Burdens and Blessings

I have held off blogging about The Enigma in the hopes that she would blog for herself; such a thing would be extremely challenging, and I've seen some kids do it who are then attacked by their commenters as being fakes.

There is a process called "facilitated communication" by which one person holds the brain-injured person's hand at the wrist and this helps the brain-injured person "type out" a message on a board. The reaction from the casual bystander is to think the facilitator is doing it, not the brain-injured person. (Of course, anyone who tried to force The Enigma to do anything would realize how silly an idea that was.)

You can read about one aspect of the controversy here. The Enigma is one of those kids who has gradually gained independence in facilitation. For some things, she doesn' t need any help at all any more.

In the previous post, Troop mentioned something about having crosses to bear, and it reminded me of a discussion I'd had with a friend when The Enigma was around ten. He was talking about a basketball player or movie star who had a handicapped kid (maybe adopted one, even).

"They say it's a blessing? Is it?"

"What?"

"Having a special needs child. Celebrities are always talking about what a blessing it is."

"Are you nuts?"

I thought—and I still think—this is just a stupid celebrity thing. I mean, what are they going to say: "Every day is a soul-crushing burden"? (Not that I have felt that way, but I've certainly seen parents who did.)

It's hard to enumerate the costs. Financially ruinous, of course, several times. (Most recently, shortly after being reduced to a part-time employee, The Enigma incurred a $12,000 dental bill.) My own health shot (or at least diminished), as I've spent 15 years tending her at nights because she doesn't sleep well. (Health experts disagree on a lot of things, like nutrition and exercise, but they all seem to agree that not getting enough sleep will kill you.)

To say nothing having missed many of the joys of a normal life with her, and feeling that loss acutely as each of her siblings grow up.

A blessing?

But then, it has to be said that if the condition is horrible, some of the fallout has been decidedly positive. The Enigma attended a special school where they said their ABCs and motored her through doing cut-outs; at twelve, with the help of the Institutes, we put her on a home program, where she ultimately developed the ability to comprehend over 20 different languages.

So, her siblings also have been homeschooled. The Boy was a particular beneficiary as he could've skated through school on charm.

Also, looking into alternative approaches to handling The Enigma's condition led to the elimination of my allergies, and seems to have The Boy on the road to recovery for his diabetes.

Now, I've come to understand The Enigma somewhat better over the years. We don't really understand these kids—I'll get into why in a later post, but curiously tantalizing fact is that blood tests on them have revealed compounds similar to hallucinogens—and it's true that they are alien to us, in the sense of their experience and intelligence. (Homo sapiens bases its idea of intelligence on the ability to speak.)

But even respecting that difference, let's not pretend that brain injury is not a deficiency. Even if it results in hyper-intelligence in certain areas (as I believe it does, which is something else I'll get into later), let's not go down the deaf route of declaring some kind of legitimate lifestyle choice.

It's a challenge. And a struggle. But as Troop points out, there are many crosses to bear. If there's a sin, it's allowing yourself being defined by the burdens rather than the blessings.

Introducing The Enigma

Although I haven't blogged about her explicitly, The Boy, The Flower and The Barbarienne have an older sister, who for blogging purposes, I'll refer to as "The Enigma". The Enigma is the oldest, and as all first children, she was life-changing.

The Enigma was especially life-changing, as she is severely brain-injured.

A botched surgery at four days left her with a host of developmental problems. A lot of the references I make to things like the ketogenic diet, the IAHP, or "snake oil" in general come from the experiences I've had trying to help her. ("Standard" treatment for brain-injured kids these days is to load 'em up with drugs for depression and hyperactivity, give them a lot of useless therapy, warehouse them in special—er, wait, now we pack 'em in with the rest of the kids, no matter how inappropriate—and load up the parents with antidepressants, while we're at it.)

One thing parents of brain-injured children tend to do is to look at other brain-injured children and thing "If only...". It can be hard to comprehend for someone with "normal" children, but I can look at Down's Syndrome kids and think, "They've got it easy."

I'm not going to be coy: I'm blogging now because of Simon's tweets about his son, who reminds me strongly of some of the kids the IAHP has treated over the years.

One of the eye-opening things they do at the IAHP is that they point out that kids like The Enigma, because they're obviously brain-injured, are given certain leeway. Society dismisses them, sure, but because of that, when they do something socially incorrect, the thought process is "Well, they're retarded." Or whatever the word du jour is.

But massive numbers of children are brain-injured in ways that have no visible trace. The various syndromes referred to as ADHD or dyslexia or things that don't even have names yet leave a child who looks perfectly normal, yet who is unable to function in some critical way.

