Closest thing to the elixir of life is...WALKING?

[igor_kavinski]

The crappy thing about the A1C is, it can only be done after three months since the old red blood cells die after 90 days. So whatever dietary changes you want to make, you gotta stick to them for 3 whole months to see a difference in your A1C.

 

[marees]

There is no substitute for sunlight

So go for a jog in a park or play a game of basketball/soccer/tennis

Avoid sedentary lifestyle

Have 1 to 2 min of vigorous activity periodically in the day

Lift weights, eat meat. Muscle grip matters more than obesity

 

[BonzaiDuck]

There is no substitute for sunlight

So go for a jog in a park or play a game of basketball/soccer/tennis

Avoid sedentary lifestyle

Have 1 to 2 min of vigorous activity periodically in the day

Lift weights, eat meat. Muscle grip matters more than obesity

I pick my trails so there's always a shady canopy. Or -- I know where every tree in the park near the trail is going to cast a shadow at this or that time of day.

 

[pmv]

The crappy thing about the A1C is, it can only be done after three months since the old red blood cells die after 90 days. So whatever dietary changes you want to make, you gotta stick to them for 3 whole months to see a difference in your A1C.

Also the HbA1c test can be wrong if you have a condition that changes the lifespan of your red blood cells. Or if you have one of the variant red-blood-cell types (of which the most well-known is the one associated with sickle-cell disease - but there are a few others, some of them really rare).

Got bothered about that at one point because my ethnic ancestry involves a region that has the highest incidence of one of those variant red-blood cell types, that causes the A1c test to come out wrong, and I started getting anxious that maybe my results were giving me a false sense of security! (Many people in my extended family have diabetes, so I get anxious and get tested every now and then).

I really don't trust the health system to take into account ethnic variations, particularly minority ones.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I really don't trust the health system to take into account ethnic variations, particularly minority ones.

Very true. There have been serious consequences of white doctors misdiagnosing serious emergency conditions coz of the skin tone changes related to flushing, hypoxia and other blood flow related color changes that are not readily apparent to the untrained eye when looking at the faces of African American patients.

 

[pmv]

Very true. There have been serious consequences of white doctors misdiagnosing serious emergency conditions coz of the skin tone changes related to flushing, hypoxia and other blood flow related color changes that are not readily apparent to the untrained eye when looking at the faces of African American patients.

Yeah, as I understand it, the thing about this variant red-blood-cell thing, is if you inherit genes for the variant from both parents, it's obvious, because it causes a form of anemia (sickle-cell being the most well-known one), but if you only inherit from one parent you end up with _slightly_ wonky red blood cells, that don't cause illness, but apparently _can_ make the HbA1c test come out wrong.
(Which makes me question, slightly, the way they've changed the diagnostic criteria for diabetes to be based on the HbA1c test rather than fasting glucose tests - I hope they know what they are doing and that won't lead to certain ethnic groups being misdiagnosed)

Also, I gather that they recently (in the course of the pandemic, I think) concluded that those finger-worn oxymeters don't always work reliably for black people.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I had a neurosurgeon conclude (very sure of himself) that I had an episode of epilepsy when I went to the hospital saying that I lost the sensation of touch in my skin (I had taken a cactus fruit supplement capsule that was supposed to lower blood sugar and it had never caused that particular side effect before). I purposely didn't tell them about the supplement coz that would be making their job too easy.

It was fun to see almost half a dozen doctors and nurses scratching their heads and sharing their ideas about what could have caused the loss of sensation. I had to stay in the hospital for about 12 hours while the surgeon waited for another epileptic episode. Of course, it never came coz it was never anything to do with epilepsy. He later had me come in to take some diagnostic test for epilepsy and of course, it also came out negative.

It's funny that pmv and I don't trust doctors and hence, we keep seeing evidence of the incompetence of doctors while most people who genuinely trust doctors see nothing but miracles! Someone up there chuckles a lot I bet 😀

 

[BonzaiDuck]

The only time I've had an experience with medical professionals that caused me to doubt their pronouncements was an incident with a dentist. I had temporarily switched from my family dentist of some 17 years, over a remark he made in connection with the 2016 election after the inauguration. This second dentist began to harvest my teeth and my wallet, and I was at least vigilant enough to notice the change in number of dental repairs and the annual expense. My previous and current dentist told me she might have been guilty of malpractice if she'd gone through with her recommendation about a tooth and its filling.

