You know when you share an article on Facebook and it shows a thumbnail taken from the article, which is sometimes the wrong image? Well I posted this article on Facebook and it appeared along with an image of Joe Biden appearing to pray. Just sayin' 

Funny - I was thinking about my late grand father earlier this week. The doctors had put him on a special diet and, among other things, specified that he should replace butter w/ margarine. That was back in the 80s.

I've recently started seeing lots of anti-margarine articles on the internet. 

My own experience w/ hospitals and doctors left me thinking that I wouldn't want to have to count on anyone if I were really sick. 

Just recently, we've seen 3 different doctors for my wife's ear/vertigo problems. When the second one saw what the first one had prescribed, her eyes rolled up to the sky and she shook her head. 

Her own suggested treatment involved a much more invasive treatment, w/ steroids shots and all. We said we'd think about it.

We finally saw a 3rd doctor who suggested a very simple exercise - no medication of any kind. You know what? That entirely solved the problem.

We'd start seeing doctors for that issue last year while in Spain. We've also met a few specialists in NY last summer when the issue came back.

My own take on all that stuff - try and eat natural/unprocessed food, not too much meat, plenty of fruits and veggies, drink water. Exercise. And enjoy your health if you are healthy because it's a fragile thing. 

And if you ever get sick, cross your fingers that the doctor you'll meet will come up w/ the appropriate treatment. I've seen to many of them who seem to "specialize" into certain solutions and won't even investigate other possibilities.

Rain


Funny - I was thinking about my late grand father earlier this week. The doctors had put him on a special diet and, among other things, specified that he should replace butter w/ margarine. That was back in the 80s.

I've recently started seeing lots of anti-margarine articles on the internet. 

My own experience w/ hospitals and doctors left me thinking that I wouldn't want to have to count on anyone if I were really sick. 

Just recently, we've seen 3 different doctors for my wife's ear/vertigo problems. When the second one saw what the first one had prescribed, her eyes rolled up to the sky and she shook her head. 

Her own suggested treatment involved a much more invasive treatment, w/ steroids shots and all. We said we'd think about it.

We finally saw a 3rd doctor who suggested a very simple exercise - no medication of any kind. You know what? That entirely solved the problem.

We'd start seeing doctors for that issue last year while in Spain. We've also met a few specialists in NY last summer when the issue came back.

My own take on all that stuff - try and eat natural/unprocessed food, not too much meat, plenty of fruits and veggies, drink water. Exercise. And enjoy your health if you are healthy because it's a fragile thing. 

And if you ever get sick, cross your fingers that the doctor you'll meet will come up w/ the appropriate treatment. I've seen to many of them who seem to "specialize" into certain solutions and won't even investigate other possibilities.

Re: Margarine...I think the best way to describe that horrible stuff would be "liquefied plastic." Most of the so-called "healthier" low fat products have been exposed as unhealthier recently. Another one is skimmed milk. That stuff is really just the grey water that is the by-product of cream production, with milk powder added to turn it white again. It's not very healthy at all. Apparently the fat that's in milk enhances the body's absorption of the nutrients in milk, and that by drinking skimmed milk you're really missing out on a lot of goodness. There was also a study done in Europe which showed that kids who grew up on skimmed milk were more likely to become overweight than kids who grew up on regular milk. 


Re: Doctors...you have to take everything they say with a pinch of salt. They are not experts on every aspect of health, and are frequently steered into one treatment or another according to the relationship they have with the manufacturer. Ever notice how doctors's offices are crammed with pens, notepads, calendars and the like that are branded with the names of some unpronounceable drug or other? I've had some spectacularly bad advice from doctors who didn't have a clue what they were talking about. In my mid 20's I went through a bad patch of depression which drove me to seek pharmaceutical help. My doctor didn't know the first thing about anti-depressives, and when I came back and said that a particular pill wasn't working, he'd delve into this large commercial catalog that he had in his drawer, and say "hmm....let's try.....this one." 


What's even more amazing is this: when I had tried amytriplyline and said it made me feel bad, he looked through my medical records and said "Oh, I see you've already been prescribed this." When I asked him what in the hell he was talking about, it turns out that when I was 5 I went through a bed-wetting phase, so my mother took me to the doctor. They prescribed me amytriplyline, an anti-depressant, which I took for a month! At age 5! Apparently it's given to bed wetting kids sometimes. God knows what it did to my intellectual development 

daryl1968

Does that mean that ants are optimists?  

Old55

daryl1968

Does that mean that ants are optimists?  

well according to Frank, yes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWZ-pLUb9L8

sharke

Re: Margarine...I think the best way to describe that horrible stuff would be "liquefied plastic." Most of the so-called "healthier" low fat products have been exposed as unhealthier recently. Another one is skimmed milk. That stuff is really just the grey water that is the by-product of cream production, with milk powder added to turn it white again. It's not very healthy at all. Apparently the fat that's in milk enhances the body's absorption of the nutrients in milk, and that by drinking skimmed milk you're really missing out on a lot of goodness. There was also a study done in Europe which showed that kids who grew up on skimmed milk were more likely to become overweight than kids who grew up on regular milk. 


