that money is on the line, otherwise it would just be random woo. In fact early Chiropractic was explicitly framed as a belief from irrefutable doctrine and rejecting inferential reasoning, essentially claiming defence as religious freedom, in order to exempt it from being regulated as practicing medicine without a license. Most Chiropractors nowadays do incorporate a degree of scientific reasoning and evidence into their practice, but personally it's not clear to me to what extent this is genuine or just adopting the terminology to paper over the holistic wellness metaphysics claptrap with a veneer of respectability.

Personally, I'd rather go to a real physiotherapist.

People will do anything to get an edge up on the competition, even if the 'anything' is something dubious (placebo effect). I don't think we should look to the NFL as a source of medical truth. They have long papered over the dangers over a career in the NFL and the ensuing long term damage. The NFL, MLB, and Olympic teams are not authorities on medical advice. Their usage of chiropractic should not give rise to its credibility.

Massage may still feel worthwhile to the majority of people if it were also customary to drink a poison beforehand that makes 1% of customers deathly ill and just makes the other 99% feel a little weird. Most people will report "wow, that was a nice massage, and I definitely felt different afterwards", but how could you say there are any benefits beyond a simple massage, except perhaps a much heightened placebo effect? Chiropractic is risky, and strictly worse than massage or physical therapy. That's what you have to compare it with.

Thanks but I must disagree. Will you come with me awhile and let's look for the bigger fish here before pointing the finger?

Are you aware that for the poor, as I sadly came to find out, the injury attorney is in charge? Just like a coach who calls the plays and decides which players to put on the field, the atty decides on which doctor chiro surgeon etc to send the victim to.

The injury lawyer sent me to a chiropractor who has apparently been in business a long time.

Let me ask you: of all those stories you've heard of injury and paralysis by chiropractors...how many of them resulted from car accidents or other cases where the victim is 'sent' to the chiropractor as opposed to 'choosing' them?

I have met many over these past years who were car accident victims and at least anecdotally it seems like I am not much of an edge case in this specific regard.

I am not trying to argue with you. I guess I am thinking about what you said and I am trying to point out that mere cash payments to homeless are pointless if there are not other changes to these systemic frauds that exploit the poor, the weak, the homeless.

I'm not sure I follow. The parent commenter isn't pointing any fingers or saying it's your fault that you were sent to a chiropractor. Simply that it's a bad idea to go to one in general if you do have a choice.

But I didnt have a choice so this repetitive noise about chiropractors did an excellent job of drowning my signal about homeless and payments.

Do you see how vigorously he is pushing this view against chiropractors and he is pushing it here in my comments?

You don't own this comment section, and I'm not making it harder for you to post by sharing my thoughts. The internet is big enough for the two of us.

If we spread the word about chiropractic being a scam, perhaps it will deter attorneys from subjecting people to such treatments and thus save someone in a similar position as you were from a future permanent injury.

I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with. Chiropractic is a scam and I'm sorry that it has such an impact on the poor. I'd call this an obvious systemic societal problem that we do this. Car wreck injuries should be met with a physical therapist at the very least, and no less.

A lot of Chiropractic practice is about regaining and preserving good posture and many places employ actual physical therapists and massage therapists. It's true they put too much stock in the spine being the root all ailments, but it's not a total sham. They may not be medical doctors but they certainly do do evidence-based treatments and understand anatomy. From your comment it sounds like you've never been to one and fundamentally don't understand what they are about.

Nononono, it is a total scam. They do not do any kind of evidence based treatment. Please stop spouting this nonsense here.

He's never been to one because it's a well-known scam, I would guess? They have no idea what "evidence-based" entails, and rely on the fact that neither do their clients ("Well, I went to a chiropractor and then felt no pain, so it works.").

I thank each of you for your thoughts. And its my fault for not getting to the next part of my story yet.

I believe there are good chiropractors despite my experience. I ended up finding a few who I believe have been able to reverse some the damage done prior.

To me there are good and bad doctors Good and bad chiropractors Good and bad attorneys Good and bad financial advisors (I was one for a short period into 9/11)

Shop around is my advice.

To the OP topic I would use any financial assistance first to address my spinal cord injury as opposed to further developing the RTS game mod I am creating.

And I guess my segment is no exception...there are good and bad homeless too.

