Showing posts with label health/medicine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label health/medicine. Show all posts

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Diet record-keeping

So I'm taking this nutrition class, and one of the key exercises is keeping track of everything you eat for five days, once at the beginning of the quarter and again, later, when you will allegedly will have learned enough to mend your wayward chow-hounding.

I think I've done pretty well, but the program we're using to keep track keeps record of both eats and activities. I say "but" because the short questionnaire the program uses has labeled me as "active" and thus believes I need nearly 2,500 calories a day just to keep my head above water. I'm dubious.

I'm also skeptical of the claims about how much the kinds of exercise I do count. For example, I swim (hard, baby). I did a pretty aggressive half-hour yesterday (Friday) and the gizmo thinks that's about 400 calories burnt. I don't know about that. I find it hard to believe that a half-hour swim could counteract, say for example, a six-shot bender of vodka (65 calories apiece). To put it a different way, the swim would amount to four normal peanut butter spoons (1 tablespoon each).

Anyway, the upshot of the five-day deal is that I have been paying way, way more attention to my eating patterns. I probably have snacked a lot less than usual on account of the record-keeping. If you believe my friend Chris Sawin, a college pal, the bad-habit-breaking/positive-habit-forming threshold is 17 days. I assume he came up with that during one of his quit-smoking efforts. Anyway, I'm not sure 17 is right, but five surely is to few?

I've tried to act normal this week, but I'm sure I've cut back. And because I tend to eat cyclically (i.e. I'll go on a V-8 jag starting tonight and lasting a couple weeks, then avoid the stuff), I am certain this isn't going to be super representative. But it is interesting!

Saturday, October 03, 2009

Vaccines

Sunday, August 02, 2009

Observation on narcotics

I can't say I'm a big fan of narcotics, particularly the vicodin, percocet, darvocet, oxycodone, oxycontin set.

I'm sure that for some people, they are a godsend, but I've also seen a fair amount of evidence to suggest that maybe, oh maybe, they're not all they're cracked up to be.

For me, they don't make a dent. If I need a painkiller, I'm better off with an Aleve, or an aspirin, or a cup of coffee or glass of whisky for that matter.

And I know a bunch of other people for whom the pills don't kill the pain, or if they do also have a host of nasty side effects.

It makes me think of anesthesia: Something that's a good tool but nobody knows why it works. I heard a doctor recently saying he thought the painkillers don't actually "kill" the pain, but just give your mind something else to occupy it.

Of course, to be fair the medical sciences haven't had many years since coming out of the Dark Ages (i.e. pre-1900 or so), so there should still be a lot of mysteries.

Maybe that's why I find the field appealing: I like undiscovered country.

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Health risks, public and private

Today's front page at USA Today carries a story about the elevated risk of dying of a heart problem during a triathlon vs. a marathon (but not, oddly enough, in comparison to walking on city streets).

A study found the casualty rate is about 15 per 1 million participants, way higher than marathons (4 to 8 per million). The raw numbers are similar to the rate - 13 dead swimmers out of 922,810 (and one dead biker!) over a roughly 2.5-year period.

The story goes into detail, which is cool, and offers some sound advice for people thinking about doing a triathlon (get the OK from the doctor, do some open water swims, wear a wetsuit if the water's too cold and make sure race staff are prepared for emergencies).

But although it acknowledges the rising popularity of triathlons, the story is silent on the health benefits enjoyed by the 921,996 people who weren't killed in competition. And it says nothing about the 4,749 pedestrians killed in 2003 alone, a number the federal government provided me within about 30 seconds of my doing a Google search. If that number held up, you'd be looking at, what? Ten thousand dead pedestrians in the same period as 14 dead triathletes?

Granted, the study is new, so its news. But still.

Friday, March 13, 2009

When the walls start crumblin' down

I get questions now and again about what my plans are for when newspapers - and mine in particular - shit the bed.