These kids are "stupid", "lazy" or just plain "bad". I was in a room full of parents of severely brain-injured kids, and not one of us didn't tear up hearing about kids who were so high functioning, that they were actually treated worse than our own kids.

When I hear about Simon's kid, I think of a story they told at the Institutes of a teen who had been brought in because he always made the wrong choice. Well, that's weird, isn't it? It doesn't sound like a brain problem.

Now, anyone who reads this blog knows I'm big on looking at spiritual causes, responsibility, discipline. But, to draw an analogy, if the body is a computer and the brain is the CPU, then if the CPU is screwed up, it doesn't really matter what the computer user's intentions are. The results will be screwed up.

This kid who always made the wrong choice was brought in for an interview. And after exchanging some light interview questions, the interviewer adjourned with the kid to show him around the campus.

On the way out, he asked him to turn off the light—a little desk lamp.

And the kid reached for it with one hand. Then he stopped. Then he reached for it with the other hand. Then there was this little struggle. This kid couldn't turn off a light! Instead, after agonizing for several seconds, he grabbed it and tried to smash it on the floor. (I don't recall if he succeeded.)

It's sort of astounding. I might even be disinclined to believe it, but I see similar behaviors from The Enigma on a daily basis. I see "normal" kids all the time and can spot the brain injuries that will go unnoticed for all their lives. You can imagine the reaction of a parent to the notion that their beautiful, perfect child is "brain-injured". It's better, in most cases, not to bring it up.

(This, in my opinion, is due to the complete failure of "standard" treatments to do anything at all about brain injuries, so a brain injury is considered a sort of life sentence.)

An average kid who functions normally in most instances is almost never going to be correctly identified as far as brain injuries go. In most cases, that just means they'll go through life thinking they're clumsy, or unable to do certain things. In other cases, the results are more dire.

Now, where I get jealous of kids like this is that the fix is ridiculously easy, at least compared to the more severe injuries, many of which are not totally fixable (at least not by the IAHP's methods).

Anyway, my heart goes out to Simon and his family. I hope they find an answer.

So Many Chemicals, So Little Time

One of my favorite quacks—and I use that term affectionately is a lady named Hulda Clark. She has a theory that all diseases are the result of chemicals and parasites (using the term "parasites" to mean any bacteria, virus, fungus or actual worm). More specifically, that what goes wrong is that modern chemicals interact with parasites and cause them to go through their life cycles in "the wrong place".

So, while your body may be able to handle Ascaris going through your intestines, if it gets into your liver and interacts with propyl alcohol, bang, you get cancer. I may have that muddled. But the basic idea is there: wrong organism, wrong place, wrong chemical — disease.

Of course, the only thing more common than propyl alcohol is Ascaris, so it's hard to get clean. However, I met many people whom she had cured of "terminal" cancer when I went to her clinic. (Not just cancer, either. And whatever her motivations are, greed does not seem to be among them.)

I thought of her fondly while reading this Pop Sci article on chemicals. We carry around, literally, thousands of different chemicals, largely unknown both in terms of how they affect us singly and how they interact with each other. That's before we get around to medicating ourselves.

There are a few mentalities that I find interesting, which that tiny webspace illustrates. First, there's the idea that "this it the new normal", according to a scientist in D.C. Keep that in mind: It doesn't really matter if these chemicals are going to kill you, don't expect anyone to acknowledge anything too challenging. (And getting rid of these chemicals would be very challenging indeed.)

Second, there's the idea that "we're living longer so we must be doing something right". Well, not really: What if shortened life spans in previous centuries had to do with cosmic rays? I'm just pulling that out of thin air, but it shared thin-airspace with "we must be doing something right".

Third, there's the comment that, well, whatever the issue is, it's too trivial to waste time on. It's only a few extra sick kids after all—this idea is based on the example of leukemia used by the article's author—and we'd do better to use that money for helping kids presumably not killed by exposure to chemicals. (Interestingly, the name on the comment is "Shannon Love". ChicagoBoyz' Shannon Love spurred a very early post. Dunno if it's the same one.)

There's a certain class of people who absolutely hate "quacks", where "quack" is defined as anyone who doesn't conform to the current conventional medical wisdom. On the other hand, I consider Ignaz Semmelweiss sort of the patron saint of this blog.

Clark is an interesting person. Very nerdy. Into research. I would have liked to question her on certain things about her philosophy (in which I see certain apparent contradictions). But to me the question of "does it work" is junior to the question "why does it work?"

And since I used her "zapper"—a device that cycles a low level current at various frequencies through your body to kill these parasites—to quickly knock out some debilitating allergies that had been plaguing me for years, I'm less inclined to worry about those contradictions. She could be completely wrong, but I still can breathe.

