And the monkey on my back that I can’t seem to shake.
Any ideas for alt treatments that you have, please share! I’ve run out of ideas. What I’ve tried: chiropractic, various nutritional supplements, progesterone cream, drinking more water, warming my hands & feet during the pre-headache stage, avoiding triggers. Nothing seems to help consistently. Anyone have any other ideas?
Why not?
Aubrey de Grey says that
radical increases in human life expectancy will be possible within the next twenty to thirty years. “As medicine becomes more powerful”, he says, “we will inevitably be able to address ageing just as effectively as we address many diseases today. I think the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already.”
Much more in this piece by Paul Miller and James Wilsdon in openDemocracy.
(P.S. If you pooh pooh this idea, you’re a “deathist.” lol — who knew?)
Dog and Kennel Magazine has published a special report on nutrigenomics — foods designed to influence the way genetic tendencies express in dogs’ bodies.
The report says that the most successful application of this idea, so far, is in treating arthritis (partly because researchers have made solid progress in understanding the genetics of arthritis in dogs). By tweaking the levels of certain proteins and fats in their products, dog food manufacturers believe they can influence biochemical activity at the cellular level, cutting short the progression of the disease.
A twist on the story is that although these foods contain only natural ingredients — no drugs, nothing from a test tube — they are only available, right now, through veterinarians, as explained here by Dan Carey, DVM, “a trained veterinarian who now works as a scientist at Iams,” and Dr. Dru Forrester, scientific spokesperson for Hills Pet Nutrition:
“We want veterinarians to confirm that your dog has the body type and size so he’ll benefit from this diet.” Even more, Carey says, “We want to encourage people to work with veterinarians so they continue to get good general advice about their dog’s health.” Forrester also wants people to go through a veterinarian to prevent the rise of inferior imitations. “Everything in these foods is the result of detailed work. We don’s want to see nutrigenomic foods being copied and sold in grocery stores, where there are fewer controls on the contents.”
Translation: we plan to charge an arm and a leg for this stuff, and we don’t want people to get the idea that they can mix it up more cheaply in their own kitchens.
The article also asks why we can’t do something similar for people.
The answer is that we can exert more control over our dogs’ diets — and dogs are more willing to eat uniform (i.e. boring) food: “For nutrigenomics to work, you must eat the specific foods that have been developed for you, and do it faithfully.”
Faithfully as a dog, must be :-)
That said, the piece predicts this work will influence trends in human nutritional science, which is a good thing.
— since your fair blogger hasn’t begun to get her head around that topic yet, and she’s not in curmudgeonly skeptic mode at the moment — this is still astonishing.
Not that women are driven a bit bonkers, from time to time, by our hormones. But that men are, too. Driven bonkers by women’s hormones. Only not in the way you thought:
Men . . . appear to step up mate-guarding strategies when their wives or girlfriends ovulate, even when neither is keeping track of the woman’s cycle, the research shows.
“It’s not just that men are more jealous and possessive when their partners ovulate, but they’re also more attentive to their partners and more giving to their needs,” said collaborator Steven W. Gangestad, a University of New Mexico psychologist.
We’re hopelessly entwined, aren’t we. Biologically — chemically entwined.
Wild.
[tags] health hormones [/tags]
A salad spinner.
Reasons:
1. Lettuce is probably sentient. Give the poor lettuce a little fun before its final demise.
2. Unwashed lettuce will kill you. You’re probably safer eating roadkill in August than unwashed greens.
3. Wet salad is horrid. It isn’t even salad, really. It’s raw soup.
4. Water on a salad plate, when you’ve finished your salad, is horrid.
5. There are only two other ways to dry lettuce, unless you want to wait a couple of days.
6. Drying lettuce with a hair dryer wilts it. While wilted lettuce salad is, admittedly, a culinary mainstay, no known recipe suggests wilting it with forced hot air.
7. The only other way to dry your lettuce is to daub it with something.
8. Daubing it with a dish towel will re-contaminate it with the pathogens you just washed off. Don’t you want to live?
9. Daubing it with paper towels is safer, but paper towels are made from trees, and cutting down trees is bad . . .
10. Never mind. I’m going back to work!
I’ve been dealing with a painful shoulder for quite awhile now (we’re talking more than a few weeks) but I’m not blogging about it to solicit sympathy or advice.
I’m blogging about it because I learned last night that a dear friend’s son has OD’d on prescription painkillers.
