Thinking About the Health of Our Hearts

The very sad news about mega-blogger Marc Orchant has got me thinking about heart health. We are all vulnerable to heart disease, but there are things that we can all do to reduce our risk.

So many of us in the geek community in particular do not get enough exercise. We sit in front of our computers logging 80 hour weeks. We smoke, and we don’t pay attention to what we eat. Marc’s death is certainly a tragedy, but it should serve as a reminder to all of us that we are made of flesh. Our bodies need care and exercise.

As we circle the wagons and take care of one another during this time of grief, let’s also take care of one another by giving support. To quit smoking. To eat healthier at our geeky gatherings. To get some exercise, even in the middle of an exhausting business trip.

It could save a friend’s life.

How to Get Embryonic Stem Cells Without Destroying Embryos

Pro-life activists have long opposed research with embryonic stem cells because they require the creation and destruction of human embryos. But now scientists have now found a way to actually turn back the clock on adult mouse cells, forcing them to revert to their most plastic, embryonic state.

The implications for this are profound. If the research conclusions bear out in humans, we could see the growth of genetically identical replacement tissue without ever having to clone, create or destroy an embryo.

This could eliminate some arguments against the practice. But I wouldn’t be surprised if some pro-lifers continue to argue that the stem cells created in this process have the right to become living beings. After all, some of the current research has resulted in the creation of living, squeaking baby mice from these cells.

Obviously, the research is also very preliminary. We’ll have to wait a good long time before we can really apply the practice to human disease processes. The crucial issue at this point is funding, something that the Bush White House has all but shut down at the Federal level due to its relationship with right-wing Evangelicals. Perhaps with this new procedure that requires no work with actual embryos, the president will change his tune.

President Bush Knows What Prescription Drugs You’re Taking

According to AmericaBlog the Bush Administration has a secret list, obtained in violation of the law, that lists all the prescription drugs that you’ve ever purchased.

That’s right, every prescription drug purchased by every person in this country. Ever taken antidepressants? Ever been on birth control? Ever sought treatment for erectile dysfunction?

They know.

This brings up the question why they would want to know. It’s pretty hard to make the case that tracking prescription drug use is a critical weapon on the war on terror.

No, this is simply a sign of an overreaching administration that likes power, authority and information for its own sake. It’s an erosion of our basic civil liberties. I know one thing is for certain, I’m writing my Federal representatives. You should do the same.

Everything a Straight Man Needs To Know About Bleaching His Hair

I dyed my hair on Tuesday to surprise Teresa. I got blonde highlights about a year ago and she loved them, so I figured she’d love it if I went totally blonde. I called this place called Seven to do my hair. They have a DJ spinning and tons of “vibe”. They told me it would cost 100 dollars and take two hours.

This seemed a little steep, so I did a google search on dying hair and found out that it’s really easy to do yourself, costs about five bucks, and only takes thirty minutes.

This really did not seem like a difficult decison: 115 dollars and two hours listening to crappy techno, or 5 bucks and thirty minutes watching Jack Bauer. So I went down to Bartelle’s drugs and asked the girl there which dye to use. She was very helpful, and even though her own hair was suspect, I figured she was a girl, so she knew what she was talking about.

Before dying my hair, I consulted with my friends Evan and Suzanne from college. Neither have dyed their hair, but they both dress pretty good. Plus Evan is in Med School and Suzanne is in Grad School on scholarship. Smart people. They suggested I also shave my mustache and goatee.

I dyed it once, but I missed a few spots, so I consulted with Evan again, and determined that I should run it one more time. After all, I had some extra dye.

When I was done, I took a quick look in the mirror and was pretty sure that I saw a head of gorgeous, movie-star quality golden blonde hair. Then I headed off to the climbing gym to meet up with Teresa. She was going to be SO thrilled.

When I met her, she saw that I had gone and bleached my hair for her. She had a huge smile and kissed me. She said it made her day. She was so impressed that I would be willing to go to so much trouble just for her, and that she thought I was amazing.

Then, she stepped out for a moment, and, in tears, called her stylist and made an appointment for me the next afternoon.

Because, what I didn’t realize is that:
A) I missed pretty much all the spots I couldn;t see in the mirror, leaving dark patches everywhere.
B) I look about 9 years younger without facial hair. And not in a good way.
C) I missed golden blonde and hit bright orange. It only looked golden blonde in soft light.
D) Bright Orange looks GREAT on people with blue undertones in their skin. It does not look good on people with olive skin and chronic 5 o’clock shadows. It makes them look washed out with clown hair.

