HinesSight

Penis enhancement story in New Yorker was disturbing reading

I love The New Yorker because the magazine exposes me to great writing about important issues (I skip the fiction, preferring the non-fiction articles). But sometimes what I read is so disturbing, yet so eloquently described, I'm torn between finishing an article or putting it aside.

That was my dilemma with Ava Koffman's piece in the July 3, 2023 issue, The Perils and Promises of Penis-Enlargement Surgery: One doctor's Promethean quest to grow the male member is leaving some men desperate and disfigured.

I'll share a PDF file of the story in case that link doesn't work for non-subscribers.
Download The Perils and Promises of Penis-Enlargement Surgery | The New Yorker

I ended up reading the entire article, which was fascinating and terrifying in equal measure. Until the article came along I knew nothing about this sort of surgery. The first paragraph drew me in, making me want to learn more about why men entrust such a vital and sensitive organ to a surgeon's knife.

They wanted it because they’d just gone through a bad breakup and needed an edge in the volatile dating market; because porn had warped their sense of scale; because they’d been in a car accident, or were looking to fix a curve, or were hoping for a little “software upgrade”; because they were not having a midlife crisis; because they were, “and it was cheaper than a Bugatti Veyron”; because, after five kids, their wife couldn’t feel them anymore; because they’d been molested as a child and still remembered the laughter of the adults in the room; because they couldn’t forget a passing comment their spouse made in 1975; because, despite the objections of their couples therapist, they believed it would bring them closer to their “sex-obsessed” husband (who then had an affair that precipitated their divorce); because they’d stopped changing in locker rooms, stopped peeing in urinals, stopped having sex; because who wouldn’t want it?

Well, nine New Yorker pages later my question became, who would want it?

For while there are plenty of men who are satisfied with their penis-enhancement surgery, there's also plenty who are trapped in a doom loop of seeking help to undo the surgery, which typically isn't easy to accomplish. For the procedure is much more complicated than breast-enhancement surgery.

James Elist is a urologist who is the centerpiece of the article. He developed a silicone implant "shaped like a hot-dog bun which could be implanted just under the skin of the penis to increase its girth and flaccid length."

With the blockbuster launch of Viagra, in 1998, Elist feared that demand for surgical cures for erectile dysfunction would fall, and decided it was time to diversify. Over the years, many of his patients had asked if he could make them bigger while he was down there. Walking around the 90210 Zip Code, where the median breast size seemed to balloon by the day, Elist realized that his next move was staring him in the face.

As he toyed with an early prototype for the Penuma, other doctors were dismissive. The penis—a tentacle that shrinks and swells with an exquisite sensitivity—was nothing like the breast; it wouldn’t be possible, they told him, to put something static under its elastic skin.

Because the F.D.A. requires the pharmaceutical industry to conduct clinical studies of new drugs, it is often assumed that the same is required of medical-device manufacturers. However, a loophole known as the 510(k) process allows companies to implant untested products in patients as long as they can demonstrate that the devices are “substantially equivalent” to those already on the market.

In September, 2004, not long after Elist convinced the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office of the novelty of his invention, he informed the F.D.A. that his “silicone block” was comparable to calf and butt implants. A month later, when the agency cleared the device for the “cosmetic correction of soft-tissue deformities,” the word “penis” did not appear in its indications for use.

The article describes how many of Elist's patients were not at all happy with the penis implant they got, to put it mildly. Here's a sample of the gory details.

For dozens of Penuma patients who spoke to me, the shock of the new was the prelude to graver troubles. Some, like Mick, lost sensation. Others said they experienced stabbing pains in the shower or during sex. Seroma, or excess fluid, was not uncommon. When a defense-and-intelligence contractor’s girlfriend, a registered nurse, aspirated his seroma with a sterile needle, a cup of amber fluid oozed out. The one time they tried to have sex, she told me, the corners of his implant felt like “someone sticking a butter knife inside you.”

Some implants got infected or detached. Others buckled at the corners. Occasionally these protrusions broke through the skin, forming holes that would fester. The hole of the health-spa vice-president was so tiny that he originally mistook its fermented odor for an S.T.D. An engineer with gallows humor played me a video of the snorting crunch his penis made when air moved through a hole. He had two holes, and the skin between them eventually eroded so that a corner of the implant emerged, pearlescent.

Later, doctors unaffiliated with the Penuma would compare such penises to “a torpedo,” “a penguin,” “a pig in a blanket,” “a beer can with a mushroom sticking out on the top,” and “the tipped-down nose of the Concorde.” But the imperturbable assistants at Elist’s clinic, besieged by photographs documenting these phenomena, told patients that they were “healing as expected” and “continuing to heal well!” It was only after months had passed and the men insisted they weren’t healing well at all that Elist would sometimes suggest that an “upgrade” to a bigger size would resolve their problems.

A sad part of Kofman's article was these passages.

What surgeons continually emphasized—the implanters with pride, the explanters with dismay—was that most of the men they were seeing had been of at least average size before going under the knife. (The photographic evidence men sent to me over text and e-mail supported this contention.) “Most don’t have anything physically wrong with them at all, so what they don’t need is vultures preying on them, which is almost always a disaster,” Muir, the London urologist, said.

Along with other urologists and psychiatrists, at King’s College and the University of Turin, Muir conducted a literature review called “Surgical and Nonsurgical Interventions in Normal Men Complaining of Small Penis Size.”

The research showed that men dissatisfied with their penises respond well to educational counselling about the average size, which is 3.6 inches long when flaccid, and 5.2 inches erect. (The average girth is 3.5 inches flaccid, and 4.6 inches erect.) For men who have an excessive and distorted preoccupation with the appearance of their genitals—a form of body dysmorphic disorder—Muir said that cognitive-behavioral therapy and medications may also be necessary.

Which would be a heck of a lot wiser thing to do than get a penis implant.

How my trabeculectomy is doing 7 1/2 weeks after surgery

This is a follow-up to my initial blog post about the trabeculectomy eye surgery I had on March 6, reported on in "My eye surgery went well, though not a load of fun."

As a Johns Hopkins article about trabeculectomy says, this surgery is aimed at controlled eye pressure in people like me with glaucoma, when eye drops or laser surgery either aren't doing a good enough job at lowering eye pressure -- the only viable way of keeping glaucoma from doing more damage to the eye -- or someone can't use those other methods.

In my case, Dr. Young, a Portland glaucoma specialist, felt that I needed this surgery because I'd lost so much peripheral vision in my very nearsighted right eye, while my left eye is only very minimally affected by glaucoma. 

My eye pressure was in the low to mid 20's when I was first diagnosed with glaucoma. Prescription eye drops had lowered the pressure to 10-12 in both eyes,  but Dr. Young wanted to get the pressure in my right eye down to 6-7.

When I asked him why laser surgery wasn't an option for my right eye, Dr. Young told me that given the seriousness of my vision loss, and how slowly glaucoma usually progresses, he didn't want to wait a couple of years to learn how well laser surgery was working -- perhaps because I'm 74, and want to preserve as much vision as possible for the rest of my life.

So I had the surgery. Which then involved five follow-up appointments.

Those weren't convenient for me to get to, since Dr. Young practices in Tualatin, Oregon and I live a ways south of Salem, about a 50 minute drive from Tualatin. But mostly I didn't encounter the dreaded Portland-area freeway traffic, so the Trabeculectomy God must have been smiling upon me.

Dr. Young kept telling me that my eye looked fine, but when he pressed on the trabeculectomy site the pressure in my right eye would drop to zero, or one time 2, which isn't a good thing. In fact, it's a bad thing. 

This meant that while I could stop using an eye shield, and phase down on the post-surgery eye drops I was prescribed, Dr. Young wanted me to keep on not lifting heavy weight. At first the limit was ten pounds. Then twenty pounds. Than thirty pounds. Three weeks ago I was given the OK to lift sixty pounds.

That enabled me to use the weight machines at our athletic club, albeit some of them at a considerably lower weight than I was using before the surgery (120 pounds on four of the eleven machines).

Today, though, I got my trabeculectomy graduation notice, three weeks after my previous visit with Dr. Young where he'd said that my eye wasn't forming scar tissue very quickly. My right eye pressure was six, an excellent pressure and right on what Dr. Young had hoped for.

(Further, Young has told me that there's reason to consider that a low eye pressure following trabeculectomy is a "higher quality" pressure, since it doesn't vary much, whereas lowering pressure via periodic drops in the eye has more ups and downs during the day.)

And, yay!, Dr. Young said I could do away with any weight-lifting restriction -- though I told him that I'd gradually ramp up the weight on the machines where I was using 120 pounds. 

Time will tell whether the trabeculectomy is as successful in preserving the vision in my right eye as it seems to be doing at present.

My next appointment with Dr. Young is in four weeks. I have to wear glasses for the foreseeable future, after quite a few decades of contact lens wearing. I want to ask him when I can wear contacts again. This might relate to when I need cataract surgery, which so far I've avoided.

Ozempic shows that obesity often is a medical problem

I wish Bill Maher was a reader of this blog, because this post was stimulated by him. For Maher, who I argue has become an irritating purveyor of liberal myths, has an outdated view of people who are obese.

Here's how I put it in the above-linked post from last January.

Lastly, I can't disagree with Maher's often-stated point that obesity is a big problem in our country. He's correct that obesity is a risk factor if someone gets Covid. But it's a bit simplistic for Maher to say that all it takes for someone to lose weight is will power. 

Meaning, just eat less and you'll lose weight. I've read about numerous scientific studies that show how some people have a natural, probably genetic, propensity to obesity. Sometimes a person's metabolism is out of whack, which makes it really tough for them to lose weight. Medication and surgery may be called for in some cases of obesity.

The March 27, 2023 issue of The New Yorker has an article that indicates that I'm right and Maher is wrong about obesity. In the print edition it was called The Ozempic Era: Will new medications change how we think about being fat and being thin?

The subtitle of the online version is even more direct about what Maher gets wrong about obesity: A popular, growing class of drugs for obesity and diabetes could, in an ideal world, help us see that metabolism and appetite are biological facts, not moral choices.

If that link doesn't work for you, here's a PDF file of the article.
Download Will Ozempic Change How We Think About Being Fat and Being Thin? | The New Yorker

Some excerpts from the article by Jia Tolentino, along with the illustration that accompanied it:

The ideal female body of the past decade, born through the godless alliance of Instagram and the Kardashian family, was as juicy and uncanny as a silicone-injected peach. Young women all over the Internet copied the shape—a sculpted waist, an enormous ass, hips that spread generously underneath a high-cut bikini—and also the face atop it, a contoured hybrid of recognizably human mannequin and sexy feline. This prototype was as technologically mediated as the era that produced it; women attained the look by injecting artificial substances, removing natural ones, and altering photographic evidence.

Dana Omari, a registered dietitian and an Instagram influencer in Houston, has accumulated a quarter of a million followers by documenting the blepharoplasties, breast implants, and Brazilian butt lifts of the rich and famous. Recently, she noticed that the human weathervanes of the social-media beauty standard were spinning in a new direction.

The Kardashians were shrinking. Having previously appropriated styles created by Black women, they were now leaning into a skinnier, whiter ideal. Kim dropped twenty-one pounds before the Met Gala, where she wore a dress made famous by Marilyn Monroe; Khloé, who has spoken in the past about struggling with her weight, posted fortieth-birthday photos in which she looked as slim and blond as a Barbie. All over Instagram, the wealthy and the professionally attractive were showing newly prominent clavicles and rib cages.

Last spring, Omari shared with her followers the open secret behind such striking thinness: the Kardashians and others, she insisted, were likely taking semaglutide, the active ingredient in the medication Ozempic. “This is the ‘diabetic shot’ for weight loss everyone’s been talking about,” she wrote. “Really good sources have told me that Kim and Khloé allegedly started on their Ozempic journey last year.” Omari was about to start taking a version of the medication herself.

Ozempic, which is manufactured by Novo Nordisk, is part of an expanding class of drugs called GLP-1 receptor agonists, which have dramatically altered the treatment of diabetes and obesity. Ozempic is approved by the Food and Drug Administration only for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes—a condition that accounts for ninety per cent of all diabetes cases—and has been available since 2017. Its name is now shorthand for the entire category of weight-loss injections.

In 2021, Novo Nordisk received approval for Wegovy, which has the same active ingredient as Ozempic but comes with a higher maximum dose, as an anti-obesity drug. On a year-end earnings call in 2022, Novo Nordisk cited worldwide market growth of fifty per cent, with almost forty thousand new Wegovy prescriptions being written every week.

...A healthy body can generally signal to the brain when it has had enough food. But that signalling system can be faulty, or get injured. “One of the most important things about obesity, and something most people don’t understand, is that, in the process of gaining weight, the neural circuitry of the brain that regulates weight is damaged,” Dr. Louis Aronne, the director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Center, at Weill Cornell Medicine, told me. (Aronne, like many other prominent practitioners of obesity medicine, has consulted on trials conducted by Novo Nordisk.)

“The hypothalamus shows signs of inflammation and injury,” he went on. The prevailing theory, he explained, is that “too many calories coming in too quickly damages nerves that respond to the hormones that control body weight.” One of these hormones is leptin, which is produced in body fat, and which signals to the brain that it’s time to stop eating. But, if you gain fat, the oversupply of leptin can cause your body to be desensitized to it, making your brain erroneously believe that you are starving.

“Your body tries to rebalance the system by slowing down the metabolism and increasing appetite,” Aronne said. After a person has gained enough weight to enter this cycle of metabolic misdirection, it becomes nearly impossible to lose that weight and keep it off long-term simply through diet and exercise. (About five per cent of people manage to do it.)

A well-known study followed contestants on “The Biggest Loser,” the weight-loss-competition show, and found that the contestants’ metabolisms slowed so drastically after their weight loss that nearly all of them regained what they’d lost. One contestant, who’d dropped an astonishing two hundred and thirty-nine pounds, soon regained a hundred, and then began gaining weight whenever he ate more than eight hundred calories less than the average amount recommended for a man his size.

...Omari, the Instagram-famous dietitian, is now off her compounded semaglutide, which she’d taken to shed some pandemic pounds. She was optimistic that she’d be able to maintain her weight, as she’d generally been able to do before. But, as I kept reminding Ozempic-curious friends, these medications were designed for chronic conditions, obesity and diabetes.

For people who are dealing with those conditions, Ozempic appears to create a path toward a healthy relationship to food. For those who aren’t, it might function more like an injectable eating disorder. As the side effects make clear, it’s not a casual thing to drastically alter your body’s metabolic process, and there is no large-scale data about the safety of these drugs when taken by people who are mainly interested in treating another chronic condition, the desire to be thin.

...Kaplan, a plastic surgeon, is better known on TikTok as @RealDrBae—in his videos, he wears navy scrubs monogrammed “dr bae” and talks to the camera as though it’s his partner in an absorbing conversation at an airport bar. He believes that more people—a lot more people—are going to start taking GLP-1 drugs soon.

He didn’t have in mind thin people who want to be thinner, he added; he was thinking about fat people who had been struggling with discomfort, with inconvenience, with social pressure all their lives, who might have lately felt encouraged to try to accept their heavier weight. He predicted that the Ozempic era would put an end to all that. “They’re no longer going to accept that they should just be happy with the body they have,” he said.

My eye surgery went well, though not a load of fun

When I had surgery in 2021 to repair an inguinal hernia, my motivation was to have something wrong with me fixed so I could get back to living life as I did before the hernia popped up (literally).

But the glaucoma surgery I had today was tougher to get enthusiastic about. There's no way to fix damage that's occurred to the optic nerve. All that can be done is reduce the chance of further damage. 

However, Dr. Young, the glaucoma specialist in Portland I was referred to after some significant nerve damage was found in my very nearsighted right eye, felt that a Trabeculectomy surgery was the way to go, even though drops to reduce eye pressure (that's the main cause of glaucoma) had been working quite well for the last 18 months or thereabouts.

So despite some initial qualms -- I view all surgery as scary; eye surgery is extra scary -- after hearing Dr. Young's reasons for wanting me to have a Trabeculectomy, one was scheduled for 11:30 am today at Good Samaritan Hospital in NW Portland.

Here's why I was pleased with the surgery, though obviously it's too early to tell how successful it will be in further reducing the pressure in my right eye. (My left eye is only minimally affected by glaucoma.)

First, the Traffic Gods were with my wife and me.

I'd begged for the latest possible surgery time, because I told the scheduler that we live south of Salem and neither wanted to leave our house at a super-early time for the 75 minute or so drive to Good Samaritan, nor run the very real risk of getting stuck in morning rush-hour traffic heading into Portland.

Pleasingly, we encountered no backups at all today on either our drive to Portland or our drive home. That was a major stress reducer.

Another stress reducer was my surgery starting on time. My hernia surgery was delayed. I found it tough to be all prepped and ready to go, then be told that because a previous surgery took longer than expected, mine wouldn't start for an extra hour.

But today I was wheeled into the outpatient operating room a few minutes early.

And it was good to be awake through the eye surgery, though I'd told the anesthesiologist that I enjoy propofol when I've had it for colonoscopies. He said that he'd put a small amount in my IV tube. Don't know if that happened, though, since I felt pretty much the same during the surgery.

UPDATE: I need to change my "pretty much the same" claim after idly scratching my chest while watching TV last night and feeling a strange lump. A big lump. Checking it out, I found that it was a square of adhesive with a metal connector thingie on the top. And not just one, there were three of them on the top of my chest where they were hard to see without looking in a mirror. Must have been put there in the surgery room to monitor my heart. I have no memory of that happening, nor, as I thought more about it, of being wheeled into the recovery room. So now I believe that while I was conscious during most of the eye surgery, I wasn't for all of it, and the "pretty much the same" feeling I had while the eye was being operated on could have been a propofol effect where propofol reality feels more real than actual reality (and more pleasant). Also, I forgot to credit the anesthesiologist with a clever question. He asked me, "So what did you have for breakfast today?" Quick-witted senior citizen that I am, I replied, "Ha, trick question! I didn't have anything to eat after midnight, as I was told to do by the pre-op instructions." He must feel this gets a more honest answer than "Have you had anything to eat after midnight?"

Good Samaritan is a teaching hospital (maybe all are). A nursing student from the University of Portland accompanied the RN who did my pre-surgery workup. She asked if I was OK with the student inserting the IV tube.

I said, "Sure." I did have some qualms about this, but the student did a good job. I told him that I admired him setting out on a career in nursing, given that so many nurses retired or quit the profession during the high stress time of Covid. 

Having relaxing conversations with the nursing staff goes a long way toward making surgery as pleasant as possible, though in no way was it fun. 

It'll be interesting to see what Regence MedAdvantage is charged for my surgery. When I was wheeled into the operating room, I was surprised to see what appeared to be about a dozen people in the room. I'm sure they're all necessary. I just visualized dollar signs floating above the head of each person.

As with my hernia surgery, once again the anesthesiologist who talked with me just before the eye surgery said "You're really healthy." And once again I replied, "OK, but I'm about to be wheeled into surgery, so I'm not that healthy."

His point, he went on to say, is that I don't have diabetes, heart disease, cancer, a lung problem, an inability to walk, or other common problems that, I assume, he sees in many older patients he works with. So that conversation provided me with some perspective on my glaucoma.

Now I have to do the post-surgery thing. Three kinds of medicated drops that I have to use for several weeks four times a day. Wearing an eye shield while I sleep for a week. Not lifting more than ten pounds for a while. Going to Dr. Young's Tualatin office the next three Friday afternoons to see how the eye is healing.

Which is all fine with me. The best thing about having surgery is that it feels so good to have it over with. I'd worried about all kinds of things going wrong today. None of those things happened. 

I found that sometime last week my attitude toward the surgery changed from "Oh, no, I need to have this damn eye surgery" to "Oh, please, let's get the eye surgery done so I can stop worrying about it."

Mission accomplished. Now I can start worrying about other things that probably won't happen.

When life goes wrong, it can happen in bunches

Anticipating how some people are going to react to this blog post, I want to start off by making one thing clear:

While my wife Laurel, our dog, and I are going through a stretch of more problems in our lives than usual, we're fortunate to have a decent income, good health insurance, and a pleasant home.

Lots of people have worse problems than we do, with fewer resources available to deal with them. Like, anyone homeless.

Having hopefully defused the "privilege" objection to what I'm about to say, my main point is simple:

Life can be tough, no matter who you are, and when things go wrong, it's unfortunate that sometimes those problems occur in bunches.

Mooka is our 5-6 year old Husky mix. She came from a shelter, so we don't know her exact age. As I wrote about in January, her hip dysplasia diagnosis worried us. 

She's an active dog. We live in rural south Salem with hardly any flat areas. Our home has several sets of stairs. Long walks and trips to the Minto Brown dog park were favorite activities of Laurel and Mooka.

That was threatened by the hip dysplasia. But in February Mooka started limping badly after playing with a dog she encountered on a walk. At first she wasn't putting any weight on that paw, though now she can, at least when walking slowly.

However, today a vet told Laurel that Mooka probably has an ACL tear in her knee. There's treatments that we're pursuing. However, knee surgery would involve a lengthy recovery period, which for a dog like Mooka, who really enjoys her twice daily walks and other excursions, would be hard to take.

Laurel had to spend many hours dealing with a screw-up by Best Buy after she ordered an induction cooktop and got something else. Fortunately Kelly's came to our rescue, so that problem has been resolved.

But a few days ago Laurel had a lengthy dentist appointment to have a broken crown replaced, after getting a temporary crown about a month ago. Now she has a toothache in that tooth, which shouldn't happen after a crown replacement.

That tooth has been worked on a lot over the years, so Laurel is worried that the root is damaged, which could require an implant. Not a fun prospect.

As for me, I'm scheduled for eye surgery next Monday at Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland. This is related to the glaucoma diagnosis I got about a year and a half ago. I'm very nearsighted in my right eye, which is where almost all of the optic nerve damage has occurred to my peripheral vision, which happened surprisingly rapidly.

So even though two types of eye drops have lowered my eye pressure from the low 20s to about 10 in each eye (lowering pressure is the only way to slow down glaucoma from progressing), the Portland glaucoma specialist I was referred to wants me to get a Trabeculectomy.

I'm pleased that I can spell the procedure. Not so pleased at having eye surgery, a first for me. It'll be good to get it over with, though, since I had to cancel a February surgery appointment when I got Covid last month.

Anyway, while the health problems of my wife, dog, and myself aren't as serious as many people have to deal with, it's been stressful for us to have to cope with them all at once. But that's the way life is: unpredictable.

We just wish life could have spaced out those problems. Sadly, life isn't a conscious being that demands can be made of. Even so, we look forward to life giving us a break as spring approaches.

I get Paxlovid "rebound," but I'm OK with being Covid positive again

Six days ago I completed my 5-day course of Covid treatment with Paxlovid, which basically puts a brake on replication of the virus, giving your body a chance to deal with it before it gets up a big head of Covid steam.

I commemorated that event with a blog post, "My somewhat contrarian take on Paxlovid 'rebound.'" I said:

My symptoms (nasal congestion and a cough) have been gone for a few days. The rapid test I took this afternoon was negative. So things are looking good. 

And I'm not all that worried about Paxlovid rebound, which doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

I still feel it isn't a big deal, even though last Wednesday, four days after I finished the Paxlovid treatment, I was dismayed to find that a rapid test I took showed I was positive for Covid again. So far (this is Friday) I'm still testing positive.

That's irritating, since I enjoyed my few days of post-Covid normalcy -- having coffee with a friend, going back to exercising at my athletic club, attending my Tai Chi class. 

On the plus side, my symptoms are milder than before, and they were pretty mild the first Covid time around. I haven't had to take a decongestant at bedtime, which I did during the first bout of Covid. And I came across a recent Scientific American story about Paxlovid rebound which indicates that my "contrarian take" on this actually is scientifically mainstream. 

A tweet clued me in to the story.

If you have doubts about Paxlovid because you've heard about the rebound effect, or if you know people who qualify to get Paxlovid because they're in a higher-risk Covid category (elderly, for example) and might be reluctant to take the drug, check out the February 8, 2023 Scientific American story by Lauren Gravitz, COVID Rebound Can Happen Even without Paxlovid.

Here's a PDF file if you have difficulty accessing that web page.
Download COVID Rebound Can Happen Even without Paxlovid - Scientific American

Some excerpts from the story:

Paxlovid gets a bad rap over concerns about COVID “rebound.” That’s the primary takeaway from a series of papers showing that whether or not people take the antiviral medication, many have symptoms that wax and wane before going away completely.    

Over the past few months a number of peer-reviewed and preprint studies have looked at patients with COVID in the placebo groups of clinical trials for Paxlovid and other treatments. As part of the trials, the patients in these groups were required to fill out daily symptom trackers. Researchers consistently found that as many as 30 percent of those who did not take an antiviral experienced a rebound in coughing, fatigue, headache or other symptoms after initially feeling better. 

...Despite Paxlovid’s proved efficacy at preventing severe disease and death in people considered high-risk, Smith found increasing resistance to it. “When Paxlovid rebound started to gain traction—I’m going to be blunt—I kind of got annoyed,” he says. Perhaps more worrisome, however, is the fact that some physicians have become hesitant to prescribe it. “The drug kept people out of the hospital and kept them from dying,” Smith says. “My patients started saying they didn’t want to take it,” he adds, and “I felt guilty because I’d started it all.”

Because he knew that respiratory viral symptoms have a tendency to come and go no matter the virus or treatment, Smith set out to better characterize the course of COVID itself. As chair of the U.S.-government-sponsored ACTIV-2 trial—a series of placebo-controlled studies that aims to assess new COVID treatments—he had troves of data at his fingertips, so he dove into the trials and gave the placebo groups extra scrutiny.    

...Smith wasn’t surprised by the results. “As an infectious disease doc, [I] know that respiratory disease viruses often have this waxing and waning,” he says, adding that it also happens with colds, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). “It’s just their nature.” This is likely because most symptoms are related to the body’s inflammatory response to the virus, not the virus itself, he says. The inflammation—which is different for everyone—generally lasts longer than the virus, and it ebbs and flows as viral remnants are cleared from the body.

Other infectious disease specialists agree. “In my view, the story of rebound was overblown,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist and chief of the research and education service at the Department of Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System. He notes that he frequently hears of physicians who resist prescribing Paxlovid to high-risk patients for fear of rebound or the much-lamented side effect of a bitter, metallic taste. And yet, he says, “rebound never killed anyone. But COVID can put you in the hospital or, even worse, could lead to death.”    

Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has heard similar reactions to Paxlovid. “I’ve heard many times from patients and from a fair number of physicians that ‘I don’t like to use it because of rebound,’” he says. “I kind of understand it viscerally, but it doesn’t make sense when looking at a dispassionate ledger sheet of the medication’s benefits and downsides.... It’s not that close a call.”    