I suppose I've been lucky with all my other doctors and my medical clinic.

I didn't do my walk today, because I've been working in my garden digging holes. Sometimes a person has experiences that throw off their entire day's agenda. I went to the post-office to mail a letter, and had a "tail-light lens" episode with another car in the parking lot -- both of us backing out of the parking spaces at the same time. No damage to my vehicle.

I hate when things like this happen. No -- I don't feel like walking. I feel upset. I don't think it was my fault, but I won't go into the details. I drew a diagram and drafted a narrative for the eventual contact by the claims adjuster.

It's bad enough being old. It's worse when you behave in a more confused manner than is actually the case. We exchanged information and went our separate ways. The driver's boyfriend seemed impatient and had to help me with my cellphone to snap pictures of the driver license and proof-of-insurance card.

I HATE this s***. Life is moving forward. I shall walk tomorrow. Tail-light damage or no, being old sucks.

 

[pmv]

I am completely confused about what to think about medical professionals. I know there's legit reason for the scorn directed at 'doing your own research', and I am in no sense anti-vaccine (still less a believer in Bill Gates 5G conspiracy crazyness). But I've had _so many_ negative experiences with properly accredited doctors over the decades, that I just don't entirely trust any of them now.

When you are obliged to look into it (because you have such conditions) you find the list of conditions doctors don't collectively understand particularly well is still pretty substantial. This seems to be especially true of anything neurological or anything auto-immune related (categories which my definitively diagnosed conditions fall under). Given that, I get quite irate every time anything reminds me of the tetchiness, dismissiveness and over-confidence I experienced from so many medics in the decades it took to get even the beginnings of a diagnosis (seems they still haven't gotten to the bottom of it all).

They are good at sticking you back together and keeping you alive after major trauma, like being run over by a truck or shot or stabbed. Wouldn't hesitate to call on them in such an emergency situation. But for anything chronic, congenital, genetic or rare, they really aren't all they are cracked up to be.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I saw this movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104756/

and read Enzymes: The Fountain of Life (available for a measly $2.50) and discussed here: https://www.getting-started-with-healthy-eating.com/enzymes-the-fountain-of-life.html

And that was enough for me to develop disdain for the medical profession. My father BADLY wanted me to become a doc because his best friend is one and he was captivated by the charm of respect his friend got from everybody and the allure of "effortless" money rolling in every day (his words). But my heart wasn't in it so I did not give it my best shot. The closest I came was being just 0.5 marks away from being admitted into medical school but those 0.5 marks meant 50 more candidates to surpass. If I had gotten one or two more questions right in the exam, I would've been miserable today as a doctor wanting to help patients but forbidden by the medical establishment to pursue unconventional treatments or therapies under the threat of losing my medical license.

Anyway, my father then spent a huge amount of money to educate my brother in a private medical school and he became a dentist. To this day, he is not happy with me. "You were supposed to be the brilliant one", is what he keeps saying. He envisioned me as a doctor when he saw me as a baby and now I'm just a sorry ass loser to him for failing to live up to his expectations.

 

[pmv]

One thing that never ceases to surprise me is how unscientific are practitioners of supposedly "scientific" medicine. Doctors aren't scientists, they are tradespeople, who mostly just follow flowcharts. What they _don't_ do is examine the evidence then construct hypotheses from first principles and devise ways of testing those hypotheses.

The tests they choose to do are generally dictated by whatever tests are easy or cheap to do, rather than whether they are appropriate to the symptoms reported. Much like the drunk who drops his keys in the street then looks for them on the opposite side of the road from where he dropped them, 'because the light is better there'.

 

[pmv]

....Hence they are seriously rubbish at diagnosing anything that isn't in their textbooks, or that is poorly-understood by medical science as a whole. Because they don't make much of an effort to use the scientific method. Instead they rapidly retreat into God-of-the-gaps mysticism, declaring that anything they can't immediately diagnose must be caused by the magical mystical power of "the mind" (spooky voice) i.e. by the sufferers "wrong thoughts". I heard that "the mind can affect the body" mysticism-based speech so many times from doctors over the decades of trying to find an explanation for my multiplying "unexplained" symptoms.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I was suffering from excruciating broken disc pain and I went to this doc who seemed too young with a joyous expression on his face. I later realized that his forte was making patients feel bad about themselves for thinking too much. So I tell him about my pain and he asks me to bend over as much as I can. I do, with great difficulty and he goes, you seem fine. If it were as serious as you are describing, you wouldn't be able to bend that far. Then he told me to take walks and enjoy the sunshine. All the while I'm thinking, wait. So I just wasted my time AND money seeing you? One of the worst useless docs I've seen in my life.