We gotta look deeper than the labels!

As with most disciplines, the variation between practitioners is bigger than the variation between disciplines.

If you have a practitioner who works for your problems, more power to you.

However, if you're looking for someone new - do not search among chiropractors. They are - on average - much more likely to harm you than a psychotherapist or osteopath.

Thank you very much for your comment. Osteopath just made my list.

It might be true that there are some chiropractors who are also skilled physical therapists or massage therapists.

But that's just a coincidence -- the name "chiropractor" does not imply those things. Chiropractic itself is not evidenced based in any way.

Aside: I wish you the best in your life and hope you find justice/success/happiness.

Thank you. I believe you are right. I was merely trying to identify the people in my story concisely and accurately. With a helicopter hovering 300 feet overhead. In the dark.

To me its the nut of the homeless problem bias. I did not cry 'WOLF'. I said 'Chiropractor' and the rest is inference and in this case I believe mistaken judgement but I would be curious to know what others think.

It's been a longstanding problem that chiropractors have tried to co-opt people's conception of physical therapy to believe it is one and the same as chiropractic, so as to legitimize chiropractic as a real therapy. So I don't think the severe reaction on here to chiropractic should be taken as anything personal.

Choosing Chiropractic over evidence-based science is a bit like saying gambling on slots is a good way to make steady income. There are good slot machines and bad slot machines, just like there are good jobs and bad jobs; find the correct one and you'll be well off!

> there are good and bad doctors Good and bad chiropractors Good and bad attorneys Good and bad financial advisors

How about clairvoyants, mediums, and dowsers? Sometimes a whole profession is just nonsense.

> We gotta look deeper than the labels!

It isn't empty labeling. Chiropractic is pseudoscience. This is neither a matter of opinion, nor an open question.

Excuse me but how are you still missing my point? I merely used the vocational terms to identify the people in my story.

If you can get past your witchhunt against chiropractors then I think you may understand more of what I am trying to say. With respect

> I have heard too many stories of injuries and paralysis.

There is a saying that every doctor has a graveyard. Chiropractors are no different.

I don't require any evidence, if given practitioner helps me with my problem, while traditional ones can't. It amazes me that people always need someone to blame. How about taking responsibility for your own health and your body well-being?

> I don't require any evidence, if given practitioner helps me with my problem, while traditional ones can't.

Let's say you wake up with back pain, and there's nothing obviously wrong with your spine.

You can go to a physical therapist, and they will check your spine and muscles, move your body, tell you to do some exercises to improve your posture. There is no clear diagnosis beyond some muscle tension and no immediate relief, and you are disappointed, and when the pain goes away on its own in a few days you think visiting the therapist was pointless. You tell your friends how pointless traditional medicine is.

Or you visit a chiropracter. He tells you a very satisfying diagnosis, promises to heal you, and makes a few movements that feel surprising. You are impressed. After a few days the pain is completely gone! You are stoked! This person healed you! You don't need evidence from scientific trials, because you experienced the power of alternative medicine yourself!! You tell all your friends how you were healed by this persons magic hands!

Of course, without any treatment at all, the pain would also have gone away after a few days.

This is why we need evidence based medicine. (And this of course applies to traditional medicine as well -- just because real doctors went to university doesn't make them immune to this problems. There are plenty of doctors who prescribe inefficient treatments.)

> Of course, without any treatment at all, the pain would also have gone away after a few days.

And if you struggle for years with chronic back problems and doctors don't really have an answer except to prescribe addictive painkillers and then you see a chiro and everything is cleared up in a couple days?

Telling me that's a coincidence is just gaslighting.

Sorry, I have no clue what confluence of political/cultural forces have led to the inability of science to figure out how/why this stuff works.

Maybe in another 40 years. Good luck!

Scientific studies have shown that the placebo effect is very real. You may think that a placebo could never help with your back pain, but I see no reason why a random person on the internet should be immune to the placebo effect.

"Do you know what they call 'alternative medicine' that's been proved to work? Medicine."

- Tim Minchin

> Chiropractors are no different.

Chiropractors are not doctors, nor hold any other medical-based degree.

How does it relate to the fact they all do mistakes?