...Until more data emerge, physicians must rely on their intuition and whatever solid information they can find. Existing data consistently point to the upside of Paxlovid. “In my world, people have looked at the data and believe the benefits of medication are quite probable,” Wachter says. “I’m certainly going to give it to high-risk people. Most of my colleagues who have gotten COVID have taken it.” And Wachter, who is 65 years old, adds that if he tests positive for COVID, he will absolutely take the drug himself.    

Physicians agree that COVID rebound after antivirals may be a nuisance, but it is far better than hospitalization or death. “Paxlovid is the best weapon we have right now for people who have COVID,” says Smith, who knows the treatment landscape better than most. “It keeps people out of the hospital, keeps them from dying and probably decreases the risk of long COVID. In short, I think it’s worth the bitter taste.” 

My somewhat contrarian take on Paxlovid "rebound"

After getting some Covid symptoms and testing positive on a rapid test last Monday, this morning I completed the 5-day Paxlovid treatment regimen. 

My symptoms (nasal congestion and a cough) have been gone for a few days. The rapid test I took this afternoon was negative. So things are looking good. 

And I'm not all that worried about Paxlovid rebound, which doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

Nobody really knows how many people who take Paxlovid either get Covid symptoms after the 5-day treatment is over, or test positive after testing first positive, then negative, then positive again. A Scientific American story says:

The Pfizer clinical trial reported between 1 and 2 percent of those who received the drug tested positive for COVID after finishing the Paxlovid course; their illness rebounded. Those rebounds were not statistically different from rebounds experienced by people with COVID who received the placebo, however.

And a Los Angeles Times story strikes a cautionary tone.

This is a story about a COVID-19 medication, a nasty trick the coronavirus sometimes plays on its victims, and how the two became a pandemic couple called “Paxlovid rebound.”

It’s also a story about how looks can be deceiving.

Americans have been quick to embrace the idea that the antiviral drug is to blame for COVID-19 relapses in people just days after they’ve seemingly recovered. President Biden was said to have experienced Paxlovid rebound this summer, after White House doctors declared him coronavirus-free. The same thing happened to Dr. Anthony Fauci and Stephen Colbert, among others.

It’s tempting to presume a cause-and-effect relationship between two things that occur in quick succession. And even when events are completely random, we tend to see the patterns we expect to find.

But researchers are not so sure Paxlovid rebound is real. Relapses have occurred in COVID-19 patients who didn’t take the drug — they just didn’t get as much attention when there wasn’t a new medicine to blame.

Doctors fear some patients who could benefit from Paxlovid are skipping it in an effort to avoid a boomerang bout of COVID-19. That’s troubling because the medication has been found to powerfully reduce the risk of hospitalization or death in the unvaccinated, older people and those with compromised immunity. Preliminary research hints it may even reduce the risk of long COVID.

Today I shared some thoughts with a friend about the subject of Paxlovid rebound. She also took Paxlovid, but is still testing positive about a week after the treatment ended. She shared an email from her doctor, which I cited in my own message. 

The way I see it, your doctor and my pharmacist are saying the same thing. Paxlovid doesn’t cause any virus lingering in the body after the 5-day treatment regimen to somehow pop back up and reinfect the person. It’s the Covid virus that caused the initial infection and it’s the Covid virus that causes any negative test result at the end of treatment to turn into a positive test result later on.

As your doctor correctly noted, Paxlovid puts a brake on replication of the virus during the 5-day treatment period. If a person’s body/immune system wasn’t able to clear all of the virus during that period, or if the person for one reason or another didn’t respond properly to the Paxlovid treatment, then any residual virus can emerge after the Paxlovid brake is turned off after the 5-days.

So if a positive test result occurs after Paxlovid, as has happened with you, this doesn’t mean Paxlovid is responsible. Paxlovid did what it should. And the Covid virus is doing what it does so well, replicate if given the chance. 

I look at the situation this way. Without Paxlovid, you or I might well have spent several weeks suffering from moderate symptoms. That was the case with a woman I know, somewhat younger than me, who got Covid and emailed me, “I hope you get over it more quickly than I did.” I recall she was sick for a couple of weeks.

So we take Paxlovid. It puts a brake on the virus replicating in our bodies. We have mild symptoms. If after the brake is released, some residual virus causes a positive test result some days after the end of Paxlovid treatment, we’re still considerably better off than if we hadn’t taken Paxlovid at all, because of the 5-day brake period, which enabled our bodies to better fight the comparatively small amount of virus that the Paxlovid brake couldn’t stop.

Like you said, it seems to come down to word choices. The word “rebound” conjures up an image of something happening that shouldn’t, whereas actually a positive test result after the 5-day course of treatment isn’t surprising, if some residual virus remained in the body after the five days. Some people seem to view “rebound” as meaning that Paxlovid caused two Covid infections rather than just one, which makes them reluctant to take Paxlovid. Of course, there was just one Covid infection.

They don’t realize that if they qualify to get Paxlovid, they should take it, since whatever happens with the course of treatment, they’ll be better off than if they just let Covid run its course in their body without Paxlovid. I took another rapid test about an hour ago: negative. So that’s good news. Of course, I’ll re-test myself every few days to see if a positive test result emerges.

I couldn’t tell from your message whether you took a rapid test after the 5-day course of treatment. If so, I’m curious if it was negative. 

I test positive for Covid. And feel positive about Paxlovid.

Well, it was a good run without ever getting Covid -- about three years since the nasty virus came to the United States in early 2020. 

After I had trouble sleeping last Saturday night, feeling on edge for no discernible reason, I took a rapid Covid test Sunday morning, which came back negative, even though my voice was a bit hoarse.

But Monday morning I had some nasal congestion and increased hoarseness, so I tested again. Yikes! A positive result. 

That kicked off a flurry of phone calls. First, I called my Salem Health family physician's office. I talked with someone who described my treatment options after I told her that I'd like to get Paxlovid given my age (74) and understandable desire to avoid a serious case of Covid.

She explained that a complication was that Paxlovid interacted with several prescription medications that I was taking. OK, I told her, no problem. I just won't take the medications while on the five-day Paxlovid course of treatment.

I then was told that they use the Salem Health pharmacy and that I'd be getting a call from a pharmacist. Probably the same day. Around 2:30 in the afternoon I got that call.

The Salem Health pharmacist was wonderfully clear.

He had me repeat what the person in my doctor's office had told me (which probably was in my chart): stop taking all of my other prescription medications for the five-day Paxlovid treatment, plus three days afterward, waiting another two days to restart the most problematic medication, Lovastatin (10 mg).

Again I said, no problem. I told the pharmacist I wasn't going to suffer much, if at all, from not taking the other medications. I'd much rather shorter the course of my Covid infection and lower the risk of getting Long Covid, which a VA study indicates is about a 25% risk reduction. 

Laurel, my wife, picked up the no-cost Paxlovid prescription for me. I took my first dose of three pills late Monday afternoon on the same day I tested positive for Covid. So I felt good that it was possible to get going with Paxlovid so soon (Paxlovid needs to be started within five days of having Covid symptoms). 

Here's how Paxlovid works.

Paxlovid is an antiviral therapy that consists of two separate medications packaged together. When you take your three-pill dose, two of those pills will be nirmatrelvir, which inhibits a key enzyme that the COVID virus requires in order to make functional virus particles. After nirmatrelvir treatment, the COVID virus that is released from the cells is no longer able to enter uninfected cells in the body, which, in turn, stops the infection. The other is ritonavir, a drug that was once used to treat HIV/AIDS but is now used to boost levels of antiviral medicines. 

As a COVID-19 treatment, ritonavir essentially shuts down nirmatrelvir’s metabolism in the liver, so that it doesn’t move out of your body as quickly, which means it can work longer—giving it a boost to help fight the infection.

At the moment I'm 3 1/2 days into the 5-day treatment. Starting today, Thursday, I'm almost symptom free.

My nasal congestion is just about gone. I cough occasionally, but way less than before. The only annoying side effect is some diarrhea, along with a bit of a metallic taste in my mouth for several hours after taking a dose.

Regarding the oft-heard Paxlovid "rebound effect," where Covid symptoms recur after going away, the Salem Health Pharmacist told me that this isn't due to Paxlovid, but to Covid. I believe he's right, after some Googling of this subject. For example, see here and here.

Not everyone with Covid is eligible to get Paxlovid. Based on my experience, I recommend that if you have Covid, ask if you can be prescribed Paxlovid.

My first counseling session: "I feel like you heard me"

I could have saved the $40 insurance co-pay by taking the advice of this cartoon and letting our dog make me feel better, instead of going to my first Salem Health counseling session.

But after seeing Wayne Halle, a MSW counselor, I'm convinced that I made the right decision to take my problems to a human, rather than a canine.

I was referred to Halle in late December after I told my family physician that I found a recent glaucoma diagnosis to be more than a little disturbing, especially when layered on top of a couple of other annoying health problems that I have.

However, early on in today's initial session I told Halle that since it took about ten weeks to get an appointment with him, now I wasn't as worried about my glaucoma. 

Of course, I quickly said that I have other concerns.

This was after I noted that like Halle, I too have a MSW (Master of Social Work) degree, as does my wife, a big difference being that soon after I got my degree, I realized that I wasn't really cut out to be a social worker, which led to me getting a job in health services research and then health planning.

My main takeaway from the 50 minutes or so I spent talking with Halle was how good it feels to be listened to attentively. That's why, when we were making plans for a second session, I told him, "I feel like you heard me."

Which isn't surprising, given that's what counseling/psychotherapy is largely about. It's also what everyday conversations should be about.  Often, though, we're guilty of paying as much attention to how we're going to respond to the other person, as to what they're saying. 

At least, I'm guilty of this. 

So it was refreshing to have Halle ask good questions about the difficulty I have in coping with a bladder that, as I like to put it, went on strike about five years ago and hasn't gotten back to working normally.

(Smooth bladder muscle, unlike regular muscle, doesn't recover when it loses its tone and becomes atonic, unable to properly push out the pee.)

I explained that one of my mental health concerns is a strong feeling of regret that I both failed to recognize warning signs that the prostate problem which I knew I had was morphing into a bladder problem, and also that when I had a urinary retention episode (unable to pee), I delayed seeking treatment, wrongly feeling that the problem would resolve itself.

Halle zeroed in on the key issue. 

"So tell me," he said, "before this happened, how many times in your life had your bladder stopped working?" "Um, none," I told him. "How then," Halle asked me, "could you have known what was going to happen, since you'd had no experience with it?"

Bingo. This interchange alone would have made the session worthwhile. My regret immediately lessened.

I'd had similar thoughts, but since the thoughts came from my own mind, they didn't have the impact  that Halle's words did. Meaning, I'm kind of immune to my own bullshit. My mind is continually churning out ideas, some of which make sense, and some don't. 

This is the problem with being your own therapist, something I alluded to in talking with Halle.

I told him that I have countless (almost) books about meditation, mindfulness, neuroscience, and such, many of which have good tips for dealing with anxiety and worries, of which regret is one manifestation. But it's difficult for me to break out of deep mentally unhealthy patterns on my own, since this is akin to me lifting myself off of the ground.

Someone else can do this, because they can use their legs and arms as leverage to raise me up. I, though, am stuck when I try to do the same thing.

This is the beauty of a skilled counselor like Wayne Halle. Within a few minutes of meeting this perfect stranger, I was telling him things about myself that I'd shared with only a couple of other close friends and relatives.

Such is the power of unconditional acceptance in a therapeutic relationship. I felt like the ideas and feelings I was sharing, though naturally familiar to me, since I was speaking them, had a special power when directed at Halle's welcoming and non-judgmental ears.

Somehow that made my concerns seem more manageable -- given that a stranger was listening to me with calm acceptance, unlike the often negative reaction I have to my own thoughts and emotions.

Which is damn strange, really, how I can be harder on myself than other people are with me. Anyway, I look forward to my next session with Halle, which won't be for about another month. (Salem, like most places, needs more mental health professionals.) 

MDMA research shows war on drugs is absurd

Sadly, I've never tried MDMA, otherwise known as Ecstasy or Molly. If I had, maybe I wouldn't have said sadly, since MDMA is a feel-good drug due to its ability to induce a massive release of serotonin, creating a feeling of well-being, love, joy.

In his book, "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion," Sam Harris describes an experience he had at the age of 19, taking MDMA with a friend in 1987.

The setting of our experience bore little resemblance to the conditions of Dionysian abandon under which MDMA is now often consumed. We were alone in a house, seated across from each other on opposite ends of a couch, and engaged in quiet conversation as the chemical worked its way into our heads.

Unlike other drugs with which we were by then familiar (marijuana and alcohol), MDMA produced no feeling of distortion in our senses. Our minds seemed completely clear. 

In the midst of this ordinariness, however, I was suddenly struck by the knowledge that I loved my friend. This shouldn't have surprised me -- he was, after all, one of my best friends. However, at that age I was not in the habit of dwelling on how much I loved the men in my life. 

Now I could feel that I loved him, and this feeling had ethical implications that suddenly seemed as profound as they now sound pedestrian on this page: I wanted him to be happy.

...The interesting thing about this final shift in perspective is that it was not driven by any change in the way I felt. I was not overwhelmed by a new feeling of love. The insight had more the character of a geometric proof: It was as if, having glimpsed the properties of one set of parallel lines, I suddenly understood what must be common to them all.

...The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured. Love was -- as advertised by mystics and crackpots through the ages -- a state of being. How had we not seen this before? And how could we overlook it ever again?

Sounds great. Sign me up for some MDMA!

Oh, there's a problem. According to an article in the February 2022 issue of Scientific American, "A Psychedelic for Trauma," this happened after MDMA began to be used as part of psychotherapy with people who had distressing memories.

In 1985 the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) classified MDMA as a Schedule I substance, making its possession a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison. The National Institutes of Health subsequently spent two decades funding research that suggested MDMA is neurotoxic and often lethal.

Which isn't true, as a bit of Googling easily reveals.

Most people who have a toxic reaction to MDMA got an adulterated version of the drug. This is what happens when a drug is made illegal. People still use it, but they don't get the pure drug, since it is unregulated. The Drug Policy Alliance says in relation to overdosing on MDMA:

“Overdose” refers to taking a higher than appropriate dose of a medicine or drug, which can happen with MDMA, but is extremely rare. It is much more likely that a problem would occur as a result of MDMA use with contraindicated medications (such as MAOI anti-depressants), preexisting health conditions, overexertion, or dehydration. Given the highly adulterated molly market, it’s also more likely to see an unidentified substance cause problems, rather than MDMA itself.

The Scientific American story by Jennifer Mitchell describes a key reason MDMA got such a bad reputation. 

These early studies indicated that MDMA can promote long-lasting restructuring of serotonin-containing nerve fibers, but they also suggested that such changes occurred only in high doses and were reversible over time.

Then along came George Ricaurte, a neurologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who made a name for himself by touting the alleged neurotoxic and lethal effects of MDMA. Ricaurte claimed that "even one drop of MDMA can lead to permanent brain damage."

His findings, proclaiming that MDMA could ravage the brain and leave nothing but damaged fibers in its wake, were published in the Journal Science and used time and again by the National Institute on Drug Abuse to support the war on drugs.

These data were later retracted after it was revealed that amphetamine, not MDMA, had caused the reported neurotoxicity.

But it has taken us years to get beyond sensationalist antidrug propaganda posters in which phrases such as "This is your brain on Ecstasy" were splashed atop artificially colored brain scans, making it look as if MDMA, as one DEA official put it, "turns your brain into Swiss cheese."

Mitchell is both hopeful and appropriately cautious about the current efforts to restore MDMA as a therapeutic drug for people suffering from PTSD, depression, anxiety, and other mental problems. She writes:

At 15 study sites across three counties, working with more than 70 different therapists and with study participants with childhood trauma, depression, and a treatment-resistant subtype of PTSD, we have obtained incredibly promising results.

...And although there had been concern that administering new medication to people with suicidal ideation could worsen their problems, MDMA-assisted therapy did not increase measures of suicidal thinking or behavior. 

MDMA also did not demonstrate any measurable misuse potential (which should compel us to reconsider the reasoning behind the war on drugs and scare tactics of the 1990s).

For sure.

I'm happy that I live in Oregon, a state that has legalized marijuana, approved psilocybin (magic mushrooms) for therapeutic use, and is the first state to decriminalize possession of all drugs and greatly increase access to supportive health services.

It's time -- past time, really -- for the United States to say yes to drugs. Adults should be able to purchase legal, well-regulated drugs that they want to use either for pleasure or therapy/healing/self-improvement.

It's crazy that alcohol and nicotine can be bought everywhere, even though these substances are much more destructive than most of the drugs still under tight control by the federal government.

I have glaucoma but not worried about CBD raising eye pressure

About three months ago I was diagnosed with glaucoma. I'm very nearsighted, which is a risk factor, along with age (I'm 73). The good news is that my eye pressure has dropped from 20-21 to 11-14 via prescription eye drops.

(Lowering eye pressure is the only way of preventing further optic nerve damage from glaucoma.)

Early on, though, I had a lot of anxious moments. After all, going blind from glaucoma or "just" experiencing functional loss of vision is scary. 

My anxiety increased after my wife wondered if my use of CBD could have been a cause of the glaucoma. My first reaction was to tell her, of course not, because it's well-known that THC, another form of cannabis, lowers eye pressure.

But some Googling revealed numerous articles about how CBD raises eye pressure, so glaucoma patients should be wary of using it.

However, I've asked two optometrists and an ophthalmologist who specializes in glaucoma if I should stop using CBD. All three said "No."

Here's what one optometrist said in a reply to my question about whether I should be concerned. The small doses of CBD he refers to me using are 20 mg twice a day and 10 mg once a day, spread out during the day.

After his message I'll share additional reasons why I'm not worried about CBD raising my eye pressure.

~Brian
Hello there ~ the article from the AAO [American Academy of Ophthalmology] you cited is likely referring to this study, which was performed at Indiana University in 2018:

https://iovs.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2718702

In that study, the researchers found that dosing mice with THC (the active ingredient in marijuana) lowered eye pressure, while CBD transiently raised eye pressure. This information has been known for a while, but has perhaps become more relevant recently as CBD products have become more available.

While it is easy to draw conclusions from the study, I would caution you from throwing away all of your CBD product. Instead, I would draw your attention to this study, completed at the University of Aberdeen in 2006:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16988594/

While the Indiana study was performed on mice, this study was performed with human subjects. Though the sample size was small (six individuals), it did provide some comforting information. The researchers found that while high doses of CBD (40 mg) did raise eye pressure, small doses (20 mg) had no effect. This suggests that small doses can likely be tolerated without producing eye pressure-raising effects.

Of course, much more research needs to be completed on human subjects for us to determine exactly what strength/dosage of these products is safe. But you can take heart that your small doses are unlikely to have a significant effect on your eye pressure.

My suggestion would be to continue your CBD use for now. If anything, prematurely stopping it would potentially color the results that your glaucoma medication provides. I would recommend continuing to keep your single doses at 20 mL/mg or below and spread them throughout the day.

We will be monitoring your eye pressure at each visit and should it start to creep up, we have other ways to bring it down than for you to cease your CBD treatment. At this point, I wouldn’t stress about it too much.

Good advice. I've stopped stressing about using CBD entirely, for these reasons.

First, the December 2018 IOVS Journal article described how eye pressure in mice responded to doses of THC and CBD. Mice aren't people, obviously. The article says:

Three of four studies that have tested CBD for effects on IOP [intraocular pressure] have reported no effect, but the fourth has reported an increase in IOP.

Somewhat strangely, the article doesn't give references to the three studies that showed CBD having no effect on eye pressure, just the single study that reported an increase.

But that study was the 2006 University of Aberdeen research which my optometrist referred to as showing that only a CBD dose of 40 mg raised eye pressure, while 20 mg of CBD had no effect. Since I assume the other three no-effect studies mentioned in the IOVS Journal article also were on humans, seemingly the only evidence that CBD raises eye pressure in people is the 2006 study.

Then there's the issue of CBDA, a precursor of CBD that an Oregon State University lab study found prevented cells from being infected by the coronavirus. I've been using CBDA rather than CBD for about a week, as described in my blog post, "I got some CBDA. Covid can't touch me now!"

I'm no expert on the pharmacology of CBD and CBDA. However, it seems to me that CBDA is even less likely than CBD to raise eye pressure, since CBD and CBDA work in considerably different ways. Meaning, the mechanisms by which they have effects on the human body are different.

The IOVS article says "there is no effect on IOP by CBD if GPR18 and CB1 are both blocked/deleted." In other words, eye pressure in the mice didn't increase if the receptors GPR18 and CB1 weren't functional. 

I found a lengthy study that looked at how various forms of cannabis operate. In the CBDA section, it says:

Bolognini et al. (2013) also found that, in contrast to CBD (section 7.3.1), CBDA did not display significant activity as either an agonist or an inverse agonist at cannabinoid CB1 receptors in mouse whole brain membranes, even at a concentration 100,000-fold higher than a concentration (0.1 nM) at which it potentiated 8-OH-DPAT in rat brainstem membranes.

I don't understand much of that language, but it seems clear that CBDA didn't have any significant activity at the CB1 receptor that could cause CBD to raise eye pressure at high doses. 

So I'm comfortable with using CBD even though I have glaucoma, and I'm considerably more comfortable with using CBDA. 

I got some CBDA. Covid can't touch me now!

Like I said in a recent post about an Oregon State University study that found CBDA and CBGA prevented Covid infection in a laboratory study of cells, regular CBD has very little of these acids that are  precursors to CBD, so mostly disappear when CBD is created from hemp.

But I found several online sources of CBDA. Fewer seem to exist for CBGA. This story describes the key differences between CBD, CBDA, and CBGA, with this takeaway quote.

A study published this week by researchers at Oregon State University found some hemp compounds have the ability to prevent the virus that causes COVID-19 from entering human cells.

Findings of the study led by Richard van Breemen, a researcher with Oregon State’s Global Hemp Innovation Center, College of Pharmacy and Linus Pauling Institute, were published this week in the Journal of Natural Products.

...“We identified several cannabinoid ligands and ranked them by affinity to the spike protein,” van Breemen said. “The two cannabinoids with the highest affinities for the spike protein were CBDA and CBGA, and they were confirmed to block infection.”

So I was thrilled to find this bottle in our mail today, which arrived quickly from FluxxLab, a Colorado company.

The label on the back says that half a dropper contains about 10 mg of CBDA and 6.6 mg of CBD. I've had two doses today, so it's pretty clear...

Covid can't touch me now!

Leaving aside the minor detail that there's no evidence CBDA actually prevents Covid in humans, as opposed to cells in a lab dish. But if the placebo effect is at play here, I'm even more protected, since I believe in CBD and CBDA.

I don't claim to fully understand what makes Fluxxlab products different from regular CBD, but this excerpt from the product page for their CBDA oil say those products are considerably more potent -- five times as much. 

FluxxLab™ CBDA Tinctures

Expect results that will outperform any CBD you have ever experienced. Completely natural, this pure CBDA oil tincture delivers potency many times greater than standard CBD. Carefully crafted in our own Colorado lab, we have added exactly the right natural terpenes to precisely balance the performance of what our customers tell us is “The World’s most perfect Tincture.”One ounce will provide you with a full month’s supply of the Best CBDA Rich Oil tincture you will ever find anywhere. Satisfaction always guaranteed.

Beyond all other tinctures

FluxxLab™ tinctures are precisely formulated to fit your needs and usage levels. Experience tells us that 90% of people who use CBD don’t take enough and don’t get the full benefits that they need or expect. At Fluxxlab™, we have addressed that problem with an economical and effective solution. We offer you three carefully selected CBDA tinctures. Our 500mg tincture is exactly right for those serious users who would otherwise be taking 2,500mg of regular CBD per month. We refer to this as the normal CBD dosage level. Our 1000mg CBDA oil is correct for users who would otherwise be taking 5,000mg of CBD per month, on average.

OK. I've been taking about 50 mg of CBD a day, so that comes out to 1,500 mg a month. Thus supposedly I've been well under the normal CBD dosage level of 2,500 mg.

Regardless, I'm enthused about trying out CBGA, a new thing for me. There hasn't been as much research on it as on CBD, but there's some intriguing potential benefits aside from preventing Covid.

CBDA shows promise as an effective medicine in the treatment of a variety of conditions. CBDA’s affinity for serotonin receptors helps it affect everything from mood to nausea to inflammation.

CBDA has shown to have a more intense activation of 5-HT1A serotonin receptors compared to CBD. Serotonin can affect a variety of physiological functions including mood regulation, nausea, vomiting, and intestinal motility. 

Based on the current research, CBDA’s potential as a medicine is still up in the air. 

Up until now, clinical trials have largely focused on animal models. Until trials focus on human health and how CBDA works, we will not know the full extent of CBDA’s power.

Pain relief also is a possibility (scroll down and click on benefits). 

There can be dramatic results when using CBD products. At FluxxLab™ we have first-hand experience with many hundreds of cases where our customers have experienced dramatic and amazing results using CBDA as compared to plain CBD.

The overall Endocannabinoid response to CBDA appears to be far more powerful than it is with CBD. CBDA binds with some of the same Endocannabinoid receptors in the human body as CBD, but it is also known to bind with different receptors.

Expect to find many cases where CBDA acts in similar but more powerful and effective ways than plain CBD. For example: Research indicates that CBDA acts on the human body by inhibiting COX-1, an enzyme linked to inflammation. When the human body feels there is a problem in a particular organ, it sends this enzyme to cause inflammation and stop the problem from spreading throughout the body. Inflammation is a natural body response. However, our body often creates inflammation even when there is no real problem. People suffering from such inflammation usually complain about chronic pain. CBDA appears to be as much as 100 times more effective in targeting this receptor, compared to CBD.

Not much Covid-fighting CBDA and CBGA in regular CBD

I've been using CBD oil and capsules for quite a while. So I got excited yesterday when I saw reports of an Oregon State University study that found precursors to CBD, CBDA and CBGA, prevented Covid infection in a laboratory study of cells.

Hemp

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Hemp compounds identified by Oregon State University research via a chemical screening technique invented at OSU show the ability to prevent the virus that causes COVID-19 from entering human cells.

Findings of the study led by Richard van Breemen, a researcher with Oregon State’s Global Hemp Innovation Center, College of Pharmacy and Linus Pauling Institute, were published today in the Journal of Natural Products.

Hemp, known scientifically as Cannabis sativa, is a source of fiber, food and animal feed, and multiple hemp extracts and compounds are added to cosmetics, body lotions, dietary supplements and food, van Breemen said.