 

[pmv]

I was suffering from excruciating broken disc pain and I went to this doc who seemed too young with a joyous expression on his face. I later realized that his forte was making patients feel bad about themselves for thinking too much. So I tell him about my pain and he asks me to bend over as much as I can. I do, with great difficulty and he goes, you seem fine. If it were as serious as you are describing, you wouldn't be able to bend that far. Then he told me to take walks and enjoy the sunshine. All the while I'm thinking, wait. So I just wasted my time AND money seeing you? One of the worst useless docs I've seen in my life.

There's a bit of a catch-22 around that sort of thing. They'll ask you to make more of an effort and behave _as if_ you didn't have the symptom. If you succeed in doing that, they declare that shows there's nothing really wrong, and if you don't manage to do it, they declare that shows you aren't making an effort or following their instructions, hence you don't want to be helped. Either way they excuse themselves from having to actually investigate or treat anything. Had that with my chronic fatigue for over a decade.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Because their first instinct (dunno if that is part of their actual training) is to treat the patient as a non-patient, i.e. this person may be imagining things.

 

[pmv]

Because their first instinct (dunno if that is part of their actual training) is to treat the patient as a non-patient, i.e. this person may be imagining things.

That does seem to be the case. I suspect it may be a kind of over-correction, that while once they would have ignored emotional and psychological factors in health, they've now become completely obsessed with them, and it's their first explanation for everything.

 

[pmv]

I am _so_ confused by the "Dunning Kruger" concept. How do you ever know if you know enough to know whether you actually know anything or not?

A lifetime of experiences has left me with a deep suspicion that many 'experts' (most of all the non-specialist variety - like GPs) are every bit as prone to over-estimate the extent of their expertise as are the most uncritical YouTube-video-consuming laypeople. A sort of Dunning-Kruger extended universe.

But am I falling into the same trap in thinking that? Am I doing the 'every accusation is a confession' thing myself? How can I tell?

 

[marees]

I am _so_ confused by the "Dunning Kruger" concept. How do you ever know if you know enough to know whether you actually know anything or not?

A lifetime of experiences has left me with a deep suspicion that many 'experts' (most of all the non-specialist variety - like GPs) are every bit as prone to over-estimate the extent of their expertise as are the most uncritical YouTube-video-consuming laypeople. A sort of Dunning-Kruger extended universe.

But am I falling into the same trap in thinking that? Am I doing the 'every accusation is a confession' thing myself? How can I tell?

I used to think, I was good at maths

Now I've realized that I have just memorized the multiplication table upto 12*12. Rest of my maths skills are just higher order derivative of that memorization skill !!

 

[igor_kavinski]

Now I've realized that I have just memorized the multiplication table upto 12*12. Rest of my maths skills are just higher order derivative of that memorization skill !!

Most people can't do that so yes, you are good 🙂

 

[manly]

I had a neurosurgeon conclude (very sure of himself) that I had an episode of epilepsy when I went to the hospital saying that I lost the sensation of touch in my skin (I had taken a cactus fruit supplement capsule that was supposed to lower blood sugar and it had never caused that particular side effect before). I purposely didn't tell them about the supplement coz that would be making their job too easy.

It was fun to see almost half a dozen doctors and nurses scratching their heads and sharing their ideas about what could have caused the loss of sensation. I had to stay in the hospital for about 12 hours while the surgeon waited for another epileptic episode. Of course, it never came coz it was never anything to do with epilepsy. He later had me come in to take some diagnostic test for epilepsy and of course, it also came out negative.

