Category: Health

Inside Information

Advice, Health

Here’s one for my long-suffering Lady Readers:  it turns out that engaging in a simple fitness exercise can provide you with a Big Moment.

The tingly, burning sensation traveled from the bottom of my feet up the back of my taut calves, through my thighs, into my pelvis, up my spine, on towards the crown of my head. Then as I raised myself back up onto my toes, it traveled back down my body again. My calves burned but so did other parts of my body – parts that shouldn’t be at 9.15am on a Tuesday, as I stood in my gym kit trying to increase my core strength as I trained for a half marathon. It was pain, but it was also, unmistakably, pleasure.

It was – and I apologize if you’re eating your breakfast as you read this – an orgasm.

I mean, think about it:  you can get a Big O without all that hassle of involving a partner, or touching yourself inappropriately under the desk, or messing up the bed (if you’re doing it properly, that is).

And you can even get it while doing something healthy:  a two-fer, to use retail-speak.

No need to thank me, ladies;  it’s all part of the service.

And for the rest of you:  it seems like this is a girls-only phenomenon, sorry.  You’ll just have to do what you normally do to get yours.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.

Secret Fears

Health

I am surprisingly sympathetic to this story from writer Bryony Gordon:

What if I had done something awful to someone on the Tube the evening before and blanked it out because I was secretly a psychopath? Had I accidentally sent my child to school with a water bottle full of bleach? Had I emailed a terrible, abusive message to her teacher and deleted it from my sent items to hide the evidence? 

The “blanked out” thing is what caught my attention.

Many years ago, I was afflicted with terrible PTSD dreams.  I mean the kind of dreams where you wake up shaking in terror — all horribly violent, all involving death (my own) — and they happened often, sometimes three times a week.  And they were also repetitive, revolving around being attacked by lions, and getting into a street fight being two examples.

But they weren’t the worst.  I actually learned to cope with those dreams after a while, by simply recognizing them as they began to unfold, and forcing myself to wake up before they got any worse.  Now, I only get them maybe once a year, and they’re easily overcome.

The worst of my dreams, however, is where I become two characters in a murder mystery:  a cop or investigator of some kind on the track of a serial killer, a killer whose murders are gruesome and revolting.  And part of the investigation is my seeming ability to visualize the murders as they’re taking place — as portrayed in the movie The Eyes Of Laura Mars. 

After a while (in the dream), the realization would begin to dawn that the reason I could visualize the gruesome murders was that I was the murderer, and this manifested itself in the dreadful fear of discovery.

I would wake up, and so realistic were the dreams that in process of awakening I would ask myself if I actually was a murderer in real life and had somehow managed to get away with the killing.  The feeling of horror (at being that kind of person and of being discovered) was as strong in my semi-wakened state as it had been in the dream.

It would take me a long time, as much as an hour of rational thinking, to dispel those fears.

Fortunately, I haven’t had one of those dreams in a couple of years.  Maybe they’re gone — I certainly hope so.

I cannot imagine that feeling of dread happening to me in an awakened state.  It must be awful, just terrible;  and that’s why I’m sympathetic towards Bryony Gordon.

Nobody deserves to have the mind play such foul tricks on them.

An afterthought:  many times, these kinds of dreams and hallucinations are caused by psychotropic drugs, taken to suppress things like feelings of panic or depression.  Mine weren’t, because I’ve never taken such drugs;  that’s why they’re all the more terrifying.

I’ve tried to analyze why I get them.  The most plausible explanation is that when writing fiction, writers have to envision the plot from both sides of the mystery so that the plot doesn’t have holes in it.  And even if I’m not in the process of writing a book, I’m always developing plots and storylines in my head.  I haven’t done any such writing for a while, now, and maybe that’s why I haven’t had those dreams recently.

I just hope that writing about them today doesn’t cause a re-occurrence.

So Much For That

Food & Drink, Health

For a while now — about five months — I’ve not been taking Ozempic because I cannot in all conscience afford the (rip-off) price of $250 a month for the rest of my life.  As my old buddy Patterson puts it so succinctly:  “Fuck that for a tale.”

And he’s right.

Anyway, I had my semi-annual physical yesterday, and got weighed with a certain degree of trepidation because there are all sorts of stories extant that say categorically that if you quit taking your weekly stomach-jab, the weight comes screaming back on.  To recap (for those unfamiliar with my tale of woe):  I weighed about 275 lbs. before I started taking Ozempic;  several months later I was down to 230 lbs. (n.b. my Army weight after boot camp was 225 lbs.), and at my annual checkup last November I was back up slightly (still on Ozempic), to 235 lbs.

So I got weighed yesterday, fearing for the worst:  236 lbs.

When I told the doctor that I had quit taking Ozempic, therefore, he just shrugged and said, “No big deal.  Your weight seems to have stabilized.”

Then he said that I was one of his healthiest patients, and for my 70 years of decrepitude, the healthiest he’d seen in years.  Then (as usual), he told me to fuck off and stop wasting his time because he had sick people to look after.

The interesting thing that happened to me with Ozempic was that my appetite disappeared completely:  three meals a day plus much snacking dwindled away to one meal a day, with maybe a snack every few days.  And what’s still more interesting is that the smaller food intake has become habitual;  I haven’t gone back to gorging myself on a daily basis. (The day before yesterday, for instance, I had a couple pieces of biltong at lunchtime followed by an egg and bacon sandwich for dinner — that’s one egg and two strips of bacon on a piece of French baguette.)

And if I feel really hungry during the day, the biltong (with maybe a piece of Jarlsberg cheese) takes care of it.