Van Breemen and collaborators, including scientists at Oregon Health & Science University, found that a pair of cannabinoid acids bind to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, blocking a critical step in the process the virus uses to infect people.

The compounds are cannabigerolic acid, or CBGA, and cannabidiolic acid, CBDA, and the spike protein is the same drug target used in COVID-19 vaccines and antibody therapy. A drug target is any molecule critical to the process a disease follows, meaning its disruption can thwart infection or disease progression.

“These cannabinoid acids are abundant in hemp and in many hemp extracts,” van Breemen said. “They are not controlled substances like THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, and have a good safety profile in humans. And our research showed the hemp compounds were equally effective against variants of SARS-CoV-2, including variant B.1.1.7, which was first detected in the United Kingdom, and variant B.1.351, first detected in South Africa.”

Those two variants are also known the alpha and beta variant, respectively.

But since the news release spoke of CBGA and CBDA being precursors to CBD, this paragraph caused me to wonder whether the CBD drops and capsules I'd been taking were Covid fighters.

“These compounds can be taken orally and have a long history of safe use in humans,” van Breemen said. “They have the potential to prevent as well as treat infection by SARS-CoV-2. CBDA and CBGA are produced by the hemp plant as precursors to CBD and CBG, which are familiar to many consumers. However, they are different from the acids and are not contained in hemp products.”

So last night I emailed the folks at Sunsoil, a Vermont company where I've been buying CBD, asking if their products contained CBDA and CBGA. They replied promptly today, referencing a news story I'd sent them about the OSU study.

Hi Brian,

 

Thanks for sending this article along! We've had a few customers forward it to us today as well 😀 We post all of our lab reports on our website and you can find them here: https://www.sunsoil.com/pages/lab-results-1. You can match your specific bottles and batch/lot # to the reports on our website.

 

As you will see, our products do contain the full range of cannabinoids present in the hemp plant, but we definitely focus on and propagate our seeds and plants to product more CBD than other cannabinoids. Our oil does contain CBGA and CBDA but in very small quantities so that on the reports you may see either "ND" (none detected) or <LOQ (below the limit of quantification). Both of these mean that there is trace amounts of these cannabinoids in our oil, but lower amounts than the lab equipment used for results can detect.

 

Let me know if you have any other questions or need clarification! The reports can be tricky to read so I always recommend scrolling down to the Sunsoil header report as it's a bit more reader friendly. Hope this helps!

 

Have a great day,

Tia

Following the link in the email message, I checked out the lab results for the Sunsoil CBD drops I've been taking with 20 mg of CBD in a serving. Here's a table of what they contained.

The easiest way to look at this, assuming I'm reading the table correctly, which I think I am, is that the sample totaled 27.55 mg of Cannabinoids, with 22.43 mg being CBD. There was 1.83 mg of CBDA in the sample, and just a trace amount of CBGA, not enough to measure.

So, hey, almost 2 mg of CBDA is better than nothing, Covid-fighting-wise, but pretty minimal. That led me to a Google search for real CBDA or CBGA.

I focused on CBDA, since there seemed to be more sellers of this. Montkush has a detailed description of CBDA, which educated me about this CBD precursor. Excerpt:

What Is CBDA?

All cannabinoids in cannabis and hemp come from cannabigerolic acid (CBGa), the mother of all cannabinoids.

Plant enzymes then convert the CBGa into a combination of the three major cannabinoid precursor compounds: tetrahydrocannabinolic acid (THCA), cannabichromenic acid (CBCA), and cannabidiolic acid (CBDA). The combination will depend on the unique cannabis strain they are derived from.

CBDA is a non-psychoactive compound that serves as a precursor to CBD. More specifically, CBDA is decarboxylated to create CBD, meaning it is heated. This can happen instantly if smoked or vaped, or slowly if the plant material is left to dry in the sun or even at room temperature.

Cannabidiolic acid can, therefore, be thought of as raw CBD. CBDA is most often found in the live or raw hemp plants bred for high CBD levels.

Cannabidiolic acid is often consumed as CBD, but it can also be beneficial in its raw form. CBDA oil can be consumed or absorbed via tinctures, raw cannabis juice, topical creams, and raw CBDA oil.

To date, CBDA has attracted much less public attention and is seen less on the market. However, the raw juicing cannabis trend is bringing CBDA into the spotlight. People are wondering about the differences between CBD and CBDA and if CBDA is better than CBD.

So is it?

Let’s take a look.

The Differences Between CBDA & CBD

The major difference between CBDA and CBD is actually the amount of heat applied to the substance.

As we mentioned, the main difference is that CBDA is a precursor to CBD. You create CBD by heating CBDA or raw CBD.

While research in CBDA is in much earlier stages than even CBD, we know that they share some similarities.

Unfortunately, Monkush was sold out of CBDA. I signed up for an email alert for when it is expected to be available at the end of January.

I had better luck with Myriam's Hemp, which offered CBDA oil. I also got some from FluxxLab, even though their ordering process was frustrating. The box I had to check to agree to the terms of service didn't work with Safari or Chrome, but using Firefox enabled me to make an order. 

Of course, the OSU study was just laboratory research. There's no evidence, so far as I know, that CBDA prevents Covid in humans. But I figure that taking some CBDA won't hurt me, and it may have a placebo effect.

I also read that CBDA has a much stronger antidepressant effect that CBD, so if I do get Covid, hopefully I won't feel as sad about that.

Two things gym users do that really bugs me

Yeah, I know. It's almost Christmas. I'm supposed to be in a Happy Holidays cheerful mood.

But today I was reminded of two things that fellow users of Courthouse Club Fitness do that irritate me enough to warrant a complaining blog post on the eve of Christmas Eve.

One relates to sanitation.

I always carry a small "sweat towel" with me to wipe off the handles of the equipment I was on after I'm finished with it: first, the elliptical trainer in the aerobics room, then the weight machines in the circuit training room.

I also always wear a mask while exercising at the gym in these Covid times. There's a sign next to the door of the River Road Courthouse Club Fitness saying that a mask or face shield is required.

Most gym users don't wear a mask, though. I'd say three-fourths.

OK, that's an irresponsible decision that puts both them and other people at risk. But I wouldn't find those people nearly as irritating if many of them didn't also drench the machine they're using in sanitizer both before and after they use it.

That's bizarre.

The risk of getting a health problem, including Covid, by touching an unsanitized surface is hugely less than the risk of becoming seriously ill, or even dying, because of not wearing a mask in an indoor public space like a gym where many are maskless and breathing hard.

Maybe these people don't realize that Covid is almost entirely spread through the air, not by touching something someone infected with the virus has handled.

Also, I don't see them sanitizing the handles on the door they have to use to enter and leave the gym. For some reason they just have a fetish of wiping down the exercise equipment far beyond what is necessary for health and cleanliness.

My second gripe is about cell phone use by young people using the weight machines in the circuit training room.

Google images photo. 
I don't have my phone out when I'm exercising,
so I can't take a photo of the irritating people who do.

I don't do free weights, so I'm not sure if they also clog up that equipment with their obsessive need to check their phone before and after doing a few repetitions on a weight machine. Me, I've got the old-fashioned attitude that when you're at the gym, you should be exercising, not clicking away on your phone.

Yes, I do some repetitions, usually twelve, then take a short break before I do eight more repetitions. During that break I -- shock! -- simply sit on the machine, take a few deep breaths, and then resume my workout.

But almost every young person at the gym carries their phone with them while exercising. I find this to be akin to an obsessive mental health disorder. It's hard for me to believe that whatever vital information they're reading and writing about on their phone couldn't wait until they've finished their workout.

When someone sits down at a weight machine that I need to use, pulls out their phone, and proceeds to type away for several minutes, I'm tempted to go over and say to them, "Are you done using this machine as a place to play around with your phone? If so, I'd like to actually use it for the purpose it was intended."

But because I'm a polite senior citizen, I don't do this. Maybe instead I should casually drop a copy of an article at their feet, "Get off your phone at the gym, says Lou Ferrigno."

Speaking on Instagram, the New York native said:

"It's very frustrating that you go to the gym and want to have the quality of time to workout.

"I can't tell you how many times I go to the gym, I walk over to a piece of equipment, and I see some guys sitting there, holding their phone like this."

Ferrigno didn't hold back when sharing his thoughts on time-wasting gym goers.

"I'm here to train. If you don't want to work out, don't waste your time at the gym."

Although Ferrigno is best known as the original Hulk, he's also a bodybuilding icon. He hails from the Arnold Schwarzenegger heyday, and actually finished third behind the Austrian and Serge Nubret at the 1975 Mr. Olympia contest.

Not so fun day: I probably have glaucoma

I thought the day started off badly when our dog threw up three times on our living room carpet.

But it got considerably worse when I exited my visit to Retina Consultants here in Salem with a probable diagnosis of glaucoma.

Well to be exact, Dr. Justin Baynham told me that my test results were "suspicious of glaucoma." 

I'm trying to look at the bright side. Maybe it's good that my optometrist at Eye Care Physicians & Surgeons, Dr. Rebecca Chung, also wasn't completely sure that I have glaucoma.

That's why she referred me for a consultation at Retina Consultants. 

I've had an annual eye exam for most of my life, since I wear contacts. One year a while back the pressure in my eye was elevated, but it went down the next year.

In 2020 my previous optometrist, Dr. Betsy McDowell (now retired), didn't see any damage to the optic nerve, so it was a surprise when a field of vision test last Monday showed that my right eye sucks when it comes to peripheral vision.

However, Dr. Baynham told me this afternoon that 50% of people with glaucoma don't have high pressure in their eyes.

On the darker side, Chung noted some damage to my right optic nerve, and Baynham confirmed that after I had a test where some sort of dye stuff was injected into my upper arm, where it quickly found its way to my eyes, which allowed images to be taken of the optic nerves.

Not good, especially in my right eye. My left eye had considerably lesser damage.

That's irreversible, unfortunately. So the goal is to keep my possible/probable glaucoma under control to prevent further damage, which Baynham said would occur by lowering my eye pressure from 21 to 14 mm Hg. 

So I've got a prescription for Latanoprost eye drops, which hopefully will reduce my eye pressure from the high normal level of 21 to the low normal level of 14.

The big message I want to convey to others is this: Get a regular eye exam! 

Not just a vision test, but an exam that checks y0ur eye pressure and dilates your eyes so the doctor can see if any optic nerve damage in occurring. This is especially important if you're over 60, have a family history of glaucoma, or at high risk for getting this disease.

I had no vision problems other than my usual nearsightedness when I went in for my annual eye exam on October 28. Though my peripheral vision is bad in my right eye, I hadn't noticed this.

A generally positive web page about glaucoma (things can be fine if it is detected and treated early) has this to say:

People with glaucoma who manage it well can live a normal, independent life. A big problem with glaucoma is that in the early stages, people with glaucoma live their lives largely unaffected by the condition while it is all the while progressing silently.

Problems with vision can at first be subtle and many people are able to manage life well with mild to moderate visual impairment. Visual loss can even go unnoticed until it becomes severe, at which point much of the damage caused by glaucoma is irreversible.

As a doctor treating hundreds of individuals with glaucoma, my goal is to pick up on early changes and use timely and effective interventions to prevent loss of vision.  Nothing warms my heart more than to hear how my patients’ vision has become stable and that they are getting on with normal lives, being productive at work, enjoying their time with family, friends and having great experiences.

...I am grateful that we can detect glaucoma at its early stages. When my patients get a diagnosis of glaucoma at an early disease stage, I am able to keep them seeing well throughout the course of their lives.

Of course, my first reaction after hearing that I probably have glaucoma was, oh, no, I'm going to go blind! That seems unlikely, now that I've been able to have more rational reactions. 

If you have glaucoma and could share some thoughts about how you've dealt with your problem, please do so in a comment on this post. Especially if things have gone well for you. No offense, but if you've gone blind from glaucoma, I'd prefer not to know this.

My problem with the Mendi neurofeedback device

It's been a bit more than two months since I started using the Mendi neurofeedback device that I ordered via a Kickstarter campaign.

I started off enthusiastic about my Mendi, as discussed in my July 26 blog post, "I'm enjoying my Mendi neurofeedback device."

I've only been using the Mendi for a short time and need to do more exploring with it. This is my initial impression of what works best to get the ball moving upward.

My first try with the Mendi produced a pretty good score. I think this was because I simply focused on the ball and didn't try to make the ball go up.

The next few Mendi sessions didn't go so well, probably because I was trying to get a better score. From what I can tell so far -- and my experience likely is different from other Mendi users -- trying isn't the best way to train the brain.

Not trying is. 

Well, after a lot more experience with my Mendi, I'm much less enthused about the device. The main reason why was pointed to in my first blog post when I said that after I did well with the Mendi, the next few sessions didn't go so well.

For quite a while I thought the problem was with me, not the device.

But now I lean strongly to the position that the Mendi hardware, the software, or both isn't capable of reliably providing feedback on how well a user is concentrating on the single task currently available with the smart phone app: making a ball rise.

I've been meditating every day for over fifty years, often for an hour or two.

I'm a strong advocate of mindfulness, my current approach to meditation. So I'm confident that I can tell the difference between a frenzied scattered mind and a calm concentrated mind. 

Yet the scores I get with the Mendi device have little or nothing to do with my ability to focus on the ball. There's simply no evident connection between my state of mind and how much the ball moves upward, which supposedly is a reflection of oxygenated blood flow and neural activity.

The folks who designed and sell the Mendi device also seem to have a haphazard way of describing what a user is supposed to do during their sessions.

My iPhone app tells me to relax and focus on the ball. But I've also seen the advice to concentrate on trying to make the ball go upward, which is quite different from simply focusing on the ball. And other advice is to think about a mental issue you're working on, like anxiety about something.

My suspicion is that the reason there are so many different ways of describing how someone is supposed to use their Mendi device is that there's no consistent way of making the ball go up. Meaning, the device basically is giving random results, not genuine neurofeedback about someone's state of mind or ability to concentrate. 

As noted in my first blog post, I get better scores in a dark room than in the room I meditate each morning in -- which has a window facing west with a white shade that I pull down. So even though sun isn't coming through the window, even diffuse light appears to lead to a lower Mendi score.

Thus the combination of not getting results that match up with my feeling relaxed and concentrated and the sensitivity of the Mendi device to how bright a room is, possibly along with other external factors (like where on the forehead the device is worn) has caused me to stop using the device on a regular basis.

I figure that simply meditating is a better use of my time than getting scores from the device that, so far as I can tell, don't mean anything. Reportedly a software/app update is coming that might deal with my concerns, so I'll keep an open mind about the device.

I was moved to write this follow-up blog post about the Mendi device after reading a Facebook post from a user who has a similar attitude to mine. Since you have to be a member of the private Facebook group to read the posts, I'll copy in what Sami Zegnani had to say.

After several months of practice, I notice that my progress is extremely low. I have managed to make 37% increase but this is because the procedure consists of meditating during the Calibration and then I pick up the phone and inevitably my head falls and this causes an increase in blood flow in the brain. Otherwise nothing works.

 

My background is that in the middle of meditation, I reach a HRV easily exceeding 70 ms, sometimes I reach 100 ms which shows that my blood flow can be very high... On other neurofeedback devices, either on muse or on myndlift I am one of the most experienced. My scores are very good. I have thousands of hours of vipassana meditation. So I have a serious problem with this device.

 

Not only do I not progress despite regular and consistent practice, but I don't feel any well being after a session, sometimes I have a little headache! I mean I can understand that I have a low score, I started meditation 13 years ago and I had no concentration. I made 10 retreats..

 

But what I do know is that in just a few short weeks, the progress in meditation has been felt. I have no problem with having to learn. I recently started Wim Hof and I saw the benefits even though I was a novice. But with mendi, nothing, nothing nothing.

 

I wanted to wait before saying anything but now that several weeks have passed, I have a huge doubt about the device and its measurement. I'm really sorry to have to say this because I would have liked to say something good about this device. If this post can reassure people who are practicing and who think that maybe they are the problem. No, it's not necessarily you.

My hernia operation shows weirdness of hospital billing

I've been meaning to share what my May 6 hernia operation at Salem Hospital cost, because this shows how strange health care billing can be.

But I'd been putting this off -- until I was spurred into blog post action by a story in today's Statesman Journal, "Salem Hospital lacks pricing transparency, new report says."

Now, what I've shared below doesn't have anything directly to do with pricing transparency, but indirectly it does.

I'm on Medicare. My insurance company is Regence MedAdvantage.

Here's what the Medicare billing statement showed for my hernia operation. I combined the line items into categories, not that I totally understand what is included in each.

Description	Billed by Salem Health	Approved by Regence MedAdvantage	What I paid
Surgeon	378	174	40
EKG	219	80	10
Blood test	92	0	0
Covid test	160	55	0
Anesthesiologist	1,875	343	0
Operation-endoscope	1,554	667	0
Operation-Salem Health	21,972	6,413	300
Total	26,250	7,732	350

 

The main things that leapt out at me are how expensive a routine outpatient operation is, and the big difference between what Salem Health billed and what Regence MedAdvantage approved/paid.

Salem Health billed $26,250. Regence MedAdvantage paid $7,732. I paid $350.

Given this huge difference between what was billed and what my insurance paid, it's difficult for me to understand how more transparency in pricing would help people who have insurance.

Is the price what Salem Health bills insurance, what is approved by the insurance company, or something else?

Plus, when someone with good insurance, like me on Medicare, pays so little out of pocket, there's very little motivation to care about how much health care costs.

From what I've learned, the amount Medicare will pay for hospital services guarantees a decent profit for the hospital, though I'm sure Salem Health administrators would disagree. 

Intuitively, what Regence MedAdvantage approved for my hernia operation seems about right. I was at the hospital for about six hours. The operation went smoothly. Hernia repairs are common.

It doesn't seem like an outpatient hernia operation should cost $26,250. Instead, $7,732 seems about right. 

What this shows is how complicated our screwed-up health care system is. I'm a big proponent of Medicare for All, or some other form of universal health coverage for everybody in the United States.

Moving from private insurance to Medicare has been great. No regrets at all about embracing "socialized medicine," as many Republicans term Medicare, even though almost everybody on Medicare loves it.

My robotic hernia surgery goes well. Behold one incision.

At the age of 72, I'm no longer an adult surgery virgin. 

Up until today my only surgery was a tonsillectomy that was so long ago, I had to say "I don't know" when asked about the date of previous surgeries. Probably I was four or five.

All I remember about it was ether being poured on some sort of cloth, then put over my nose and mouth. 

But now I have a blog! (three, in fact) So I can go beyond the usual verbal "let me tell you about my surgery" -- a sure-fire conversation stopper, especially if an old guy is talking to a younger person.

I can write about my surgery. And share a photo of one of my three laparoscopic incisions. 

Not too gross, right? And by viewing it in a blog post, you're saved from me pulling up my shirt and making you look at it in person.

I'm a bit leery of being too enthusiastic about how little pain I feel about seven hours after the operation, since the anesthesiologist told me he puts some painkillers in the anesthetic "cocktail."

But so far I haven't even felt the need to take a Tylenol, much less one of the Hydrocod-Acetamin pills I was prescribed on an "as needed" basis.

The right side of my abdomen is sore -- which isn't surprising, since my large inguinal (groin) hernia was on that side.

My Salem Health surgeon, Dr. Hsinchen Lin, used robots to aid in the laparoscopic procedure. I've read that robot-assisted surgery has some advantages over plain old laparoscopy. Hopefully one of those benefits is less post-surgery pain.

The most stressful part of the surgery was waiting for it to start. 

My wife and I arrived right on time for the 11:30 am check-in at Salem Hospital. And it didn't take long for me to be ushered into the surgery prep room, where I got to put on the charming backless gown, get my vital signs checked, have an IV started, and chat with several friendly nurses.

Since my surgery was scheduled for 1:30 pm, I optimistically thought that I'd be home before too long.

That happy thought lasted until around 1:45 pm, when I was told that due to the previous surgery taking longer than expected, mine wouldn't start for another hour. This was the toughest part, since I already was getting tired of the decidedly non-ergonomic hospital bed I was on.

Way too soft. No back support. My sciatica-prone right leg wasn't having a good time. 

What saved me was a nurse disconnecting the IV tube in my left arm so I could use the restroom conveniently located right next door to the room I was in.

That solved a couple of problems.

I got out of the damn hospital bed and could stretch my legs. And since I have to use an intermittent catheter to pee, my bladder having gone on strike four years ago, I didn't need to worry about going through a semi-lengthy urinating process right after the surgery.

And the nurse told me that surgeons want the bladder as empty as possible prior to surgery, given the  proximity of the bladder to the hernia location.

(The anesthesiologist had pointed out what I already suspected. Just as when you go to sleep, the body's peeing and pooping functions are basically put on hold during anesthesia.)

Anyway, it feels good to have the surgery done with. It'll take six weeks to get back to 80% normalcy, Dr. Lin said.

But I'll be able to lift no more than 10 pounds between now and then, so light exercising will be possible, along with my usual two-mile hilly dog walk in the late afternoon after a few days of shorter walks.

I really appreciated how smoothly the Salem Hospital surgery process went, leaving aside the unavoidable delay in my surgery time. The nurses made me feel well-cared for. My wife and I had a very enjoyable conversation with the first RN who looked after me.

Having a surgery is stressful. Being able to chat about subjects totally unrelated to what I was about to go through helped a lot to keep my mind from obsessing about what was to come. 

Time will tell if I continue to have minimal post-surgery pain.

Regardless, I'm happy that things went as well as they did. Dr. Lin had said that I might need four incisions, given how large my hernia was, so I feel fortunate that I ended up with three, her original prognosis.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention a tip that might benefit others who need hernia surgery. About ten days before my surgery I had a rare bout of constipation, perhaps caused by stress, but maybe not. I'm a vegetarian, so constipation hasn't been a problem for me.

At any rate, I found that MiraLax, a mild stool softener, ended up working best for me. It takes several days to work, so I was glad that I'd started taking it before the surgery. Straining to have a bowel movement is a post-hernia surgery no-no, which is why a stool softener was included in my discharge instructions. (Heavy duty pain medications cause constipation.)

But since they take a while to do their thing -- softening the stool -- to me it makes sense for someone scheduled for a hernia surgery to start taking MiraLax prior to the surgery. It comes in powder form that's dissolved in liquid, so less than the recommended amount can be taken.

Yesterday I was told that if I use the Hydrocodone I was prescribed, I should increase the amount of MiraLax I'd been taking. But since I don't need that pain reliever, I'm sticking with the usual MiraLax dosage.

My hernia consultation goes well (if I ignore scary stuff)

About two weeks ago I got a hernia diagnosis, which I memorialized in "Now I can scratch 'get hernia' off my bucket list." 

The diagnosis wasn't a big surprise, given the large bulge on the right side of my groin that appeared suddenly while I was sitting in a dentist's chair a few days before I got the official diagnosis based on an ultrasound. 

I've been trying to be as positive as possible while waiting for a surgery consultation. But as today's consultation approached, my mind veered off in some decidedly negative directions.

My hernia is large; maybe it is too large for surgery. I have to use an intermittent catheter to pee; maybe this will be difficult to do after surgery. My family physician said it was OK to exercise while wearing a hernia belt; maybe the surgeon will say this made my hernia worse.

Well, as often happens it turned out that none of my fears came to pass -- though the surgeon did bring up some scary stuff when describing what could go wrong with my hernia repair.

The Salem Health surgeon I saw today, Hsinchen Lin, M.D., made a great impression. Here's a screenshot from her official You Tube video.

Personable. Caring. Good communicator. And best of all, almost, Dr. Lin used the term "OCD" about herself while describing part of the hernia procedure. 

That's exactly what I want in a surgeon -- someone nice who also is obsessively compulsive about the details of the surgery she's performing. Especially when the surgery is being performed on me.

Dr. Lin started off by saying she didn't have her usual visual aid with her, so she'd have to draw me a diagram of the hernia surgery. She offered it to me as I was leaving. I grabbed the piece of paper, saying, "I'll keep this memento in a scrapbook."

Or, blog post. 

Those are my legs down at the bottom. The dot is my belly button, and the lines above are the three laparoscopic incisions she would be making.

My private parts are in the middle of the groin, though not drawn to scale, I hasten to say. The round circle on the right side of the groin is the hole where some of what should be inside me, like part of my bowel, has crept outside. 

Dr. Lin said that men are especially vulnerable to inguinal hernias due to the way the testes descend into the testicles in a boy baby. Then the wear and tear of aging can create a hernia in that already weak spot.

Plastic mesh is used to shore up the weak areas in my groin area. I penned in the word "sew" in the area where stitches would be used to fasten down the mesh. That can't be done on the lower side, for a reason I only vaguely remember.

Something to do with blood vessels and such that have to be left clear, I believe. So scar tissue forms over the mesh to keep it in place in those areas. And natural lining from my body also covers the mesh.

Early on in the consultation Dr. Lin used the term "robot" in describing the hernia surgery. For a bit I hoped that a robot would be doing the surgery, like an internal Roomba. Lin explained, though, that she controls the four robotic arms.

The laparoscopic approach is preferred by Dr. Lin over open surgery, though she said there was a small chance she'd have to go the open route after starting with laparoscopy. 

She told me that 50% of her hernia patients don't need pain medication after the procedure, which was great news, given how some Googling yesterday revealed that sometimes the post-surgery period can be quite painful. 

My scribbling is almost illegible, but I think Lin said that I shouldn't lift more than ten pounds for six weeks. Or maybe two weeks. Guess I'll find out after the surgery. Six weeks seemed to be the usual recovery period, with a two-week follow-up to see how things are going.

I mostly blurred out in my mind the obligatory explanation of what could go wrong with the surgery. The only note I made was "Chronic pain 1-6%." I'll focus on the one percent, liking those odds.

Pleasingly, this seemed to be a rare occasion when using a catheter five times a day to empty my bladder fully (I can pee some on my own, but my bladder basically went on strike four years ago) is a plus.

Dr. Lin said that sometimes the bladder works slowly after hernia surgery, and a catheter is required. But since I'm already using a catheter, problem solved! 

I double-checked with Lin about exercising while waiting for surgery, including chores like mowing the grass on our ten rural acres with a walk-behind mower. She said that'd be fine so long as I wore a hernia belt, which I've already been doing.

Now I have to wait for Regence MedAdvantage to approve the surgery. After that I'll get a call to schedule the hernia repair. 

At the end of the consultation Dr. Lin said I should consider whether I wanted the surgery, since I'm not experiencing any pain from the hernia at the moment.

It took me about two seconds of considering to say, "Let's do it."

Now I can scratch "get hernia" off my bucket list

Trying to find some humor in the hernia diagnosis I received today, this cartoon reminded me that, hey, I only have a single hernia, so lucky me! 