The Race Against Time

As the struggle to increase state control over health care continues, it occurs to me that this is a race against time.

Sure, this is often been framed as a race against time, in the sense that Obama needs to spend his political capital as fast as he can before the impact of his actual actions (or inaction) start to deplete it.

But there's another race against time: The more time passes, the harder and harder it gets to pretend that "Well, Europe does this, and they're all just swell as can be!"

'cause, of course, they're not. Right now, Americans (on the whole) would not tolerate the sort of care that Canadians and British receive. The French system is supposedly top notch, but of course it's in the red to the tune about 10% of its total budget, can't be decreased, and so of course will only increase.

On top of that, you have the constant double-digit unemployment and the sometimes staggering poverty levels of western Europe.

Even the middle-class in, say, Scandinavian countries, which are often heralded as blissful blonde paradises, can't (for example) go to lunch routinely. It's a significant expense. Not surprising, when you consider how much a Big Mac costs. Not surprisingly, Sweden, Norway and Denmark are in the top 5 of the Big Mac Index.

I haven't been able to validate the $8.99 footlong sub at Subway, talked about in that PJTV video, but most things are taxed to death. I once sent a Dutch pal a $20 computer game because it was $70 in his country.

Last time we voted down government medicine was 15 years ago. And it was tabled for all that time, and all that time the countries that had government medicine have only gotten more in debt. 15 from now, some of them (at least) will be bankrupt, and that will be the least of their problems, one suspects.

So, if we can win this battle, that might end the argument for the century.

It'll come back, of course. Tyranny always comes back in one form or another. All we can do is fight it off every single time.

Eternal vigilance.

Wherein I Throw Down With XWL

XWL over at Immodest Proposals commits the ultimate crime here.

That's right, folks, he disses the placebo. Here at the 'strom, it's a toss up as to whether we prefer placebos or snake oil, but both have an exalted position in our world.

I'll concede his basic point that vague diseases lend themselves to vague cures. But it's a mistake to regard placebos as meaning that the patient was never sick to begin with. A lot of people tend to think that psychosomatic illnesses aren't real, that they're "all in your head".

But of course, they are real. The symptoms match those of "real" diseases. It seems to me that a psychosomatic condition could have a perfectly ordinary biological origin, but be held in place by a state of mind. The placebo gives the mind an excuse to let go of the symptoms, basically.

There's a congruence of mind and body not to be overlooked. If you injured your leg and tended to favor it, it would get stiff. And you might, noticing that it was stiff, tend to keep favoring it, actually making it stiffer. If you were convinced, on the other hand, that it was all right and just needed a little exercise, not only would you tend not to favor it, your body would probably create conditions more inclined to relax it.

The real question is how many diseases could be positively influenced by a placebo. Sometimes, I suspect, all of them. A midwife I knew said that while labor hurt, a lot of that hurt was a combination of past pain and future pain. In other words, remembering the previous contraction and fearing the next one made the present contraction three-times as bad as it really was.

I often wonder how much we could do with a really good placebo. I've mentioned my friend who died of cancer (three years ago now) and as I sat with her as she lay dying, I contemplated a chicken sacrifice. Rattle shaking. Dancing in a mask. I would've done it if I thought I could've convincingly sold it. Or if I could've hooked up a couple of Tesla coils and Jacob's ladders, and pulled a mad scientist.

There are examples of just about every disease getting spontaneously better. Maybe that's what we should be looking at rather than running placebos down.

Separation of Medicine and State

The latest encroachment of state upon medicine is, I think most of us realize, nothing novel. We have socialized medicine elsewhere in the world, and no matter how badly it fails and how reductive of liberty it is, the drumbeat to implement it here has been constant throughout my lifetime. But the slope didn't start slipping with Medicare or any of the other government programs; in my opinion, the journey predates modern collectivism by centuries.

I've written before about how my great-grandmother was threatened with arrest for curing TB patients. This would've been in the early decades of the 20th century. But she was hardly alone: Medical guilds have been attacking outsiders since the days they were respectable barbers with a shady side-business.

Basically, when the various medical associations managed to get a monopoly on treating the sick, and got the force of the state on their side, they not only diminished prospects for health (in the name of protecting people, of course, it's always in the name of protecting people), they signed their own death warrant.

Someone else at Ace's or Althouse mentioned Microsoft, which is a propos because one of Microsoft's tactics for conquering a niche has always been to "partner" with their future competitors, usually offering some tempting deal. At that point they'd steal code (for example), and integrate it into the OS. Cut off their oxygen, as I think MS CEO Steve Ballmer put it. At that point, you can either outlawyer them, buy them off cheap (if you need to buy them off at all), and voila, you own the market.