It's funny that pmv and I don't trust doctors and hence, we keep seeing evidence of the incompetence of doctors while most people who genuinely trust doctors see nothing but miracles! Someone up there chuckles a lot I bet 😀

The nurses must have been super cute for you to voluntarily stick around for 12 hours. 😛

 

[pmv]

I have an increasingly-strong suspicion that there's a dangerous insularity about 'experts' (particularly those that deal with the domain of humans rather than things, e.g. doctors and economists and psychologists and lawyers, as opposed to engineers or mathematicians), insofar as they often only interact with their fellows (who in turn are often all from the same demographic) and thus, very much like police officers, end up existing in a kind of bubble of shared prejudices.

This applies particularly to generalists (like GPs) who seem to grossly overestimate how much they know about issues that belong to the domain of specialists.

They are, after all, human beings.

I can easily imagine how they all get together in med school, all mutually congratulating themselves on how smart they are and how much better they did in their exams than their peers.
It clearly goes to their heads, and causes too many of them to believe they know everything.

This sort of problem has arisen so many times in my life - how the hell do you know when an 'expert' actually knows what they are talking about or not? Having qualifications or prestigious job titles really doesn't mean much in the world as it is (just look at Clarence Thomas and Thomas Alito)

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I have an increasingly-strong suspicion that there's a dangerous insularity about 'experts' (particularly those that deal with the domain of humans rather than things, e.g. doctors and economists and psychologists and lawyers, as opposed to engineers or mathematicians), insofar as they often only interact with their fellows (who in turn are often all from the same demographic) and thus, very much like police officers, end up existing in a kind of bubble of shared prejudices.

This applies particularly to generalists (like GPs) who seem to grossly overestimate how much they know about issues that belong to the domain of specialists.

They are, after all, human beings.

I can easily imagine how they all get together in med school, all mutually congratulating themselves on how smart they are and how much better they did in their exams than their peers.
It clearly goes to their heads, and causes too many of them to believe they know everything.

This sort of problem has arisen so many times in my life - how the hell do you know when an 'expert' actually knows what they are talking about or not? Having qualifications or prestigious job titles really doesn't mean much in the world as it is (just look at Clarence Thomas and Thomas Alito)

I had developed a friendship with my dentist, and also with a specialist colleague of his.

In interactions I've had with MD or DDS medical pros, they exhibit a quality you might easily suspect. People treat them with undue respect, thinking that if they got through medical school, they must be total geniuses in every possible way.

But, in fact, with regard to other matters of expertise, or history, economics -- politics -- I've discovered considerable ignorance among the medical elite. they begin to believe their great intellectual prowess themselves.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I got colon cancer at 33... the unglamorous symptom you should check

Marisa Peters, a 43-year-old mother-of-three and advocacy worker from California, has revealed the 'unglamorous' stage three colon cancer symptom her doctors ignored for five years.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Care about your health and longevity? Don't ignore your symptoms even if doctors ignore them. Question is, how many doctors one needs to see before being satisfied that the symptoms can be ignored safely...

 

[marees]

I got colon cancer at 33... the unglamorous symptom you should check

Marisa Peters, a 43-year-old mother-of-three and advocacy worker from California, has revealed the 'unglamorous' stage three colon cancer symptom her doctors ignored for five years.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Care about your health and longevity? Don't ignore your symptoms even if doctors ignore them. Question is, how many doctors one needs to see before being satisfied that the symptoms can be ignored safely...

There are now a few tests available for cancer

But not in my country (India)

A New Blood Test Can Detect More Than 50 Types Of Cancer

The Galleri test can detect more than 50 kinds of cancer and determine where it started. Here’s how the blood test works and why it changes what we know about cancer.

health.clevelandclinic.org

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I feel I'm in good hands with my medical clinic, facilities scattered across the county, its "Good Health Portal" allowing patients to review their records online, and the primary and specialist staff who all seem equally concerned with my health.

My primary doctor may have fallen short, though. In an appointment, they only have so much time for idle chatter. They try to be "all business". I just happened to discover in my online records of recent vintage that I have "stage 3 kidney disease". He never mentioned it in person, only remarking to me once about "albumin in my urine". Initially, I was a bit panicked by this discovery, but I looked up its meaning.

Some kidney disease at that level can be reversed, and -- supposedly -- drinking a cup of beet juice daily can help. At least -- studies show it helped the lab rats. I just cringe at any prospect for eventually requiring dialysis.

The Doc also put me on Lipitor for cholesterol reduction. I have to pick up my first bottle of pills at the drug store today. I just hope my luck holds with every new medication, so there aren't any adverse side-effects to report or deal with.