(I also have taken to wearing joggers much of the time rather than regular pants, which qualify as skinny jeans. And sure, I've got a lifetime supply of bitter regrets -- which now includes getting a hernia. But it's a stretch to say I'm in midlife, since I'm 72.)

As befits my age, I don't have a great story to tell about how I ended up with a right-sided inguinal hernia.

No, I wasn't bench pressing too high of a weight. I was sitting in a dentist's chair for about 90 minutes, the first part of a lengthy session involving three fillings and a crown replacement.

During the time the new crown was being fashioned by a 3-D printer in my dentist's office, I decided to visit the restroom. When I pulled my pants down I was met by a shockingly large bulge.

Ordinarily I'd be pleased by such a bulge in the region of my groin. But this bulge was to the right of my penis, a bit less than half the size of a baseball. So impossible to miss.

I decided to ignore it for the time being, since my focus was on getting through the rest of the dental appointment. When I got home, I phoned my family physician's office.

Not surprisingly, their best guess was a hernia -- which somehow decided to manifest in a dentist's chair, since I'm certain the bulge wasn't there when I took a shower earlier that day.

I was able to see a nurse practitioner the next day. He asked if I had any pain. No, I told him.

He then stressed that if I did feel a lot of pain, that was a danger sign that should cause me to go to the ER, since a strangulated hernia where part of the colon gets deprived of blood can lead to gangrene and other nasty stuff.

I was scheduled for an ultrasound at Salem Hospital. That was done yesterday, and I got the results this morning. Not cheery findings, but pretty much what I expected.

There is a large right inguinal hernia containing fat and bowel as well as a small amount of fluid. Hernia sac measures up to 5 cm. Fascial hernia defect measures up to 3.4 cm. Hernia is partially reducible but not completely reducible.

What immediately worried me was that the nurse practitioner had said I should get a hernia belt, what used to be called a "truss." (And maybe still is, by some.) I'd ordered and gotten several belts from Amazon. 

They all said "for a reducible hernia." Meaning, the protruding stuff can be poked back into the body, thereby reducing the protrusion to nothing or almost nothing. 

So I phoned my family physician's office.

Pleasingly, I was told by a nurse to not worry and go ahead with wearing a hernia belt, which I did today. Since my hernia protrusion mostly goes away when I lie down, I put on the belt while lying prone on a bed.

The hernia belt is pretty comfortable. I went on my usual two-mile afternoon dog walk while wearing it with no problem. It gives me more confidence while I wait for a surgery consultation, which is in the works.

All in all, I'm feeling mostly OK about my new health problem. 

Hernias are much more common in men. (Thus they really should be called "Himnias.") Some Googling revealed:

Researchers estimate that about 27 percent of men and 3 percent of women will develop an inguinal hernia at some point in their lives.

OK, I've reached that point. Now I'm looking forward to getting past that point. Hopefully it won't take too long to schedule a surgery.

Reading recent Amazon reviews of hernia belts caused me to realize that many men who were diagnosed with a hernia last year around springtime had to wait quite a few months for surgery, since elective surgeries weren't being done during the first wave of Covid cases. 

I guess my hernia picked a good time to pop out for a visit. 

I'm also grateful that my family physician responded promptly to several My Chart messages I sent her with hernia questions.

Pleasingly, she said it would be fine if I kept on with my daily exercising with the Monkii 360 ball and resistance bands, as I've gotten addicted to this enjoyable wear of working out. She also told me I could continue doing physical therapy stretching exercises for my sciatica problem.

The only caveat is the same thing my physical therapist kept telling me: if it hurts after you do something, stop doing that thing. And obviously I shouldn't be lifting heavy weights.

In an attempt to be positive about having a hernia, I've discovered that when you have a couple of longstanding health problems, getting a new problem tends to shift the focus of your mind off of the old problems and onto the new problem.

Thus my sciatica isn't bothering me as much anymore. Yay! Only problem is, my hernia has become a bother.

Metabolism myths about diet, exercise, and weight loss

Science rocks. It's by far our best way of understanding reality. 

But most of us, me certainly included, often are prone to embracing folk wisdom rather than science when it comes to losing weight.

I'm six feet tall and 178 pounds at the moment -- though sadly, my long-term trend (I'm 72) has been to lose a bit of height and gain a bit of weight. 

Since I'd like to get to about 175 pounds and know how difficult it is for me to lose even a few pounds, I was eager to read the front page story in the February 27 New Scientist issue, "Metabolism Myths: Seven Things We Get Wrong About Diet and Exercise."

The author, Herman Pontzer, has impressive credentials. Here's the bio on his Amazon page.

How did the human body evolve, and how does our species' deep past shape our health and physiology today? Through lab and field research, I investigate the physiology of humans and apes to understand how ecology, lifestyle, diet, and evolutionary history affect metabolism and health.

I'm also interested in how ecology and evolution influence musculoskeletal design and physical activity. Field projects focus on small-scale societies, including hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers, in Africa and South America. Lab research focuses on energetics and metabolism, including respirometry and doubly labeled water methods.

(He's written a recently released book, Burn: New Science Reveals How Metabolism Shapes Your Body, Health, and Longevity.)

These are the Seven Metabolism Myths in the New Scientist story, along with excerpts. Some surprised me. Some didn't. Bottom line: if you want to lose weight, likely you've got to reduce calories. There's no short cut.

Remember: the boldfaced headlines are myths. 

(1) Exercise burns through calories and boosts metabolism. It is the bedrock belief of pretty much every workout routine featured in magazines: exercise more, burn more calories. In the short term, it is correct – you burn energy while you are exercising, and if you start a new workout routine, you will burn more calories, at least in the beginning. But recent studies show just how dynamic and adaptive our metabolisms can be.

...Daily expenditures measured for participants in exercise studies routinely increase at the beginning of a new workout regimen, but those gains diminish over time. Their bodies adapt, so that within a few months, the daily energy they burn is only marginally higher, and sometimes exactly the same, as before they started working out. The boost is a bust.

(2) Exercise will make you lose weight. Even those who do manage to increase the amount of energy they burn through exercise typically still find it hard to lose weight. A recent review of 61 exercise studies, totalling more than 900 participants, lays out the grim evidence that will be familiar to many.

Weight loss often starts off well at the beginning of a new exercise regime, but it fades over time, so that a year or so later, the weight lost is a vanishing fraction of what we would expect from all the calories burned through working out.

...The reason for this is frustratingly simple: when you burn more calories, you eat more calories. You might not mean to, of course, but that is the problem. The complex systems working subconsciously to regulate your hunger and satiety do an exceptional job of matching energy intake to expenditure. 

(3) Your workout programme isn't succeeding unless you are losing weight. Not losing weight? Don’t give up! Exercise might not change the number on your bathroom scales, but that isn’t what it is for. Humans evolved as hunter-gatherers, and a heavy dose of physical activity was an inescapable part of the daily routine for more than 2 million years.

Our bodies are built to move, and there are good reasons why the Hadza avoid heart disease and diabetes, despite the fact that they burn the same amount of calories as sedentary people. Regular exercise keeps our hearts healthy, our muscles strong and our minds sharp, especially as we age.

Intriguingly, recent studies suggest that the metabolic adjustments that frustrate weight loss are a big reason why exercise is so good for us. My lab and others are working to track down the precise nature of these changes, but it seems our bodies respond to increased daily activity by reducing the energy expended on other tasks.

(4) Calories don't matter. Gaining weight is fundamentally a physics problem: when we eat more calories than we burn, those extra calories pile up as fat. Since it is futile trying to boost the energy we burn each day with exercise (or superfoods, or ice water, or the latest gimmick), the primary cause of being overweight or obese is clearly diet. We gain weight because we eat too much.

Yet counting calories has become passé. We are told it is the types of foods we eat, or the way that we eat them, that get us into trouble, and that the “calories in, calories out” view of the world is for suckers. Low-carb evangelists tout ketogenic diets – which rely heavily on fat, rather than carbohydrates – as a way to lose weight without cutting calories (some even claim you can eat more). Intermittent fasting fanatics promise much the same.

...If you are attempting to lose weight, the trick is to find a diet that you can maintain without feeling miserable. Foods high in protein and fibre tend to make us feel full. It also helps to avoid crash diets that can cause our clever, evolved metabolisms to hit the brakes and reduce daily energy expenditure.

(5) Humans evolved to eat a Paleo diet. Striving to eat the kinds of foods our ancestors ate makes intuitive sense. But emulating ancient diets, the idea behind the fashionable Paleo or “caveman” diet movement, in which people eat similarly to how our ancestors did in the Palaeolithic era, isn’t as straightforward as it might appear.

Cast your mind across the dizzying array of cultures on this planet, and consider the staggering variety of foods we eat. Clearly, there is no single human diet today, and it would be laughable to claim otherwise.

...Hunter-gatherer diets are (and were) just as diverse as diets in industrialised populations, with lots of variety among groups and through time in the proportions of meat and plants, fat and carbs. Some diets, particularly those of Indigenous people in the Arctic, are meat-heavy; others, especially in warmer climates, are plant-heavy. 

(6) A slow metabolism dooms you to obesity. Like most other biological traits, the amount of energy burned in a day varies from person to person. Daily energy expenditure in two people who are the same age and sex, and have the same lifestyle, can easily differ by 500 calories or more. Surprisingly, that variation in energy use doesn’t predict someone’s weight.

People with obesity have the same daily energy expenditure, on average, as those who are slim. That’s after accounting for body size, since a larger body tends to burn more calories per day simply by virtue of having more cells at work. If we don’t correct for size, people with obesity burn more energy. Weight gain and obesity aren’t products of a slow metabolism.

So why do some people find it easy to stay trim while others struggle? Although there is probably no single answer, a major factor seems to be the way our brains are wired. For most, weight gain comes on slowly over months and years, reflecting tiny errors in the regulation of energy intake.

The vast array of processed and engineered foods available to us overwhelms neural reward systems evolved to handle unprocessed wild foods. Our brains err on the side of overconsumption.

(7) Obesity and weight gain are a sign of personal failure. As powerful as our genes are, DNA isn’t destiny. Today’s gene pool is essentially unchanged from that of our great grandparents’ generation because genetic change is slow. They didn’t face a global obesity crisis. What’s different in much of the world is our environment, specifically our food environment – the access we have to specific foods.

In engineering our industrialised world, we have surrounded ourselves with foods that drive us to overconsume. The battle with obesity is often framed as a test of willpower, pitting the virtues of exercise and portion control against the vices of gluttony and sloth. New metabolic science says otherwise. Shops are stocked with ultra-processed foods, laden with added sugars and oils, symphonies of sweet and savoury that overwhelm our Palaeolithic brains.

...In wealthy countries, ultra-processed options often dominate the foods available in low-income neighbourhoods and those where the majority of inhabitants are from minority groups, contributing to inequities in health and nutrition. In low and middle-income countries, the growing dependence on ultra-processed foods has helped to fuel the global rise of obesity and related disease. 

I finally fill out an Advance Directive. But not a POLST.

Well, it only took me about forty years. Better late than never, as the saying goes.

Tomorrow I'm taking an Advance Directive to my family physician when I go for my annual physical exam, so it can be made part of my medical record. I've had this booklet from Oregon Health Decisions sitting at the bottom of a pile of papers in my office for a year, at least.

This booklet replaced a previous booklet that I lost or threw away.

It's kind of strange that I've been so reluctant to make my end-of-life wishes known, since I was the first executive director of Oregon Health Decisions in the 1980s, when this pioneering citizen-based bioethics organization got off the ground after a brilliant psychiatrist, Ralph Crawshaw, worked to get it going with the help of me and many other Oregonians.

In fact, I wrote the first advance directive booklet published by Oregon Health Decisions. Since back then I was in my 30s, whereas now I'm 72, it made sense that I'd put off filling out an advance directive for quite a while.

And I readily admit that as I grew older, I did my best to avoid thinking about the not-so-cheery prospect -- a certainty, actually -- of my eventual death.No longer. Yes, I'm still pretty damn healthy, though I have a couple of health problems. Most people do at my age.

I just felt it was time to do the Advance Directive thing. Probably the Covid crisis helped spur me to do this, since the prospect of being kept alive via a feeding tube, ventilator, or whatever when there is no hope of recovery isn't an appealing notion. 

What gave me the most trouble was deciding whether to complete the brightly colored POLST form that had been inserted in the booklet. That stands for Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment. My wife, Laurel, has a POLST even though she also is healthy with just a few relatively minor medical issues. 

Laurel is convinced that she doesn't want CPR, should this ever be a consideration. I believe Laurel is correct that the view of CPR in movies and TV shows, where a person recovers nicely after getting this potentially live-saving procedure, often doesn't reflect reality. For example, one CPR web site says:

Overall, all of these side effects mean that, if a person does survive CPR, their long-term health could suffer and they may be alive, but it is possible that their overall health and quality of life is significantly affected. Additionally, the psychological ramifications of a near-death experience can greatly affect a survivor, leading to anxiety, stress and depression, among other psychological conditions.

A POLST appears to be the only way to make sure that you don't get CPR, since a POLST becomes part of a registry available to medical professionals, and you can carry a POLST card with you. 

On the other hand, the POLST form says that it "is usually for persons with serious illness or frailty." And POLST.org has this FAQ about which patients should be offered a POLST form.

The POLST form is not for everyone; a POLST form is appropriate for patients who are considered to be at risk for a life-threatening clinical event because they have a serious life-limiting medical condition, which may include advanced frailty. For these patients, their current health status indicates the need for standing medical orders for emergent or future medical care.

Also, these are the patients at the greatest risk of having a medical emergency but who may not want our standard of care (standard of care currently being that everything possible to attempt to save someone's life must be done). For healthy patients, an advance directive is an appropriate tool for making future end-of-life care wishes known to loved ones.

So I decided to complete an Advance Directive, but not a POLST. I can always go the POLST route later, should this seem like a good thing for me to do. 

Monkii 360 is my favorite Covid-era home workout device

Here in Oregon health clubs have been closed for most of the pandemic. I'd been working out three days a week at Courthouse Club Fitness, so needed to find an alternative way of getting in my usual dose of aerobic exercise and weight training.

I've bought five devices that seemed promising. Three of them currently are sitting unused. I'll mention them briefly, then share what I like about the #1 and #2 favorite home workout devices.

(I walk two miles a day with our dog up and down some fairly steep hills, so my device focus has been on strength and core exercises.)

Early on I got a Gorilla Bow. I used it for a while, but it didn't appeal to me all that much. The Activ5 is a palm-sized gadget that lets you do isometric exercises via a smartphone app. At first I liked it, but eventually it came to seem too difficult to use correctly. The Nucleus Central Core Pro is a simple water-filled device that I'd still be using if I hadn't discovered...

Monkii 360. (Scroll down that web page to see a video and description of the device.)

As shown in the photo above, Monkii 360 consists of a cleverly-designed ball with hand grips that allow you to grasp it in different ways depending on the exercise you're doing, resistance bands ranging from 20 pounds to 45 pounds that afix to the ball via a carabiner in three possible locations, and optional weights that fit inside the ball to adjust the intensity of a workout.

The other end of a resistance band is easily tethered to a door in your house -- either at the top, side, or bottom. A well-designed smart phone app leads you through a variety of multi-day programs such as Cardio, Core, and Hybrid (mix of Cardio and Core).

I've been using the Monkii 360 every day for about five weeks.

I finished the 36 day Hybrid program a few days ago. It starts off with short easy workouts, then ramps up considerably by the end, where a heavier internal weight and stronger resistance bands made for a pleasingly sweaty 20 to 30 minute workout session. 

The smart phone workouts are a blend of timed exercises, short rest periods, and exercises with a set number of repetitions.

This makes for an enjoyable workout that is challenging, yet not excessively so. I still enjoy my Monkii 360 as much, or more, as when I first got it. Every day I look forward to heading to our utility room, which has the best door for attaching the device, and experiencing another workout on whatever program I'm using.

Bottom line for me: Monkii 360 is a fun way to exercise at home. It's a full body workout, for sure.

I've gotten considerably more fit after using it for the past five weeks, and I was in pretty good shape before. The wide variety of movements you can do with the device makes it a winner. It can be used by people of all ages and fitness levels. 

I feel good that at the age of 72 I was able to get through the entire Hybrid program with no problem. Here's a video that explains Monkii 360 nicely.

Lastly, I can also recommend the OYO Personal Gym. I use it every day after doing some physical therapy and yoga exercises in front of the TV. It's well designed and is a good substitute for lifting weights. I just can't call it fun, like Monkii 360 is. For me, at least. Your opinion may vary, naturally.

Getting a high dose senior flu vaccine isn't easy in 2020

Being 72 and a believer in vaccines (everybody should be, since they work), every October I've been heading off to Walgreens on south Liberty to get my annual high dose flu shot. 

(Since us old folks have weaker immune systems, a high dose flu shot offers more protection, though a regular flu shot is better than nothing, for sure.)

That's what I did last Tuesday, only to be met with a sign on the pharmacy window saying that they didn't have any high dose vaccine. Which was the same sign I saw last week.

So I decided to check with the south Commercial Walgreens. There I was told that they had high dose vaccine, but no needles/syringes. Maybe the needles would be available next week, I was told. 

Next stop was the Fred Meyer pharmacy on Commercial. The word there was they'd run out of high dose flu vaccine that day. More might come in next week.

When I got home, I did two things. I phoned my Salem Health family physician's office. They told me that they didn't have any high dose vaccine, but would put me on a waiting list. (The next day I got a call telling me I could make an appointment for October 23 to get the shot.)

I also made an online appointment for 2:45 pm today with the Costco pharmacy.

Last year, I think it was, Costco had bailed us out when my wife and I had gotten the first Shingrix shingles shot, but couldn't find any place with the second shot. Even though we hadn't gotten the first shot at the Costco pharmacy, they told us that they reserved some vaccine for people like us who'd had the first shot.

Talking with the pharmacist at Costco who gave me the high dose shot, he said they had run out several times recently, and were going to run out again today. But when someone has an appointment, they put aside the vaccine. Which was good news for my wife, since she had an appointment for 4 pm today.

Something is different this year, since I haven't had a problem getting a high dose shot since I turned 65 seven years ago.

The covid crisis must be the main reason there's more demand than usual for the high dose vaccine. Also, the Costco pharmacist said the demand for flu shots started early this year, since the wildfire smoke we were inhaling led to recommendations to get a flu shot, apparently because lungs already were being impaired somewhat by the smoke.

My theory, which I shared with the pharmacist, is that with all the debate about whether Covid is more deadly than the flu (it is, despite what Trump claims), maybe seniors are seeing the figures about how many people die from the flu each year -- 12,000 to 61,000 since 2010 -- and more fully realize now how important it is to get a flu shot.

Google News has numerous stories about shortages around the country of the high dose flu vaccine, so this is a real thing. See here, here, and here. Fortunately, any shortages likely will be temporary. 

But since it is impossible to know when the flu season will start in earnest, the wise thing to do is get a flu shot as soon as possible, especially if you're in a high risk group, such as being over 65.

How to strengthen your immune system -- advice from New Scientist

When I got the mail today and plopped the current issue of New Scientist, a British magazine, on a table, almost right away my wife started reading the cover story, "You're only as young as your immune system."

(Online version has different title, "How to fight infection by turning back your immune system's clock.")

That's the effect of the coronavirus pandemic. Suddenly almost everybody is concerned about their ability to fight off the virus, especially people over 70 like my wife and me, along with those with compromised immune systems and/or underlying health conditions. 

It's a good cover story. So good, and so timely, I'm sharing a PDF file so those without a New Scientist subscription can read it in full.
Download How to fight infection by turning back your immune system's clock | New Scientist

Below are some excerpts from the piece. I've focused on advice (in bold, for emphasis) on boosting our immune system that almost everybody can follow.

Sure, it may not be possible for someone to strengthen their resistance to infection in time for that to make a difference in how their body would respond to the coronavirus, but now is always an excellent time to start improving our immune health. Here's the excerpts:

WASH your hands religiously for 20 seconds, sneeze into your elbow, avoid touching your face, stay 1 metre away from all other people and, as a last resort, self-quarantine for a week with only your emergency rations for company. If you want to avoid getting the new coronavirus, all of these are a good idea. But ultimately, one of the most important things standing between you and a deadly bout of covid-19 is your immune system.

We know that the immune system gets weaker as we age – which is a key reason why those over the age of 70 are most at risk from the disease. But what is becoming clear is that when it comes to immune health, age is just a number. Some people have an immune system that is effectively significantly older or younger than they are.

“Some 60-year-olds have the immune system of a 40-year-old, some are more like an 80-year-old,” says Shai Shen-Orr, an immunologist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The good news is that there are some simple ways to turn back the immunological clock. Because even after the threat of this virus has passed – sooner or later another one is going to come along, and none of us is getting any younger.

...If you are younger than 60, in good health and don’t have too many bad habits, then your immune system is probably functioning well enough to keep you safe from almost any infectious disease, including coronavirus.

The bad news is that as we age, our immune systems gradually deteriorate too. This “immunosenescence” starts to affect people’s health at about 60, says Janet Lord at the University of Birmingham, UK. The older you get, the weaker your immune system becomes, and the more likely you are to get seriously ill or die because of it.

...Beyond genetics, the team found that smokers have a much older immune profile than non-smokers of the same age. It’s unknown if this is reversible. But if you don’t want to prematurely age your immune system, it would be best not to smoke.

...One key approach to keeping our immune age down relates to the fact that as we get older, some of our immune cells start to misbehave. This is especially problematic for a class of immune cells called neutrophils, the most common type of white blood cell. These form part of the innate immune system, the body’s first line of defence against infection, and are the border force of the immune system, patrolling tirelessly through the bloodstream on the lookout for harmful bacteria.

...What are these miracle drugs [that boost neutrophils]? Statins, the ordinary cholesterol-lowering drugs already taken by millions of people. Turning to real patient data from the University of Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth hospital, Lord found that people admitted to hospital with pneumonia were much less likely to die if they were already taking statins to lower their cholesterol.

Another class of immune cells that begin to misfire as we age are T-cells. These are pivotal in the adaptive immune response – the more targeted part of the system – but are blunted in two ways by immunosenescence. As with neutrophils, their internal signalling pathways go awry, and they are also inhibited by inflammaging.

But there may be a simple way to undo this damage. According to Dayong Wu, a nutritional immunologist at Tufts University in Boston, the answer is vitamin E. ...Wu recommends people over 65 routinely take 200 international units (IUs) of vitamin E. “It may help immune function. It doesn’t hurt,” he says.

...There is also a drug-free way to rejuvenate your neutrophils: exercise. In 2016, Lord and her colleagues measured exercise levels and neutrophil migration in 211 older adults.

“Those doing 10,000 steps on average had neutrophils as good as young adults,” she says. She emphasises that neutrophils aren’t antiviral so won’t prevent you catching coronavirus or help you beat it, but they will protect you from the real danger, which is pneumonia. “Usually what carries people away with these [viral] infections is secondary infections,” she says.

...Exercise has other immune-boosting effects too. “Active skeletal muscle is anti- inflammatory and stimulates macrophages,” says Lord, who goes running every day. “Skeletal muscle is a profound immunoregulatory tissue in the body and keeping it going by physical activity really will have a lot of benefits for health. Exercise benefits all ages.”

Asked what one thing she would recommend to strengthen your immune system, she says: “Increase your step count to 10,000 per day.” In the face of the new coronavirus, it is more important than ever to find ways to stay active – even in lockdown or isolation, which isn’t going to be easy.

...Vitamin D, meanwhile, appears to do the same for the innate arm of the immune system, especially among people living at latitudes where there isn’t enough winter sunlight for their skin to synthesise the molecule. A 2017 review of the evidence for taking vitamin D supplementation concluded that it prevents upper respiratory tract infections. About 1000 to 2000 IUs should be safe and beneficial, says Wu, but people shouldn’t go higher than that because big doses actually suppress T-cell function.

...A third supplement with good evidence for immune-boosting powers is zinc. “It is very effective for viral infections,” says Wu. Though he adds, “be cautious, the effective window is narrow and an overdose will suppress your immune system”.

...What you eat will also matter to your immune system – now is the time to look after your gut flora. There is good evidence that probiotics can enhance the immune system, that poor gut health is a cause of premature ageing and even that a healthy microbiome can reduce your immune age.

...Even if a fasting diet isn’t for you, simply keeping your weight down can have immune-boosting effects. According to Bonnie Blomberg at the University of Miami in Florida, being obese suppresses the immune system to a similar extent as being immunosenesced. 

...None of these interventions is without sacrifice. But if you want to stay alive and well for as long as possible, looking after your immune system is a no-brainer – especially now the new coronavirus is being called the biggest threat to public health since the 1918 flu. “The age of your immune system is a critical component of your lifespan,” says Shen-Orr. “Think about what the system is supposed to do!”

I'm not wearing gloves because of cold, but of old (COVID-19)

With fairly warm weather coming to western Oregon next week, I want to explain why I'll be wearing gloves when I go grocery shopping, enter a coffee shop, or am in other public places.

As should be obvious, it isn't because I'm cold, but because I'm old -- and thus more susceptible to the nastier effects of COVID-19, or coronavirus. My wife, Laurel, is in the same situation, except a bit more so, since she has asthma and COVID-19 attacks the respiratory system.

Today Amazon delivered four pairs of these oh-so-trendy gloves that Laurel ordered for me. (Via Amazon I'm also getting some gray gloves with no markings, though I do like the two-tone look of these gloves.)

Laurel has been using similar gloves during her many years of walking dogs at the Willamette Humane Society.

So she's got a routine down that we'll be using until the COVID-19 epidemic in Oregon slows down markedly. Namely, have several pairs of thin plastic gloves available so the ones that have been used can be washed with a load of laundry, then reused.

The reason wearing gloves makes sense to us is that COVID-19 can linger on surfaces for hours, and we don't have a very big supply of hand sanitizer. Thus our plan is to put gloves on when we go into a store or other public place, then take them off before getting back into our car.

It'll be important to not touch the fingers of the gloves when taking them off and putting them back on, but I've been practicing how to do this.

Wearing gloves will give us some increased peace of mind when we're out and about. 

Some Googling revealed that in general, public health experts haven't been advising people to wear gloves, just as they haven't been advising the use of masks. But that advice has focused on thin disposable medical gloves.

And gloves are not recommended either: "This isn't something the general public would be wearing," said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "I don't think they're going to do anything but give people a false sense of security, waste time and create more demand for something that's unnecessary, just like masks."

While disposable gloves are frequently worn in medical settings, they won't be as effective in day-to-day life.