I actually consulted for a company that partnered with MS. I was astonished that they partnered with them, seemed to be proud of that fact, and watched as MS created a competitor that is now included with every version of Windows. But at least they're still in business.

That's, of course, similar to how the government works, as well. The government "partners" with doctors--and look how tight the AMA and government are--offering them the sweet deal of a monopoly, and wiping out their competition. (Remember, the government just spent $2.5 billion to prove that none of these other things work. Meanwhile tens of billions go into curing cancer with no appreciable progress made.)

And while the government forbade compensation increases during WWII (to stem inflation), they exempted medical insurance, thus leading to the current weird situation where one is beholding to an employer for tax-deductable coverage or else stuck buying their own, giving us the current market distortions in the insurance market. (Well, that and all the other "help" the government gives.)

And now it's time to pay the piper: The price for the monopoly--for convincing the country that there is only way to treat medical problems, and that there is only one source for that treatment--is to become public servants, under the thumb of the government. In the words of Darth Vader, "I have altered the deal. Pray that I don't alter it again."

The thing that got me thinking about this was stumbling across this somewhat overblown video on poor Willhelm Reich. I referred to him as a "probable quack" in my previous post, which was just a flip statement (plus, like "snake oil", I use "quack" affectionately).

I don't know if Reich was really a quack or not. I do know that he was destroyed, just like my old pal Ignaz Semmelweis, and his writings actually banned by the government! (Or so they say; I haven't seen the order.) I'm not sure how the First Amendment allows celebrities to be attacked with known lies, but also allows controversial philosophical and medical ideas to be banned.

But I do think it's kind of interesting that I keep seeing "the ether" pop up in scientific articles. And I'm pretty sure that it's within my rights as an American--or it was supposed to be--to explore such ideas, however wacky, stupid or even personally harmful, they might be. I think the Founding Fathers would have wanted me to be able to buy an orgone box if I felt like.

Hell, Franklin would've gone halfsies with me.

Weird Science

We were back at the dietitian's last Friday after a couple of weeks away, and both I and The Boy were dehydrated. Not a huge surprise, really: We'd been walking around the college, in the heat, I'd been working out a bit more, etc.

As a coda to this post about my weird dream, the dietitian was giving us signs of dehydration to watch for, so that we would know when to drink extra water. First one she mentions? Weird dreams. General sleep disturbances (I hadn't been sleeping well, or at least not long enough.)

So far, though, everything that she said would happen has happened. We had some blood sugar crashes early on (as The Boy's body released the artificial insulin it stored up) and then, in line with his graph being in the right place, he's started to have sugar in his urine.

Generally, you don't want sugar in your urine, but in this case it's supposed to be indicative of the healing process. Intriguingly, The Boy's sugars are very well in control, if a little wild. (They'll get suddenly high, then drop down just as suddenly, though never into a dangerous zone.) He's also on half the per-meal insulin he was a few months ago.

The theory is that artificial insulin is like a cast for the pancreas, so once the body starts healing, you need to take the cast off, letting your sugars get a bit high so that the pancreas will be stimulated to start producing.

I'm sure this could cause a panic attack in a lot of medical professionals. I'm sure it's dangerous. But you know what? So is diabetes-for-the-rest-of-your-life. They kind of feed you a cock-and-bull story about how you can be in the NBA and live a normal life, but the long term consequences for a diabetic, even one with well-controlled blood sugar, are really pretty horrible.

I love mainstream medicine, don't get me wrong, but really only for emergencies. Bad infections, broken bones, heart attacks, and so on. But if I have high blood pressure, I don't want to take a pill forever. I want my blood pressure back to normal. Same with high cholesterol.

But even if you're an all-mainstream-medicine-all-the-time-guy, the FDA sits on drugs that might help people in the name of protecting them, essentially protecting them to death. "Excuse me, Mr. Government, sir, but I'd like to try that cancer medicine, even if it might kill me. Because I'm going to die anyway."

I think Man has an inalienable right to his snake oil, as I've said here many times. I'm sure, in my case, that it's part of the pursuit of happiness. And in everyone's case, it's a matter of sovereignty over his body.

If the government would leave my body and my property alone, I'd be happy to have the social liberals and conservative battle out whatever they wanted.

All Clear

OK, so tests came back and everything's fine.

Phew.

Everyone's happy with the results. No need for further tests. And my dietary numbers look good, too. Well, not good, but better.

I'm still not allowed to exercise. Exercise may have contributed to the situation, actually. (Though my money's still on the antibiotics.)

In any event, I'm good to go. I live...again.

UPDATE: And pardon my manners. Thank you all for being so supportive here. Means a lot, even though I wasn't all that communicative about it.