It's a good question, but it is tied up in an expectation that I, the supposed curer of cancer who chose the wrong career path, will somehow also have an answer, the answer, that will save the profession. That's pretty ridiculous: Those test scores don't give me any better idea than the next newsie of how to "monetize" online news.

I like the question sans expectations, partly because it is a chance to talk about what I like about the business I'm in.

The best part is simple: You get to help people. It's kind of like being on the A-Team. When some unlucky soul has tried everyone else and has nowhere else to turn, they call us. I get UFO calls, psychological emergencies, cooking advice queries (How many melons do I need for my party? Seriously), drunks and druggies, you name it.

I relish the customer service part of my job. If a reader is mad as hell, I want them calling me.

Now, I can count a few times a caller has been an unacceptable asshole: The criminal mastermind whose scumbag daughters showed up on the blotter, the Freedom Forum dickhead who called me "one of the Nazis" and the guy who called an opinion piece I wrote "one of the most one-sided, biased stories I've ever read." No shit, Sherlock.

On the flip side, I can't count the times I've picked up the phone to someone who had driven past their wit's end and been able to get them back on the road to somewhere. That's tied for the most rewarding part of the job, really.

It beats the awards, though they reap the praise from above. It beats the substandard pay, although that comes in more handy for paying bills. It doesn't beat sticking it to the man, however. Nothing can come close to holding someone in power accountable when he's (or she's) screwed the least among us.

But let's get back to that question: What are you going to do when the bell tolls? I've got backup plans, of course. Who doesn't? But it isn't that easy to find something that has the same day-to-day make-a-difference aspect. Except for one option, which a perceptive reader might intuit from reading this blog, or at least checking out the frequency of my tags.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

By land and sea

So, I started running again (maximum distance so far, a whopping two miles), and I'm still swimming, though I'm mixing the two to try to fend off injuries. Now I'm wondering if I should consider maybe doing a triathlon, one of the short ones. I'm ambivalent. I haven't really enjoyed riding a bike since I was edged off the road by a careless driver and crashed.

That wasn't a great moment, but it was a long time ago and it is ridiculous to live in the past. But with our place in New Hampshire being super bike-unfriendly and life being pretty busy here, I just haven't bothered to pick up the habit, which I enjoyed very much before.

Well, who knows? But it might be fun to take a shot at a triathlon. I think there's one in town with reasonable distances (500-yard swim, 5-kilometer run, 20-mile bike ride).

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Top of the heap!

I don't know how long this will last:

But I'll take it!

Friday, July 18, 2008

Swimming

Ages ago, I thought I'd use this space to chronicle my conversion from long-distance runner (boy, talk about the distant past...) to swimmer.

That fabulous process started with a ligament strain (MCL, I think) sustained trying to recapture being a distance runner from being a guy who used to be a distance runner.

Swimming hasn't gone entirely swimmingly. I hit the pool in late summer 2005 and started having shoulder problems in January 2006 that haven't really gone away. But I also lost a lot of weight (21 pounds from then to now, as well as a few inches off the waistline). And I'm getting faster, finally, thank god.

And less injured, too, I think. The other week, I got a tip from a fellow pool person that, combined with an observation of a speedy swimmer girl, has taken damn near all the pain out of swimming. I suspect I'll still need the massage therapy and such for a while, but maybe the light is finally shining at the end of the tunnel. And the light isn't a fast-approaching train :)