"Latex gloves can rip very easily," said Adajla. "They're not designed for going out, running up stairs, doing things in daily life. They're not very durable when it comes to pumping gas or anything ... They're going to get holes. They're not meant for wearing during activities and daily living. Even as a physician, I have my gloves rip all the time."

OK. But what my wife and I will be wearing are lightweight garden gloves, which, as noted above, we'll be washing and reusing. Sure, we'll look like old people worried about getting COVID-19, but here's the thing: that's exactly who we are!

And we're not alone. Today I asked the dozen or so members of our monthly Salon discussion group if they were comfortable meeting during the COVID-19 outbreak. Only one person said they were, so we're going to cancel our March meeting and see how it goes come April.

It's a risk vs. return thing.

Yes, we enjoy getting together and talking about all sorts of interesting subjects. But as I said in an email to the group, it wouldn't be worth it if someone got seriously ill from attending a meeting, as unlikely as that might be. (Plus, it's going to get more likely as the disease spreads.)

Lastly, here's a right-on post that a Facebook friend, Susann Kaltwasser, wrote today. Susann makes some excellent points.

It occurred to me last night after watching all kinds of shows with interviews of experts, mayors and governor dealing with the pandemic that here in Salem we are focusing on the wrong things!

We are worried about toilet paper and handiwipes and masks. And we worry about the crowds in the grocery stores and if school is going to be closed and how will we get to work.

But while we are worrying about the little things like staying safe and our jobs, who is worrying about the big things?

Things like ....is Salem Health (hospital) going to have enough beds to accommodate all the sick patients who have the virus and can they keep them separate from the rest of the patients in the hospital?

Do they have enough equipment to treat hundreds of people who might get ill at the same time? Respirators? ICU equipment?

What will happen to the people who are ill, but not so ill that they need to be in the hospital? People who if they stay at home will just infect the rest of the family need to be kept in isolation. Where will they stay?

What do we do about children who live with their grandparents, because they do not have parents? And then the grandparents get sick?

When will we begin testing people in Salem and then what do the rest of us do, because right now the authorities are not even telling people what city they live in?

Seattle has taken some strong measures out of necessity, but do we want to have thousands of people become ill before Salem begins to take precautions?

Our City does press releases, but where is the face of the "City"? Where is the leadership? What are they doing to help calm us now, so that when things get really bad....and we need to assume that they will...that we do not have panic (assuming that it has not already begun)?

Are we all alone and have to fend for ourselves? Do we think our president is going to save us? Is washing our hands and avoiding people all we should be doing?

This is what other cities did and it did not stop the virus...it is just placating and delaying the inevitable. But can we learn a lesson and do some more proactive things to lower our curve?

I'll bet that you have more questions. When are we going to take this situation serious and begin to actually ask the right questions?

My thoughts about the coronavirus outbreak

Yeah, there's other stuff going on in the world right now other than the coronavirus. But since my mind is filled to overflowing with thoughts about this rapidly evolving tragedy, I figure I might as well do a brain dump into this blog post. So in no particular order...

(1) Feel for us old folks, America. My wife and I are both over 70 by a year or two. So we're doomed! If we get infected. Well, maybe not mortally doomed, though this is possible, but likely we'll suffer more than younger folks. Yet the empty shelves of hand sanitizer, both in stores and online, face young and old alike.

I completely understand why a 30-something parent wants to stock up on hand sanitizer to protect their children and other family members.

But just as public health experts are saying everybody at low risk should wash their hands regularly to reduce the chance they could pass the coronavirus on to someone high risk -- like my wife and me -- maybe it makes sense to reserve some supplies of hand sanitizer for those with compromised immune systems, other serious health problems, and the elderly.

(2) Trump supporters need to wake up. Last night Trump gave a speech designed to reassure a worried nation. It had the opposite effect. Which isn't surprising, because Trump can be guaranteed to tell lies, falsehoods, and half-truths at every opportunity. His failure to mobilize the federal government in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak has made a bad situation way worse.

Other countries have tested vastly more people than the United States. Thus our country is flying blind when it comes to knowing the real extent of how many are infected with the coronavirus. The lack of testing kits is a clear case of presidential malpractice. Unfortunately, those who will become seriously ill because of our Idiot-in-Chief won't be able to sue him. We can vote him out of office this November, though.

(3) Investors are acting wisely. It's painful to see the stock market crashing. But a (small) bright spot is that investors are recognizing with great clarity that the crap Trump has been spewing about the coronavirus outbreak can't be trusted. This morning I read a great Bloomberg piece that explained why the market crashed after Trump's speech to the nation.

Basically, the reason is that Trump's ideas for bolstering the economy were feeble and made little sense, while what is needed to calm the markets is a strong, fact-based, scientifically sound approach to dealing with the coronavirus. Other countries have done this with considerable success. Until the Trump administration changes course and admits it is on the wrong track, the stock market is gong to keep saying, do something different.

(4) Life does seem a bit sweeter. Quite a few years ago I read a piece in Parade magazine by an Iraq war veteran (if I recall correctly) that contained a gripping line: "We all need something in our life that can kill us." Of course, that would be life itself. But what this guy was getting at is that life feels more lively when we know it could end at any moment.

I've been dealing with pretty severe pain in my right leg for about a month. But today was sunny here in Oregon, and it's supposed to rain tomorrow. So I got out my DR Field Mower with the lawn mowing attachment and attacked the grass in our large rural yard. As I was mowing, I kept thinking, "If I were to die from the coronavirus soon, at least I'd leave behind a good-looking lawn."

Somehow that was comforting. It got me focused on the here and now, with a dose of there and then. Namely, the prospect of my eventual death, which obviously isn't a matter of "if" but "when." Sure, it is unlikely that the coronavirus will do me in. But something will, one day, and it felt good to be reminded of how precious every moment is, given that we can't be sure how many moments remain to us -- a lesson that the coronavirus outbreak is teaching all of us.

(5) Sports... who cares? Today it was announced that March Madness, the NCAA basketball tournament, won't happen this year. Likely the rest of the NBA season is headed for the same outcome. I was looking forward to watching the Oregon teams in the tournament, but this was a wise decision by the NCAA.

Let's imagine that just one person in the whole United States contacted the coronavirus and died as a result of March Madness. Would that make the tournament worthwhile, a whole bunch of basketball entertainment in exchange for one death? I don't think so, because there isn't any way to weigh the value of a single life versus millions of satisfied fans. Sports are just a small part of life. Life, on the other hand, is life.

(6) Our health care system is teetering. What's deeply concerning about the coronavirus outbreak is how it is going to cast a spotlight on the shortcomings of our health care system. Democrats in Congress are correctly proposing ways to ensure that everyone who needs medical treatment gets it, whether or not they have insurance. But this should be a permanent given, not an add-on in a public health emergency.

Also, I'm feeling mildly guilty about my days in the 1970s and 80s when I was a health planner here in Oregon. One of our jobs was to regulate hospital and nursing home expansions and purchases of expensive medical equipment like CT scanners. The goal was a lean health care system with little excess capacity. 

But now it looks like a lot of excess capacity would be highly desirable. Likely hospitals are going to have to choose between treating seriously ill coronavirus patients, and people with equally serious other problems, such as heart attacks. Bill Gates and others have been warning that a global pandemic was coming. It's too bad that our nation's leaders didn't take those warnings seriously.

(7) Seniors, the homeless, and other vulnerable people deserve to be Job #1. Most Americans are going to get through the coronavirus crisis just fine. Yes, we might have to ration our toilet paper and hand sanitizer, along with finding other things to do than watch sports. But mostly hidden from our view will be many other people who will suffer much more.

Reports already are coming in of seniors who are afraid to go shopping because they might be infected. I hate to think of elderly people sitting at home, isolated and fearful. The homeless also are going to be affected by the outbreak. How do you "socially distance" -- keeping six feet away from other people -- when you're living on the street, or in a homeless shelter?

Then there's those with lung, heart, kidney, and other health problems. My wife has asthma. She likely would be at greater risk than I am from the coronavirus, since it attacks the lungs. And there's millions of other people in this county in a similar situation: having to deal with an immune deficiency problem, or some other serious medical condition.

I just wish we had a president right now who could speak as Joe Biden did today. Compassionately, competently, caringly. The coronavirus could be a way for our county to come together and face this problem as one people, bound together by a common enemy.

It still could happen. But not because of Donald Trump. Rather, in spite of him.

Pros and cons of being a 70-something white guy these days

Well, it was fun while it lasted... being a 71 year-old white guy. For a while recently, I was exulting in the ascendance of my 70-something peers in the Democratic primary.

Bernie Sanders: 78 years old

Joe Biden: 77 years old

Mike Bloomberg: 78 years old

Woo-hoo! The three most viable candidates left standing (albeit shakily) were white guys even older than me.

Yes, Elizabeth Warren was still in the race for a while after Bloomberg dropped out, but by that time it was clear that Sanders and Biden were going to duke it out for the Democratic nomination. It sure looked like 2020 was going to be the Year of the Septuagenarian, in my own mind at least.

I stood a little taller. My back was a little straighter. I looked in the mirror at my gray hair and beard and felt a little better about my aging visage.

Until the coronavirus panic struck. 

I was OK, though obviously not ecstatic, about the stock market going up and down like a yo-yo. Or, to really show my age, like a slinky. 

What truly grabbed my attention, though, was the frequent mentions of how old people -- often disturbingly defined as over 70 -- were at much higher risk of dying from the coronavirus. Suddenly being an old white guy didn't seem nearly as appealing.

A few days ago NPR reported that while the overall death rate was 2.3% in China, among those 70-79 the death rate was 8%. And unless my aging ears misheard the satellite radio in my car today, I recall that someone said the elderly death rate could be 10-15%.

Yikes! Those aren't great odds. Of course, having an underlying condition like a heart, lung, or whatever disease adds to the risk for us old folks, and I'm in pretty good shape, health-wise.

Still... now when I look at Sanders and Biden my thoughts are less on how great it is that they've been able to rise to the top of the Democratic presidential race at their age, as on how risky it is for them to be pressing the flesh at so many campaign events, surrounded by throngs of people that could easily include someone carrying the coronavirus. 

Oh, well. At least I can take solace in the fact that 73-year old President Donald J. Trump is in charge of keeping me safe from the coronavirus. Problem is, early on that solace took a nosedive when I heard all the lies, falsehoods, and misstatements coming out of Trump's mouth.

But all things will pass. I just hope that one of them isn't me passing away from the coronavirus before I get to see Biden (most likely) or Sanders (less likely) defeating Trump in November.

Good news is, I don't have a blood clot. Bad news is, Trump still is president.

Being an ardent progressive in election year 2020 means that I'm prone to view everything through the lens of what it means for the prospect of making Trump a one-term president this November. 

Yes, even being tested to rule out a blood clot in my right leg -- which occurred yesterday.

A bit over a week ago I had a physical therapy visit to get some advice on what to do about annoying leg pain. When Michael, the therapist, asked me what caused the pain, I gave this 30-something guy my 71-year-old perspective on health problems like this one.

"Michael, when I was your age, I could figure out why something hurt. Like, playing too much tennis with my questionable serving technique led to tennis elbow pain. But now that I'm the age I am, aching body parts happen mysteriously. I get out of bed the wrong way, or lift a bag of groceries weirdly, and -- bingo! -- pain. Except the pain doesn't occur right away, so I can never be sure what caused it."

Which is typical for us Medicare folks, based on lots of conversations I've had with people about my age regarding their bodily afflictions. 

Anyway, yesterday the pain in my right leg was so bad, I kept thinking about what a nurse at my family physician's office told me a few days ago when I talked with her about my leg pain. Her main concern was a blood clot, so she told me that if my leg is swollen and feels warm to the touch, I should seek medical care right away.

After some Googling of "blood clot leg" and measuring my calves to see if the right one was the same size as the left one (it was), and feeling that both legs were the same temperature, at first I was reassured that I didn't have a clot. Until I read one more article that said sometimes a blood clot can be present with none of the usual symptoms.

Then I got a second leg warmth opinion from my wife. She spent way more time comparing my lower legs than I did, eventually concluding, "Maybe the right one is a little bit warmer."

That tiny maybe got me to thinking that I should go to Salem Health Urgent Care to rule out a blood clot. However, that didn't turn out to be as simple as I expected, even though it was easy to make an online appointment for 2:40 pm with a Nurse Practitioner. And I was seen close to on-time.

She felt my legs, questioned me about the pain I'd been having, and did her own measurement of my calves. She also prescribed a topical NSAID that could replace the oral Advil I'd been taking, but seemingly with less risk of side effects. Somewhat surprisingly, though, she also strongly recommended that I get an ultrasound to make sure I didn't have a blood clot in my leg.

Yes, I was worried about this possibility, as low as the chance was that I had a clot. And it made sense to rule out a potentially fatal problem, like a clot breaking free and heading to my lungs, or maybe even heart. 

But having been a health planner and policy analyst in my pre-retirement life, I also was aware of how legal liability concerns can affect medical care decisions. I'm not saying that occurred in this case, but just now the Great God Google did reveal a number of law firms who have web pages along the lines of "Medical Malpractice for Failure to Diagnose Deep Vein Thrombosis."

The symptoms of DVT can be missed or misdiagnosed.  This can be extremely dangerous because a person may think that they have something simple like a leg cramp or strain when they actually are experiencing symptoms of DVT.  

I was fortunate that the Cardiac/Vascular center at Salem Hospital could perform an ultrasound on my legs later in the day, which avoided an E.R. visit. The "lower extremity venous duplex unilateral" procedure went smoothly, and I enjoyed chatting with the technician who explained what was being shown on a large screen which, pleasingly, didn't include a blood clot.

This gets me to Trump.

Health care is super-important for everybody. When you're hurting, sick, or needing medical attention for whatever reason, getting that care with a minimum of fuss and cost is Job #1 on your mind. I'm fortunate to be on Medicare, which I like vastly more than the private health insurance I had before.

Medicare For All makes a lot of sense. So does Medicare For All Who Want It. So does the Affordable Care Act. 

What makes zero sense is Trump's unceasing effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare -- undoubtedly in part because of that word "Obama," which fills Trump with irrational anger (and maybe envy, since Obama was a much more popular president than he is).

Trump has no interest in making our nation's health care system better. He simply wants to destroy the most conservative approach to providing health care to all Americans, the Affordable Care Act. Since it relies on private health insurance, Republicans like Trump should be embracing the Affordable Care Act instead of trying to demolish it.

The plain fact is that, like me, most people feel good about their doctors and other health care providers, while being indifferent (at best) about their insurance company. So if somehow Trump, or the Supreme Court, succeed in killing the Affordable Care Act, that makes Medicare for All much more likely, given that Republicans have no viable health care plan of their own.

Lastly, Trump's health care incompetence is on full display as he stumbles through a response to the coronavirus crisis. It's evident that Trump cares much more about how the stock market is doing (horribly) than overseeing a fact-based, transparent approach to dealing with the coronavirus.

One big problem that Trump faces is that his incessant lying makes people automatically believe that whatever he says isn't true. Thus his efforts to calm people down about the coronavirus are having the opposite effect, as Catherine Rampell says in a Washington Post opinion piece, "With coronavirus, Trump's lies and his reassurances backfire."

Trump clearly understands that government messaging can move markets; he blames the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for issuing warnings that may have unnerved traders. At his news conference Wednesday, he also scolded Democrats for allegedly “trying to create a panic.” Trump seems not to realize that saying everything is fine when no one trusts you to assess the situation honestly can cause people to freak out, too.

...In this context, it’s clear how Trump-delivered reassurances might backfire — and already have. While Trump spoke Wednesday from the White House, telling Americans that the government has things under control, stock futures fell. Ordering government scientists to clear comments with Vice President Pence’s office, as has been reported, threatens to dilute the value of any soothing words such experts might offer, too.

There is a corollary to the Goolsbee rule on crisis and credibility. It’s one that Goolsbee told me he learned from the late, great former Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker during the financial crisis a decade ago, when Goolsbee was advising President Barack Obama. Volcker said that the only asset you have in a crisis is your credibility. Hence this other rule of thumb: All normal, non-crisis time should be spent establishing the credibility you’ll need when a crisis inevitably hits.

Would that the Trump administration had done so, instead of fibbing about crowd size and so much else that followed.

How a doctor's waiting room suddenly turned pleasant

Almost always, in my experience, a doctor's waiting room has a funereal feel to it. Just about everybody sitting in the chairs is there because they've got some sort of medical issue, which isn't exactly a cause for joy.

And if people were feeling good when they entered the waiting room, generally they soon understand why it's got the word waiting in its name. 

But yesterday was different. Here's why.

My wife had gone with me to an appointment I had at a clinic here in Salem. We arrived a few minutes early for my 1:50 pm appointment.

After checking in, we sat down in a waiting area that, at first glance, worried me. Almost every chair was filled, which indicated that, per usual, my doctor was behind schedule.

There were just two empty chairs adjacent to each other, so we sat down in them. Per usual, the area was completely quiet. No one was talking. I'd brought some magazines, so I started to read one. My wife took out her iPhone and perused what it had to offer.

I'd noticed that a woman to our right was sitting with her head in her hands. After we'd been there for about ten minutes, she let out a sigh. 

My wife, who was sitting next to her, said, "Have you been waiting long?" 

Turns out, she had. "I made the mistake of getting here half an hour early," she said. Then she described how she'd been having kidney pain.

That kicked off a lively discussion about a topic dear to the heart of everybody in a waiting room: waiting. I told a story about a professor I had in graduate school who would only wait for 20 minutes to see a doctor. Then he'd walk out and bill the doctor for his wasted time.

A man sitting next to me said, "But then he'd never get medical care, right?"

I had to agree that my professor probably had embellished his story, and that I wasn't recommending billing a doctor for time spent in a waiting room, since I don't think the professor ever had gotten paid.

"Sure sounded like you were recommending this," the man said with a laugh. "OK, I guess I was," I responded.

And so it went. Once the conversational ice had been broken, the four of us, two strangers plus my wife and me, passed the time pleasantly. 

It made a huge difference to my mood.

I don't like seeing a doctor, and I especially don't like having to wait 45 minutes, like I did yesterday. But my wife's simple act of speaking to the woman, who clearly wasn't enjoying herself prior to that, changed the atmosphere in the waiting room completely.

Instead of being patients with medical problems having to passively wait for our names to be called and then ushered into an examination room, we became people with quite a bit in common.

Like a distaste for waiting. And a love of dogs, along with other subjects I've forgotten.

Just remembered another thing I said -- how another clinic I went to a few times had a whiteboard with the doctor's names on it, which, sort of like an airport waiting area, indicated whether the doctor was on time and, if not, how many minutes behind schedule the doctor was.

Great idea. Shows a lot of respect for the patients. Or rather, people, in the waiting area.

Why eating at In-N-Out Burger is morally wrong

Today an In-N-Out Burger restaurant has opened in nearby Keizer, Oregon, sending waves of feverish delight through the taste buds of people willing to spend hours in line to buy the main food offering... dead cows.

I consider this to be morally wrong, having been a vegetarian for most of my life. So my objection isn't to In-N-Out Burger itself. What bothers me is that most Americans are so uncaring about the suffering they're producing by eating meat and fish.

Understand: there's a variety of good reasons to be vegetarian or vegan. It's a healthier way to go. It's better for the planet. But my main motivation when I became a vegetarian in college (I'm 71 now) was that I didn't want to kill conscious beings that suffer for no good reason.

If you've read this far, maybe you have at least a slight openness to that argument.

Perhaps you're an animal lover, with a dog and/or cat in your home that you are confident enjoys sensations, feelings, and such just as you do, albeit in different ways. You would feel bad if someone caused the family pet to suffer.

Well, cows have sensations and feelings also. And I'm going to present a scientist's arguments for why it is immoral to cause any living being to suffer or die without a good reason. 

(Since almost everybody in the United States doesn't need meat/fish to survive, killing animals for food isn't a good reason.)

Here's quotations from the final chapter of Christof Koch's book, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness is Widespread but Can't Be Computed. Koch is the president and chief scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, following twenty-seven years as a professor at the California Institute of Technology.

My lifelong quest is to grasp the true nature of being... I now know that I live in a universe in which the inner light of experience is far more widespread than assumed within the standard Western canon. This inner light shines in humans and in the denizens of the animal kingdom, brighter or dimmer, in proportion to the complexity of their nervous system.

Integrated information theory predicts the possibility that all cellular life feels like something. The mental and the physical are closely linked, two aspects of one underlying reality.

...I want to end this book by moving from the descriptive to the prescriptive and proscriptive, to how we should think about good and bad and to a call to action.

Most importantly, we must abandon the idea that humans are at the center of the ethical universe and that we bestow value on the rest of the natural world only insofar as it suits humanity's ends, a belief that is such a large part of Western culture and tradition. We are evolved creatures, one leaf among millions on the tree of life.

...We must cure humanity's narcissism and our deep-seated belief that animals and plants exist solely for our pleasure and benefit. We need to embrace the principle that the moral status of any subject, of any Whole, is rooted in their consciousness, not solely in their humanness.

There are three justifications for being admitted to the privileged rank of subjects. I call them the sentience, experiential, and the cognitive criteria. 

Emotionally, we most easily resonate with sentience in others. We all have a strong instinctual reaction when we see a child or a dog being abused. We feel something of its pain; we empathize with it. Hence the moral intuition that any subject capable of suffering ceases to be a means to an end and becomes an end in itself.

Any creature that has the potential to feel distress has some minimal moral standing -- foremost the desire to be and the desire not to suffer.

...The experiential justification for the idea that species other than humans ought to be considered intrinsically valuable subjects is that any entity with an inner point of view is precious. Phenomenal experience is irreplaceable in a universe devoid of extrinsic purpose.

It is the only thing that really matters. For if something does not feel, it does not exist as a subject. A corpse and a zombie both exist, but not for themselves, only for others.

A third justification for this grounding is cognitive ability, having beliefs and desires, a sense of self, a sense of the future, of being able to imagine counterfactuals ("If I hadn't lost my legs, I could still climb"), the potential to be creative. To the extent that animals have such advanced cognitive abilities, they have rights.

However, I am against justifying moral standing purely on the basis of cognitive skills. First, not all humans possess such abilities -- think of babies, anencephalic children, or patients in a vegetative state or in late-stage dementia. Should they have lesser standing and fewer rights than able adults?

...Of these three justifications, sentience is in my view the most powerful one for why creatures that can suffer deserve special status. Because I can imagine myself being left alone, starved, or beaten, I feel sympathy or empathy with the other.

...The New Testament reminds us in Matthew 25: "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." The Czech writer Milan Kundera in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being generalizes this moral stipulation to all creatures:

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test... consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals.

The Buddhist attitude toward sentience mirrors this view. We should treat all animals as being conscious, as feeling what-it-is-like-to-be. This must inform how we behave toward our fellow travelers through this cosmos, who are defenseless before our fences, cages, blades, and bullets and our relentless drive for Lebensraum. [living space]

One day, humanity may well be judged for how we treated our relatives on the tree of life.

We should extend a universal ethical stance to all creatures, whether they speak, cry, bark, whine, howl, bellow, chirp, shriek, buzz, or are mute. For all experience life, book-ended between two eternities.

Not all vaping is dangerous. Vaping cannabis flower is safe.

I ingest THC and CBD by vaping every day. It's my substitute for a nightly glass of red wine, because I believe cannabis is more beneficial and safer than alcohol.

So it bothers me when reports of vaping illnesses and deaths (including two here in Oregon) make it sound like all kinds of vaping should be given up.

What appears to be dangerous is vaping e-cigarettes containing nicotine, and vaping THC cartridges that contain additives and oil.

A Vox story today, "THC vape products appear to be the main culprit in the mysterious lung illness outbreak," says: 

Investigators appear to be getting closer to uncovering one of the main causes of the outbreak of mysterious lung injuries linked with e-cigarettes: vaping products containing THC, the main psychoactive chemical in cannabis.

On Friday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials said that while they haven’t figured out exactly which chemical or device is making people sick, the majority of the cases in both national and state studies to date appear to involve THC-based vaping products. Many of them are illicit products labeled with brand names such as “Dank Vape.”

Note the mention of products, chemical, and device. That's because manmade THC cartridges, not the natural loose-leaf cannabis flower, have been implicated in the vaping illnesses.

The cartridges are used with vaping devices. They contain concentrated THC that is considerably stronger than cannabis flower. I used to use THC cartridges, but now only vape ground cannabis flower in my much-beloved PAX3 vaporizer. 

I buy cannabis flower ("buds") that's been tested in accord with Oregon cannabis growing/selling regulations. I grind it into small pieces using my Santa Cruz herb grinder. Then a small amount of ground cannabis goes into the heating receptacle of the PAX3 vaporizer. 

A little goes a long way.

Vaping cannabis flower is far removed from my Cheech & Chong'ish college days in the late 60's when we'd roll joints out of whatever was available on the black market: flower, leaves, seeds... it all was rolled up and smoked.

Which meant we were inhaling, not surprisingly, smoke. Not so with vaping, where, not surprisingly, vapor is inhaled. A PAX web page explains:

A vaporizer is an electronic device that heats dry herb or concentrated cannabis to release vapor. Vaporizing does not combust the plant material, reducing odors. Vaporizing herbs has its roots in ancient history. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about the use of hot stones to create steam vapor baths as early as 440 BC. We’ve certainly come a long way from using rocks, with many electronic options of varying sizes and capabilities on the market today.

Thus it isn't vaping that is dangerous.

What's causing illnesses and deaths is something in a product that's being vaped. Note in the quotation above that a vaporizer can heat "dry herb or concentrated cannabis." It's the concentrated cannabis that health authorities are worried about, not the dry herb (cannabis flower).

Now, I realize that experienced marijuana consumers already know what I've talked about in this blog post. My intended audience is other people who hear "you should stop vaping" and jump to the conclusion that all varieties of vaping are dangerous.

They aren't. A comment on an Oregonian story about vaping illnesses got it just right.

My fourth colonoscopy goes smoothly at Salem Gastro

First off, I just noticed the appealing slogan on the Salem Gastro web site: "What matters is what's inside." Nice mixture of philosophy and double entendre. 

The colonoscopy I had last month at the hands of Dr. Richard Brandes wasn't exactly appealing, but it went about as smoothly as possible.

This was my fourth colonoscopy.

Well, fifth, counting a virtual (CT) colonoscopy I had in 2006. In retrospect, that probably wasn't a great idea, since if a suspicious polyp had been found (maybe all polyps are suspicious), I would have needed to undergo a regular colonoscopy. But at the time it seemed like a good idea: simpler prep, no anesthesia.