What I learned is that:
A) Highlights look amazing on me.
B) Proper highlighting should take about two hours. It takes 3 if you try to do it yourself and a stylist has to fix it.
C) Proper highlighting should costs about $100. It costs $200 if you try to do it yourself and a stylist has to fix it.
D) Proper highlighting shouldn’t hurt like a bitch because the stylist only has to do it once. It hurts like a bitch if you do it yourself and then a stylist has to fix it, because apparently every time you dye your hair, it’s like having meat tenderizer poured on your scalp. When the stylist pulls your hair through a rubber skullcap to get the highlights just right, your tenderized scalp feels like it is being tortured with a hot iron.
E) Just because someone has get straight A’s in medical school does not mean they know anything about fashion, beauty or hair. Someone who goes to beauty school probably does, though.
F) There is a difference between bleaching and dying. If you have light hair and you want to go darker, you can get away with doing it at home. If you have dark hair and want to go lighter, go to a salon.
G) If you watch SportsCenter more than twice a week, you have to pay someone to do your hair, and you need a girl with fashion sense to help you with your clothes, face, and hair, for at least a few years until all this business makes sense.

Thank you for being patient, Teresa. And thanks to the people at 13 Boston in Seattle for getting me in on such short notice.

Correlations Between Gum Disease and Other Diseases

I just saw an ad for Colgate Total that mentioned the recent research that has pointed out the relationship between gum disease and other ailments such as heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

The Colgate commercial implies that gum disease causes other negative outcomes. But isn’t it possible that people who don’t take care of their gums also don’t take care of their bodies? It could be that a general disregard for physical health is the third variable that causes both outcomes?

My First 5.11

I just got back from rock climbing with some of my friends. I made it up my first 5.11 in a very, very long time. For those of you not familiar with rock climbing, a 5.11 is a pretty difficult route. Most gym climbs start at a difficulty rating of 5.3 or 5.4 and go up from there. By the time you’re getting into 5.10 and up, you’re in the advanced range of climbing.

It’s wonderful to be able to bounce back so much more quickly from illness. I may have a love-hate relationship with albuterol, but there’s no disputing the fact that it helps my asthma.

Public Citizen is Overreaching in Call for FDA Ban on Third-Gen Birth Control Pills

This morning, I recieved an e-mail from Public Citizen, a non-profit public interest group. They were asking for signatures to their petition to the FDA to ban all “third generation” birth control pills. Their main issue is that the synthetic progestin known as desogestrel — which is used in most of the newest birth control pills — doubles the risk of blood clots and strokes in women using the pill. There’s been a lot of hype around the whole thing:

Being a consumer of a third-generation birth control pill — I take Yasmin — I wanted to get more information. I called my gynecologist’s office and recieved a call back from a very nice nurse.

She told me that the risk of blood clot and stroke from the use of “second generation” birth control pills is only 10-30 per 100,000 women. Double that, and you have 20-60 per 100,000 women. “If you double the likelihood of a very rare occurence,” she explained, “it’s still a very rare occurence.”

I was also very relieved to hear that Yasmin doesn’t even have desogestrel, it has drospirenone, which is also a synthetic progestin.

Finally, she mentioned to me that the risk of blood clot and stroke during pregnancy was much higher. One study found it to be as high as 210 in 100,000 women during pregnancy and post-partum.

That’s a much greater risk than the one associated with desogestrel. I understand that its still an elevated risk, but it’s being blown way out of proportion by Public Citizen. Banning all third-generation birth control pills because some statistics demonstrated a slightly increased risk of a negative outcome would be a huge overreach on the part of the FDA. Instead, let’s just require doctors to explain the difference between desogestrel and other progestin options. I think that makes the most sense.

BTW, here is a list of the commercial birth control products that contain desogestrel:

• Desogestrel and Ethinyl Estradiol — ethinyl estradiol is the standard estrogen ingredient in all modern birth control pills
• Apri-28
• Cyclessa
• Desogen
• Kariva
• Mircette
• Ortho-Cept
• Reclipsen
• Velivet

If you’re taking any of those pills, and the slightly increased risk bothers you, you might want to think about switching.

Millions of Uninsured Could Qualify and Don’t Know It

With so much being said recently about universal health care in the U.S. I find it really interesting to learn that resources that already exist for this purpose aren’t being used. Apparently, there are a lot of government programs out there to help low-income folks get themselves insured. The problem is that most people don’t know about the programs, or are daunted by mega-paperwork and delayed by miles of red tape.