Re: Doctors...you have to take everything they say with a pinch of salt. They are not experts on every aspect of health, and are frequently steered into one treatment or another according to the relationship they have with the manufacturer. Ever notice how doctors's offices are crammed with pens, notepads, calendars and the like that are branded with the names of some unpronounceable drug or other? I've had some spectacularly bad advice from doctors who didn't have a clue what they were talking about. In my mid 20's I went through a bad patch of depression which drove me to seek pharmaceutical help. My doctor didn't know the first thing about anti-depressives, and when I came back and said that a particular pill wasn't working, he'd delve into this large commercial catalog that he had in his drawer, and say "hmm....let's try.....this one." 


What's even more amazing is this: when I had tried amytriplyline and said it made me feel bad, he looked through my medical records and said "Oh, I see you've already been prescribed this." When I asked him what in the hell he was talking about, it turns out that when I was 5 I went through a bed-wetting phase, so my mother took me to the doctor. They prescribed me amytriplyline, an anti-depressant, which I took for a month! At age 5! Apparently it's given to bed wetting kids sometimes. God knows what it did to my intellectual development 

Agreed on milk - though I did go through a skimmed milk phase at one point, but then, it was merely used in coffee. 


Nowadays, I'd rather drink less of it, but drink the real thing. Which is a hard thing for me, by the way. I could drink gallons of milk every day if I didn't know better. :P

You know, a couple of years ago, a cyst I had had under my belly button for over 10 years got infected and started to grow. So I finally went to the hospital to get it removed. On the first day, I saw 2 doctors, both w/ different opinions. The second one took care of it, and then I had to go back every day so they could drain it. Every doctor I saw that week had a different reaction. 

One of them looked fairly alarmed and took a sample to have it analyzed. The next day, a different doctor told me he saw nothing abnormal but the previous guy came back before I left and told me something like "we can't do anything for you here, I'm sending you to that other hospital right now!"

I was kind of freaked out, wondering what was so wrong w/ me.

So I went to that other hospital, they performed a few tests, and told me there was nothing wrong. They looked as if they wondered why I'd been sent to them. One of the doctors there told me there was nothing to worry about but that he'd like to open up the incision a bit wider - to his opinion, the first doctor hadn't cut it properly.

A few months later, I had the same problem, this time in the armpit. Same back and forth for a week. Since I was curious about the cause, and no doctor had an answer for me, I did a bit of research and discovered that repetitive cysts could sometimes be linked to diabetes - and there is a history of diabetes in my family. 

The next day when I mentioned that to the doctor, his only answer was " I wouldn't be inclined to think so". After insisting quite a bit, I managed to get him to perform a basic check up. Which thankfully turned out negative. But still... 

And the most wonderful part about this is - not only did they have no clue as to the cause but they never removed the actual cysts! 

So when it got infected again last year, I thought it was an opportunity. We were heading for Russia a few weeks later, and at that time, I was dreading having to go to the hospital there, so I thought: let's see what happens if I don't go to the hospital - so if it ever happens again while we're in Russia, I'll know what to expect. And you know what? It went away. And came back last summer. And went away again. 

In other words - whether I go to hospital or not, the result is the same. 

Did I mention that my grand father had similar issues for years towards the end of his life which the doctors could never fix or figure out? That a bad medical decision precipitated my mother's death? That my ex-wife had those 2 weird dark spots on her skin which they never could identify (and which magically vanished after 6 or 7 years)? That the same ex-wife's little brother was crippled for life because a medical error? And that her parents, who had decided not to have other kids after that, ended up bringing another children into this world because the sterilizing surgery didn't work?

And that list goes on and on.

So, yeah, I'm having a trust issue w/ medicine.

Wow that's quite a history of medical screw-ups. I mean modern medicine has obviously been hugely beneficial to our health, but you really have to stay on your toes and never have blind faith under any circumstances! 

Last year I had minor surgery to remove a large lump from my ear lobe. It had been there since I had my ear pierced at age 16, and had grown bigger over the years. Still not really sure what it was, but they seemed to think it was harmless. Anyway it actually made one of my earlobes look bigger, and the thing creeped me out. So I paid $1000 and he removed it. Only he removed a little more of my earlobe than was necessary, which made it much smaller than the other one. So then he offered to reduce the other one as well to make them match. Only that went a bit wrong as well and now it's an odd shape....nothing too freaky, but just a case of none-too-stellar workmanship  He offered to dive in there again and make an alteration, at which point I said no, I'm fine, I'm totally over the whole earlobe thing. God knows where I'd be now if I'd taken him up, I'd probably be left with two little flaps of skin for ears. 

Your doctor's last name wasn't Van Gogh by any chance? lol

I will have to check my records