Fortunately, I had a regular colonoscopy in 2009 after an occult blood test was positive, though a repeat test was negative. My family physician thought I should have a "real" colonoscopy, and it revealed a polyp that turned out to be benign.

Then I had another colonoscopy just two years later, in 2011, because the prep in 2009 wasn't ideal, and the doctor who performed the procedure said he couldn't see every part of my colon. Another wise decision, since another benign polyp was found in that location in 2011.

My first two regular colonoscopies were done at Gastroenterology Associates of Oregon in Tualatin, because I was turned off by what struck me as an overly lengthy prep period that Salem Gastro required at the time: no solid food for two days prior to the colonoscopy. Meaning, if your appointment was 9 am on Wednesday, you'd start the prep on Monday morning.

But in 2014 I was pleased to learn that Salem Gastro allowed a low volume prep solution, Suprep, that didn't require as much drinking on the night before my colonoscopy. And the no solid food time was a bit less, I believe. Again, three benign polyps were found.

As with my previous two colonoscopies, I enjoyed the propofol anesthesia -- which stimulated a quasi-spiritual 2011 blog post, "Finding enlightenment through a colonoscopy (and propofol)."

Five years passed before I was scheduled to have another colonoscopy in 2019.

Perhaps the longer period this time was because benign polyps were found the three previous colonoscopies. Regardless, my 2019 colonoscopy seemed to go the smoothest -- aside from some anxiety about possible snow being in the forecast, since I sure didn't want to go through the prep and then be stuck in our rural south Salem home because of thick snow or ice.

This time around I'd scheduled the procedure for early afternoon.

That meant I went without food for about four extra hours, compared to having an early morning colonoscopy, but I liked not having to get up early and head off to Salem Gastro at a time when retired me isn't used to fully functioning.

Interestingly, there were some differences between my 2014 colonoscopy at Salem Gastro and the 2019 procedure. Guess this shows the benefit of being an obsessive blogger. My posts function as sort of a diary. In 2014 I noted that it was nice to sit in a chair during the pre-colonoscopy preparation period. And I walked to the procedure room.

This time I reclined during the preparation period, and I was wheeled into the procedure room. But Dr. Brandes was still appealingly loose and joking around with the nurses, with rock music playing, as it was in 2014.

The nurse anesthetist told me before the colonoscopy that some changes had been made to the propofol. This time there was no counting backwards, or indeed any indication at all that I'd started getting the propofol. I was just out. Waking up, I didn't feel as blissful as the previous time. 

Meaning, no feeling that I'd been in a happy place, and now I had to deal with reality again. Instead, I had a vague recollection of what I thought at the time had been a dream. Now, though, I'm wondering if I was minimally aware during part or all of the procedure, and my "dream" was a vague memory. 

No big deal either way.

As I've noted before, it's unclear to me whether propofol truly renders you unconscious, or whether you forget what happened during the colonoscopy. I prefer the first option, so that's what I choose to believe, since it would bother me to consider that I endured pain during the procedure and simply didn't have a memory of it.

Dr. Brandes sent me a letter saying that the polyps removed this time (again!) were benign (again!), and I should have a repeat colonoscopy in five years. That seems a long ways off, but when 2024 rolls around, at least I'll have this blog post to refer to as a written memory of how smoothly my previous colonoscopy went.

The staff at Salem Gastro were wonderfully informal and pleasant. I had a great conversation with the nurse who handled my pre-colonoscopy preparation. However, I can't really recall when we talked about.

I like to think that's due to the propofol, rather than my age.

Youth mental health focus of gripping City Club program

In retrospect, I was crazy to consider not going to today's Salem City Club program, "Oregon Youth: Crisis in Mental Health."

Fortunately I had the good sense to attend the meeting and hear two people from Liberty House, a child abuse assessment center, plus a South Salem High School counselor. 

I'll end this blog post by talking about my own long-ago mental health problems in my high school years.

First, though, here's some of what I remember from the presentations by Alison Kelley, CEO of Liberty House; Neda Grant, program manager of Liberty House's Hope and Wellness services; and Ryan Marshall, counselor at South Salem High School. 

I didn't take any notes during their talks, in part because they all were such great speakers, and had such compelling information to share, I wanted to listen wholeheartedly to them. So while I may not have gotten what follows exactly right, I'm confident that I've captured the spirit of their messages.

Maybe the most important thing I heard was this: if a youth confides in you, having the courage to tell you about a problem they're having, don't say "I'm so sorry." Instead, say "I'm here for you." 

Marshall said that often it isn't until 45 minutes into a counseling session that a student has enough trust in him to reveal what is really going on in their life. So keep this in mind if a troubled youth is willing to speak with you, even haltingly, about what's bothering them. 

Grant shared compelling anecdotes about what parents do right and wrong. She related a decidedly unhelpful thing a father said after his child talked about a problem: "Put your big-girl panties on and deal with it" (or words to that effect). 

We all know how obnoxious teenagers can be -- typically forgetting, of course, that once upon a time we adults acted very much the same. But often this seemingly recalcitrant behavior is masking an underlying mental health problem. Which leads me to break my intention to leave my personal story for the end, since I can offer up a good example of this.

My high school years (1962-66) included a period when my alcoholic mother was drinking heavily. Here's an excerpt from a previous blog post of mine that I wrote on a Mother's Day.

Since my clearest memories of my mother are from when I was older, the drunken, mean, angry moments that I can easily recollect got all mixed up with happier moments when I tried to ponder what my mother meant to me.

A pain in the ass. Like when, during my teenage years, she'd yell from her bedroom into mine when I was trying to go to sleep, muttering nasty alcoholic crap that I couldn't tune out even with a pillow over my head.

It got so bad, when I'd drive home from a date with my high school girlfriend, who had a pleasingly normal family, I'd pass a liquor store and think "I should throw a rock through the glass and steal some stuff, just so people would know that seemingly well-adjusted star student Me actually is screwed-up beyond belief but I do a damn good job of hiding it."

Even now, reading what I wrote brings some tears to my 70 year-old eyes.

Our teenage years are formative. We're struggling to make the transition from being a child to being an adult. A part-time guidance counselor in my high school, who also was my tennis coach, called me in to his office once to ask how my mother was doing.

Not well, I knew for a fact. But I said nothing about the pain I was in, and the counselor left it at that.

Students in the Salem-Keizer School District have more mental health services. However, the City Club audience was told that compared to other large districts in Oregon, Salem-Keizer doesn't have nearly enough counselors. Hopefully the 2019 legislature is going to address youth mental health by providing more money in this area.

After the program ended I asked Kelley if she considered that there actually were more disturbed youth now, or if mental health problems were simply not recognized previously. Her answer was clear: now is worse. 

And a big reason is social media and smart phones. The iPhone was introduced in 2007. Since, smart phone use among youth is ubiquitous. This produces problems that didn't exist before. Here's some examples that I recall.

-- "Sexting" (sending sexy/nude photos via text messages) begins as early as eight years old. A girl may be pressured by classmates to send a naked photo of themselves. Then they hear, "You're fat, ugly, and should kill yourself." Sadly, some students do. Or at least seriously consider this.

-- At a party, youth may communicate by text even when they are sitting next to each other on a couch. This seems decidedly weird to my senior citizen mind. However, at my athletic club I see young people obsessively clicking away on their smart phones while on a weight machine, while old folks like me have the quaint idea that exercising should be Job #1 in this setting.

-- Everybody wants to be popular in high school. Now, though, social media like Instagram make this quantifiable. If a student doesn't have 500 followers, they may consider themselves unliked. Or even worse, unlikeable. Too often, youth substitute distant relationships in cyberspace for intimate relationships in real life.

In her presentation, Kelley talked about how problems at home translate into youth mental health problems.

Divorce and death in a family, for example. More disturbingly, sexual abuse and drug problems. Some parents even give their children marijuana edibles to quiet them down. (But I have to note that legal weed apparently hasn't led to more marijuana use by young people in Oregon.)

Parents may expect either too little or too much of their children. Regarding the latter, it's important that youth be given sufficient time to relax, do nothing, enjoy free time. Too many students have almost every moment scheduled with either school or after-school activities.

Lastly, during the Q&A part of the City Club program a question about mindfulness training was asked. Kelley responded that this Eastern/Buddhist approach to being directly aware of what is happening with us, typically using the breath as a focus of attention, can be very useful for distracted/anxious/worried youth.

I heartily agree, having meditated every day for about 50 years. Some time ago I embraced mindfulness meditation and have found it helpful for keeping me mentally healthy.

More or less, at least. (A small dose of craziness adds spice to life.)

Dr. Vinay Prasad zaps fellow physicians at provocative Salem City Club talk

"Maybe 40% of what doctors do is mistaken."

That was one of the first of many OMG! zingers medical provocateur Vinay Prasad, MD MPH, flung at us at today's Salem City Club presentation, rather drily titled Evidence Based Medicine: Weighing the Evidence for Effective Health Care.

But not one moment of his talk was boring. In fact, it was one of the most interesting and entertaining City Club talks I've experienced. And I've been to many of them. Prasad is a great speaker: funny, caustic, informed, blunt, spontaneous.

I found what appears to be a very close version of his talk on You Tube. So if you find my summary of what Prasad told us today piques your interest, check this video out. His talk starts at about four minutes in.

Later in his talk Prasad noted that there's no way to know exactly what percentage of medical care is ineffective. So it could be less or more than 40%. Regardless, it's a lot. 

If you're thinking that this makes him less than universally popular among his fellow doctors, you'd be correct. After his talk I asked him how his presentation is received by other MDs. He told me that in Europe and Canada he gets a standing ovation. But in Texas, say, speaking to cardiologists, Prasad said he'd get boos.

Which speaks volumes about the sorry state of our American health care system. Or more accurately, non-system. As is well known, we spend way more on health care than other comparable countries yet have health outcomes that are worse. 

There are many reasons for this, but paying for costly medical services that don't provide any real benefit is a major contributor.

Prasad noted that we have a bias toward believing in continual technological process. He showed a slide of an old Model T next to a Tesla Model T. Now, this was the only error I recognized in his talk, since I couldn't find any sign via the Great God Google that a Tesla model with that initial actually exists or is planned.

But it is conjecture, so some apparent Prasad literary license is fine with me.

His point with the auto analogy is that we can see how much cars have progressed since the Model T era. Ditto with computers, cell phones, televisions, and so much else. But with health care we can't discern progress with the naked eye. Controlled studies are necessary.

And these frequently demonstrate what the title of a book he's co-authored refers to: Medical Reversal. This is when doing something is found to be no better or worse than a prior standard of care.

Examples: routine hormone replacement therapy for post-menopausal women and steroid injections for certain spinal problems. Regarding the latter, a a controlled study where half the patients got a salt water injection revealed that both groups felt better.

Which points to the power of placebos. And a question I asked during the Q & A period.

It went like this: "If both steroid and salt water injections benefit patients with back pain, please comment on the ethical issues surrounding placebos, since doing away with ineffective treatments seems like doing away with a witch doctor a tribe believes in, and who makes them feel better."

Prasad's answer made sense, though it raises additional questions. He said that a medical treatment shouldn't be more costly than a placebo, and also shouldn't be any riskier than a placebo.

And he correctly pointed out that bottles of pills marked "Placebo" can be bought on Amazon, since it has been found that even when people know a treatment is a placebo, it still provides benefits to many.

Publication bias is one reason why ineffective treatments get so much attention. Journals like to publish reports of positive findings involving new forms of medical practice. So studies that show something doesn't work, or is a review of the effectiveness of an established medical practice, don't get as much publicity.

Prasad said about doctors, "A lot we learn because someone senior to us taught that it works." In other words, doctors believe in their own experience -- much of which surely shouldn't be trusted, because it isn't based on solid science. 

Again, the 40% figure is just a guesstimate. But Prasad told us that the actual percentage of ineffective treatments in medicine is much more like snow in Chicago than a massive California earthquake. Meaning, it happens frequently, not rarely.

Even randomized clinical trials came in for some criticism, since companies funding them often hope to make billions of dollars by getting a new drug, device, or whatever approved. So they put considerable effort into increasing the odds that a clinical trial will show that their innovation is effective.

I'm vague on how this is done. But if you peruse Prasad's impressive web site, you'll find countless (almost) papers, articles, and other material to read on a wide variety of subjects. The News and Media page has some profiles of Prasad.

I enjoyed "Did he really just tweet that? Dr. Vinay Prasad takes on Big Pharma, Big Medicine, and his own colleagues -- with glee." Here's how it starts out:

Dr. Vinay Prasad is a professional scold: He takes to Twitter each day to critique this cancer drug as ineffective, or blast that one as overpriced, or dismiss the clinical trial of another as completely irrelevant.

So it’s a bit of a surprise to catch him at the bedside of an elderly man with lymphoma, laughing gently with his patient as he inquires about his day — and painstakingly explains a potent drug’s unpleasant side effects.

Prasad’s empathic bedside manner — and generally affable mien — is at stark odds with his digital persona as a caustic crusader for the principle that solid scientific evidence, not hope or hype, should guide how we as a society spend $700 billion a year on health care.

Just 34, Prasad has become an influential voice in the medical community through his prolific, high-impact publishing, a steady stream of media cameos, and — of course — his vociferous Twitter presence. Among his main arguments: Drug costs have spiraled out of control. Conflicts of interest run amok in health care. We don’t have any idea how well new cancer drugs and diagnostics work, thanks to ill-designed clinical trials. And more than half of all practiced medicine is based on scant evidence — and possibly ineffectual.

Needless to say, such positions haven’t won him many close friends among pharma companies — or even among some fellow doctors. He doesn’t much care.

Shingrix gave my wife and I bad side effects. Still way better than shingles, though.

Getting shingles isn't fun, to put it mildly. 

Shingles, also known as herpes zoster, is a painful skin rash caused by reactivation of the varicella zoster virus (the same virus that causes chickenpox).

...Generally, people only develop shingles once, although it is possible to get shingles more than once. Shingles may lead to long-term complications such as debilitating pain that lasts for months or even years. In rare cases, serious, long-term eye or hearing issues can occur.

My wife, Laurel, and I are 69 and 70, respectively. We'd gotten the original Shingles vaccine, Zostavax, but we wanted to get the new and improved vaccine, Shingrix, because it is much more effective at preventing shingles. 

However, Shingrix has considerably stronger side effects. And between the two of us, we've experienced most of them. Here's how the makers of Shingrix describe the side effects.

The most common side effects of SHINGRIX are:

Pain, redness, and swelling at the injection site
Muscle pain
Tiredness
Headache
Shivering
Fever
Upset stomach

Severe allergic reactions are less common and include: hives, swelling of the face/throat, difficulty breathing, a fast heartbeat, dizziness, and weakness. If you experience any of these reactions, seek medical attention immediately.

You're supposed to get two Shingrix doses, with the second ideally two to six months after the first dose. Problem is, there's a shortage of Shingrix. 

We lucked out when we went to our local Walgreens a couple of months ago and were told they had two doses left. So Laurel and I each got vaccinated, a few minutes apart. 

But Laurel had much more severe side effects after taking the first dose.

My arm was just really sore. However, this didn't prevent me from sleeping more or less normally. Laurel, though, had a really bad night. She barely slept, being beset with uncontrollable shivering that, not surprisingly, put a big dent in her quality sleep time.

A few days ago we reached the two-month mark after getting the first dose of Shingrix. So I optimistically headed to the same Walgreens and said I wanted to get the second dose. The reply: We've been ordering it for weeks, but haven't got any more doses. So keep on coming back, since we can't be sure when we'll get additional doses.

The next day Laurel started calling drug stores and pharmacies here in Salem, Oregon. The responses were discouraging. Some drug stores had a waiting list as long as six months. Nobody had Shingrix in stock. Except...Costco.

Laurel was told that the Costco pharmacy would save two doses for her and me. When we went to the Salem Costco yesterday, the pharmacist who gave us the Shingrix shots told us that Costco is prioritizing doses for their customers who have gotten the first dose.

Which makes sense, since while one dose probably is better than nothing, the effectiveness of Shingrix is at least 90% if two doses are given, again, ideally two to six months apart. 

Pleasingly, the pharmacist told us that Costco also allocates a few doses for people who got their first dose at a non-Costco pharmacy, but are having difficulty locating a second dose. (We're Costco members, but we hadn't used the Costco pharmacy until yesterday.)

So when we left Costco yesterday afternoon, both of us were happy that we'd managed to get a second dose of Shingrix. But if you'd asked either of us how we felt after we went to bed, our feelings would have been different.

Almost as soon as I turned the light out, I started to feel really weird. Soon I was feeling chilled, even though the heat was set to 67 degrees. I also started shivering uncontrollably. Both side effect symptoms persisted after I turned the heat up to 71 degrees, though I didn't feel quite as chilled.

Neither of us slept much, if at all. It was one of the worst nights of my life, and the same was even more true for Laurel. In addition to the chills and shivering, she felt nauseous and just about every part of her body ached. Really bad. 

For most of today I've felt more or less normal, aside from being tired from lack of sleep. But Laurel's side effects persisted. They're only supposed to last 2-3 days, so hopefully she'll be feeling better tomorrow, which is Thanksgiving.

Understand: in no way do we regret getting the Shingrix shots. Getting shingles would be much more painful and distressing than suffering for a day or two after getting a dose of Shingrix. 

Everybody is different with regard to side effects.

And for some reason I had little problem with the first dose, but a big problem with the second dose. Just keep this in mind if you get Shingrix vaccinations. If it's possible to do this on a day where you don't have to function well the next day, that'd be a wise thing to do.

City Club talk about opioids both enlightening and disturbing

We're all addicted to something. Coffee. Video games. TV. Golf. Travel. Whatever. But usually our addictions aren't so intense as to wreck our lives. And rarely are they fatal.

Opioids, though, are both addictive and highly dangerous. They can do good, when used correctly. They also do a lot of harm, when used incorrectly.

Last Friday a Salem City Club talk, "The Opioid Epidemic: How We Got Here and the Way Forward," both fascinated me with facts I hadn't been aware of before, and depressed me with fairly familiar statistics about how opioids are ravaging our country. 

Coelho and Holton

The speakers were Dr. Paul Coelho of the Salem Health Pain Clinic and Dwight Holton, CEO of Lines for Life (and a former US Attorney for Oregon). This isn't a very cheery photo of them that I took, but then, their topic was deadly serious. Literally.

Holton spoke first. He said that when he was US Attorney, he started to work on an effort to combat heroin use in Oregon. But he shifted gears after someone told him, "You're looking at the wrong drug." Indeed, opioids are a much bigger problem.

There are 42,000 car deaths per year. The Vietnam War killed 58,000 Americans, in total. And in 2017 it is estimated there were 72,000 drug overdose deaths. That number seemed so high, I worried that my notes were wrong. So I found a National Institute of Drug Abuse link that confirmed it.

Here's a figure from that web page. It shows that deaths from natural and semi-synthetic opioids, both prescription and black market, have been steadily increasing. Heroin deaths have been rising even more rapidly, now surpassing "regular" opioid deaths. 

But deaths from synthetic drugs other than methadone have been really increasing in recent years.

In his remarks, Coelho said that $1,000 worth of Fentanyl can be worth $8 million on the black market, while $1,000 worth of heroin is only worth $4,000. So there's a huge incentive for drug dealers/cartels to push Fentanyl onto people addicted to opioids. Problem is, only a few grains of Fentanyl can be fatal.

So how did we get into this opioid mess? 

It's well known that pharmaceutical companies must shoulder a large part of the blame. I'd say, most of the blame. Holton mentioned a New Yorker story, "The Family That Built an Empire on Pain,"  that I'd read which described in excruciatingly painful detail how the Sackler family became hugely rich by selling OxyContin through Purdue Pharmaceuticals.

"Selling" doesn't do justice to the crap that happened. Purdue knew that OxyContin was being overprescribed, with jillions (more or less) of pills finding their way onto the black market. Purdue paid six hundred million dollars in fines, but the New Yorker story says:

Given the billions of dollars that the Sacklers and Purdue had reaped from OxyContin, some observers felt that the company had got off easy. Arlen Specter, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania, remarked that such fines amounted to “expensive licenses for criminal misconduct.”

Coelho said that doctors were encouraged to prescribe OxyContin by attractive young female pharmaceutical reps. Helping to sway them was an absurdly over-cited 1980 letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Yes, a mere letter to the editor. Here it is.

This study only dealt with hospitalized patients, not people prescribed opioids on an outpatient basis. Nonetheless, the letter was used frequently in advertising for OxyContin and, I assume, other opioids. The NEJM only issued a retraction in 2017, long after it should have.

Holton said that pharmaceutical companies marketed opioids as being low risk and high benefit, but they were very wrong on both counts. 

After 30 days of using opioids, there's a 47% chance a person still will be using them in three years. And if I can read my scribbled writing correctly, after using opioids for 90 days, there's a 66% chance a person still will be using them in five years. Whatever the percentage actually is, the longer the use, the greater the chance of addiction. Also, the higher the dose, the greater the chance is.

Four out of five heroin users had used opioids previously. So if there's a gateway drug to heroin, it is opioids, not marijuana. Regarding marijuana, neither of the speakers mentioned this, but research shows that after states legalize marijuana, the number of opioid prescriptions and the daily dose of opioids goes way down. 

Since no one has ever died from an overdose of marijuana, this argues for legalizing pot as a way to reduce opioid addiction and the harms that come with overuse of opioids. 

Astoundingly, Holton said that 216 million opioid pills are prescribed each year in Oregon. That's about fifty pills per person. So it's hard to believe that all of these prescriptions are medically necessary. The good news is, as shown in the slide above, that Oregon is making progress on reducing opioid use. 

Nationally and in general, though, the trend is disturbing. This slide showed how opioid deaths are just the tip of the opioid problem iceberg. 

And this slide shows how mortality rates in the 45-54 age group, which I gather is a prime age for using opioids, has been rising in the United States (red line; not sure why it says "USW"), while the rates have been falling in other industrialized countries.

Another slide fell prey to bad focusing on my iPhone. It showed that opioid prescription rates are much higher in this country, perhaps because we have such evil pharmaceutical companies like Purdue, and lack a national health system. Coelho said that meth use is spiking in Oregon. Stimulant prescriptions are increasing. 

On the positive side, this slide showed that Baltimore had a 40% drop in overdose deaths over seven years following an expansion of opioid agonist (counter-acting) medication. Many police officers now carry agonists such as Naloxone, which is great.

Lastly, this slide shows what needs to be done to combat the opioid epidemic. It's a bit hard to read, so here's what it says; 

(1) Safe pain management. Better access to safe and effective pain care.

(2) Fewer pills. Protect the community through safer prescribing and better medication disposal. 

(3) Support harm reduction, treatment & recovery. Better access/availability of naloxone, MAT, & other addiction treatment & recovery supports.

(4) Data/education. Better data to inform action. 

Deep thoughts on switching my breakfast to regular oats from quick oats

It's only been one day, but optimistic me is considering this to be a life-changing moment -- switching my breakfast cereal from microwaved quick oats to stovetop boiled regular oats. 

Sure, I've meditated every morning since I was 20, and for most of those 49 years I figured that one day meditation would reveal, if not the Secret of the Universe, at least some mini-secrets of how my own mind works. 

But with age comes a bit of realism. I've now lowered my sights on how deeply I'm going to be able to penetrate the mysteries that surround us. So if switching to regular oats from quick oats brings me more life satisfaction, I'll take it!

It all started yesterday, when I was doing our weekly grocery shopping at LifeSource Natural Foods here in Salem, Oregon. I had "oats" on the list, and was about ready to scoop quick oats out of the bulk bin when I took some time to peruse the other oats offerings. 

This is Deep Thought #1: take some time. 

The Daily Calm guided meditation by Tamara Levitt I listen to on my iPhone speaks frequently about attending not only to the pause between our in-breath and out-breath, but also to the gaps between our thoughts. That, Levitt says, often can be the empty space where inspiration has an opportunity to blossom.

I do tend to operate on autopilot. At my age, 69, I've tried enough different things to be pretty confident in what I like and dislike. 

Having tried many different kinds of breakfast cereals, and pondering the pros and cons of each, for quite a few years I've settled on quick oats for my Monday-Saturday fare. (Sunday is pancake day, as the God atheist me no longer believes in clearly intended it to be.)

Put 1/2 cup of quick oats in a bowl. Add 3/4 cup of water. Microwave for 1 1/2 minutes. Top with Agave and fruit. Bingo! Breakfast. Fast and easy. 

I knew there were oat alternatives. I just hadn't paid much attention to them, since quick oats seemed, well, so quick. Yesterday, though, I paused to examine the neighboring oat bins.

There was steel cut oats. Didn't know what that was, so I moved on. There was heavy duty oats (forgotten actual name). It seemed like too great a jump from quick oats, and the bin didn't have cooking instructions, so I moved on from it also. Then, like Goldilocks, I focused on what struck me as a Middle Way between quick oats and those heavy duty oats.

This led to Deep Thought #2 (corollary to #1): slow down.

I liked that the Rolled Oats bin had cooking instructions. I also liked that the one-serving instruction used the same amount of oats, 1/2 cup, as the quick oats I'd been having each morning. The hurdle I had to cross was the "boil water; stir in oats; cook 5 minutes; stir occasionally."

Yikes! My first thought was, "This is going to take a lot longer than quick oats." Which, though, was followed by a second thought, "But not that much longer."

So I decided to squash the fear that my (not so busy) retired life would be consumed by boiling and stirring, and scooped some Rolled Oats (Thick) into a bag. 

This morning I semi-excitedly got out a small pan and did the Rolled Oats (Thick) cooking deed. I did take a peek at the bag of quick oats behind a kitchen cupboard door to see if any You don't love me anymore! oat tears were obvious. Seeing none, I proceeded with the boiling and stirring.

I don't like to cook very much. So this was a pretty big deal for me, given how many years I've put quick oats and water into a bowl, pressed start on the microwave, and waited a mere 90 seconds for cooked oats.

However, I found myself feeling like Chef Brian, since the instructions on the bin didn't cover all of the preparation steps. Notably, should I remove the pan from the burner after five minutes on medium heat had passed, or should I turn the burner off and leave the pan where it was, since it seemed like there was some excess water that needed to be absorbed.

Pleasingly, turning the burner off and leaving the pan on produced a perfect oatmeal consistency. And the five minute cooking time passed pleasantly. I read the Statesman Journal (print) newspaper while occasionally stirring the oats, per the instructions. 

Tasting my culinary masterpiece leads me to my final Deep Thought #3: substance is worth the wait. 

These oats tasted considerably more substantial than the quick oats. More oat'y, a good thing when you're eating oatmeal. My stomach smiled more than usual, and I don't think this was merely because I was expecting a different oat experience. Makes sense: thicker oats that require more cooking will taste better.