The actions that chiropractors use that end up injuring people were not mistakes. They're an intended part of the practice. Since it's not an evidence-based profession, that doesn't matter to them. It's not like someone went around and yanked a thousand spines and made sure nobody was paralyzed before chiropractic became a thing. No, there's not any body of evidence. On the contrary, modern mainstream medicine is based on which interventions tend to help people measurably.

Do you recommend these treatments?

Acupuncture, massage, biofeedback therapy, laser therapy, electrical nerve stimulation and other nonsurgical spine treatments

What you are saying is the intention of every chiropractor is to make harm, because they know upfront it wont work and will harm. Which is absurd.

Action of chiropractor is a mean to correct imbalance in the body. Most of the time it works, sometimes not. I would call it side effect, which any evidence-based pill has also.

The intention of every chiropractor is to conduct chiropractic treatments in exchange for money, not to willfully make harm.

The problem is that there is no expectation for a chiropractic treatment to be effective in solving any problem, since chiropractic is not evidence based. However there is evidence to show that there are significant risks of injury to undergoing chiropractic treatments.

No, they harm people because of what they don't know and don't understand. Get it.

Feels good to talk down to people. Good on you for showing this person that degrees are stupid and science is a sham.

That's not what he said. Chiropractic is a sham because it isn't science; the scientific method fails to show evidence that chiropractic treatments are effective.

"If alternative medicine worked it would be called 'medicine'"

Not disagreeing about chiropractors but...

> "If alternative medicine worked it would be called 'medicine'"

This seems a bit simplistic. There is some scope for exploration of new ideas in medicine, and many ideas may go untested until after they see adoption in the community.

They then might go through a double blinded trial (or several) that doesn't reveal any benefit beyond placebo, but even then, it's worth noting that some placebos work better than others, and likely placebos work differently for each individual. So for something like pain, which can be controlled somewhat by psychological intervention, a better placebo could have merit. But also, it could be found that some 'alternative medicines' supported by anecdata become scientifically validated interventions.

Not saying that unproven interventions should be thrust upon naive patients, but there are many willing and desperate people who've tried mainstream therapies without success

> desperate people who've tried mainstream therapies without success

It would be wonderful if we could help desperate people without lying about the expected outcome of alternative treatment.

I don't think anybody will complain if you say something like "maybe you will find this medidation technique makes it easier to deal with your pain".

The problem is when people say "This technique will cure your pain. You only need to give me 5000€. Also, don't bother continuing with chemo, it just interferes with your natural healing powers."

I don't think it has to be this way, or that is necessarily the norm. For example, in most countries you can sit as many 10-day Vipassana meditation courses as you like with zero obligation to pay. I did though, because I'd been suffering with debilitating whole body eczema since I was born, where the most effective treatment was corticosteroids. I've been free of this burden for years now. No-one told me it would cure my ills, and I would never have been prescribed this by my GP or dermatologist. Likewise, I would say to anyone YMMV and meditation isn't a panacea.

There are definitely fraudsters out there, but there's doctors who prescribe an ineffectual or even harmful medication for kick-backs, such as 'seminars' which are basically paid-for vacations. So keep in mind that conventional medicine isn't the paragon of ethics either

I agree with you and I want to make it clear that I don't think meditation itself is fraud. I'm pretty sure meditation is an effective way to deal with stress.

It also sounds plausible that reducing stress would help with skin problems -- I think it's pretty much consensus that neurodermatitis can be triggered by stress.

Another example are IR heat lamps: they were often used to help with joint pain. I don't know how effective they are, but at least they feel good. In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with buying a heat lamp and using it.

But someone I know was sold one of these lamps as a cure for her cancer, for about 100x the normal price of such lamps. There is no way a fancy lamp is going to help when the surgery failed. People will pay anything for a glimmer of hope, and peddlers of "alternative" treatments prey on this desperation. That's the problem with alternative medicine.

> I think it's pretty much consensus that neurodermatitis can be triggered by stress.

No offense intended, but you're a little out of your depth here. Keep in mind I had this for decades and thought of everything you could think of, and more. And yes, stress makes it worse, but quitting work and pretty much eliminating any stress from my life, didn't fix it.

> But someone I know was sold one of these lamps as a cure for her cancer, for about 100x the normal price of such lamps.

That's a bummer of a story. As I said, I wouldn't say this is the norm for alternative therapies.