Medicine and Technology

The Boy and I watched an interesting demo today on a device that monitors blood sugar continuously for 72 hours. I was a little disappointed by it, because I thought it was going to be something like a watch you could look at to see your blood sugar at any time. Instead, it doesn't transmit the information at all. After the 72 hours you remove it and a computer reads the data.

How positively medieval.

This is all a come-on for an insulin pump. If I had known that, I probably wouldn't have bothered. Two extra trips downtown (one for the demo and sensor insertion, one to drop off the sensor later) for something I don't think we'll be using, but it was kind of interesting. The basic premise is simple enough: You wear an external device that acts sort of as a pancreas.

The pancreas does more than produce insulin but, hey, it's a start.

Anyway, the boy raked the rep--who was, of course, cute and hot, as all such reps seem to be--and the doctors over the coals: What were the bugs? What could go wrong with the system? His syringes sometimes leak, what if that happened? What if his blood sugar dropped too low at night? How would he know what his blood sugar was at any given moment?

The technology is pretty good, though, and delivers small amounts of insulin over time rather than big loads, and apparently can actually do so based on blood sugar readings from the sensor. (Via wireless bluetooth! Now we're talking! The rep said one guy had the readings hooked to his car GPS.)

Part of the appeal of this is that you can eat whatever you want, whenever you want.

But, you know, what if that's how you got into the mess you're in in the first place?

The Boy's numbers are looking good anyway. In the two months since we started the diet his scores have dropped 20% (lower is better), and he's started lowering his insulin again. (This time, theoretically, he should be able to keep the insulin lowered.)

The outlook for me is not so rosy, unfortunately. My numbers are rather dire and getting worse, and despite a checkout from a doctor, I'll be having X-rays and bloodwork done tomorrow. So wish me luck. (Again.)

Correction

I mentioned over at Althouse that my stay in the hospital (I was seven or eight weeks premature) cost $25/day versus the $2,500/day last time I checked. That's the baseline. It doesn't cover any extras, just a warm crib in a room full of other cribs and nurse/nuns. (Now ) And a doctor checking in once or twice a day.

I mis-spoke. The cost of NICU back in my infancy was ONE dollar/day. My entire stay cost, adjusting for inflation, about $160.

My poor parents (with no insurance, or at least none that covered this) had to pay that out of pocket.

I wonder if they wrote a check.

De-Talks

I wrote about fairness not long ago on these virtual pages and I wanted to point out that there is one area in which I'm particularly unreasonable on the topic: My children.

In an early experiment with one of the Boy Scout groups, The Boy entered a Pinewood Derby. Apart from shaping the wood with the power tools, which no one in his age group could do, I required him to do everything on his own. I was there to offer advice--not that I had much to give--but I wasn't going to be sanding, oiling, talcing or whatever tricks they do for those things.

Which, on the day of the race was evident, were extensive and well researched by all the fathers involved. The disinterest from the actual boys was obvious but the guys my age? They were into it. Not even the vaguest premise of having the troopers do their own work.

This is a minor unfairness, and it had its own value in showing The Boy the way of the world.

A more serious unfairness is that The Boy has been sick for the past three days from drinking water and the vegetable juice. His blood sugars have been great, fortunately, and this is precisely what the doctor said would happen, but I feel bad.

I'm an old man (at least relatively) and somehow this stuff isn't affecting me negatively at all. It's just unfair that a 13-year-old should have to put up with it. His whole life's been a lot harder than it should be. We do this on the hope that he'll come out the other side better.

Which brings me to the subject of de-toxification.

Detoxification is a hot topic because every quack pedlling snake oil talks about "detox". Like those foot guys on the television selling wasabi or kinoki or shinobi or whatever it is that, if I'm not mistaken, takes the dirty outer layer of skin off your feet and tells you you're being purified.

The drinking of distilled water at regular intervals is done to provide the body with a basic, necessary resource to let it do its thing. (The vegetable juice is for minerals; these guys are crazy about the minerals! Later we add calcium.) The symptoms of this detoxification process are runny or stuffy nose, sore throat, lots of phlegm in the lungs (with coughing), and even things like fever or some nausea. Even if you don't understand how it happens, you sort of have to respect the predictability of it, given that there's no conventional medical reason that slightly greater hydration should lead to it.

One of my main issues regarding "snake oil"--a term I use affectionately about a time period before the government locked up medicine--is that the theories behind them may be completely whack. That doesn't mean the medicine's no good.

My canonical reference is Ignaz Semmelweiss, who didn't know why washing your hands before surgery helped, he just knew that it did. Likewise, ancient astrologers (sorry, guys, they were astrologers at the time, not astronomers!) could map the motion of the planets in the sky, even though their understanding of said bodies was fanciful at best.

