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Fastest Injury Recovery EVER

I just had the fastest recovery from a muscle injury EVER. Two days ago, I twisted the wrong way while playing with my dog and hurt my back. It felt like an oblique muscle was pulled. It hurt every time I moved, even in bed. The next day after I took a shower, it was gone. Not better, but gone.  Yogurt: stronger than it looks! Photo from Pixabay . A few months ago, working for a few hours on my garage left me feeling like I'd been run over .  The only thing I'm doing differently is eating yogurt made with Bacillus Coagulans Unique IS-2. I ate my normal amount of it, maybe even less, over the past few days. I started making and eating it around mid-November. I've had a number of muscle injuries over the years (including turf toe, which was nearly as painful as an infected tooth, and a couple of bad sprains that took a year to completely heal). I'm blown away at how fast I mended this time. Dr. Davis says his daughter, who plays competitive tennis, uses B. coagulans GBI

Was there a Thanksgiving Bump?

Wholesome holiday or superspreader supper? Photo from Pixabay . Doomers warned of a Thanksgiving bump in COVID cases. "A surge upon surge," warned Fauci; " assume that you were exposed and you became infected," advised Birx . Some states instituted restrictions : New Mexico issued a stay-at-home order; Washington state banned indoor restaurant service for a month; Michigan banned indoor dining service for three weeks. North Dakota and Iowa, meanwhile, finally told people to wear face coverings if they're out in public. South Dakota stayed its libertarian course. What were the effects of these various orders, or lack of them? The US has seen increasing COVID deaths and hospitalizations over the past few weeks. Thanksgiving was Thursday, November 26; it's now three weeks later. Was it due to Thanksgiving gatherings? Charts below are from CovidTracking.com , accessed December 16. Thanksgiving bump? Well, it doesn't look like a bump, but a trend that starte

"We Don't Know the Long-term Consequences of COVID Vaccines"

 Biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying discuss the unknowns of the new COVID vaccines.  Highlights: This is the first time it's been approved in humans It doesn't contain the virus (it's an mRNA vaccine and might be very safe) But we inherintly don't know what's down this novel road We don't know what the long-term consequences of the vaccine are Is vaccinating our whole medical workforce a good idea, not knowing the long-term consequences of the vaccine? Long video, but worth your time.

Frustrations! GERD, Masks and Carrageenan

I'll start with the good news: my Thanksgiving vacation didn't give me COVID. Since I don't have any major risk factors and I'm not 80 years old, I'm not surprised. Yesterday I was able to whip the yard into shape with the mower, rake, hedge trimmers and a sawzall . It was a beautiful sunny day, like winter in Denver, and most of my coworkers who give me work were in training. I was outdoors in a t-shirt. The thyroid problems seem like they're behind me.  But my GERD is back. After coming back from Ohio, I bought a magazine full of delicious looking keto recipes and made some of them: keto pound cake, keto brunch, keto enchiladas, and keto broccoli soup. The last two were heavenly going down--then they started pushing up acid. It's thought to be too much bacteria that creates gas and causes GERD; I wonder if the culture in the cheese has something to do with it, too.  Cheese: my love for you is way out of line. So I was suffering after having the enchiladas

Ignoring the Experts on Thanksgiving

Expert advice for Thanksgiving was to stay home. But I've been ignoring most experts' health advice for ten years and enjoyed good health for it; we'll see in a few weeks if this latest decision was sublime or ridiculous. I drove 300 miles to Cleveland. I hugged my cousin and finally met her husband. I ate food I shouldn't have. The three of us went to restaurants and attractions. We didn't do anything ridiculous or illegal--we all wore masks in public places and none of us were sick. Nobody I encountered seemed ill and nobody formed a crowd. I hung out with people for the first time in almost a year, relaxed and slept nine hours a night. It was health food for the soul and I'd do it again.  Sublime? Ridiculous? It can be hard to tell. Photo from Amazon . The day before I left, I made vegetarian collards from the garden and low-carb pumpkin pie. My cousin is a vegetarian, but she cooks meat for me when I'm there and I bring vegetarian food when I visit. I al

Thanksgiving is ON

What Gov. Newsom & top doctors really think of California's COVID restrictions. Thanksgiving alone is too much even for someone like me. I'm secular, I'm a loner, I don't keep in touch with many family members. But a family holiday alone ( alone together is nonsense) is too strange even for me. A month and a half in quarantine last spring was tolerable because I was ill and too tired to do much after work. Summer and fall, I rehabbed my garage. Now? I ruminate over the sort of things that get worse when they're picked at.  I spent my first Thanksgiving in Indiana with a friend and her family and subsequent ones with a few members from my meetup group. This year, I'll be at a cousin's house. The weather in Cleveland, where she lives, is supposed to dry--something of a Thanksgiving miracle.  Risks? I'm about as likely to die of COVID as I am to get shot in Indianapolis: a few chances in ten thousand, at most. I don't have risk factors like diabetes

South Dakota, Sweden are Failures--Compared to What?

The Badlands of South Dakota. An article today in The Spectator ( US and UK ) decries the lack of regulations in South Dakota to deal with the coronavirus, calling it a "failed experiment." The author compares South Dakota's response, or lack of it, to Sweden--and then calls Sweden a failure, too. From this, he concludes that lack of coronavirus regulation allows rampant spreading of the disease, and implies that strict regulation controls it. Does it really--and are those devil-may-care Swedes and South Dakotans about to drop like flies? Let's look at their numbers and compare them not to perfection, but to some places that have had strict regulations to get an idea how well the regulations might be working. The article doesn't specify which measures should be mandated, so let's assume lockdowns.  I'll avoid using out-of-the-way places and epicenters, since they would have low or high numbers no matter what they did. And since there's been so much v