> That's the problem with alternative medicine.

It is certainly a problem that exists within 'alternative medicine'. There are fewer check and balances, and government oversight, as per the traditional medical establishment, and there's nonsense like homeopathy, but unscrupulous things happen in conventional medicine too. Like say, trying to fix psychological issues with chemical interventions that aren't all that efficacious, or addictive pain meds that lead to overdoses.

Conventional medicine of course has plenty of merit, and is often backed up by rigorous clinical studies, but I'd also argue there's plenty of helpful encounters with 'alternative medicine'. I think also helps to have some epistemic humility, and that in order to be truly 'scientific', alternative therapies should be taken seriously, and studied properly, before they are dismissed... and yes, fraud is a problem that should be taken seriously too.

> No offense intended, but you're a little out of your depth here.

I wasn't trying to make any claims about how skin diseases work, I apologise if it came across this way. I just wanted to say that it sounds plausible to me that meditation could help with excemas, since to my knowledge some skin diseases correlate with stress.

I'm not saying that your exzemas were caused by stress. I also didn't say that removing stress would cure neurodermatitis -- these kinds of statements based on anecdotes are exactly what I'm trying to argue against.

(One interesting anecdote about neurodermatitis is that with all the people I knew it mostly went away at some point in their lives, and they don't know why)

> I wouldn't say this is the norm for alternative therapies.

I have a lot of relatives who are very fond of "alternative medicine", and almost all of it is total bullshit.

There's people determining the correct ingredients of a medicine using a pendulum, others determining food allergies by measuring electrical resistance of the skin, people who cure headaches with electric shocks, or those that cure epilepsy by taking specific "salts", and there's always some general purpose alcohol drops that help cure everything.

> alternative therapies should be taken seriously, and studied properly, before they are dismissed

So many people come up with devices that channel earth rays and complain that the establishment doesn't take them serious. If you try to make money with some made up treatment, it's on you to prove that it works. You can't just go peddle your cure for everything and then expect some scientist to come along and do the work for you.

If it's something sensible, then people do study it. Out of curiosity I typed the keywords "meditation" and "exzema" into Google scholar, and 5000 articles matched the query. I don't have any background in clinical research, so I have no idea how I'd go about to evaluate the quality of these articles, but it definitely does look to me like research is being done on alternative treatments.

> I wasn't trying to make any claims about how skin diseases work, I apologise if it came across this way. I just wanted to say that it sounds plausible to me that meditation could help with excemas, since to my knowledge some skin diseases correlate with stress.

> (One interesting anecdote about neurodermatitis is that with all the people I knew it mostly went away at some point in their lives, and they don't know why)

You were informing me about the mechanisms of a disease I lived with for 36 desperate years, as if I was naive, and never read any literature, consulted any experts, and didn't know the basics, like say, that stress is a factor in eczema severity. Try to imagine how that might feel.

But I'm surprised you know of more than one person with neurodermatitis, I can only think of one other. What I had was atopic dermatitis, it was from birth, and never abated.

I read that for most people atopic dermatitis usually disappears around their late 20s, and that milestone came and went for me. Things only got worse. My whole body was covered - unlike for typical neurodermatitis. My dermatologist put me on a course of oral corticosteroids, which didn't really help, and also told me to take lightly bleached baths. The body-wide secondary infection meant my bed was damp from my broken skin leaking out everywhere. My whole body was screaming at me to scratch. I basically never had proper sleep.

I changed everything I could change. I quit my job (so no more exposure to air conditioning drying out my skin everyday, no more stressful deadlines), moved back home to a sunnier climate (low-dose UV is a treatment for eczema, so I'd sun myself every day), had healthy good food that avoided any of the allergens on my RAST tests, and the situation improved... but I still had it across my whole body, I still had no sleep.

The meditation practice of Vipassana solved the problem for me in 10 days... for free. Maybe I could have spent months going to CBT sessions and got the same results from a medically sanctioned clinical methodology... but why, when the better thing is orders of magnitude faster and cheaper? It just so happened the technique is basically not reacting to sensations, which seems perfectly designed psychological intervention for breaking the itch-scratch-itch cycle.

> I have a lot of relatives who are very fond of "alternative medicine", and almost all of it is total bullshit.