This is the problem with government-sponsored health care in a country as vast as ours. Nothing can be done efficiently, and the result is that the poor are left without coverage. It’s not because the people and the government have no will to help them. It’s because of the sheer scale of the problem and the government’s powerlessness to change anything.

One potential solution in order to maximize adoption of existing programs is to install software that helps people to navigate the paperwork on public library computers statewide (and offer it for free download). The program would work the way that TurboTax does for your IRS forms. You answer a series of simple Yes/No questions and the program prints out your insurance application forms.

As for outreach, I’m not sure that’s the government’s responsibility. But perhaps an incentivized Word of Mouth marketing campaign would work best. Anytime that someone who is enrolled in any of the programs gets a friend to sign up, they get a reward ($5, entered in a raffle for a trip to Mexico, etc.). More to the point, any time anyone brings their kid to the doctor and doesn’t have insurance, the hospital officials should be required to talk to them about the state-run health insurance programs and encourage them to find out if they qualify.

Ultimately, some responsibility does rest with the uninsured. They need to take personal responsibility for asking about state health insurance programs and finding out if they qualify. I understand that many of them are working long hours, raising kids, and trying to survive. But it’s not the government’s responsibility to come and knock on their doors and let them know about health insurance programs.

Before we start talking about universalizing health care in this country, let’s examine what can be done to make existing programs work better.

New Medicinal Marijuana May Help People Lose Weight

Britain’s GW Pharmaceuticals Plc is beginning human experimental trials later this year on a fat-loss drug derived from Cannabis. The company, which grows Marijuana indoors in a secret location in England, has also found Cannabis derivatives to be effective in treating multiple schlerosis and continues to look for other potential cures and treatments from the plant.

My personal suggestions for other experimental treatments for Cannabis:
1) Glaucoma
2) Back Pain
3) Nausea
4) Boredom

My First HPV Shot

Sorry I’ve been so silent the past few days. I’ve been trying to conserve my bloggy energy for my job and not so much for my personal blog, but being sick isn’t all that’s been going on in my life…

Today, I got the first of three vaccinations against Human Papillomavirus (HPV), which is a sexually transmitted disease. For those of you who haven’t heard, the vaccine — known as Gardasil — protects against the four major types of HPV. HPV causes genital warts, and in some cases can cause cervical cancer.

I’ll be getting my second shot in March and my third in September. At 23, I’m well within the recommended age range for this vaccine. They’re advocating it for girls as young as nine and for women well into our twenties and thirties.

Why am I being so public about getting vaccinated against a sexually transmitted disease? Because I want other women to know that protecting ourselves against genital warts and cancer is nothing to be ashamed of. The only risk factor in our sex lives that we have 100% control over is our own behavior, and that includes getting vaccinated against preventable diseases when possible.

So do something good for yourself. Call your gyno and schedule your HPV vaccination today. You’ll be glad you did.

But What if She’s Raped?

I think the objections to the HPV vaccine by Christian groups are wacky in the extreme. But I do understand the idealism. It’s comforting to believe for certain that your little girl is going to be chaste until she marries. And maybe if she adheres to the values you raised her with, she will.

But what if she’s raped? It happens all the time, and it doesn’t matter whether your little girl is chaste or not. She could even be targeted because she is chaste. Rapists don’t use condoms. They’re not going to care whether your chaste little girl gets an STD. What then?

Or what if her husband has a checkered past? What if he didn’t walk the straight and narrow road your daughter did? What if he has HPV and doesn’t even know it? That’s not so terribly uncommon either.

You don’t have to tell her what the vaccination is for if you’re worried that it will give her ideas about sex. Or you can tell her that it will prevent some kinds of cancer, which is the truth. But for pity’s sake, look after her health and physical well-being. Even if she does stray from the path you would like to see her walk, would you really punish your own daughter with cancer?

Scientists Find the Protein-Enzyme Combination Responsible for HIV Self-Replication

Scientists may have discovered an ‘off-switch’ for the HIV virus. Recent reserach by Princeton scientists Leor Weinberger and Thomas Shenk indicates that a protein called ‘Tat’ could be responsible for speeding up the chemical chain reaction that causes the HIV virus to self-replicate and destroy the human immune system.

Apparently, an enzyme known as p300-which exists naturally in T cells-attaches a chemical tail to the ‘Tat’ protein. This completes the chemical signal that awakens the virus and begins the replication process. Without that chemical tail the virus is likely to go dormant within the T cell. A protein called SirT1 is thought to be responsible for stripping the chemical tail off the ‘Tat’ protein.