And so I take that approach with medicine. (Alternative or otherwise. You don't get a free pass from me just 'cause you can prescribe drugs.) I'm utterly unconvinced by the theories behind mood-altering drugs, and in every case I've seen them used, they've failed.

And then there are the enema guys.

You know the enema guys, right? They have a long, storied history going back to the Kellogg brothers of Battle Creek, Michigan. And, oh, my, they have pictures! Pictures of twisted intestines, all gnarled up by residual fecal matter and, heavens, it's quite awful.

But the enema guys have a problem, I think: We now have footage of the insides of people's colons, and they don't appear to be the messes that the enema guys predict. I haven't thoroughly researched this, mind you: I'm just going by the shots that I've seen which show the walls of the intestines to be pretty clear. (And by their own literature, the enema is necessary to clean said intestines out, the drink you get before a colonoscopy shouldn't be sufficient.)

I've not seen any benefits from enemas that couldn't be explained by the rapid infusion of caffeine into the blood stream. (Enemas are often done with coffee, and the lower intestines are way more absorptive than the digestive system from top-to-bottom.) And this absorption factor makes enemas potentially dangerous, too.

But now watch this sleight-of-hand: I'm totally willing to let the enema guys be, because, hey, I could be wrong. And people need to have the right to explore these things on their own. That's just how I roll. As it stands, right now conventional medicine is being hampered by government regulation. And, predictably, politics--more than science--seems to be the big factor in what gets made available.

An effort to make things fair always seems to make things even more unfair than ever.

(Snake) Oil and Water Mix

The Boy has been easing into a nutritional program to help with his diabetes and I have a rule that I don't do unto my children what I wouldn't myself endure, so I've been easing into the same program myself.

The first part of the program involves drinking distilled water at regular intervals. This is somewhat controversial, as you might discover if you were to Google it. But I have reason to trust the doctor I'm dealing with, who's very knowledgeable about body chemistry.

Actually, water is an interesting sticking point for a lot of programs. You hear a lot about people being dehydrated, for example, but Adele Davis eschewed the eight-glasses-a-day meme saying she'd never met anyone who did that who wasn't seriously deficient in some vitamins. (The water flushing water-soluble vitamins out of the system.) The IAHP warns against too much fluid on the basis of over-hydration leading to seizures. (One of the effects of a seizure is to push fluid out of the body with saliva and urination.)

Conventional medicine seems largley unconcerned with the quality of fluids--water, Gatorade, whatever, it's all fluid, though most draw the line at soda--but alternative medicine hyperventilates over the water's mineral quality, fluoridation, source, etc.

For myself, if I have a glass of water at my desk that I can easily refill, I'll end up drinking a gallon in a day. But I have no dog in the what-sort-of-water-and-how-much race; I have no idea.

So, yesterday, I drank the prescribed amounts at the prescribed intervals for about 3/4s of the amount prescribed me. (I started late and ran out of time.)

Those of you who are regular readers know that part of my treadmill desk environment is to reduce some stiffness in my achilles' tendons that I acquired during a particularly sedentary job. I had made great progress. The only stiffness I'd feel any more was after sitting for a while or sleeping; I'd take about a minute to loosen up. You also might recall that I was experiencing a bit of numbness from the early days from when I had overdone.

This morning I was walking around for several minutes and realized there was no stiffness at all in my tendons. Just a very slight ache. As I was writing this, I had to stop, get off the treadmill, take off my shoes and double-check my foot--numbness all gone.

Wild, eh?

Then, of course, I've reported on the stiffness in my back. (As I've mentioned, I've always been tight: Even during my martial arts years, with tons of stretching, I was never much of a kicker.) The downside of doing all the walking seemed to be that I had to make sure I did some periodic back stretches or I'd feel sort of locked at the waist. (And I'd forget to do those stretches; it's been weeks since the last time.)

As of this morning--without a single stretch--I can now comfortably grab my legs just above my ankles.

That's a hell of a placebo. I love a good placebo.

On the flipside, I was warned that this water regiment would likely lead to a cold due, allegedly, to the body using this water to flush out things it hasn't been able to before. No cold yet, but a remarkable amount of goop in the throat.

"Alternative" Treatments

I missed the big kerfuffle on Friday over the alternative treatment article in the WSJ. Althouse had a nice takedown and I couldn't really wade through the comments.

On the other hand, I don't believe that the path modern medicine follows is comprehensive or exclusive. Sometimes it's just plain wrong. (They like to pretend that all the drugs have been double-blind tested and shown to be effective, but they haven't. And drug interactions have hardly been exhaustively explored. My problem with vaccines is that there are live-organism and dead-organism vaccines, and a multitude of other chemicals, and you can't really switch or add these other factors again and claim that you have science on your side.)