The examples you go on to describe are total BS and I agree these should never claim to be a stand in for already-proven medicine, like say taking a RAST test to determine allergies vs measuring skin conductivity. This sort of Gwyneth Paltrow stuff for me seems to be on the fringes and mostly benign, but the sorts of alternative medicines I'm thinking of are more psychological interventions, or maybe last-resort placebos, or even plant medicine outside what has been properly studied. I think there's some scope to bring these into the fold of conventional medicine should they prove their worth.

> You can't just go peddle your cure for everything and then expect some scientist to come along and do the work for you.

Agreed.

> but it definitely does look to me like research is being done on alternative treatments.

You're probably right. Though it took some time before meditation was taken seriously by science, and it's been around for millennia. I'm certain that if my GP said -- in some alternate dimension -- 'I prescribe you a Vipassana meditation retreat', and I took that 'medicine' in my teenage years, I would have been vastly better off. It's bizarre, to be at my peak cognition and physical fitness in my late 30s, because I'm no longer distracted by my whole body screaming at me with the largest organ on my body shredded from head to toe. But how was my doctor to know?

>but even then, it's worth noting that some placebos work better than others, and likely placebos work differently for each individual. So for something like pain, which can be controlled somewhat by psychological intervention, a better placebo could have merit.

Do you think it's ethical for manufacturers to advertise sugar pills as real drugs being able to treat illness, even though their effects are purely placebo?

I'll quote myself

> Not saying that unproven interventions should be thrust upon naive patients,

Do you believe you’re representative of the population of homeless people (ie are their origin stories similar in nature to yours)?

Also, what life circumstances led to you sharing a motel room with a person who, out of nowhere, rushed at people with a knife? Had this person done similar acts prior to you / have they since / was there a dispute / were there drugs?

Thanks for your question. I do not believe I am a representative example of the homeless population.

But I would venture to say I represent the effects of a culturally biased view of the entire homeless population. A bias that inaccurately portrays homeless as somehow 'deserving' of their miserable situation(s).

Drugs, mental issues, stupidity ... after all I have seen out here these are not typical root causes of homelessness. They are typical consequences of being homeless.

So i was renting a bedroom in a 2bd apartment. It wasnt a motel. I had been living there several months and there were no known issues although I could tell we likely were not to become friends due to differences in value systems. I suspect he has lied successfully many, many, many times in the past.

If you talk to homeless people a lot of them have interesting origin stories.

Please. Escape. LA.

LA has 66,433 [1] homeless people and there is not the resource system to help. LA has a huge drug culture which creates an aggressive gang culture. Homeless are taken advantage of by gangs. The camps that are allowed are not worth it! It is so bad - Typhoid Fever, Typhus & Tuberculosis are spreading among the homeless encampments [2]. Your best bet is to find a small town in the middle of no where America and pan handle. By the end of the day you will be cleaning someones garage for cash sleeping in a mechanics guest house. No one cares in LA.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2019/06/04/typhoid-...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/875888864/homelessness-in-los...

I like your thinking. But Its hard to clean even a garage with a broken spine, and yes I have tried.

I have been seeking employment out of state too but this the Greater Depression we are in.

Arrrg and now there is a santa monica police helicopter hovering dirctly over my head for the past 10 minutes after I started writing this (pico blvd and ocean blvd). If you are in the area you can attest. Its hard out here.

Ok it's clear the chopper left.

Thank you for your insider’s perspective. It sounds like you had a lot of bad luck. Just curious: what do you need most at this point to get your life back on track, and if it’s money, how much?

Thank you for this question. I don't have an answer with high confidence right now. Still recovering from a trauma from Monday.

A year ago was different, with less traumas stacking on me.

It seems because a basic evaluation of the extent of my injury has been so elusive.

Im not a quitter but since monday im seriously starting to lean toward pivoting from trying to find work to pursuing disability income status.

I might be able to help with the car accident injury. I had a rear-end car accident 11 years ago. I know the pain/suffering. It's like nothing you can imagine till you have it and then it never goes away, worst of all no professional knows what to do about it.

The last two years I've read pretty much everything and contacted every researcher/research group working on this. They have some good material, but eventually I had to adapt their work into my own techniques. I'm now about 80-90% fixed and in a few months I think I'll be all good.

