Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Two dozen members of Dr. Davis's Inner Circle site have reported unauthorized credit card charges or settings in the past few days. Many of the charges were to WalMart, churches or youth sports groups for a few cents--a telltale sign of a credit card scam.  Photo from Pixabay The site administrator is looking into it but cannot confirm whether the site was hacked or the data breach occurred elsewhere, adding that they use numerous security measures to protect credit card information. He says their processor (PayPal) sent him this message about "an industry-wide 'carding attack' which began on or about the first week of May":  The payment industry is being attacked by carding BOTs and this is causing an unfortunate disruption in service as we work to mitigate the issue. The BOTs are using compromised credit cards and performing $0 authorizations on many merchant websites causing a financial burden to everyone involved. We apologize in advance as we know our cardin...

Finishing my garden projects without aggravating my pinched nerve has been impossible. Weeding overgrown areas, pulling up the weed barrier under the weeds, hand-tilling the soil, grading it, then planting was about the most I could do without hurting myself--but then the lawn had to be mowed. Putting off mowing it just makes it harder later. The weather going from chilly to hot within two weeks offered a very short window to get everything done, but almost all of the nearly two hundred seedlings I started are in the ground.  The worst part about my pinched nerve is that I don't sleep well. It makes my left side buzz and keeps me awake. At that point, doing yoga just makes it worse--all that helps is aspirin.  So after weeding, tilling, grading and seeding a spot by the driveway this morning, I stopped for the day spent a pleasant hour enjoying some coffee and reading what the Indiana legislature was up to. They've set up a process to create urban agriculture zones, prioritize...

Let me start by saying I'm generally in favor of vaccines: I got a tetanus shot when I fell off my bike onto the pavement; I got a flu shot last year because I didn't think I could fight off both the flu and COVID if I was unlucky enough to get both. But one reason I haven't gotten a COVID shot is because there's no way of knowing the long-term effects, if any, of the new technology it uses.  Now I have another reason. For people like me (not old, diabetic, overweight or suffering from heart disease), the clinical trials of the vaccines showed a reduced absolute risk of getting COVID of...wait for it...around 1%.  Regular readers probably know about absolute risk vs. relative risk. Reducing your relative risk of something by 70% or 95%, as the vaccines do for symptomatic COVID infections, sounds like they are extremely effective. But when your risk of something is low enough to start with, reducing it further may not mean much. This graphic of a hypothetical vaccine tr...

I don't normally get into online arguments, especially now that vegetrollians have gone away to start eating meat again or scolding people for--well, practically anything nowadays. But something set me off the other day and I finally realized why.  A poster on a forum asked how he could cheaply obtain several hundred rose starts to make a giant rose garden out of an uncultivated piece of ground at his house. I love roses, I've grown a lot of them, and know what's required to grow them. I asked several questions about cost and maintenance of such a project and pointed out potential pitfalls, all of which he waved away, even though he mentioned he was on a budget.  For anyone under the delusion that gardening is a dainty hobby, a garden this size typically has a crew and a professional horticulturist to plant and take care of it. Annual pruning alone would take one person two solid weeks of stoop labor. And since rose gardens went out of style with bridge games and Tupperware...

Michigan sheriffs aren't the only ones against some of the state's COVID restrictions. Governor Gretchen Whitmer went to Florida to visit her father, weeks after warning others against taking spring break trips .  Michigan is currently the biggest COVID hotbed in the US. Nevertheless, Travel Michigan ran an ad on a local Indianapolis radio station this morning to entice Hoosiers to come visit "pure Michigan." Michigan is too far away to pick up Indy radio stations, so contrary to Travel Michigan's website, they couldn't have been trying to lure fellow Michiganders to take a camping trip, which is apparently allowed now.  Manistique MI--an island of calm in a sea of craziness. Photo from Pixabay . Maybe it's an unofficial acknowledgment that the lockdowns have only kicked the can down the road and that Michigan needs the revenue.  If I go to Lake Michigan this year--something I've meant to do for years--I'll probably stay on the Indiana side where ...

Sitting in another doctor's office this week, I wondered if I was on my way to a 17-year bout with diarrhea, like John Nicholson in The Meat Fix . I wondered if this doctor would have any fresh insights. I wondered why Community Health sent me to a clinic 30 miles away when I live in a city full of doctors. This doctor saw that the lab never ran the lab test for ova and parasites as they were supposed to, so she opened the order for the test. After an examination and taking my symptoms, she suggested seeing a gastronenterologist. I countered with a request for a prescription for a gut zoomer test. She looked it up and was skeptical of it and admitted she wouldn't know know to read the results, but she did write out a prescription for it. No way was I going to get scoped and run the risk of ending up like Wolverine , who went in healthy for a colonoscopy and nearly died after getting perforated and needing an intestinal transplant.  Later that day, my stomach felt like it was bu...

Hazards have been lurking where I never expected them. A chipped fuse on a pressure cooker last week, and last night, navy bean soup and probiotics.  The new fuse on my pressure cooker held out despite my apprehensions: it looked a little different from the old one and maybe it was cheap junk that would blow out and let hot soup spray me while I washed the dishes. But the fuse held and I had a wonderful dinner of navy bean soup. Later, though, I was thirsty and my potassium was low.  Then the trouble started at 4:00 this morning. I woke up hot and jittery with diarrhea and spent a rough day at work. I've also been having what feels like  sleep paralysis , but while I'm wide awake. The problem has to be bacteria--beans are full of prebiotics that bacteria love to eat. Dr. Davis said based on some similar reactions to SIBO yogurt, I'm probably having a die-off reaction from BNR17, one of the ingredients in SIBO yogurt and in the Synbiotic 365 I started taking a few months a...