Pain, Pain, Go Away!

That's what the title should have been for my blog post last June about the benefits I'd seen from strength training . Being happily ignorant of the big butt craze, I went on about losing enough fat to need new pants and lowering my fasting insulin. Maybe I should have been clear that my waist size went down and butt got bigger. (Sorry, no before and after shots--I don't take pictures of my ass.) Photo from Pixabay . The closest thing you'll get to a butt picture here. I only heard about the big butt craze a few days ago when YouTube suddenly started putting a bunch of BBL (Brazilian butt lift) videos in my feed. I have no idea why those came up. But some of the plastic surgeons making the videos have said that it's the riskiest plastic surgery--so risky that some of them won't do it--and that implants you sit on all day are going to move around.  Brave AI lists the risks of BBLs as fat embolism (potentially fatal), high mortality rate (1 in 3,000), loss of fat...

Keith Smith, the founder of and an anesthesiologist at the Oklahoma Surgery Center, was recently on EconTalk, a podcast from the Library of Economics and Liberty at Stanford University. The Oklahoma Surgery Center is unusual in that they don't deal with insurance companies, they do post all-inclusive prices on their web site, and they typically charge far less for the same procedures compared to regular hospitals. Time magazine interviewed a patient who had total knee replacement done there for $19,000. The average price in the US is $57,000. The actual cost to the hospital? At one, it turned out to be $10,550. Dr. Smith and host Russ Roberts discuss the surgery center and the US health care system in this mind-blowing episode . Sources: "Keith Smith on Free Market Health Care." Keith Smith and Russ Roberts, EconTalk, November 18, 2019.  https://www.econtalk.org/keith-smith-on-free-market-health-care/ "What Happens when Doctors Only Take Cash." Haley S...

It's been three and a half weeks since I first started Atkins induction. I had to stop for several days because of magnesium and potassium deficiencies (I unfortunately started the day before oral surgery, where I had a shot of epinephrine, which can also cause low potassium, and couldn't eat very much in the days following). I lost a few pounds right away, then another few when I restarted. Then I gained it all back due to, ahem, female hormones. That's never happened to me before. I didn't change the way I was eating: no chocolate indulgences or anything saltier than what I'd been eating, and a keto-stick showed large ketones. But I'm back to losing about 0.6 pounds a day. I started at 130; this morning I was 127 and had moderate to large ketones. My energy level is beyond what it was before I started. Sunday, for the first time in far too long, I took my dog for a long hike in the mountains, where she loves to swim in the creek. (She's doing her own ...

It's going both well and badly. My mouth is healing. It stopped bleeding after a day and the chunk my surgeon removed from the roof of my mouth (the size felt somewhere between a shotgun pellet and a pea) feels like it's mostly grown back. Both sites are still tender, though. I'm talking better; I could barely stand to move my mouth for a few days. And I'm down 4.1 pounds since I started Atkins induction a few days ago. But I spent an uncomfortable day today: my heart was pounding even though I was sitting at my desk having a slow day at work among pleasant coworkers. I popped potassium pills to little avail. My distress could have a few causes: Very low carb diet, which has given me palpitations before. Low blood pressure. Right before surgery--when I was about to have my mouth cut and sewn, and I needed a potassium pill to chill out--it was 97/60. Bleeding for a day and relaxing would have only lowered this number. Low blood sugar. I haven't taken my b...

I've run into a problem with Atkins induction: my brand new shorts are now so loose on me that I can get them on without unbuttoning them. Truly, two days ago, nothing in my usual size fit. Cue the sappy violin music. Having to have your clothes taken in isn't the worst problem. What about dental surgery, though? Back in my Body for Life days, I ate a lot of carbohydrate and ended up with a bunch of cavities, a few of them at the gumline of my bottom front teeth. As much as I brushed and flossed, I constantly had plaque on my teeth back then. Even though I haven't had any tooth decay since starting LC, the gumline there (where my old dentist had to remove gum tissue to put in a filling) has receded and I've had bone loss. Gum tissue doesn't stick to fillings, so it just keeps receding. To avoid any further bone loss, my oral surgeon (the one who gave me my dental implant a few years ago after an accident) grafted some tissue from the roof of my mouth to the gum. ...

Between severe episodes of TMJ, an oncoming cold and a mountain of work, I was tired and miserable this time last night. Thank goodness I didn't use any common sense, but, as Tom Naughton would put it, used my functioning brain. Fifty thousand IU of vitamin D last night strangled the cold in its cradle by mid-morning today. A few doses of Umcka Cold Care probably helped. My TMJ is back under control. On the assumption that my roaming TMJ pain was from a tension, pain and spasm cycle spiraling out of control, I started taking ibuprofin every few hours. Some extra magnesium might have helped, too. It's needed for proper muscle function, and you can burn through more than usual when you're under a lot of stress. Vitamin D is a natural anti-imflammatory, so it might have helped as well. The TMJ pain started Saturday night after I missed lunch, missed a dose of ibuprofin and worked at the office for a few hours after the heat shut off. I don't do well skipping m...

