How to be sick (part 2)

Part 1: How to get over the flu

• Listen to your body. Certainly this isn't everyone but for me, if I'm not doing well, I've got to remember to take the hint.
• Immediately get warm. Turn on the heater, put on a jacket or extra layers even if you're not cold. Early moves in this can save hours of misery. 
• Don’t trust a mild cold - too often I’ve had something that looked very temporary that turned into a bunch of unpleasant symptoms on day 2.  Take time off, lay down, and watch movies.  Turn up the heat and wrap yourself in blankets.  Take no chances.  Speaking from a moment where I didn’t do that, it really didn’t end well. 
• Real drugs.  If you have any medication to knock you out, make sure you drink a lot of water.  As always, whatever you take, make sure you take half first.

Travel trick

On a recent trip, I had a huge amount of trouble getting a clear itinerary to share with others.  I could get a printed copy that worked okay but even just getting things into a simple spreadsheet was a huge pain.

The solution was to forward all my travel itinerary emails into the TripIt service (it's free) and the program will spit all the data out into a calendar file (ICS) that most programs can view.

This saved me a lot of stress.

From there, if you still want to save to a spreadsheet, Mozilla Thunderbird + the lightning plugin has some good spreadsheet export tools.

No Vicodin

All my life I've known exactly one person who was addicted to "real" drugs of the class of coke, heroin, etc.  Meanwhile I've known 4 different people with serious (two of them life-threatening) issues around doctor-prescribed opiates.  In the absence of being able to share my own stories, I found this.

Once again, vaccines are fine

It blew me away when someone I knew actually bought into the vaccine fear thing happening with their kid.  Fortunately, that seemed to get worked out, but it's evidently going to be an issue well into the future, despite loads of evidence otherwise.  Seems like a waste of research money.

State mental health

An excellent article on the dismal state of mental health resources.

If you have a friend with mental illness, getting resources from the state will usually make the problem much worse, not better.  For those that I've talked to (especially in the South), these places are essentially prisons.  Even psychologists who have a legal requirement to notify the authorities if a patient threatens to harm themself or others strongly hesitate to do so, knowing it will make the problem worse.

Tragically, paranoid schizophrenia is a completely treatable illness.  However, if a loved one is suffering mental illness, seek private assistance.

Never going to drink Ozarka again

I used to be a regular customer for their big bottles, and Aquafina on occasion.  Apart from Nestle, it seems filtering tap water is the only way to go.  Full report here.

Cigarettes bad for everyone always

Although I don't generally mind cigarette smoke, the strongest language yet from the surgeon general just came out.

Pretty much if you see someone smoking, you should get them with the fire extinguisher.  Its win-win.

Making Steel-cut Oats

They're more dense, cheaper, are reputed to be better for you, and don't get tedious and boring the way regular oatmeal seems to.  Unfortunately, as they are less processed than regular oatmeal, they frequently require more cooking/preparation.  Fortunately there's a long list of ways to do that.

(Thanks W)

Making fun of people in trouble

From a few years back, Craig Ferguson talks about picking on people who obviously need help.  Remarkably open and honest for a late night show.

 Related: Great article on addiction .

Modern hearing loss

Anything that interferes with an audiophile's enjoyment of music is an automatic enemy.  As such, riding in a roller coaster might not be a good idea.  Additionally, listening to very loud music can hurt your ability to enjoy it.

Chemicals in beef

Heavy metals in American beef due to lower testing standards than its neighbors.  Fortunately reform is promised but in the mean time, organic? (thanks Kristy)

Sleep research: Valerian Root, blood sugar, and software

There's a variety of herbal drugs for coping with medical problems but it hard to tell the good stuff from "snake oil."  Now there's a graph to help determine what's worth the time.  Having done quite a bit of research about getting good sleep, I've heard about Valerian Root for a while now but it seems pretty well received.

Low blood sugar meanwhile can actually cause nightmares.  This sounds odd, but generally your body will respond to low blood sugar by having intense dreams.  Then, once your adrenalin kicks in, it zaps your blood sugar almost immediately and then for the rest of the night, you will continue to have intense dreams as your body tries to tell you it needs energy (thanks switch).  How you manage your own blood sugar is not a simple topic, but its something you should discuss with your doctor to handle restless sleep or frequent nightmares.

Some websites to help with sleep and some controversial software solutions (for Mac and Windows):

• F.lux, which changes your monitor color slightly over the coarse of a day, purportedly helping you get more restful sleep at night. 
  
• Brainwave entrainment with Gnaural.

Tanning bed regulation

The dangers of tanning have been spoken of here before and now it looks as if you won't be able to use one without parental permission before age 21.

High Fructose Fat Syrup

... is what I will call it from now on.

Bad dad/mom

Children wanting to have a relationship with their parents despite serious problems is not unusual, but sometimes can be too toxic to maintain. (thanks silver)  You don't have to hit your kids to be abusive.

Remember, if your parents were shitty, you've got to try harder.

How to feel like crap all the time

In the same tradition as the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, How to be Depressed.

Health care public option conversation

On the topic of healthcare reform, a wise friend of mine pointed out the following (paraphrasing):

"The so called "public" option has no competition, no profit incentive, and therefore, no incentive to be *efficient*. Ergo, its cost to run will keep escalating, as demand escalates, and all the while the actual supply side of the healthcare economic equation remains stagnant, further compounding prices. To offset the problem, government will throw more money at it, causing higher taxes and another recession, which will be offset by printing more money, thus weakening the dollar and losing more foreign investment in the US. Better solution: stimulate growth and competition in healthcare supply markets (i.e. supplies, equipment, services) and limit "public option" participation to those who can prove they don't make enough to become insured on their own."

While in principle, the profit and competition motive should drive better services like computers, cars, and more, it's not working with health care.  As I understand it, profit-driven health care is the problem, not the solution.  Where the profit motive in other industries drives innovation, the motive here is to deny service at the time of greatest need, as that means the greatest profit.

Thus, a public option seems more viable and the analysis is whether this waste is an acceptable failure level to justify the public good.  This could be compared to the publicly funded police and education systems: they are wasteful, but necessary to maintain the peace and keep America competitive.  When family members get sick without treatment, that doesn't maintain the peace or make us more competitive.

(Responses welcome.)

Note: some of these ideas come from an essay by Bill Maher touching on the public option.

Japan hates dolphins

Japan's dolphin "research" is a pretty big industry.  Mercury poisoning, killing intelligent creatures, and totally inhumane methods?  What's not to love?

Health care analysis using actual research

A recent hilarious interlude fully underlines some people will just make things up as they go along.  Here's a little fact-checking on both sides.

Good news -- bad news

First the good news: a teenager in Ontario isolated a bacteria that will break down plastic bags considerably faster than several hundred years. This appears to be something that could be done on a broad scale, which may dramatically reduce landfill waste. (Thanks to Mark for this one.)

Next, the bad news: Bisphenol A -- a topic I've been following for a long time should have been banned long ago. The villains according to this article are the Weinberg Group, Sunoco, and Sciences International. Although these people have no business in the civilized world, what's much worse is what this situation implies about the rest of us:

"Humans are terrible at reacting to subtle threats: We fear the unknown, the immediate, but not things which harm us slowly in subtle ways." (source)

If this is true and global warming is true (so far the vast consensus is yes), we're in a great deal of trouble.