I was researching last week’s article, when I discovered something I had not noticed before. It seems the Mayo Clinic website has started putting alternative and home remedy information in their medical articles.

Ten years ago, this would not have happened. While I don’t buy any of the conspiracy theories about the medical industry in general, non-Westernized medical solutions were just not discussed in major public forums. The vast majority of what would be found in the library, the bookstore, the doctor’s office, and contemporary magazines and newspapers was tilted heavily towards the basic model of: go to the doctor; get a prescription; schedule a surgery if it might help. Alternatives, such as Eastern medicine, homeopathic or native disciplines, and home remedies were put down and ignored by the medical community.

There are many reasons for this.

First and foremost, our culture is one that is heavily tilted towards immediate results rather than solutions. It is often the case that long-term care or strategies are ignored by the public in favor of something that fixes the immediate symptoms right away. Take the common cold: most people refuse to ride it out, instead opting for doses of cough syrup, headache pills, and decongestants. Instead of letting the body fight the illness naturally, we fill ourselves up with drugs to ‘feel better’ and then plod along like everything is OK. Instead of resting and helping our body with the fight, we sabatoge the body’s ability to do it’s job in favor of incremental, immediate relief of the symptom. So when doctors are asked for a medical opinion, they feed the public what it wants to hear: how to fix the symptom in the moment.

Another reason is that modern, scientific approaches to illness sound cooler than their alternative counterparts. Telling your friends you are going to have an MRI and orthoscopic surgery, they ‘oooh’ and ‘ahh’ and sympathize and support you. They might not have any idea what it means, but it sounds impressive. So when something goes wrong, we look to what we’ve seen people respond to, even if the track record is not the best possible.

Also, it’s easier to go with the flow and do what everyone else is doing rather than doing something different. If everyone else gets surgery and takes pharmaceuticals, well, then, you’d be crazy not to for your problems, right? Peer pressure plays a big role in our medical choices.

Western medicine has dominated our thinking for too long with regards to disease and sickness. Many surgeries are crude and dangerous, and the goals usually revolve around ‘lifespan’ rather than ‘life-quality’. But we haven’t had choices.

I’m not saying alternative remedies are the end-all. I’m just glad to see a major organization, with a proven track-record and high credibility, is now showing many possible ways to treat an illness or disease, rather than just the mainstream suggestions. Good job, Mayo Clinic!

• Mayo Clinic

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Quote for the week

Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd. - Edith Sitwell

From the editor

The last three weeks have been vacation, and I’ve happily rested, relaxed, read, played on my computer, traveled, watched movies, and generally enjoyed not having any pressing work that had to be done.

Today, it’s back to work. My vacation wasn’t quite as long as I would have liked it to be. But that happens sometimes. Oh, well.

Healthy thoughts,
Jeff

If you’ve got tenderness, swelling, and pain in your joints, you may have gouty arthritis, or gout. What exactly is gout?

Gout is basically a buildup of uric acid in the joints and surrounding tissues of the body. It is most common in men, and most often is first experienced in the big toe. If uric acid collects in a significant quantity, it crystallizes, and these crystals cause severe pain in the affected area.

The pain is usually a burning sensation, and can be so intense that simple contact with any foreign material is intolerable. Along with the pain will be swelling, redness, and tenderness around the affected area. The symptoms will last a few days, and up to a few weeks on occasion.

Gout is easily treated by dissolving or breaking up the crystallized acid. The most important step is simply getting enough water during the day and maintaining movement to stimulate blood flow everywhere. Reducing red meat and alcohol intake also helps, as both of these impact hydration. Additionally, alcohol slows uric acid excretion and red meat contains purine, which the body converts to uric acid (adding to the existing levels). There are medicinal treatments as well, ranging from Tylenol to a variety of anti-inflammatory drugs and drugs to reduce uric acid levels in the bloodstream and body.

The most important thing with gout is to actually treat it early. The pain is a direct response to tissue damage being done to the affected joint, and left untreated it will result in long-term or permanent damage to those joints.