I've developed an exercise program along with an elastic head sling that supports and strengthens the neck. If you're interested DM me on twitter https://bit.ly/2LTVMMl and I'll send you some info about how I did it, you might have to modify some things but I think the basic ideas will apply.

I just wanted to say thank you for posting. I read what you had to say and I plan on reading when you post again. That’s all. Thank you.

Wow I have had more constructive social interaction communicating here in the past half day than I have experienced in the past two years. Thank you hn! Im overwhelmed in a good way. Even if it just lasts for half a day before I screw it up somehow, it's a welcome change.

So please let me express how much I appreciate the responsiveness from each of you who have read my comments and especially each of you who have responded. I get that it isnt easy talking with a homeless person, it isnt easy talking to a new profile on hn, etc. So I very much appreciate the courageous among y'all.

Please don't give up on me if you want the rest of the story its just that I didn't anticipate the response.

But from comments it's more important to me to say:

1. To whoever posted asking for advice because you are facing an impending homeless situation please do not wait for my response. Take the details you wanted to share with me and instead take those to 1 or 2 people you already know right now its a Saturday and see if you strike some sort of 'partnership' where each gets value and you stay housed. Think outside the box on this. Be sure to approach people you already know but if that number is too low then ask who they would ask for help. You see how your credibility gets thin once you move further from direct contacts so i would say focus on the people you know. Ask for help from those you already know and do it now while you still can. If everyone says no...ask them why not. Perhaps down the road you can come up with a different way they can help, a way that bypasses their previous objection. Geez I sound like a sales manager but its what I would if I were you. Dont give up no matter what.

2. The back-n-forth about chiropractors in the comments seems to illustrate the key bias impeding any real effort to solve the homelessness problem. Not all chiropractors are bad, just as not all homeless are bad. Whether you use Webster's or Michael Jackson's definition of bad I think what I say stands true.

Please consider sharing more when you can. Also please reach out to all the government run programs to get all the help you can. At least that way the taxpayers money is put to good use. And don’t give up.

Why did you refuse the surgery? Do you think it would help with the pain?

I empathize with this person. It’s clear from his story he does not have a support network.

I think many of the decisions you make that are good decisions are helped by your friends and family. When people act alone or without support, they tend to make bad decisions. (Not to say this is always the case, just something I’ve noticed and felt in myself - I make bad decisions when I feel alone)

The first mistake he made was not seeking assistance after the stabbing incident. Either he didn’t trust anyone or he simply didn’t have anyone he could turn to to take him in. Many people would be able to go back to their parents or stay with a friend after something like that, but he felt that going homeless was the only option.

Even if I wanted to go homeless, I can think of a number of people who would literally drag me off the street and in to their house. Where was that for this person?

Surgery is a decision that an individual cannot make alone, it’s too overwhelming, you need support to get through that.

Thank you for your thoughts but you sir are selling me short.

>The first mistake he made was not seeking assistance after the stabbing incident

Sadly I found no assistance. I clarified some things about the surgery decision in another comment that may enlighten you.

>going homeless was the only option

No friends, no family. I have a brother who graduated Harvard Law under Dershowitz and worked for Weinstein. My younger brother. He called the police to tell them I was suicidal and they showed up at my ex-girlfriend's house to haul me away. (I was not, and have never been suicidal).

Sadly for me but luckily for you, you have much more support.

In your story, you are the unfortunate recipient of a shit stick from everyone:

- your brother, a successful attorney who lied to the police to commit you

- your shelter, who kicked you out randomly without cause (people who run and work at shelters are generally well-intended

- your roommate, who literally attacked you with a knife completely randomly

- your lawyer, and potentially the surgeon he recommended

- the chiropractor

- the other driver

Each is believable, especially the chiropractor, but you’re essentially the completely passive and no-fault recipient of a giant shit stick from like 7 different people in short order.

I hate to ask this but do you think it’s possible there’s some common thread here? Your past behavior, mental health, drug use (and thus being exposed to people who attack others with knives during disputes), etc?

Thank you for responding. There is a common thread (me) and it includes all of my strengths and weaknesses. But no mental health or bad behaviour or drug use in my past.

Please dont get mad but even what you have summarized about me is not accurate. It seems as if you have dramatized my setbacks because I certainly dont have such a long list of people to point fingers at?