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Tale of the tape

As I've mentioned, I get a lot of hits from people who want more information on strep and staph infections in their snoots. To wit, according to Statcounter, here's the rundown since Monday at dinnertime:
  1. Lebanon, Ill.
  2. Warsaw, Poland
  3. Tupelo, Miss.
  4. Oak Park, Ill.
  5. Sydney, Australia
  6. Granada Hills, Calif.
  7. West Bloomfield, Mich.
  8. New York state
  9. Brooklyn, N.Y.
  10. Franklin, Mass.
  11. Richmond, Va.
  12. Clearwater, Fla.
  13. Clifton, N.J.
  14. Washington, D.C.
  15. Houston
  16. Sacramento, Calif.
  17. Eureka, Ill.
  18. Phoenix
  19. San Francisco
  20. Phoenix
  21. Allende, Mexico
  22. Vista, Calif.
  23. U.K. of G.B. & N.I. (city unknown)
  24. Jackson, N.J.
  25. London
  26. U.K. of G.B. & N.I. (city unknown)
  27. New York state
  28. Richmond, Va.
  29. Colville, Wash. (may be a record for closest hit)
  30. Rochester, N.Y.
  31. Seattle
  32. Encino, Calif.
  33. Hudson, Mass.
  34. London
  35. Maryville, Mo.
  36. San Diego
  37. Columbia, S.C.
  38. Roselle Park, N.J.
  39. Circle Pines, Minn.
  40. Fort Mill, S.C.
  41. Kenmore, Wash.
  42. Grass Valley, Calif.
  43. Huntsville, Texas
So, that's maybe a dozen a day? This is just a teensy slice of the geographic pie, too. I'm sure this is the reason I've got the No. 1 and No. 2 rankings at google on these topics. :)

Monday, March 31, 2008

Near the top of the heap

Statcounter amuses me when I check in, because although I am no doubt endlessly fascinating, most people who show up here are looking for information about nasal infections. Sweet!

Anyway, the oodles of visits are paying off - I'm still in first place in a Google search for "strep nose" and after months in fourth, I've taken over second place for "staph nose."

So what, right? Probably, but my post on strep & staph has now outdone the articles at about.com and medicinenet.com. I'm not sure what to make of it, but it is nice to be popular, even if for something that sort of sucks. Maybe I should get a Neosporin endorsement deal going...

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Eating Alarm Time...

One of the features my paper carries is called the Diet Detective, a weekly column by Charles Stuart Platkin. We don't run it every week: Some columns are much better than others. This week's is about Eating Alarm Times (maybe he's German and likes capitalizing things). Platkin calls the EAT (oh, clever clever. I just got it) a time when a person can consume an extra 300 calories, thus gaining weight.

His column is based on asking people about their EATs, and the results are pretty interesting, if for no other reason than that mine is the third-most popular. He calls it Afternoon Snack Attack, between 1 and 5 p.m. I call this period "lunch" because I eat after swimming. That seems like maybe a better plan than wolfing down a sandwich before jumping in the pool. Anyway, I do notice that when I get done swimming, I am even more ravenously hungry than usual.

By "usual" I mean almost all the time since I dropped about 25 pounds in August 2005. I also get cold more easily than I used to, but I have a pretty high tolerance for being cold, so maybe now I'm just normal. Whatever. I'm still hungry, damn it.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Staph nose

I have finally defeated, I think, staph nose.

Maybe it will come back, but I haven't had a bout in quite a while. Not coincidentally, I suspect, I have started using a nose clip at the pool. Ergo, I'm not congested around the clock and maybe not such a good breeding ground for our friends the bacteria.

I bring this up because I have noticed a spike in unique visitors to this blog, and statcounter informs me that many (most :) visitors come here by googling "staph nose" or "staph in nose" or "staphylococcus aureus in proboscis" or something like that.

I strongly suspect either an outbreak or a routine seasonal spike in staph infections. Of course, as an influential member of the media, I don't have to sit around wondering. I'll report back after a member of my staff has investigated.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Forward progress

I don't write much about swimming here because I have another blog for that... But I'm short on ideas and feel like blogging, so...

Since about February or March of 2006, I've had this injured wing, my left shoulder. I think the trouble started with some technical malfunction in my stroke, but who can say for sure? Anyway, I've fixed whatever I was doing wrong, been through the wringer with a massage lady and an acupuncturist and spent a fair amount of time on the shelf. That last part is a real drag. I can't stand being out of commission.