And since fluid intake, movement, and diet will all affect uric acid levels in the body, simple dietary and exercise choices are enough to avoid gout altogether for most people.

Resources:

• Gout
• Gout and Hyperuricemia
• Gout - Topic Overview

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Quote for the week

The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star. - Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

From the editor

A friend of mine was recently concerned about a sudden, stinging pain in his big toe. After some discussion, it was suggested by someone that he might have gout. Good news: it turns out that the symptoms of gout are not quite what my friend is experiencing. Bad news: now he again has no idea what the pain is from.

If you are experiencing something odd or unpleasant and would like to find out more about it, chances are others are, too. I’m happy to look into things to help you and anyone else who is interested. Just let me know what your questions are using the feedback form on the website.

Healthy thoughts,

Jeff

While I’ve been reveling in the intense heat and humidity this summer, everyone else around me has been dying (or so it would seem). I realize my comfort zone for hot weather is much different than most, and that most of you are struggling this time of year. That’s why I’d like to dedicate an issue to staying cool.

Feeling cool is primarily a function of keeping core body temperature low. If your core temperature is low enough, you’ll feel cold even on a sweltering day. We know this from experience, though most of us don’t remember unless it’s pointed out. Just think back: if you’ve been swimming in a cold lake, the first few minutes in the sun are notable for not feeling hot.

So if you can keep our core temperature down, you can beat the heat. There are a few ways to do this.

First, you need to reduce body activity of all kinds. Each muscle movement creates heat energy that must be dissipated from the body. Walking and standing, for instance, warms you up. Much more drastic are heavy workload activities such as running, dancing, lifting, shoveling, and such. Even heavy breathing counts, whether it’s from yoga or from being obese or a smoker. The less you move your body, the less heat you produce. Any movement that can be eliminated will help.

Second, you will cool more effectively in dry, shaded areas. If it’s dry, your sweating mechanism is more effective in getting rid of heat energy. And in the shade, absorbing new heat from direct sunlight is avoided.

Third, a slight breeze makes a big difference. It doesn’t take a blasting fan scattering paperwork everywhere, just a small, steady breeze is enough to help evaporate the sweat away. However, avoid fanning yourself: the heat produced in your body by working your arm and wrist is greater than the heat dissipated by the breeze.

OK, you are probably familiar with these. How about the less obvious steps?

Fourth, stick to room-temperature foods and drinks. The effect of hot food and drinks is obvious; cold items is less so. Putting cold food in your body causes a sudden drop in temperature, which is countered by internal shivering. The net result: more heat.

Fifth, avoid sugars and fats. Sugar and fat (any carbohydrates, really, but especially these) increase your metabolism, which translates into core temperature increases. They are a great way to feel warm in the winter, and a great way to overheat in the summer. Ice cream feels good in the moment, but it fails both the ‘cold food’ and ’sugar and fat’ test.

Sixth, lose weight and get in shape. Keep your cardiovascular system fit. This may not work for tomorrow or next week, but in the long run you are more readily able to maintain and regulate body temperature effectively when your body is healthy, slim, and fit.

Last, but certainly not least, be one with the weather. You can’t fight the heat completely. Instead, choose to accept it or ignore it. Put your attention on something else, and you’ll instantly feel better.

Have fun this summer!

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Quote for the week

Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic. - Anais Nin

From the editor

I spent a good part of last week in Japan, and the differences between Japan and Korea are numerous. The Japanese are much more friendly and open to strangers than the Koreans are, and getting help finding places to go and things to do was very simple.

One of the things I liked most was the quiet. In Korea, everywhere you go there are people talking loudly on mobile phones. In Japan, phones are banned in many places and hidden from view in others. On the trains, you may not speak on them and they must be in silent mode. It was nice to not be bombarded by the conversations of others all the time.

I hope to spend more time there in the future.