The past two days have seen a return of my TMJ problems, as severe as I had in 2007 after a car wreck. I've been trying all sorts of things to help, but the only thing so far that puts a dent in the pain is ibuprofin. The odd thing is, the site of the dental implant is tender, but feels fine. The teeth that were tender from being in braces feel fine. The agonizing pain wanders around my jaw joint, lower jaw, ear and sinus passages on my right side. It feels like a needle without anesthetic, except when the pain isn't there. I'm wondering if it could be someting a neurosurgeon described to me many years ago: tension leads to pain, which leads to spasms, which leads to tension, and so on. If that's the case, the best thing would be to take the ibuprofin at the first sign of a twinge of pain. I also feel like I'm getting a cold. Per the SWAMP protocol , I took 50,000 IU of vitamin D a few hours ago and already feel better. I took a chance having surgery so close t...

The short answer: like a moderate headache; it hasn't been nearly as bad as, say, a sprained ankle or wrist. Having my braces restrung was more painful than the surgery. Now for the long answer. My surgeon started with two shots, neither of which bothered me. (Full disclosure: I have a high threshold of pain and no aversion to needles. The surgeon remarked that most people find the second shot painful.) For the next 45 minutes or so, I sat there with my mouth open while he worked on me, feeling nothing. I saw him using a socket wrench on me (I've turned enough of them to know one), then saw him pulling thread. Finally, he showed me an x-ray of the titanium screw in my upper jaw. He explained that he didn't like the original position of my eye tooth, so he put the screw where there was more bone. Extracting a tooth and putting in an implant in one sitting was pushing the envelope, as he put it, but in the worst case, he'd extract it, let my mouth heal, and try again...

My surgery is tomorrow. I'm not looking forward to it, but at least I'm not seeing  Dr. Stephen Stein  tomorrow (not to be confused with the other Dr. Stein , whose mischief included turning a colleague into a zombie). A coworker told me today she was one of his patients. From CBS4 in Denver, There are now six former patients of a dentist accused of reusing needles who have tested positive for either hepatitis or HIV. It’s not known whether they contracted the diseases from Dr. Stephen Stein’s office. Stein has since surrendered his license as an oral surgeon. About 8,000 of Stein’s patients were sent letters asking them to get tested. The health department says it’s impossible to definitively tell if the infected patients got sick from Stein. I figured I'd better check out my oral surgeon. The Colorado government site to check out dentists is down for maintenance. But according to Healthgrades.com, my oral surgeon doesn't have a history of malpractice or...

 Newly planted yellow sundrops line the path to my door. Photo from wildflower.org.  My fractured arm continues to heal. Tonight, I set out 15 plants in my front yard, then stopped only because it was dark. Tomorrow night, I'll plant five clumps of tall grass in place of the large spruce my neighbors cut down. I'm hoping the grass will shade and cool the wild roses and golden currants to the north of them. Friday, I met with my oral surgeon. As soon as I can get a temporary tooth made, he'll extract the broken tooth and (if possible) implant the titanium screw where the root is now. Down time should be about two days. The temporary tooth will be attached to my braces. It'll take four months to heal, and then my dentist will put in the permanent tooth. My insurance doesn't cover braces for anyone over age 19, nor does it cover tooth implants. (The alternative to an implant is bridge work, which destroys the two surrounding teeth.) They might m...

Eleven years after my nose job, my nose has finally healed. Back in 1999, I had septoplasty to straighten the inside of my nose . My doctor told me it would help me prevent my frequent sinus infections. (It didn't.) For the first time, I could breathe through both sides of my nose at once, but at the cost of constant nosebleeds. The septum (the cartilage inside the center of the nose) didn't heal until a few weeks ago. Last May--seven months ago--I started taking megadoses of zinc. The nosebleeds mostly stopped. Then a few weeks ago after reading an abstract (1) on iron interfering with zinc absorption, I began taking iron at night and zinc in the morning. (According to the article, the interference applies only to non-food sources of the minerals. Go ahead and have your surf and turf without worry.) An aside: since taking my iron and zinc at different times, I've been able to cut down on the magnesium. I went from 750 mg to 500 mg per day. Over the past year, I've ta...

Until recently, I'd been having bad nosebleeds for a while. Specifically, since November 1999 when I had septoplasty surgery. My otolaryngologist recommended it because I had a deviated septum (that's the stiff middle part of the inside of the nose) and enlarged turbinates . I had frequent sinus infections and supposedly, this surgery would help prevent them. (It didn't. But it was nice to be able to breath through both sides of my nose at the same time.) About a month ago, I read the following in Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution p. 126, published in 1972: About vitamins in general, I don't believe in minimum daily requirements. I believe in optimum dosage. I have used vitamins in megadoses in my practice with great success. .... You cannot safely increase the standard dosage of Vitamin A (5,000 international units) nor of Vitamin D (400 international units). But so-called overdoses of the other vitamins are simply flushed away by the kidneys. And the mineral and vitami...