The problem is that by the time that SirT1 does its job, the host cell is usually dead. A therapy may be derived from this research by finding a way to speed up SirT1’s ability to strip the chemical tail off the ‘Tat’ protein. This would reduce the amount of time the virus has to replicate itself. It would also prevent the destruction of T cells. Other similar enzyme-based therapies are already in use for HIV patients.

My bottom line: I love this kind of innovation in medicine. IMHO, it’s always better to figure out how to augment some natural defense already present within the human body than to introduce a chemical compound to solve a problem. Even if it’s not always better, it’s a far more elegant solution. But then again, I always leaned more towards biology than chemistry. Heh!

This solution brings Dendreon’s Provenge treatment to mind. In that effort, scientists bathed a patient’s own immune cells in an antigen that trained them to attack tumors. Yet another elegant idea from inspired biologists…

Dastardly Bristol Myers-Squibb Caps Light to Unite Donations at $100,000

According to commenter Mak, Bristol Myers-Squibb has capped the donations from its light to unite page at $100,000.

Now, a hundred grand to AIDS research is better than no money at all. But the cap is in the fine print, which means that BMS is trying to make itself look at lot more generous than it really is. That kind of disingenuousness really pisses me off.

Light to Unite Against AIDS

For every candle lit on this website, Brisol Myers-Squibb will donate $1 to AIDS research. So far, they’ve raised almost $1m.

Great Article Following Up on Shorto’s War on Contraception

Gloria Feldt has a brilliant follow-up to the New York Times Magazine article that got me up in arms about a woman’s right to procreative self-determination and the weird sexual control that religious right fathers try to exert upon their daughters.

Writes Feldt:

This is a struggle often masquerading as a moral controversy. At its roots, however, it’s about sex and power; whether women will be allowed to keep striving for an equal place in society or confined, as much as possible, to the nursery.

Feldt also offers the most compelling evidence I’ve come across to date to refute the idea - as one of my readers put it - that “to say that if one is against the use of contraception, one is against women’s rights or anything of like is completely unfounded.”

James Leon Holmes, nominated by President Bush and confirmed by the Senate to the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Arkansas, says it straight out in an article: “It is not coincidental that the feminist movement brought with it artificial contraception … To the extent we adopt the feminist principle that the distinction between the sexes is of no consequence and should be disregarded in the organization of society and the Church, we are contributing to the culture of death.” His stated solution is that “ … the wife is to subordinate herself to her husband.”

But my favorite bit of the article has to be the closing paragraph:

A woman’s bodily integrity, her moral autonomy, her health, her very life depend on whether she has access not just to the right to reproductive freedom but also to the health care and education services that make rights meaningful. Circumstances do not change that principle. Nor is the human right to reproductive self-determination divisible. You either have it or you don’t. There’s nothing mysterious about that.

A resounding huzzah for Gloria Feldt!

Thank Goodness for Minute Clinic!

So I’ve been sick for three days and most of my symptoms are gone. No more fever. No more headache. No more congestion. But I’ve still got this horrible, devastating sore throat. I tried to swallow this morning and I nearly fell over from the pain.

That’s when it occurred to me that I might have strep throat.

Since I don’t have a primary care doc other than my fantastic gynecologist, I had three basic options: (1) go to the ER, (2) hope it goes away on its own, or (3) find a Minute Clinic. So I chose to check out the whole Minute Clinic thing and it worked out rather well. I went in. The NP took one look at my throat and confirmed my self diagnosis (of course, she ran a test just to be sure). She wrote me a script for some antibiotics and I was out the door, pills in hand, in just under an hour.

I’m so glad they make a pill for the pain in my throat. If it had been just from a cold I think I might have voluntarily induced a coma until it was over.

For Someone with a Supposedly Healthy Immune System, I Sure Get Sick a Lot

I think this is the 3rd time in the past 10 weeks that I’ve been laid low by some kind of virus. This time it’s headache, stuffy nose, general malaise, body aches, sore throat and of course the omnipresent fever.

Last night was particularly bad. I went to bed running a high fever which kept breaking and spiking throughout the night. At times I was so cold that I put on long underwear and snuggled up with a heating pad. At other times I was so hot that the sheets were soaked with sweat and I had to dive into a cold shower.

What bothers me the most is all this sickness really messes with my ability to do my job. Blech!

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