Likewise, I enjoy reading lengthy The New Yorker articles. And lengthy books. Yes, I also enjoy brief Twitter tweets and Facebook posts. There's just more substance to writing that takes quite a while to digest. 

And even though it took me a few minutes to find an article that showed more health benefits for rolled oats compared to quick oats (not surprisingly, Quaker Oats considers all kinds of oats to be equal), a Huffington Post piece, "The Difference Between Steel-Cut, Rolled and Quick Oats," says that rolled and steel-cut oats are a bit better than quick oats.

Steel-cut and rolled oats have more fibre -- due to the minimal processing, most of the fibre has been retained in steel and rolled oats. This means they will keep you feeling fuller for longer, which can assist with weight management. Quick/instant oats have been further processed, which means they have a slightly reduced fibre content.

Steel-cut and rolled oats have a lower GI -- this means they have a slower release of sugar (from carbohydrates) into your blood. This gives you a slow release of energy throughout the morning and keeps you fuller for longer. As opposed to more processed oats, which can provide a quicker burst of energy.

Since steel-cut oats take about 30 minutes to cook, I feel like I've hit the sweet spot with my new oat love, rolled oats. Time will tell if my life changes for the better as much as my first day experiment with rolled oats suggests. 

Between the black and white of suicide, there's a gray area

The recent suicides of Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade have gotten people talking about the problem of taking one's own life. That's good. 

But I don't feel like we're talking about an important issue that is almost a taboo topic: the gray area between (1) the black badness of people killing themselves when there are better options available to them, and (2) the white goodness of people taking control of their death when they are suffering and only have a few months or less to live.


What I see as a gray in-between area is when a person considers that life doesn't seem worth living, but they aren't terminally ill, and there really isn't much or anything that can be done about the bleak situation they're in.

Is it OK to kill yourself in such a situation? I lean toward saying "Yes," but I'm not completely sure. Which is why I call it a gray area. 

Now, I want to be clear that my use of the term gray area doesn't mean that someone is semi-suicidal, as in this person's description of how they feel most days. What I'm talking about is the middle ground of a societal agreement about when it is right or wrong to kill yourself.

As noted above, virtually everybody would agree that if a person is thinking of committing suicide when there are better options open to them (such as mental health treatment, or changing one's situation), every effort should be made to prevent them from taking their life.

And at the other end of the suicide spectrum, if medical professionals agree that someone is near death, and they're seriously suffering from their terminal condition, there's increasing agreement that assisted suicide, or medical aid in dying, is morally acceptable. 

(Seven states currently allow this, including Oregon, where I live.)

That's the black and white of suicide. The difficult gray area is when a person has very good reasons to feel that they don't want to keep on living, and there's little or no chance of changing those reasons, and they aren't terminally ill.

On a personal note, fairly recently I had direct experience of what it is like to be so depressed, the idea of not being alive held considerable appeal for me. Fortunately, I got help with my depression and am feeling much better now. I wrote a blog post during my dark period, "Too depressed to do anything else, I'll write about my depression."

I mention this because it was a wake-up call for me, given that I've been a person who had a distinct fear of death, which to my atheist mind means being gone forever -- a disturbing sensation I described in "Death and the primal fear of non-existence." 

So it was a decidedly unusual experience for me to be aware of my thoughts about death during my depressed period, which were along the lines of You know, being dead doesn't seem so scary anymore. In fact, it sounds pretty damn good.

Thus even though I wasn't really in the gray area that I'm talking about here, because my suicidal tendency was situational, curable with an anti-depressant, plus the support of loved ones and the passage of time, now I have a better understanding of how someone can feel like life isn't worth living, because the situation they're in is just so damn shitty.

And sometimes shitty situations can't be changed, as when someone has a chronic medical condition and it seriously affects their quality of life. 

Like I said, I'm undecided about this gray area of suicide.

My leaning is toward society being more accepting of people taking their own life after careful and full consideration of the pros and cons of committing suicide, when there is little or nothing that can be done to change the situation that is causing them to contemplate choosing death over life.

Autonomy is a wonderful thing. Conversely, feeling trapped is a bad thing. I readily admit that even in my current non-depressed frame of mind, I feel comfort in the fact that if the quality of my life ever degrades to a really low point, there's the option of ending my life.

Writing those words just struck me as strange. I almost feel ashamed, or embarrassed, to have said what I just did. But it's how I feel. And I know that I'm not alone in feeling this way. 

The strangeness of saying "there's the option of ending my life" seems to come from a taboo in our society against talking about the suicidal gray area I'm referring to. 

We're accustomed to urging people contemplating suicide for bad reasons to seek help. Increasingly, we're accustomed to praising people who are terminally ill and choose to hasten their death to avoid needless suffering. But there's an awkward silence about those who have good reason to feel that life isn't worth living, and those reasons are difficult or impossible to change.

I don't know how to deal with this gray area. I just wish that as a society, we could talk about it more openly and honestly. This blog post is my small step in that direction.  

Regence MedAdvantage planning to ditch Salem Health doctors

Irritated. Pissed-off. Disturbed. 

That's how I feel after getting an un-cheery letter from Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon letting me know that as of July 1, 2018, Salem Health Professional Services will be leaving their provider network.

So if this happens, I'd have to pay out-of-network rates for (1) the primary care doctor I've had for 13 years, Michelle Rasmussen; (2) a mental health nurse practitioner in Rasmussen's office, Melody Klug, who has been overseeing medication for depression that hit me after I acquired a chronic bladder condition, and (3) Thye Schuyler, a doctor at the Salem Health Sleep Center who found a way to stop nighttime leg cramps that were contributing to my depression.

Today I phoned Regence after noting in their letter, "If you currently receive medically necessary treatment from the provider for an illness or injury and have concerns, please call us so we can help you plan your continued care."

I talked with someone who was pleasant and a good listener. I explained that given a choice between changing my health care providers or changing my Medicare Advantage company, I was much more inclined to switch from Regence MedAdvantage at the earliest open enrollment opportunity.

I also pointed out that while the letter said that Salem Health Professional Services "has been unwilling to negotiate a new contract and continues to demand a double-digit increase in what we pay them for your care," double-digit rate increases were what Regence regularly imposed on me and my wife before we turned 65 and had a private insurance policy.

Also, I told the Regence person that because of the Trump administration's efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act, I've been reading about health insurance rates in some states going up by 50% or more. So a double-digit rate increase doesn't seem all that unreasonable.

The only possible good news that came out of our conversation was the staffer said that negotiations are continuing with Salem Health Professional Services, so there's a chance I won't have to pay out-of-network rates after July 1 of this year. 

Though she probably knew this, I couldn't resist telling the Regence person that Salem Health happens to be by far the largest health care provider in Salem, and there's a considerable advantage in having most of my medical records centralized in one location.

Plus, I've used the Salem Health Urgent Care center several times, and the providers there also would become out-of-network if Regence MedAdvantage can't reach an agreement with Salem Health Professional Services (formerly known as Willamette Valley Professional Services).

The Regence person gave me an example of how much more I'd pay with out-of-network rates. A recent follow-up visit with Melody Klug was billed at $113.91 and Regence paid $103.91, with my co-pay being $10. If I end up having to pay 50% for office visits, the out-of-network rate, my cost would be about $57 (1/2 of $113,91) rather than $10.

Now, I give Regence MedAdvantage credit for actually lowering the monthly premium I pay from $101 in 2017 to $90 in 2018. Of course, I'm sure Regence adjusted its benefit structure accordingly in ways that I'm not prepared to spend time trying to figure out (every year I get a big thick "book" from them that I glance at, but don't study in detail).

It's possible that I'd stick with Regence MedAdvantage even if they don't have a contract with Salem Health Professional Services after July 1, but it's also very possible that I'd decide to switch to a different MedAdvantage provider like Providence or Moda -- assuming one of them covered my Salem Health providers.

I'm just irritated that Regence is on the verge of terminating its contract with the doctors and nurse practitioner I rely on for my health care, since I like the care I'm getting and have no desire to change providers. The letter I got notes "many other high-quality providers" in their network, including Legacy Clinics in Tualatin, Silverton Health, and Stayton Family Practice.

Um, thanks, but no thanks. I live in Salem, not Tualatin, Silverton, or Stayton. And what happened to "if you like your doctor, you can keep him/her"?

Bottom line is that Medicare is way better than private health insurance, but with Medicare Advantage, which I generally like, there's still some complications reminiscent of the not-so-good old days when we were saddled with expensive, cumbersome, bureaucratic private insurance through Regence.

My second hypnosis session got me way small

As I said in my blog post about my first hypnosis session with Emily Cahal of Salem Hypnosis Solutions, we had to make a decision about which way to proceed.

She told me that there were two basic ways we could go with hypnosis. Basically, one way would focus on my particular presenting problem, so to speak. The other way would be more general, delving into my habitual way of dealing with life's problems. 

Interestingly, as we chatted before beginning the second session, Cahal indicated that though we went the more general way last week, she favored going the more specific way this time. Which was just how I'd been feeling.

It wasn't that I didn't find value in delving into some childhood memories of how I deal with stress. I simply wanted to experience a session or two where we focused specifically on my bladder problem, and my worries associated with dealing with it.

So last Monday Cahal started off like the last time, getting me loose and relaxed with eyes closed through what was a lot like a guided meditation. Body part by body part, head to toe, we got rid of physical tension I was carrying. 

Then I got small. Psychologically. Cahal had me imagine a Small Brian who could go anywhere in my body, sort of like Fantastic Voyage without the submarine. Small Brian journeyed to my bladder, where he reported on how things felt down there.

Then I got to imagine teeny tiny massage therapists doing their thing on tight muscles in my bladder area. That was even more fun. As an added benefit, Cahal suggested that I envision some soothing lotion being applied to the muscles also, to get them even more relaxed.

I must have been more into a hypnosis zone this time, because I don't recall as much from the second session.  But I do remember being guided into an examination of my Book of Life.

The book basically contained a record of all my experiences.

Cahal had me zero in on some noteworthy negative experiences, those that carried some powerful emotional residue. She explained that the pages of my Book of Life were encased in acrylic, or some such material, so that when I touched them, I wouldn't feel the hurt they embodied.

I didn't reveal what the pages consisted of. I just recollected various experiences one by one. Cahal then said that we were going to take out that page, crumple it up, and throw it away. Bingo! Bad experience discarded. 

To add some extra oomph to the exercise, with my eyes closed I could hear Cahal ripping a piece of paper from a notebook, crumpling it up, then tossing it away. As I recall, after we'd discarded a bunch of unwanted pages from my Book of Life, they were incinerated into ashes, then the ashes were thrown to the winds. 

Can't get more gone than that. In my imagination, at least. It remains to be seen how really gone those negative experiences are from my psyche. I can only hope...

What gives me extra hope is some scientific findings contained in an article in the April 2 issue of The New Yorker, "Are We Already Living In Virtual Reality?." I'd brought a copy of the article to give to Cahal, since some portions of the piece about Thomas Metzinger, a philosophically-minded neuroscientist, seemed highly relevant to hypnosis. 

As you can read in the excerpt below, Metzinger speaks about our inability to recognize the unconscious mental models that determine how we experience reality. In his book, The Ego Tunnel, which I've read and enjoyed, Metzinger speaks of the walls of the tunnel as being transparent to us. 

Further, he says in the book, "Although our brains create the Ego Tunnel, no one lives in this tunnel. We live with it and through it, but there is no little man running things inside our head. The Ego and the Tunnel are evolved representational phenomena, a result of dynamical self-organization on many levels."

Here's the excerpt from The New Yorker article:

In a Frankfurt cake shop—“They say this is where Adorno took the women he seduced; many historical conversations happened here!”—Metzinger teased out the implications of this view of existence. “Do you know what an ‘illusion of control’ is?” he asked, mischievously. “If people are asked to throw dice, and their task is to throw a high number, they throw the dice harder!” He believes that many experiences of being in control are similarly illusory, including experiences in which we seem to control our own minds. Brain imaging, for example, shows that our thoughts begin before we’re aware of having them.

But, Metzinger said, “if a thought crosses the boundary from unconsciousness to consciousness, we feel, ‘I caused this thought.’ ” The sensation of causing our own thoughts is also just another feature of the self-model—a phantom sensation conjured when a readout, labelled “thinking,” switches from “off” to “on.” If you suffer from schizophrenia, this readout may be deactivated inappropriately, and you may feel that someone else is causing your thoughts. “The mind has to explain to itself how it works,” he said, spreading his hands.

Lately, Metzinger has been thinking about his own experience as a meditator. At the center of the meditative experience is the exercise and cultivation of mental autonomy: when the meditator’s mind wanders, he notices and arrests that process, gently returning his mental focus to his breath. “The mind says, ‘I am now re-directing the flashlight of my attention to this,’ ” Metzinger said. “But the thought ‘I am redirecting my mind-wandering’ might itself be another inner story.” He leaned back in his chair and laughed. “It might be that the spiritual endeavor for liberation or detachment can lead to new illusions.”

He looked at me reassuringly. “This doesn’t mean that nothing is real,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that this is the Matrix—the simulation is running on some hardware. But it does mean that you are not the model. You are the whole system—the physical, biological organism in which the self-model is rendered, including its body, its social relationships, and its brain. The model is just a part of that system.” The “I” we experience is smaller than, and different from, the totality of who and what we are.

It turns out that we do, in this sense, possess subtle bodies; we also inhabit subtle selves. While a person exists, he feels that he knows the world and himself directly. In fact, he experiences a model of the world and inhabits a model of himself. These models are maintained by the mind in such a way that their constructed nature is invisible. But it can sometimes be made visible, and then—to a degree—the models can be changed.

Something about this discovery is deflating: it turns out that we are less substantial than we thought. Yet it can also be invigorating to understand the constructed, provisional nature of experience. Our perceptions of the world and the self feel real—how could they feel otherwise?—but we can come to understand our own role in the creation of their apparent realness. “The compensation of growing old,” Virginia Woolf writes, in “Mrs. Dalloway,” is that, while “the passions remain as strong as ever,” we gain “the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it around, slowly, in the light.”

Here's how my first hypnosis session went

Today I had my first real hypnosis experience with Emily Cahal of Salem Hypnosis Solutions.

Back in college I'd dabbled in self-hypnosis as taught by a Yoga teacher I was studying with.

And I'd seen a form of "show business" hypnosis during an assembly at a high school where I briefly was a teacher's aide following my college graduation. A hypnotist did his thing on stage with a female student, then told her to go find Paul Newman in the audience. She walked by me, looking into the bleachers, then leapt into the second row where I was sitting and gave me a hug. 

I suspect I was singled out as Paul Newman because I was older than the other students, but at the time it made me feel a bit movie star'ish regardless.

During the introductory part of today's session Cahal made clear that what she does is nothing like that sort of hypnosis. She explained that much (or most) of what results in our thoughts, feelings, and actions originates in the unconscious, which isn't under our direct control. 

My reason for making an appointment with Cahal was that my wife, a retired psychotherapist, thought it could be helpful in getting me to relax more with what I like to call my Damn Bladder Problem. I'm managing OK with it, but sometimes tension, anxiety, or some other force makes it difficult for me to do the self-catheterization owing to a tightening-up in my pelvic region.

As I explained to Cahal, I can feel relaxed and "normal" (whatever that is), yet at times some of my bladder muscles clearly have a mind of their own. So I was hoping that hypnosis could help me stay in a relaxation sweet spot.

She told me that there were two basic ways we could go with hypnosis. Basically, one way would focus on my particular presenting problem, so to speak. The other way would be more general, delving into my habitual way of dealing with life's problems. 

This second way would take us into my childhood where, Cahal said, we first develop our coping mechanisms. I told her that I liked that idea better, since I'd like to be able to relax more generally in various types of situations, not just those involving my chronic health problem.

We talked some about a subject that fascinates me, both intellectually and personally: how efforts to resolve a problem, which in my case was excessive tension, often backfire because effort can exacerbate the problem -- such as not being relaxed enough. It's kind of like the familiar "don't think of an elephant."

Trying not to do something can paradoxically make that something happen. So this is an argument in favor of hypnosis, which works on more of a subconscious or unconscious level. 

I then was invited to sit in a zero gravity chair that, when reclined, put me in a pleasingly comfortable position. Cahal started off by inviting me to relax both physically and mentally with my eyes closed. 

I won't go into too many details of the hypnosis session. I'll just hit some highlights that struck me as particularly interesting.

These involved a latter part of the session where I was interacting with my youthful self, initially 10-12 years old, then more like 16 years old as Cahal led me into some questions about my relationship with my mother during a period when her alcoholism was in full bloom.

She had mentioned that I shouldn't over-think my responses to her questions, but rather respond intuitively with what first popped into my head. This made the hypnosis session quite different from a regular counseling session, which in my experience involves more cognitive deliberation.

Heart versus head, basically.

The most moving part of the session for me was when I was invited to give my youthful self advice from the perspective of my current 69 year-old self. I have to admit that I've been skeptical of the value of "inner child" work, because rightly or wrongly it's seemed to me that I've pondered my childhood, with its mixture of dysfunction and normalcy, in sufficient depth to make any further pondering superfluous.

Hypnosis, though, had some surprises for me.

I found it easy to give some advice to the youthful me as if he was still a child: "Don't worry, everything changes, mostly for the better." I also enjoyed Cahal's observation that it was the situations I found myself in that were the problem, not me.

She asked if I felt I was a good person, and if I felt my mother was a good person. I answered "yes" to both questions. It was freeing, in a way, to speak out loud what I'd said to myself countless times after my mother died in 1985. Well, not only to myself, but also to my imagined mother (being an atheist, I don't believe she can hear me now).

"You were the best mother you could be, so thanks for that." 

We then moved to the present, with Cahal inviting me to imagine my youthful self co-existing with my present day self. Give your youthful self a hug, she said.

I then realized something that had never occurred to me before: I couldn't recall ever being hugged by a man during my childhood years. I had no contact with my father after my parents divorced when I was three, or thereabouts. My male relatives weren't hugging types. So when I visualized my youthful self getting a hug from my current self, it almost brought tears to my eyes.

Now, I don't know what all this means. Much more, of course, occurred during the hour or so hypnosis session. I don't know what all of that meant either. 

Strangely, which really isn't so strange, really, this is why I feel positive about hypnosis after my first experience with it.

I've done an awful lot of conscious deliberating about my life, both past and present, since my bladder problem changed a lot for me. If all of that deliberating had been fruitful, I wouldn't be feeling the need for help with relaxing into what could be called my "new normal."

(I don't like that new normal, so I've been loathe to use that term, but as time goes on I'm coming to recognize that reality doesn't really give a shit about what I like or don't like, it gives what's coming to me regardless.)

So I enjoy the feeling that what occurred in today's hypnosis session is akin to seeds planted in my unconscious which will germinate outside of my awareness. I've got several more sessions scheduled; thus, more seeds should be planted. At the very least, I'm trying something new, and this old dog should be able to learn some new tricks.

I want to mention that throughout the hypnosis session I felt quite normal, not at all under the control of the hypnotist. It was a lot like a guided meditation, though I readily admit that almost certainly there was more going on behind the scenes of what Cahal was doing than I'm aware of. 

Here's how Emily Cahal describes hypnosis in the FAQ page on her web site. This rang true for me, in part because I'm habitually prone to locking my car door, walking away a few steps, then returning to check whether I really did lock the door. 

HOW DOES HYPNOSIS WORK?

Using analytical hypnosis to address issues, such as: weight loss, smoking, depression, childbirth, stress, sports performance, confidence, habits, cravings, and fears, is about behavior modification. There is a developed behavior that is guiding your automatic reactions to events.

These reactions are based on your previous experience. When you are trying to change a behavior, it can be a very real struggle as your conscious mind attempts to change what your subconscious mind already has in place. You can compare it to the mindless way you may have trained yourself to lock the door when you get in the car. At first it takes conscious effort. Eventually it becomes automatic, to the point that you may not even know if you locked it or not without checking. Once that simple habit is in place, changing it is possible with some effort and repetition.

A habit can become stronger and more complex when you apply emotions and time. If someone has a strong fear about car doors being unlocked, they probably took on that fear at some fearful time in the past. It could have been someone’s innocent statement about car-jackings, a horror movie or a personal fearful moment. Any of those situations have the potential to create a fear behavior. The emotional content of this habit makes changing that behavior more involved. The simple fact that our mind does create behaviors means that our mind can change them, if we understand how.

Hypnosis has shown to be a rapid way to change behaviors, especially with modern hypnosis techniques. When using the very same principles behind our natural behavior creation, we can easily quit old habits as well as create new ones.

Time slowing down is a side effect of my chronic health problem

By and large, I'm sticking with my previous assessment of my atonic, underactive, neurogenic, screwed-up bladder: IT SUCKS, big time. 

But here's a positive side effect. Time has definitely slowed down for me.

Since I'm 69, and not getting any younger (which seems to be standard for everybody), I'm pleased that the days have been passing more slowly since my bladder decided to go on what appears to be a permanent work stoppage for the rest of my life.

I'm curious whether other people with chronic health problems have experienced the same phenomenon, time slowing down. Naturally I Googled this, but couldn't find any references to it. 

So on the chance that I'm the first person in the history of the world to have discovered that time slows down in the presence of a chronic health problem, I'm non-humbly calling this the Hines Effect after moi. 

(Hey, since I'm not going to live forever, leaving behind a scientific term that's named after me is a far distant second best.)

What seems to be happening is that because I have to self-catheterize about five times a day on a fairly strict schedule, rather than heading to a bathroom on demand as I used to do, I've had to become much more self-conscious of everything having to do with urination.

How much I'm drinking. What I'm drinking. Where I need to be when the time for self-catherization comes around. How my bladder is feeling, urge-to-urinate-wise. 

It's a lot like enforced mindfulness, albeit of a rather strange variety. I'm having to pay way more attention throughout the day to something that I used to take for granted: peeing. 

The subjective experience that results for me is of time passing much more slowly that it did before my bladder went on strike.

(After a serious urinary retention episode about 10 months ago, I can urinate some on my own, but not nearly enough to keep up with what's being produced by my kidneys; hence, the need to self-catheterize.)

I'm pleased that time has slowed down, though I'd be even happier about this if my life were more pleasant. But if I didn't have my chronic health problem, time would have kept on speeding by as it did when I was "normal." 

My pre-bladder-problem sense of time was that I was having a birthday about every six months, and reading the Sunday paper every couple of days. Not literally, of course, but subjectively. Back then I sort of cruised through life on auto-pilot, because I was healthy and enjoyed my various routines.

Now, I'm having to pay close attention throughout the day to what my bladder is doing, and notably, isn't doing. The five times I day I self-catheterize require a certain ritual that is considerably more involved than simply popping into a bathroom and peeing away.

My theory -- which is needed to justify naming it the Hines Effect -- is that my experience of daily life now has considerably more events or impressions in it. This produces the sensation of time slowing down, as noted in a Psychology Today article, "How the Brain Stops Time."

One of the strangest side-effects of intense fear is time dilation, the apparent slowing-down of time. It's a common trope in movies and TV shows, like the memorable scene from The Matrix in which time slows down so dramatically that bullets fired at the hero seem to move at a walking pace.

In real life, our perceptions aren't keyed up quite that dramatically, but survivors of life-and-death situations often report that things seem to take longer to happen, objects fall more slowly, and they're capable of complex thoughts in what would normally be the blink of an eye.

...fear does not actually speed up our rate of perception or mental processing. Instead, it allows us to remember what we do experience in greater detail. Since our perception of time is based on the number of things we remember, fearful experiences thus seem to unfold more slowly.

I'm not afraid, but my chronic health problem does produce a pervasive sense of caution, wariness, concern. Thus I'm having to remember more things than I did before, which apparently produces the feeling of time slowing down. 

All in all, I'd rather have a functioning bladder with time going more quickly for me.

But it's good that a crappy situation has the side benefit of elongating my subjective experience of life, since while I'm not as happy as I was before, I still find life very much worth living and generally pleasant. 

"Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved" is a great book

Kate Bowler has written a book about her struggles with several serious health problems, with the worst being a stage 4 colorectal cancer diagnosis. It is funny, sad, moving, inspiring, and so much more. From the first page to the last, I was deeply engrossed in her story. 

"Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved" is one of the most moving books I've ever read.

Even though I don't believe in God, and Kate Bowler does, I felt wonderfully close to her as I finished her marvelous book in a few transfixed sittings. She and I have much more in common -- our shared humanity -- than what divides us, our theological worldview. Like Bowler, I have a chronic health problem, though one that isn't nearly as serious as hers.

I'm so thankful that Bowler had the talent and courage to write a book with so much heart. She is so honest, so truthful, I found every sentence she wrote to be captivating.

What I admired the most was her willingness to look at her Christian beliefs with such openness and sensitivity.

Bowler accepts what makes sense to her, such as God exists and loves us. She rejects the nonsensical aspects of Christianity, notably the Prosperity Gospel ridiculousness. As someone who read and scoffed at The Secret, which similarly posits that we can create our own reality, I loved her putdowns of those who tried to find meaning in the tragedy of her cancer diagnosis.

I struggle every day with my much milder chronic condition. Thank you, Kate Bowler, for writing a book that has made it easier for me to carry on in the present moment, which really is all any of us really has -- despite our predilection to stare at the past and future rather than what is right before us.

One of my favorite passages is this:

Beverly lived in the apocalyptic future, and the scholar lived in the past. I think I believed that I was living in the center, but I rarely let my feet rest on solid ground, rooting me in the present. My eyes shifted to look for that thing just beyond, the next deadline, the next hurdle, the next plan.... I would not say it was simply that I didn't stop to smell the roses. It was the sin of arrogance, of being impervious to life itself. I failed to love what was present and decided to love what was possible instead. I must learn to live in ordinary time, but I don't know how.

It's really difficult for me to summarize Bowler's book.

She writes so well, with such heart, I feel like I'm doing a disservice to her if I substitute my words for hers. So my main piece of advice is Buy This Book. She has a web site, a blog, and a Twitter feed if you want to sample her writing that way.

Here's some other passages from her book that I loved:

My in-box is full of strangers giving reasons. People offer them to me like wildflowers they picked along the way. A few people want me to cultivate spiritual acceptance. "We have had millions of births and deaths in different life-forms," explains a Hindu woman gently. "Don't worry, this life shall pass and your soul will move forward to its next step."

This world is a place of suffering, they write, a garden full of weeds that we tend as best we can.

But most everyone I meet is dying to make me certain. They want me to know, without a doubt, that there is a hidden logic to this seeming chaos. Even when I was still in the hospital, a neighbor came to the door and told my husband that everything happens for a reason.

"I'd love to hear it," he replied.