In 1994, after the Northridge quake, I developed serious, debilitating allergies for the first time in my life. I used a thing called a "zapper" and found that when I used it, my sinuses cleared up. When I had finished one set of "zaps", though, my sinsues clogged up again.

I hated having my sinuses clogged, so I used it around the clock for a day, then half the next day, then a third of the next day. My allergy cleared up and never returned.

Now, I realize this isn't science, though the stuff I did around it and building up to three-day jag is about as close as one can get when self-treating. There's a theory behind how the device works and what its limitations are, and there are elements of that theory I find dubious.

And it may be that it was just a great big placebo, but one that was sufficiently convincing to cause the awesome healing powers of my mind to handle a serious condition.

To which I say, so what? Placebos are underrated. They work better than the anti-depressants doctors hand out like candy, and have fewer side-effects. When my friend was dying of cancer, I often thought I would happily sacrifice a chicken and dance around in a big mask, if I thought I could be convincing enough.

There are ways to handle disease other thand drugs and surgery. These would be "alternatives". It doesn't have to mean a bunch of mush-headed pseudo-science.

Would I want the government supporting it? No, but I'd sure like the government to decriminalize it!

It Figures

Also via Insty, a Reason article on why hospital costs run amok. (Ignore the wishful thinking about the Lib candidate getting air time over this.)

According to this, hospitals can write-off money they don't collect from the uninsured. This gives them powerful strong incentive to overcharge the uninsured. First, they get whatever they can collect from the poor sap who had the misfortune to get sick. Second, they get a tax break for driving the poor bastard into bankruptcy.

I believe this is what's known as "adding insult to injury".

You just knew the government was at the bottom of the whole mess, didn't you? Just like the subprime lending, the oil shortage, inflation, etc. etc. etc.

Wii Boy

The Boy is diabetic. The doctors insist, but have no tests to prove, that it's type I. We think he's type II, because he's had the symptoms all his life. (Nobody ever connected the symptoms to Diabetes until he nearly went into a coma but he had them as an infant, even.)

In the weeks prior to setting out the Wii Fit board, he was having trouble controlling his blood sugar. It was consistently hitting the 200s (when normal is in the 70-150 range).

A few days of doing the Wii Fit and it dropped down below 70. He's had to lower his insulin. The only problem I see is that it won't last. The games are fun--and he's highly competitive--but he'll lose interest once he's mastered them.

We have a pool coming, too--the Boy loves to swim--and with luck he'll stay engaged with a physical activity and be able to get off the insulin altogether.

Lorenzo's Snake Oil

I have mentioned here before, I think, that I am a fan of snake oil. Maybe not. But I am.

One of the reasons we're in the current health care mess is that doctors lobbied very successfully to lock their trade down and to enlist the government's help in beating the tar out of anyone who might compete.

This was a long battle, going back into the middle ages, actually, but fought particularly fiercely in the past two centuries. You can see casualties in likely geniuses such as Ignaz Semmelweis and likely quacks such as Wilhelm Reich. My great-grandmother used to cure tuberculosis patients--I'm not sure how, since she stopped early in her life when they threatened to throw her in jail for it.

Let that sink in for a bit: She was threatened with jail for curing TB. She didn't charge for this, and her patients were people who had been sent out west by the doctors to die. Even so, she was a big enough threat for the local medical establishment (100 years ago now, mind you, and in a relatively small midwestern town) to leverage the force of the government against her.

Here in California, I believe it's illegal to say you can cure anything.

I've had some interesting run-ins with snake oil.

This diet, for example, saved one of my kid's life. It was fascinating because at the time we had a doctor who clearly cared--went out of his way to care for a child he knew was consigned to a shortened life of seizures and ineffective (and harmful) medications. He was a very good man, I think, and yet he resisted, strongly, even so much as trying the diet.

His resistance persisted well into the diet being successful.

Let that sink in for a while.

Anyway, this same doctor, in trying to dissuade us, brought up Lorenzo's Oil. We hadn't seen it--still haven't, actually--but people kept referencing it, and curiously they all had different stories about what happened at the end. This doctor, for example, insisted that Lorenzo died in the movie.

So it was interesting to me to read that Lorenzo had just died at the age of 30.

I've seen a lot of this--it's not hard to find people defying conventional medicine. It's also not hard to find people hawking snake oil. Part of the Nanny State Americans accepted over half-a-century ago was the transfer to the government of the power to decide how to handle their bodies. (Unless it's an abortion, of course.)

But while doctors can peddle drugs that have success rates about at the level of placebo (and some even perform worse!), and can physically harm you as long as the treatment conforms to some legal principle, non-doctors are thrown in jail (or threatened) for being successful.