Anyway, all appears to be well at last - I can go hard without hurting, and I can swim when I like without worrying. Thank god.

If only I could sort out the allergy to pool chemicals...

Friday, January 26, 2007

A note from the pool

I don't usually post swimming stuff here anymore, but hey.

Since last spring, I've had a sketchy shoulder, courtesy of my usual all-or-nothing approach to workouts. I don't know why, but I'm not very good at setting small, easy-to-reach goals. I like the other kind more. Maybe the intercollegiate athlete in me is still lurking somewhere beneath the surface.

So I've been on the massage table, and recently the acupuncture table. Mr. Needles instructed me to "push it a bit" and I did today. I only swam a mile and a half (the half was a warmup), but I did the mile without holding back (aka I swam slowly, but it felt fast to me) and sprinted (aka swam a little less slowly) at the end. No pain, no problems.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

An observation on health care

I was reminded this week of a conversation I had over the holidays with a person I could only describe as privileged dude who doesn't give a shit about the less fortunate.

He was griping about how socialized medicine is an awful evil, etc. He also suggested the good ol' U.S. of A is way better because of the wonderful health care we "all" have access to.

I responded that to me, it seems there is a simple marker for whether you are rich (one that doesn't have anything to do with your income, either): Do you have health insurance? If you do, you're rich. If not, you're fucked.

That said, there's another level of this kind of wealth (this one is partly monetary) that I can see now. If you live in our city (population 30,000), you can get pretty good care, but if you are willing/able to drive to Seattle or Portland and also are a proactive patient, you can get much better care.

This isn't an abstraction. Someone I know very well indeed is due for surgery, come hell or high water. If this person had not taken the time to learn about the situation, that surgery would have been done here in town and have been pretty invasive (i.e. the kind that leaves a four-inch scar and takes six weeks to recover from).

Luckily, that person is informed and is a good self-advocate and is able to travel to the larger city, where a less-invasive procedure (in on Friday, back at work Monday, the optimists say) is de rigeur.

So you can only get adequate care if you have this huge stack of factors on your side. And that pretty much blows.

Friday, January 19, 2007

Needles

I don't know how I was when I was a kid, but needles don't trouble me at all these days.

Hepatitis vaccines? No problem. Give blood? Sure. Tetanus shots? Fine.

I added acupuncture to the list today, and it was no big deal. I didn't have a clue what to expect, so I don't know what is typical.

Besides a few needles here and there, I got to participate in resistance tests (to find out what all is catawampus), some adjustments here and there, a list of foods to eat and foods to avoid. Most of what is on the OK list and what's prohibited will not surprise you.

Best of all, I got instructions to push a little bit in the pool, which I've been itching to do.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Speaking of medicine

I saw the latest Claritin-D ad the other night, in which actors say rubbish like, "Thank you, Claritin-D, for not changing your formula! I can still count on you to clear up my congestion!"

The commercial would only need minor tweaking to make a great Saturday Night Live sketch:

"Thank you, Claritin-D, for making sure I still have ingredients for my latest batch of meth!"

Anyway, here's Schering-Plough HealthCare Product's bullshit "explanation" for why Claritin-D is now a behind-the-counter product:
"Federal legislation takes effect on September 30, 2006 that imposes a deadline on moving allergy and cold products containing the active ingredient pseudoephedrine (PSE) off store shelves and placing them behind the pharmacy or customer service counter. This legislation will make it harder to find longer lasting allergy and cold decongestants. Interestingly, many allergy and cold sufferers surveyed were unaware of the changes both in the law and on the shelf product reformulations."
I know Claritin-D contains methamphetamine ingredients, and maybe everybody else knows, too. Would it really kill the drug maker to acknoweledge they're part of a problem?