If I seem indignant its because it feels like your model wants to kill me by statistic because I am a fat tail data point.

Underneath I have had it rough no doubt, rougher than anyone with 99% SAT and 99% GMAT (logic) deserves.

There may be a longer family history here where support networks got burned - two most common I've seen are drug use and mental health issues. Criminal justice involvement much lower on list.

For transitional job programs - you don't get kicked out w out a reason - they work with lots of people. They agree not usually as ocial workers though - program is about jobs and employers usually.

Ok to use them for mail like onboarding paperwork from employers. Because of liability and other risks (folks can be hustling etc still) usually not ok too use mail service for other reasons.

>Ok to use them for mail like onboarding paperwork from employers. Because of liability and other risks (folks can be hustling etc still) usually not ok too use mail service for other reasons.

That's it. Thank you.

This person tried to do something helpful for me by sending a care package. Had she told me upfront I would've said no dont do it. I knew the rules. I wasnt expecting her to send me anything.

Sorry - that sucks. I've done job reentry work - safest bet is to just give address to employers - they rarely send stuff anyways and def not care packages!

i‘ve been watching interviews with homeless people on the Invisible People youtube channel (highly recommend), and one thing that struck me is how skin deep most support networks are. having friends and family vanish the second they could come up with a reasonable excuse seems to be the hardest part for many of them.

Its dangerous to talk to anybody out here. I feel like I am taking a huge risk even posting about it.

If someone is close enough to talk to you they are close enough to hurt you.

To your point I had reached out to a collge girlfriend after my accident in 2017. She asked for my address and I gave her c/o Chrysalis which is a work help program here in Santa Monica. Unfortunately, she wanted to do somethinf nice so she sent a care package of shampoo and other things but I will never know. Chrysalis kicked me out for 'abusing' their mail service. I never even saw the package she sent to me. I received 2 dentist bills, 0 responses to the resumes i was sending out, and 1 unannounced care package. I am so clearly not an abuser of anything except possibly myself somehow.

Thank you. I would upvote your comment but havent yet found out how.

> I would upvote your comment but havent yet found out how

Click the little upward-pointing triangle next to the username at the top of the comment. When the triangle disappears, you've upvoted. Upvotes can't be undone.

upvotes can be undone with the unvote button.

Holy shit, I never noticed that link until now.

You, sir, get an upvote that I will most certainly not be withdrawing.

I think he accepted the surgery but regrets it for some reason. That’s how I read it at least.

No, I refused the surgery and I do not regret it one byte.

The accident atty had arranged a chiropractor who hurt me, and being homeless, to me it was clearly greedily intentional in order to 'Maximize my monetary recovery'. because the atty takes a % of the award!

The timing is critical to understanding the conveyor of terror I was on. The chiro did this to me after my accident MRI was taken.

So then the atty arranges a surgeon to perform c2-c5 spine surgery based on the old MRI and he tells me "it's routine. A piece of cake."

Felt like the perfectly plausibly deniable way to put me in a wheelchair as a quadriplegic and then charge the insurance company $2 million instead of a paltry $30000.

"Oh there were complications during the routine surgery.." is the risk I was facing.

Wow, you sound like you’ve lost all your trust to humanity.

While the conspiracy to cash on your misfortune is possible, it requires an orchestration of multiple corrupt well educated individuals.

I like to think that doctors are intellectually honest people. They might have monetary motives and and biases but they wouldn’t lie.

You can stumble upon a psychopath but most people aren’t and the psychopaths also have a reputation to uphold. It’s dangerous to lie at well documented events like a surgery.

What do you need to improve your situation now?

Beyond the social communication here which has been hugely helpful, I need less pain and for my adrenaline levels to abate; I'm still wound up from Monday which is longer than typical.

And wifi access would let me chase down my 2020 w-2 to file for the 1200 and 600 federal help payments for which I am eligible but never received.

if you ever tired of other places, please come visit shitmyself.com, or sm.chg.pw. friendlier name to come.

it has a captcha login, see my profile, but no account is required. i guarantee it works with any device, no matter how old.

i have lived on the street before, and many of the other visitors also street.

What a horrible story. My best to you, brother

Kuro5hin redux.