Here’s another thing I’m not doing. I’m not claiming I deserve some medal for stoicism. Living with pain sucks. I know that it sucks. I can’t wash my hair without grimacing or (sometimes even) crying out. Ditto for backing up my car, or putting on any garment with long sleeves, or dozens of other simple movements that I’d love to take for granted.
Yet I have chosen not to go to a doctor for this.
So here’s what I think needs to be said.
It seems to me that our kneejerk reaction to pain (and you can toss in emotional pain here, too) is to try to stop it. But I’ve observed two things with regards to my shoulder. First, resisting pain is worse than feeling pain. Pain, in and of itself, is just a sensation. This is going to sound silly, but if you quiet your mind and pay attention to your pain, you’ll realize that pain doesn’t hurt. It just is. It’s just a sensation.
Resisting pain, OTOH, feels horrible. That’s where the tightness and confusion comes in, which most of us associate with pain, but is actually our reaction to pain, not the pain itself.
The second thing is that if you resist pain you set yourself up for despair, because if you’re like most people you can’t just shut off your conscious awareness of your body at will. I.e., you can’t escape your pain, so you spend all your time braced against it, which after a time induces a variety of unwanted emotional states. Maybe you’ve read the book Learned Optimism, where the author describes an experiment in which rats were subjected to electrical shock that they couldn’t escape, and how they eventually just gave up and stopped trying to get away. It’s little wonder people who suffer chronic pain become depressed.
So you go to your doctor and learn that there’s a pill.
Only what your doctor doesn’t tell you, because doctors’ understanding of such things is no deeper than the paper on a prescription pad, is that the pill comes with a catch.
Maybe not all the time; maybe not for everybody.
But make no mistake. When we surrender ourselves, even some portion of ourselves, to the authority of someone else — the doctor, the drug company — there are consequences.
The potential consequence of taking prescription painkillers include addiction, misery, and death.
I’m not saying “never go to a doctor.” But I do think that people should use medicine — conventional and alternative — more thoughtfully. Yes, that can be bewildering. The human body is enormously complex. But again, my shoulder is a great example. It hurts. And it’s slowly healing, because that’s what injuries like this one tend to do. And that is where I put my trust.
If you consider your pain to be truly debilitating, and you’ve chosen to use painkillers to deal with it, that’s your business. But if you’re taking them thoughtlessly, and especially if you’re only taking them because you can’t stop, take a long look in the mirror, because you’ve turned into a person you don’t want to be, and no matter what you might be telling yourself, what you’re really doing is causing pain. Possibly more pain than you ever imagined.
[tags]prescription painkiller, pain, OxyContin, Vicodin, Darvocet, Lortab, Lorcet, Percocet, hydrocodone, addiction[/tags]
My mom read a piece about this guy in her local paper and clipped it to show me when we gathered at my folks’ for Christmas.
He’s discovered, lo and behold, that if he doesn’t beat himself up about what he eats, he doesn’t gain weight.
If you don’t believe that I was the first one to have that idea, just ask Mom, she’ll tell you. It was in the 80s btw, predating this book by Evelyn Tribole: “Intuitive Eating”” by a decade, at least.
I’ve got it documented in any case. I wrote an essay about it that was published in this Chicken Soup for the Soul book about weight loss.
Only my version has a dog angle too, heh heh heh. I had a lively mixed breed at the time, named Brett, and I’d been coming to the realization that, with dogs, it’s better to reinforce what they’re doing right than play Obedience Commandante, chasing after them yelling no no no no no all the time.
It’s less stressful and, wonder of wonders, also makes for a better-behaved dog.
Next it occurred to me that if focusing on the positive worked for my dog, why not try it on myself? So I stopped punishing myself for eating “junk” and started noticing how nice it was to eat nutritious food that tastes good.
I’d “dieted” myself up to about 25 pounds over my ideal weight but it came off, slowly but surely, as soon as I committed to my new attitude.
I’m not necessarily in favor of the label “intuitive eating,” however. I know the concept of intuition is very trendy, but if you’re emotionally sensitive and even worse kinesthetically oriented, you end up with a lot of inner data to sort through, and I’ve never been able to isolate “intuition” from everything else.
In any case, you don’t need it. If you are worried about your weight, you need to de-charge the whole issue. Do that, and the rest will fall into place. Don’t do it, and you’ll keep proving your self-identity as “person with a weight problem.”
Or put another way, behavior follows intent — just like a dog’s behavior follows its trainer’s.