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

More on strep & staph nose

If you are reading this post, it is probably because you have a staph or strep infection in your nose. Many people who come to this blog come here for this post, so you have a lot of company.

The first time I was infected, I had never even heard of such a thing as strep or staph nose. Here's what I know about this pesky problem:

My noses background includes one strep infection, in 2003 or 2004, and one staph infection (two species, I was told) that started in 2006. The infection has been back two more times since the initial infection. My risk factor apparently is that I am routinely congested because of an allergy to swimming pool chemicals (I swim a lot).

For me, the symptoms have been annoying, itchy and painful little cuts inside my nose that won't heal. Weirdly, I have only had the infections in one nostril.

Treatment is simple. You just spread antibiotic "cream" - really a petroleum jelly goop - around inside your nose twice a day for 10 days. The drugs can be expensive (I had insurance, and the prescription for the strep was still $40), or cheap (the staph infections were attacked with an 0ver-the-counter remedy, like Neosporin).

Simple, yes, but effective? The staph infection has been back a couple times (it started in September 2006 and I just finished a third antibiotic course today, Jan. 19, 2007). Some of the literature I found online suggests eradicating staph nose (typically staphylococcus aureus, for which an excellent article can be found here) can be a yearlong process: five days each month for a year!

Speaking generally, streptococcus and staphylococcus bacteria seem to be omnipresent, like coliform bacteria, and can cause much more havoc than stupid nose infections. Flesh-eating bacteria, for example, is a variety of strep.

That's about all I know so far. If you arrive here with a bummed out nose, take heart and if you haven't already, pay a visit to your health-care provider.

Here are three more reasonably good links:

Dr. Gabe Mirkin on treatment of staph nose
MedicineNet.com article about antibiotic resistant staph nose
A longer but better netdoctor article on resistant staph

If this post did not answer a question you have, please leave a comment and I will hunt down the answer.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Making weight loss last

Until last year, my weight made steady progress in an upward direction since I graduated from high school, which is to say for many years.

I went through the customary denial (The dryer made my pants smaller! It's all muscle!) process until the point that the doctor showed me her chart, with my weight, in black and white, over the years I had seen her before leaving the area temporarily. So, I could see where I'd been, and I could certainly tell where I was. Plus, she showed me some other depressing numbers (cholesterol, blood pressure, blah blah blah).

I promptly lost 28 pounds (how? swim, don't drink much, swim, swim, don't drink much and swim), and although a few pounds have come back, I'm where she wants me to be (and wearing the pant size I had when I was in my best cross country running shape around 1989-91). The best part, I have to say, has been getting new clothes.

My motivation is a combination of wanting to live a long time, liking how I look (and how others look at me) now, that sort of thing. I don't ordinarily write about this sort of thing, but I thought I ought to put pen to paper (OK, fingertips to keys) to remind myself, if I ever look back through my blog, that life is better now than it was then.

Monday, September 25, 2006

Choosy moms choose Jif?

Of all the slogans I could think of in the past couple of minutes, Jif's bothers me most. Choosy moms choose Jif. How exactly is that choosy?

When I whip up PB&J, I want to make sure the kids eat a few wholesome extras. Partially and fully hydrogenated oil, sugar, mono- and diglycerides are some of my favorite little downhome goodies, and I'm especially proud if I can get those into the each of the ingredients, too!

Now, I can see how the old-school Jif might still have all that crap, but the comparatively new brand, Simply Jif Creamy has this ingredient list:

Roasted peanuts, contains 2 percent or less of: partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (soybean), fully hydrogenated vegetable oils (rapeseed and soybean), mono- and diglycerides, molasses, sugar and salt.

How's that simply? Of course, you can always get Adams peanut butter (made by the same people who make Jif) without the unwanted extras.

This reminds me of another conundrum: When a company makes good and bad products, should you buy nothing from them at all or just the good ones? I'm pretty sure it doesn't really matter, but I still feel reluctant to buy canola oil from Crisco...