Pain, Pain, Go Away!

A recent injury left my toe pink and black. I called the color palette "Step into Danger," but Too Faced calls it "Romantic Eye." In fairness, my toe is much brighter. Really, I slathered on the eye shadow. Sometimes a mishap shakes us out of a routine and inspires something new. Viva antifragility !

Rat chow: that's what Ensure and Enterex Diabetic drinks remind me of. I'm not into protein drinks anymore--haven't been in years--but my parents are elderly and it's hard for them to cook. They're also diabetic, and yet my father's doctor recommended two Ensure drinks per day. That's 80 grams, or 18 teaspoons, of liquid sugar. The main ingredients in Ensure: Water, Sugar, Corn Maltodextrin, Milk Protein Concentrate, Soy Oil, Soy Protein Isolate, Cocoa Powder (Processed with Alkali), Pea Protein Concentrate, Canola Oil.  Seriously--the second ingredient is sugar. (Corn maltodextrin in a starchy food additive.) Isn't that a big ol' clue that this isn't suitable for diabetics? A pharmacist recommended Enterex Diabetic . It has fewer carbs, but 24 grams of liquid carbohydrate is too much at one sitting for many diabetics. The ingredients: Water, Maltodextrin, Sodium Caseinate, High-Oleic Safflower Oil, Calcium Caseinate, Fiber (Soy Fib...

I feel like I've awakened from a dream. The past few days have been spent crowding out pain signals with music, like sending an avalanche down a mountain gulley. I wondered if some people could manage pain with a Wii or a karaoke machine even better than with music alone. But the music came to be a distraction about the time my foot stopped hurting today. I promised some coworkers more work than I could deliver, which I never do, so I'll be back at work tomorrow. Some studies say that music that you love can make your brain release dopamine. I did feel like something was different, and that I was myself again once I was able to work in silence. Dopamine is a reward neurotransmitter, but I'd had enough music, even though it was rewarding. My foot, whose problems started this, is doing better, so much so that I was able to run for the bus tonight after a former coworker saw me at the bus stop and we started chatting while my bus drove by. I didn't just trot, I ran. M...

It's been almost a year since my bike wreck. I'm happy to say that there are no lingering effects from my fractured arm or dental injuries, and in another five months, I'll have replenished my emergency funds. I'm not quite as pleased to say I'm observing the near-anniversary with a badly stubbed toe. A day and a half ago, I was watering the pots when I tripped over the old, rotted steps I disconnected from the house and stubbed my toe on the brand new steps I built. It still hurts. It hurts more than the fractured arm did. It's almost as bad as turf toe . It really hurts when I stand. It hurts a lot less when I elevate my foot and rub the bottom of it or elevate it and listen to music. I was at work and in too much pain to go down and get coffee when I put on Alice Cooper and suddenly--no pain. It's just one more reason to love Alice Cooper. I noticed the same thing back in 2007 when I was infected, recovering from a car wreck and had GI problems. S...

My last post discussed the book It Starts with Food and the principles it's based on. Going over the post, I realized that the part about hormones raised some questions. How do cells become insulin resistant? How can too much insulin lead to weight gain? Does too much carbohydrate cause leptin resistance? I'm looking again at the book Endocrinology: Basic and Clinical Principles by Shlomo Melmed and P. Michael Conn from 2005. The book says it isn't clear how insulin resistance develops, but says that it is a "key feature of the prediabetic 'metabolic syndrome' (central obesity, hypertension, insulin resistance, and dyslipidemia)" (page 318). It doesn't say how to reverse it. The book does say that insulin promotes fat formation and inhibits fat burning: Insulin promotes lipid synthesis and inhibits lipid degradation. Before insulin became available for treatment of type 1 diabetes, patients with this disease were invariably thin, reflecting ...

"Out with the old spiritual mumbo jumbo, the superstitions, and the backward ways. We're gonna see a brave new world where they run everybody a wire and hook us all up to a grid. Yes, sir, a veritable age of reason." -Ulysses McGill, O Brother, Where Art Thou? If only. Eighty years after the Tennessee Valley was put on the grid, health gurus recommend mumbo-jumbo like two-thirds of a cup of sugar a day for diabetics ,* inflammatory foods like wheat for the inflamed , and a low-fat, high-fiber, grain-based diet that fattens up livestock (in weeks!)** but is supposed to make humans slim and trim. The crazies are running the asylum. Are there any reasonable people in the mainstream? I recently sent a friend of mine the book It Starts with Food. It discusses the major hormones involved in fat storage, fat burning and inflammation, along with the authors' dietary recommendations based mostly on our paleolithic ancestors' diets and their clinical experience....

Answer: because probably, nobody else will. Awhile back, my mother's new primary care doctor saw her for a checkup. According to Mom, the doctor took her blood sugar and wrote "diabetes out of control" on her chart and prescribed Metformin and Lantus (insulin). The doctor didn't look at the blood sugar records Mom brought. Maybe it's the new medication, maybe because an infection cleared up, or maybe Mom has gotten more insulin sensitive, but she's been getting hypos in the morning. It's dangerous to have blood sugar get too low during the night. The doctor is hard to reach, and who knows how good she is at dosing insulin. Mom had been fiddling around with her evening insulin dose, but without checking her blood sugar first. So today, after she got her blood sugar up from this morning's level of 55 (70-100 is normal), I suggested she check her blood sugar before taking her evening insulin. When she checked it tonight, it was 70. After doing some...