Healthy thoughts,
Jeff

If you read news reports or environmental studies about global warming and the current environmental issues we’re dealing with, you have, no doubt, often heard solutions provided that are very simple and straightforward: use less gas, watch your carbon footprint, support ‘green’ companies, and so on. But the solutions to undoing the damage we have done to the earth are not so simple. Scientists can’t even agree on what the basic outlook is for the earth, much less the details.

How many of you have a computer? (Dumb question, I know… the answer is just about everyone in the western world). And how many of you have ever dealt with a sluggish computer. Here’s the important question: how many of you have been given a simple and straightforward suggestion about how to make your computer perform well again, and did that suggestion work?

You’ve certainly used a computer somewhere that took forever to do the simple task you were trying to perform. Maybe you clicked on a link to a website, and all the sudden the computer slows to a crawl for three or four (or 10!) minutes and doesn’t do anything at all. Are you familiar with this scenario?

What’s going on is that the computer has limited resources, and for whatever reason, one or more of those resources is being exhausted.

Maybe you need more RAM or more level 2 cache. Maybe the hard disk is failing. Maybe you have too many programs currently running for the speed of the processor that you are using. Maybe the operating system is trying to do something else in the background, performing some task that you don’t even know is turned on, like indexing and cataloging all the files on your computer. It’s possible that adding more RAM or buying a faster processor will solve the problem.

More likely, the problem is an intricate combination of several factors, and fixing any one piece of the system won’t really address the performance issue you are experiencing. You probably will need to add more RAM and buy a faster processor and tune your operating system to turn off some unnecessary features and get a bigger or faster hard disk.

You see, a computer is an extremely complicated system. Even though it can handle a large drain on the resources it has, when one or more of those resources becomes strained, performance issues show up in many places simultaneously. A particular issue, like taking too long to load a web page, could actually be caused by one of dozens (or even hundreds) of possible factors. The cost in time and money to track down the interrelated issues leading to the problem are usually much greater than the cost to simply buy a new computer in the first place. That’s why many professionals will suggest that outright when your computer starts to have issues keeping up with modern software and tasks.

Likewise, the earth is an extremely complicated system. Fixing a computer problem is nothing compared to reversing o-zone depletion, because there are so many different things that affect the problem and that complicate the solutions. But we can’t just buy a new earth.

Something as simple as predicting the weather a week in advance is currently beyond our ability, because of the enormous number of seemingly insignificant or difficult-to-accurately-measure factors affecting the weather all the time. Do you really think we can accurately predict the global weather (temperatures, storm trends, oxygen levels, o-zone depletion, ocean levels) months, years, or decades in advance? Do you really think we can fix the damage we’ve done (which, it so happens, we’re not even really sure of or able to agree on) by changing one or two things about how we as a community do things?

The reality is that we don’t know what’s going to happen. We can make educated guesses, but they could be (probably all are) completely wrong. We can suggest ideas to counteract the damage, but we have no idea whether any of them will actually work. And even if we guess most of them accurately, we might be missing one small factor that keeps everything else from falling into place properly.

Still, there is hope.

We, as individuals, can make the changes in our daily life that are most likely to change our impact on the system. We can learn and teach others. We can make a tiny change towards the balance that we know has worked in the past.

We, as a global community, are becoming aware of the issues. We are starting to care. And if humankind has shown one thing again and again, it’s that once we put our collective minds to solving a problem, we eventually succeed. These particular problems may be very complex, and we may take a while to find agreement in many places to work together to solve them, but I believe we will find solutions to them.

Life may be drastically different in generations to come, just like life now is drastically different than it was 200 years ago. But life will go on.

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Quote for the week

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man. - Henry Brooks Adams

From the editor

They say the two happiest days in a boat owner’s life are the day of purchase and the day of sale. I can vouch for the former, but the latter is not a happy day. I’m sad to see my boat go.

Since I’ve been traveling so much, I’m just never around my boat. In the last two years I’d taken her out only once, and that was to move her to a less expensive marina facility. Rather than having her grow old and neglected, it was time to transfer her to someone else. I’ll miss her!

But now I can start thinking about my next one!

Healthy thoughts,
Jeff