"Pardon?" she said, startled.

"The reason my wife is dying," he said in that sweet and sour way he has, effectively ending the conversation as the neighbor stammered something and handed him a casserole. 

Christians want me to reassure them that my cancer is all part of a plan. A few letters even suggest that God's plan was that I get cancer so I could help people by writing the New York Times article. There is a circular logic to these attempts to explain the course of my life.

If you inspire people while dying, the plan for your life was that you would become an example to others. If you don't and you die kicking and screaming, the plan was that you discover some important divine lessons. Either way, learn to accept God's plan.

...These are the three life lessons people try to teach me that, frankly, sometimes feel worse than cancer itself.

The first is that I shouldn't be so upset, because the significance of death is relative. I like to call the people with that message the Minimizers... A lot of Christians like to remind me that heaven is my true home, which makes me want to ask them if they would like to go home first. And atheists can be equally trite by demanding that I immediately give up any search for meaning.

...The second lesson comes from the Teachers, who focus on how this experience is supposed to be an education in mind, body, and spirit. "I suppose that this is the ultimate test of faith for you," one man muses, hoping that I will have the good sense to accept God's will... Sometimes I want every know-it-all to send me a note when they face the grisly specter of death, and I'll send them a cat poster that says HANG IN THERE!

...The hardest lessons come from the Solutions People, who are already a little disappointed that I am not saving myself. "Keep smiling! Your attitude determines your destiny!" says Jane from Idaho, and I am immediately worn out by the tyranny of prescriptive joy.

...There is a trite cruelty in the logic of the perfectly certain. Those letter writers are not simply trying to give me something. They are also, always, tallying up the sum of my life, sometimes for clues, sometimes for answers, always to pronounce a verdict. But I am not on trial.

...This is the problem, I suppose, with formulas. They are generic. But there is nothing generic about a human life... There is no life in general. Each day has been a collection of trivial details -- little intimacies and jokes and screw-ups and realizations. My problems can't be solved by those formulas -- those cliches -- when my life was never generic to begin with. 

God may be universal but I am not. I am Toban's wife and Zach's mom and Karen and Gerry's daughter. I am here now, bolted in time and place, to the busy sounds of a blonde boy in dinosaur pajamas crashing into every piece of furniture.

My annual Medicare wellness visit had its humorous side

Just to give you young'uns (meaning, anybody under 65) a preview of what you have to look forward to, here's some glimpses of how my annual Medicare Wellness Visit went today. 

First off, this really isn't a physical exam.

My primary care doctor did some perfunctory checking around -- listened to my heart to make sure it was beating, looked in my mouth to see if I had any teeth left, that sort of thing -- but a bigger part of the visit was a nurse asking me a bunch of questions before the doctor came in to the exam room about how I'm handling my 69 year-old activities of daily living .

One of my favorites was, "Have you fallen in the past year?" Which was followed by, "Are you afraid of falling?" I said No, and No.

But what I was thinking about was how I'd recently gotten up on top of our two story house and blown out leaves in the gutters with a Stihl backpack blower while walking along the edge of the roof. I couldn't resist mentioning this to my doctor, just to show how virile, brave, and studly I still am.

However, seemingly she was thinking of a different adjective, stupid, because she told me, "Maybe you should be afraid of falling."

I pretty much aced the other questions. It just was disturbing to be asked about stuff that could be in my decrepit future if I'm lucky, or maybe unlucky, enough to live that long. 

Like, "Can you fix your own meals?" And "Can you do the laundry?" Regarding the latter, I told the nurse, "Sure, but my wife doesn't let me, because I always screw up something, like shrinking her clothes or giving them a new tint by mixing colors together wrongly."

Another not-so-cheery question went like this: "So if you collapsed right now, with your breathing and heart stopped, should I try to resuscitate you with CPR?"

At first I didn't understand what the nurse was getting at.

"Are you asking if I think you know CPR?" I said. "No, I do know CPR. The question is whether you'd want to be resuscitated." I had to ponder this for a while.

My wife has told me that what happens with CPR on TV or in the movies isn't what usually happens in real life. Instead of people being brought back to life all happy and normal, supposedly many, if not most, victims suffer irreversible brain damage. So I told the nurse, "I'd have to think about this. I'm not sure."

That was a decidedly downer question.

After I left the doctor's office I couldn't help envisioning other questions that senior citizen me should have been asked that relate to activities of my daily living that have a heck of a lot more impact on my quality of life than whether I'm able (or allowed) to do the laundry. 

Like...

Are you able to grind marijuana buds and put the pot into the small receptacle of a vaporizer without spilling much on the floor?
Answer: yes. 

When you smoke weed in the bathtub at night, along with drinking a glass of red wine, do you ever feel a bit dizzy when you get out of the hot water?
Answer: damn right. That's a feature, not a glitch.

Do you remember to ask for the senior citizen discount in the check-out lane at Lifesource Natural Foods before your credit card is charged?
Answer: yes. Except when I don't.

When you're watching TV news in your La-Z-Boy chair and Donald Trump is shown speaking, can your fingers find the mute button on the remote control within five seconds?
Answer: absolutely. It's a reflex action.

Are you aware when you've told the exact same stories repeatedly to your granddaughter about how cool it was during your college days in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s -- Summer of Love, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, psychedelics, Vietnam War protests, flower power, etc. etc.
Answer: yes. And I'm going to keep telling those stories anyway.

Do you have any problem with hearing your wife when she is telling you that you aren't loading the dishwasher correctly?
Answer: no. I just pretend that I do.

Are you ever prone to cognitive errors such as believing that when the youthful Starbucks barista smiles at you after handing over a grande nonfat vanilla latte, she has the hots for gray-haired old men?
Answer: sure, all the time. Fantastical thinking is how I'm getting through my senior years.

Here's how I feel about my atonic, underactive, neurogenic, screwed-up bladder

Regarding the title of this blog post, in two words, IT SUCKS. Big time. 

Before I elaborate on this, let me address what I tell myself, and what my wife tells me: there are many worse health problems. 

For sure.

Aside from not being able to pee properly without the aid of self-catheterization -- not fun, but better than getting kidney failure from a backed-up bladder -- I'm basically a pretty damn healthy 69 year old guy. 

I wouldn't trade my bladder problem for, say, cancer, heart disease, or loss of a limb. And I've no doubt that people with more serious medical problems than a FUB (fucked-up bladder) have good reason to tell me, Dude, consider yourself lucky.

Look, I know all this. Yet I'm still seriously pissed-off at not being able to pee.

I've described my urinary retention travails in previous posts in this blog's "My Peeing Problem" category. Most recently, I had a third urologist tell me that, to put this in non-clinical terms, I'm screwed. 

Not for a while. Not until drugs, or surgery, or pelvic floor therapy, or whatever, does its thing. For the rest of my life. My bladder, I've been told, has decided to go on strike for the duration. 

Well, more accurately it's on a perpetual work slowdown. I can still pee a little bit, but not nearly enough to keep up with what's coming into my bladder. So four or five times a day I use a catheter to do what my bladder no longer can handle: getting rid of urine.

As a journal article puts it, this is the Other Bladder Syndrome: Underactive Bladder.

Mostly people talk about needing to go too often. Indeed this was my problem until about six months ago. I had a mildly enlarged prostate that I thought was being treated adequately with Flomax and Avodart. 

I'd have to get up several times at night to pee, then go back to bed. On long flights I'd head to the lavatory more often than most of the other people on the plane. During intermission at a play I'd visit the restroom... just in case.

Belatedly, I now realize that I should have paid more attention to some increasing problems. Like, taking longer to get a urine stream going. And a few times, not being able to pee at all for a few hours, even though my bladder was full. 

Live and learn, as they say.

Unfortunately, I learned too late and am now suffering the lifelong consequences. As one urologist told me, the progression of BPH, an enlarging prostate, can occur so slowly, so gradually, it is like the proverbial frog being boiled in water.

If the heat is turned up slowly, it's hard to tell what's going on. Until you're cooked. Which, apparently, my bladder is.

Frustratingly, I've been told by several urologists, "You don't have a prostate problem; you have a bladder problem." But when I've pointed out that it must have been my prostate problem that led to my bladder problem, I basically have been told that it really doesn't matter what the cause was -- my bladder has stopped working, regardless.

So one reason I'm writing this post is to urge men to go to a urologist sooner rather than later. Don't ignore symptoms like taking a long time to get your urine flow going, or not being able to pee at all for a few hours even though you really need to go. 

I thought I was OK. I figured the medications I was on for BPH would take care of my prostate problem. I had no idea that an enlarged prostate could lead to a non-functioning bladder. 

Like I said before, I was an idiot.

I ignored signs of impending urinary function doom because, well, just because. It wasn't that I tried to fuck up my bladder. That just happened, and now I've got to deal with a majorly sucky situation for as long as I live, according to three urologists.

An old friend had a favorite saying: No one's life is ever completely wasted. They can always serve as a horrible example to others. 

I'm hoping that by yelling loudly enough through my blog, and maybe other social media, I can reach at least a few other guys who might otherwise ignore the "gradually boiling frog" of what could become a serious bladder condition. 

I don't like my catheter-filled life, yet I've got no choice now but to deal with it. Other men with an enlarged prostate who are at risk of developing acute urinary retention that could turn into chronic urinary retention -- my fate -- you do have a choice. 

Don't follow my horrible example.

Do what I didn't do. Make an appointment with a urologist. Get checked out. Don't think that just because your family doctor has prescribed some prostate medications that seem to be working OK, you'll be able to pee pretty much normally for the rest of your life.

I thought that. I was wrong. And now my life sucks. Don't follow in my idiotic footsteps. Be smarter than me. In another post I'll explain exactly how my life sucks. For now, just believe me. It does.

(There are various terms for an under-functioning bladder: atonic, neurogenic. This Medscape article has lots of information about a neurogenic bladder. I forced myself to read it even though it was depressing. But if you want to motivate yourself to avoid getting a screwed-up bladder like mine, take a look at "Neurogenic Bladder.")

Five observations about Ed Asner's show, "A Man and His Prostate"

Last night my wife and I saw Ed Asner perform "A Man and His Prostate" at the Elsinore Theatre here in Salem, Oregon.  

It's an entertaining reading by Asner of what a different Ed, Ed Weinberger, wrote concerning what he went through after he collapsed while on a vacation in Italy. Since I'm not going to describe the show in much detail, you can read a review to learn about it. 

What I want to do is share five observations of A Man and His Prostate based on my personal experience of being also a man, with a prostate, who has had prostate problems of his own.

(1) Funny to hear about, not so amusing to experience. Weinberger's writing and Asner's performance are wonderfully light-hearted.

It was great to view the humorous side of a prostate problem. But I can pretty much guarantee that when Weinberger was experiencing his prostate travails ("two hours from kidney failure" due to urinary retention, we learn) there wasn't nearly as much amusement in them.

This isn't a criticism of the show, nor of the copious laughter that accompanied Asner's reading. It's just an observation that if someone with a serious prostate problem is overly sensitive, they might find that parts of the show hit an emotional tender spot.

(2) Flomax isn't as scary as Asner's side effects bit proclaims. Asner said Flomax, a commonly prescribed drug that makes it easier to urinate, "has more side effects than a divorce." 

That's certainly true. As regards potential side effects, at least.

But virtually every prescription drug comes with a disturbingly long list of possible side effects. Asner correctly said that dizziness is one of them, and I did indeed experience some dizziness after I took my first Flomax and got out of bed that night to, naturally, pee. 

But my bout of dizziness lasted only one day. Since, I haven't noticed any Flomax side effects. Your results may vary, of course. And I have to admit that this statement about Flomax on the Drugs.com site is worthy of making a joke about. 

Flomax may impair your thinking or reactions. Be careful if you drive or do anything that requires you to be alert.

(3) My doctors always have done a digital prostate exam at my annual physical. Ever since I turned forty or thereabouts, I'm pretty sure I've always gotten the not-so-fun digital, as in finger, prostate exam that plays a pretty prominent role in A Man and His Prostate.

By its absence. Weinberger, as read by Asner, complains to his doctor (during a phone call after he was admitted to a Florence hospital) that he'd never gotten a finger up the ass in the many years they've had a doctor-patient relationship. 

This surprised me. I've always figured that men of a certain age get their prostate felt by their doctor through the rectum wall as a matter of course. I wrote about my experience of this after switching to a woman physician in "Female doctors do it better."

Naturally I was curious as to how the most intimate and least favorite part of a middle-aged male annual physical exam would go. I’m pleased to report, just fine. This was the first time that my prostate had been examined by a female doctor and I can confidently say that, based on this sample of one, women do it better.

More gentle, for sure. Smaller fingers are nice. More communicative too. This was my first prostate exam where I got a running verbal commentary from the doctor: “Hmmmm. Feels pretty normal. Regularly shaped. Just about normal size. Well, let’s make that a normal size for men your age who have a somewhat enlarged prostate.”

Great. A prostate exam is the only time you don’t want to hear from a female who is inspecting your genital area that you’re larger than average. Maybe Flomax will get me nearer to normal.

(4) There's good reasons to either get, or decline, a PSA test for prostate cancer. Actually the mention of a PSA test only came up after Asner's reading when a Salem Health (sponsor of the local show) physician talked about the importance of screening for prostate cancer, which is a major killer of men. 

I've gone back and forth on getting a PSA test after the United States Preventive Services Task Force recommended in 2011 against getting the test in most cases. I talked about this in "Why I still decided to get a PSA test" and "My prostate is featured in the AARP Bulletin!"

My basic feeling, which is still my current feeling, is that the results of a PSA test provide information that either can be accepted or ignored depending on a man's personal circumstances. The test isn't very accurate, but a positive result should lead to consideration of other sorts of tests than point to whether a prostate is cancerous. 

(5) Asner's worries about impotence after prostate surgery were amusing. My favorite part of the show was near the end, when Asner relates Weinberger's anxiety about not being able to get an erection following surgery (even after viewing Italian porn on his hotel room TV), with his wife arriving the next day. 

He has the bright idea that a massage with a "happy ending" is called for. And it would be for his wife -- an oft-repeated statement that always got laughs from the audience. 

Eventually we learn that there was indeed a happy ending to this tale, though not the one initially envisioned. 

Now, I'm no expert on impotence following prostate surgery. However, I do know that low dose daily Cialis has been approved by the FDA as a treatment for men who have both an enlarged prostate and erectile dysfunction at the same time. 

Just an observation, along with the four others that I've listed.

Bottom line: if you have the chance, go see A Man and His Prostate. Ed Asner is going to be 88 in a few days. It was inspiring to me, a comparatively young 69 year old, to see Asner perform the show so competently and vigorously. 

Everybody is hurting in some way. My compassion lesson 101.

I'm not the most compassionate guy. But ever since I started having some semi-serious health problems, and the depression that accompanied them, I've become quite a bit more understanding of what other people are struggling with in their daily lives.

The Buddha said that life is suffering. He was right on. 

Almost invariably, when I talk with someone about my physical and mental problems, the person I'm conversing with will bring up their own problems that I wasn't aware of before. Or mention what a near and dear one is going through. 

Now, I realize that this isn't exactly groundbreaking news -- that people have problems. I'm simply gaining a deeper direct experience of an indisputable reality. 

Life is tough.

For almost everyone. And that almost can be eliminated if I add "For almost everyone at some time." No matter how good things are going now, they're going to take a turn for the worse at some point. 

Take me. My primary doctor used to say at my annual physical, when I'd have just about zero complaints, "Brian, you're my poster child for growing older." Well, not so much anymore.

Yet I look perfectly fine. As do lots of people who are struggling with a physical or mental problem that doesn't come advertised with crutches, a wheelchair, babbling incoherently, or whatever. 

So what I try to do now, having gotten my grade in Compassion 101 up to maybe a D + level, is look upon everyone I encounter, whether stranger or friend, as someone who is hurting in some way that I'm probably not aware of. 

That person who is driving way slow in front of me on our rural road when I can't pass and am late for a downtown appointment... they deserve compassion, not irritation, because they're hurting.

That person who is taking forever at the grocery store checkout lane to find their glasses and punch in a debit card code... they deserve patience, not a frustrated stare, because they're hurting.

That person who is challenging me on Facebook because we have way different political views and they seem to be making no sense... they deserve a gentle response, not an irate tirade, because they're hurting.

Sure, I don't live up to these ideals all of the time. Maybe not even most of the time. 

But at least I'm starting to recognize some simple truths that should have dawned on me before now, but didn't until I started to walk in the Shoes of Struggle that so many other people have walked down much longer paths than I have. 

Helping me in this regard are those who talk about their troubles in a humble, brave, honest fashion. Whether you do this on social media or in person, I'm hugely appreciative when you share your own story of struggle.

I feel less alone. I feel inspired. I feel more capable of carrying on.

I've found that even though it isn't really a good idea to regale somebody with your troubles when, say, I'm at Trader Joe's and get asked by the clerk, "How's your day going?," there's an alternative to "Just fine, how about you?" Which is...

"I've had better days." 

Recently I tried out a variant after being asked "How are you?" I said, "I've been better."

Because we were in a rather private setting, and I knew the person, that led to a good honest conversation about how I actually wasn't doing all that well, and neither was this woman's husband, who had some health issues of his own that he was struggling with.

I've always enjoyed a quote from the movie, Shadowlands: We read to know we're not alone. 

Well, this also is true: We talk with others to know we're not alone. Particularly when the talking goes beyond superficialities and touches on the intimate reality of our lives. 

Including our troubles, our pain, our hurting. No, even more: especially our troubles, our pain, our hurting. 

Too depressed to do anything else, I'll write about my depression

It's a new experience, being depressed. Now, to be honest I haven't actually gotten a depression diagnosis. But my wife, Laurel, is a retired psychotherapist. And she tells me, "Brian, you aren't just tired. You're depressed."

At first I didn't believe her. But Laurel gave me a Psychology Today article, "Depressed Without Knowing It," and that helped to change my mind. 

I knew that several health problems had made me anxious, sad, worried, nervous about the future. I also was feeling a lack of energy, and was having trouble doing things that I used to enjoy. But since I'd never suffered from depression, being a pretty damn optimistic person, it took a while for me to realize that something different was happening to me.

Like, tonight I'd semi-happily watched an Oregon-Wyoming football game. Then I suddenly felt a wave of what felt like tiredness wash over me. I didn't feel like doing anything. All I wanted to do was lay on the couch. 

I told Laurel, "Sometimes doing nothing feels like what I want to do." 

She let me lay there for a while. Then -- and I'm really fortunate to have a live-in therapist -- Laurel knelt by the couch and started to talk to me. 

Did I want to watch TV? No, I said. Did I want to read something? No, I said.

We kept talking. Eventually I told her the truth: "The only thing I really feel like doing is writing about what I'm learning from my depression. For me, blogging is like a diary that I can look back on when, hopefully, I'm feeling better."

Interestingly, as soon as I decided to be open with the world (or rather, the few people who will happen upon this post and decide to read it), I sensed some energy returning to my addled brain. I guess this is why writers write when they can't do anything else.

I don't have any fantasies that a waiting world really cares about how I'm feeling. This is one of the things I'm learning from my depression: I don't matter to other people as much as I thought I did.

Understand, I don't mean that I don't matter to my wife, daughter, dog, and other loved ones. Rather, what I'm realizing is that when I can't write blog posts as often as I usually do, or pursue the citizen activism activities I used to dive into with a lot more energy than I have now, life goes on.

This shouldn't be a shocker.

I'm just one person. There's billions of people in the world. Heck, there's over 160,000 people in just my home town of Salem, Oregon. Why would I think that what I'd been doing to help change the world, or Salem, was so crucial, so important, that my lassitude would make much of a difference to anyone but me?

So this strikes me as one benefit of depression. It leads me to a sort of Buddhist-like insight: my self isn't as central to reality as I thought it was.

Now, this insight is both sort of depressing (or disturbing), yet also a relief. It takes some of the pressure off me to get back to acting "normal," since I'm realizing that while my usual life is important to my near and dear ones (our dog would miss our evening walk, and even more, me preparing her evening meal, if I wasn't able to do those things), for most people I'm simply an occasional thought. 

Here's another semi-Buddhist'y insight: I don't even matter as much to myself as I thought I did. 

During the past few weeks I'd have occasional (OK, frequent) crying spells and near-panic attacks when I'd think, or tell Laurel, "I feel myself slipping away." Yet obviously there was still a Me able to say that. What I really meant is that the Brian I was used to being was feeling more and more foreign to me, like a person I used to know well, yet now was fading from memory.

In my saner moments I'd grasp that the cosmos doesn't give each of us a Lifetime Guarantee that the person we most enjoy being is going to stay that way. Change happens. Life happens. Illness happens. Suffering happens. Shit happens. 

We've all got to deal with it.

The (likely) fact that I'm depressed shows that I'm not dealing with it as well as I could, since I know quite a few people who have more serious health problems than I do, and they sure seem to be handling life better than I am. But this isn't a competition, and I guess I need to stop comparing myself with others -- including my previous self.

"It is what it is, dude" probably is the wisest thing I tell myself these days. 

Well, equally wise is a new mantra that I started repeating today: Feel more, emote less. By this I mean that letting myself get overwhelmed with emotion doesn't work out very well. Better is when I simply am aware of how I'm feeling at the moment -- tired, satisfied, worried, peaceful, anxious, whatever. 

This is much more of a bodily feeling than a mental sensation. I can be tired, yet I don't have to worry about being tired. Yeah, I know: Mindfulness 101. Also Cognitive Therapy 101. It's just a new experiential insight for me, separating what is actually going on with me from the stories I tell myself about what is going on.

Heck, I love to tell stories to myself. And, others.

But I'm finding that when I'm in a depressed state of mind, it's best to let the storytelling fade away into a corner of my mind rather than taking center stage. When I talk to myself, these days often it isn't a conversation that I really want to have. So I'm doing my best to live as much as possible in the actual here and now rather than an imagined there and then.

Or, an interpretation of here and now that gets too far away from the physical facts of what I'm feeling at the moment. 

Lastly, I've got to give a shout-out to one of my favorite authors, Jack Haas. He wrote one of my favorite books, "The Way of Wonder." It's a strangely wonderful book that I bought nine years ago and have re-read several times. I've written several blog posts about the book and Haas' other writings (you can search for them in the Google box in the right sidebar). 

Today I thumbed through "The Way of Wonder" and came upon this passage. Perfect for my depressed mind!

We must forget the forgettable, become fools, have no purpose, and make the mind new at every moment. We must live without knowing what it is to live, and be without knowing what it is to be. That is how we plug into the mystery. That is how we... be.

(In case you're wondering, yes, I have some good doctors who are aware of my not-so-good state of mind, and I've got an appointment with a mental health nurse practitioner next week.)

Cowspiracy movie presents powerful reasons to go meatless

I'm no psychic. But it doesn't take any ESP abilities to say that most of the people reading this ate meat today -- Christmas. 

My wife and I didn't. Nor do we ever. 

Which explains why we felt a pleasing sense of self-satisfaction when we watched "Cowspiracy" at the Salem Progressive Film Series last week, since the basic message of the documentary is that eating meat and fish is one of the most environmentally destructive actions a person can engage in. 

The "spiracy" part of the title comes from the assertion that environmental organizations like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace have been deeply reluctant to publicize the connection between eating meat and destruction of our planet.

After all, as the movie says repeatedly, how we choose to feed ourselves is a highly personal question that's fraught with cultural implications. 

Having been a vegetarian since 1970, my 45 years of abstaining from meat and fish have taught me how true this is. When my daughter, Celeste, was born in 1972, my uncle kept telling me that her health would suffer if raised vegetarian. 

Her pediatrician also was skeptical. But now Celeste is a trim and fit 43. Her own daughter, Evelyn, also has been a vegetarian since birth and is doing fine at the age of eight.

So for most people there's no health reason to eat meat. And anyone who sees Cowspiracy will be exposed to lots of reasons why livestock and fish production is doing terrible things to Earth's ecosystems. 

Here's what the movie's co-director, Kip Andersen, said in an interview:

Well, I thought I was doing everything I could to help the environment--driving less, riding a bike, taking short showers. And then I found out a UN report study that our diet and raising animals for food livestock creates more human-caused greenhouse gases than all the transportation put together.

And then that led me on a journey of discovering that not only that, but this one industry is the leading cause of rainforest destruction, water consumption, water pollution, ocean dead zones, and species extinction, and basically across the board, and then to find out that our world's leading environmental organizations--Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Oceana, all these groups, they don't mention this anywhere. And it seemed, if anything, they might have been covering it up.

Apparently because those groups don't want to irritate their meat-eating supporters. There's also a hint in the movie that livestock producers give money to environmental organizations with the understanding that the groups will downplay the negative effects of meat and fish production.

(It doesn't matter, by the way, if wild fish are being eaten; Cowspiracy says that catching wild fish leads to huge numbers of "unintended kills" and the consequent depletion of fish populations.)

Our local alternative paper, Salem Weekly, had a good writeup on the movie. But it included a bit of skepticism.

The movie ends with a note of optimism, perhaps required in such a pessimistic film, but which might be questioned by viewers shaken by the message. Also, some facts and figures come so fast and furious that the source of any particular assertion is not always clear – a problem when a film makes such strong claims.

Yes, it's true that strong claims are made. To their credit, the moviemakers devote a page on the Cowspiracy website to documenting the sources of facts presented in the film. I didn't see or hear anything that made me think this can't be right. 

But since I've been a vegetarian for so long, and have read so much about the harmful effects of meat-eating, I wasn't shocked by how emphatically Cowspiracy calls upon people to give up eating meat and fish if they consider themselves environmentalists.

I do, though, still eat some dairy products. And the makers of Cowspiracy tout a vegan diet -- given how poorly cows are treated in the process of milk production, along with health and environmental reasons.

I typically eat yogurt every day. After seeing the movie, though, I got some soy yogurt and found that I liked it just as much as the regular variety. I doubt that I'll ever become a full-blown vegan, yet cutting down on the small amount of dairy products I eat (I drink soy milk) now is on my to-do list.

Interestingly -- could this be a sign from the Veggie Gods? -- the day after I saw Cowspiracy, I came across a bunch of links related to diet and the environment during my usual Internet browsing. 

Take a look at these if you need more convincing that meat-eating is bad both for you and the planet.

Food and Climate Change (David Suzuki Foundation)
Agriculture Was Left Out of the Paris Deal, But That Won't Stop Countries From Taking It On (Climate Progress)
A New Year resolution that's good for you and the planet: stop eating meat (The Guardian)
Michael Pollan on how America got so screwed up about food (Vox)

Here's the Cowspiracy trailer, which focuses on the conspiracy aspect of the movie. The next You Tube video presents the facts in Cowspiracy.