As to why I have my main meal in the evening:  I seldom feel like food first thing in the morning at the best of times;  I take my meds at night (because they work better that way) and it’s best if I take them on a full stomach than an empty one;  and finally, I enjoy having dinner with New Wife because marriage.

Sorry about all that personal stuff, I know: “TMI shuddup Kim.”  But the takeaway from all this is that for some people — for me, at any rate — taking Ozempic doesn’t have to be a life sentence as they warn it will be.

So fukkem all:  the drug company who makes Ozempic (apparently from diamond dust and gold flakes), and the doomsayers and all the worrywarts who infest our lives.

I’m doing fine, thank you, and that’s all there is to say about it.

And now, if you’ll excuse me… I’m off to a happy place.

Joe Jackson Was Right

Health, Plagues and Poxes

If this report is true and the science valid, then it’s indeed a major breakthrough:

A common food bug picked up in childhood may be fueling a colon cancer epidemic in young people, according to a bombshell study.
Colorectal (bowel) cancer, long considered a disease of old age, is increasingly striking people in their 20s, 30s and 40s in the US and UK in a phenomenon that has baffled doctors.

According to the latest data, early-onset colon cancer diagnoses in the US are expected to rise by 90 percent in people 20 to 34 years old between 2010 and 2030.  In teens, rates have surged 500 percent since the early 2000s.  

Now, researchers at the University of California San Diego believe they’ve found a potential culprit: E. coli colibactin, a foodborne bacteria that infects around 75,000-90,000 Americans each year and at least 1,500 Britons.

So where does this evil little bugger likely come from?

The most common source of E. Coli is undercooked ground beef, where bacteria can spread during processing. But leafy greens like romaine and spinach are another major culprit, often contaminated in the field through tainted water or contact with livestock.

Raw milk and other unpasteurized dairy products also pose a risk, along with raw produce like apples, cucumbers, and especially sprouts — which provide the perfect warm, moist environment for bacteria to thrive.

E. Coli can also sneak in through contaminated water, which may be used to irrigate crops or clean equipment, and poor kitchen hygiene can help it spread to other foods like poultry.

Wash and clean yer foods, folks.

And if that isn’t enough to frighten you, there’s always chicken.

Cue Joe Jackson’s cheerful little ditty.

NOW They Tell Us

Health

From some doctor bloke:

The term of DGS seems to have been around since at least the early Noughties, referring to men holding their penises too hard while they have a wank.

The rule of thumb — don’t ask me how I know this — is that if your grip is strong enough to strangle your partner to death, you need to back off a little.

No need to thank me, it’s all part of the service etc. etc.  Anyway:

I’m not helping, am I?

Trust Whom?

Health, Science!

The other day New Wife and I were talking about something that affects her school greatly:  peanut allergies among the kiddies — allergies which can be life-threatening.

I said to her:  “When we were kids, nobody had a peanut allergy.  Now it seems to be all over the place.  When did this become so much of a problem, and why?”

Turns out the answer is quite simple:  fucked-up science.  Here’s the story:

The roots of this particular example of expert-inflicted mass suffering can be found in the early 1990s, when the existence of peanut allergies — still a very rare and mostly low-risk phenomenon at the time — first came to public notice. Their entry into public consciousness began with studies published by medical researchers. By the mid-1990s, however, major media outlets were running attention-grabbing stories of hospitalized children and terrified parents. The Great Parental Peanut Panic was on.

As fear and dread mounted, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a professional association of tens of thousands of US pediatricians, felt compelled to tell parents how to prevent their children from becoming the latest victims. “There was just one problem: They didn’t know what precautions, if any, parents should take,” wrote then-Johns Hopkins surgeon and now-FDA Commissioner Marty Makary in his 2024 book, Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.

Ignorance proved no obstacle. Lacking humility and seeking to bolster its reputation as an authoritative organization, the AAP in 2000 handed down definitive instructions: Parents should avoid feeding any peanut product to children under 3 years old who were believed to have a high risk of developing a peanut allergy; pregnant and lactating mothers were likewise cautioned against consuming peanuts.

The AAP noted that “the ability to determine which infants are at high risk is imperfect.” Indeed, simply having a relative with any kind of allergy could land a child or mother in the “high risk” category. Believing they were erring on the side of caution, pediatricians across the country started giving blanket instructions that children shouldn’t be fed any peanut food until age 3; pregnant and breastfeeding mothers were told to steer clear too.

So now we know when, and how.  But what was this based upon?

What was the basis of the AAP’s pronouncement? The organization was simply parroting guidance that the UK Department of Health had put forth in 1998. Makary scoured that guidance for a scientific rationale, and found a declaration that mothers who eat peanuts were more likely to have children with allergies, with the claim attributed to a 1996 study. When he checked the study, however, he was shocked to find the data demonstrated no such correlation.

In fact, the way to prevent your kids from getting a peanut allergy is precisely the opposite to what these assholes insisted upon:

  • when you’re pregnant, eat peanuts
  • after the kid is born, feed it peanut butter (in small quantities, of course)
  • so its physiology can learn to deal with peanuts, like it does with all foods and illnesses.

Fucking hell.

The next time someone suggests that we “trust the experts”, we should tell them to go and fuck themselves.  And if bodies such as the AAP can’t be trusted to do the proper due diligence with the scientific data in hand, they need to be fired, sued and all the other ways that such negligence and outright error can be punished.

I was thinking “mass floggings”, but no doubt someone’s going to have a problem with this.

And if you’re wondering how we can ascertain such incompetence for ourselves, look askance at any suggestion which “errs on the side of caution“.  (See:  Covid-19, reaction to.)

Ditto anything that comes from the UK Department of Health (i.e. those fine folks who brought you today’s NHS).

That’s a red flag, if ever there was one.