I've done some treatments that worked for me, and I used to engage in debates about "scientific" principles and the like, but of course, all that I really care about if I have a health problem, is getting rid of that problem. I don't care if I'm cured by a placebo effect or not. Hell, I'd prefer the placebo effect, since side-effects tend to be pretty low.

But I suppose that's another freedom we won't be getting back.

Food Doom

A friend of mine (who taught at the Creative Wealth seminar The Boy and I went to) sends along this video trailer. (I've been meaning to review the seminar but have been letting it digest for a while.)

This is aimed squarely between the eyes for me as I am a Western-medicine-deriding pill-hatin' pharmaceutical-mistrustin' organic-lovin' GMO-sketpicizin' snake-oil takin' left coast fruitbat. My peeps deride "Whole Foods" as "too mainstream".

And yet. I'm not really impressed by this trailer. I guess because I've seen it before so many times. The only thing lacking--and it may well be in the movie--is that Diet For A Small Planet-we're-doomed-because-three-companies-own-all-the-food motif.

I'm afraid I tend to class that stuff alongside of The Population Bomb and Future Shock.

And when people start dissin' pesticides--which I think are overused--I can't help but also think of the million children who die of malaria every year because of Rachel Carson persuaded enough people that DDT was worse than death.

And I get a little deja vu feeling when people start talking about genetically modified stuff. Once again, people are starving in Africa because persuasive people have convinced leaders there that dying is better than eating GMOs.

A cynic might say that environmentalist victories seem to equate to black people dying.

So I have this interesting dichotomy: Western medicine has personally saved people I care about, but it has also consigned people I care about to death. The elimination of whole foods (the concept, not the store) has definitely reduced the health of many people and caused many troubles, but ultimately modern food technologies have essentially saved the world.

It actually doesn't bug me much: I try to use what's appropriate for the situation. My kids don't get a lot of refined sugar, but I don't sweat the occasional cookie or birthday cake. I take them to the doctor when I think that will help, and take them to the witch doctor when I think that will help.

So perhaps this really is a modest post, after all.

New Blogroll Entry + A View Into Socialized Medicine

The company that handles the benefits for the company I work for is not particularly efficient. I heard (second hand, after personally asking a couple of times) that the benefits meeting was going on on a day that I was not at work, within a few minutes of it actually happening.

Then I heard that we had until all of the next day to fill out the paper work, though eventually that was (silently) extended to a week. (Actually, I apparently caused some agitation by pushing the deadline but, hey, if you want things in on time, you might consider some advance notice of when that time is.)

Anyway, last year I had family dental coverage (which was free) and personal medical coverage (also free). Although it didn't actually work out that way, since the dentist was on the insurance company site one moment, then not the next, then went to the trouble of being part of the dental plan (which apparently he hadn't been before), and now, this year, they've switched plans and he's (of course) not on the new plan.

So.

Medical coverage is $0 for me for some sort of limited plan. To include a spouse and any number f children it goes to $1734 per month. More than my mortgage (with RE taxes). More than I spend on food. More than any individual taxes (though perhaps not more than all of the taxes put together).

On top of that, there were seven pages of forms to fill out, to get the "free" coverage. I don't believe I've mentioned this, but I opted to not pursue a scholarship for a Masters degree (musicology) because it would've meant paperwork. (I hate paperwork. The primary value to me of using TaxCut or TurboTax is that I don't have to fill out any paperwork.)

And, you know, I hadn't used the coverage last year. One could argue (fairly reasonably) that I don't treat my body that well. But it is mine, and I tend to treat it that way, which is to say, I don't just pass it around to whatever Hippocratic sheepskin-wielding maniac some pill-pushing-bureaucracy has decreed.

Even last year, when I had the free coverage, and I had my first medical incident that required a doctor's attention since 1985, I went to the local Urgent Care clinic rather than try to wrestle with the "free" care I theoretically should have gotten. The Urgent Care guy has given us the occasional antibiotic and set a few bones, all at prices which seem mostly fair.

This was rolling around in my head when I read Sippican Cottage's tale of woe and Lyme disease. (I didn't know people actually got that! I thought it was just dogs! That lived in the Rockies!) It's a good reminder that a bureaucracy will kill you, and completely without remorse or consideration, because nobody personalizes the organization's responsibilities.

Sip is an old-tyme Althouse commenter who, for reasons unknown to me, stopped commenting and even went so far as to erase his old comments. But his site is one of the gentler spots on the Internet, peppered with old black-and-white photos and remember-whens, without any of the sort of technophobia or misanthropy that is common to such things.

Also, he makes replica antique furniture. Hmmm. He might be able to make an interesting HTPC case, eh, what?