Category: Health and wellness

I should note that today is World AIDS Day. While some things have changed for the better since the syndrome began to be noticed, some things have not, as Ben Goldacre notes. As he says, AIDS quackery is still very much with us.

Basic marketing. Create a fear, a gap, a need. Offer a solution. 

Look. Don’t just click away to the next attraction that the internet has to offer. Watch this personal testimony from Sherwin Nuland, a human phoenix. A wondrous affirmation of the human spirit.

 

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Liz has been invited to attend a Buddhist weekend meditation workshop called "The Art Of Being Human". She has mixed feelings about it. I can understand why.

Vaughan, over at Mind Hacks, points out that the famous sequence of cat pictures painted by Louis Wain that are supposed to illustrate his descent into madness actually do nothing of the sort. Damn, there’s another factoid that I’ve held on to for years suddenly whipped out from under me.

Just a note to point out that my somewhat reluctant attraction to roller-coaster rides may be something of a two-edged sword. 

…If I ever do end up contemplating suicide, then using a crossbow is probably not a good method. Dorothy Parker should have included it in her Resume. 

Jeff Atwood, over at Coding Horror, has a useful summary of best practice when it comes to computer workstation ergonomics. I have to admit, I don’t have the same position as the drawings show – I’m hunched over the keyboard staring closely into the screens. I know it’s bad for me, but up to now, I’ve been too lazy to do anything about it. First thing to do is to raise the screens a little more – that’ll be another couple of packs of A4 paper stuffed under the monitors, then… 

The Guardian has published an edited extract from a book called The Family That Couldn’t Sleep – A Venetian Medical Mystery, written by DT Max. Simultaneously fascinating and horrifying, it’s well worth reading. Oh, and the Guardian‘s links to the second part of the extract are currently broken, you’ll find it here. 

 

The thing that I find the most troublesome is that the disease – Fatal Familial Insomia (FFI) – is apparently passed on to 50% of the children of a person carrying FFI. The disease strikes and kills the carrier after child-bearing years. So, my question is this, would I be prepared to father a child knowing that there was a 50% chance that he or she would die no later than in their mid-fifties in a most horrifying fashion? I honestly think that I would prefer to adopt. I really don’t think the bloodline is that important.

Here’s a story about a teenager who is clearly aiming to get a Darwin Award. I find it slightly worrying that he was as old as fourteen. I had learned by the time I was seven that it was not a good idea to mess with electricity. I discovered that I shouldn’t check to see if a light bulb had burned out by removing it from the socket and then sticking in my fingers to see if the electricity was still on. It was. 

Come with me on a trip to the wilder shores of medical research. Ben Goldacre, over at Bad Science, raised his eyebrows at some research that has been published in the journal Medical Hypotheses. The "central thrust of their argument is that people with Down’s Syndrome have a lot in common with people from oriental countries". Oo-er, missus.

 

Vaughan, a contributor to Mind Hacks, has now referenced Goldacre’s article, and given some additional background to this esteemed journal, and its somewhat controversial founder. There’s clearly no shortage of hare-brained hypotheses in every field of human endeavour. Don’t miss the link to the hypothesis (also published in Medical Hypotheses) that asks: Is there an association between the use of heeled footwear and schizophrenia?  

That’s Asperger Quotient. Here’s a test, originally devised by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, that purports to give an indication of whether you exhibit the common signs of Asperger’s syndrome. I turn out to be boringly average with a score of 18.

Liz (of Granny Gets A Vibrator fame) tells us that we should live each day to the full. Quite right, too. 

Mo, over at Neurophilosophy, tells the history of the rise and fall of prefrontal lobotomy. Scary, scary stuff. 

Last weekend we discovered that our labrador, Kai, had a lump lurking under his fur. We took him to the vet on Monday, and on Tuesday, the lump was removed. The vet said that there was nothing to worry about, the growth was benign and easy to remove.

 

On Tuesday evening, Kai was feeling very sorry for himself as you can see from this photo. He’s wearing an old T-shirt to stop him worrying at the wound. After a couple of days, the T-shirt was removed, and now he’s back to normal. 

 

 

Another story from today’s Observer, but this time fiction is stranger than truth. Fiction, because a couple of weeks ago, The Observer had a front page story claiming that new research showed a surge in autism. That story was simply wrong on all sorts of counts. Today, the paper prints what it calls a "clarification". This is obviously a new definition of the noun, and one that I had not come across previously.

 

Ben Goldacre, over at Bad Science, is equally unimpressed. It’s worth reading his piece to appreciate how far journalistic standards appear to be falling at The Observer. Not good, not good at all.

 

Update: apparently The Observer have now removed the original story from their online archives.

The New York Times has a fascinating article on Williams Syndrome – a genetic disorder that results in a person having a cheerful, outgoing personality, but with poor understanding of social dynamics. Watch the video of Nicki Hornbaker, a 19-year old born with Williams syndrome.

 

(hat tip to Mind Hacks for the link)

Mr. Angry deconstructs a drug company’s web site that mentions the side-effects of a diet pill in a rather coy way. Mr. Angry obliterates the coy, and leaves you in no doubt as to what you are very likely to experience. Very, very funny.

Being a proud parent is all very well, but this is probably a cut too far. I have my doubts about Nurse Practitioners as it is; child surgeons seem even less of a good idea.

At the moment, I’m moving very slowly with a limp and occasionally emitting a whimper of pain. It’s all my own fault.

 

The sequence of events was set in motion about six weeks ago when Martin decided that he’d like to throw open access to the garden to members of the public. He’s a keen gardener, and very proud of what he’s achieved in the garden here in just over a year. So he joined Groei & Bloei, the Dutch association of amateur gardeners; the local chairman came to inpsect the garden, and gave Martin the go-ahead to open the garden. Martin picked next weekend as the date, and thus the garden will be open to the public next Saturday and Sunday afternoons.  

 

Of course, Martin wants the garden to look its best, so we’ve both been working hard to get it ready. My tasks are generally mowing and hedge trimming. This last week I trimmed all the box hedges and yesterday I started on the hornbeam hedge. This is a tall hedge, and requires me to use a ladder.

 

You can see where this is going, can’t you?

 

I’ve got one of those multi-purpose aluminium ladders that can be locked into a variety of shapes. I had it in the form of a raised platform, with a plank of wood laid across the rungs to form the platform. Standing on it, I could tackle the top of the hedge, using the electric hedgetrimmer.

 

Now, I’ve always understood the elementary physics of fulcrums and levers, and I knew that it was important to have the plank of wood laid carefully across the rungs. The ends of the plank, in particular, had to be resting on rungs, otherwise the plank would tip up if I trod on the end section. I knew this. And yet, about halfway through cutting the top of the hedge, I moved to the end of the plank and suddenly had a very bad feeling.

 

I looked down, and saw the the end of the plank was no longer resting on a rung. My right foot was standing on the ladder frame. However, my left foot was standing on the end of the plank that was now free to tilt downward through the ladder, which is precisely what it was doing. Everything progressed in slow motion. I remember thinking that I was still holding the hedgetrimmer, and that had to be jettisoned in as safe a manner as possible, and that I was, in all probability, about to experience for the very first time, what a broken leg would feel like.

 

Fortunately, elementary phsyics saved the day once again. Since the heavy wooden plank was now falling through the rungs of the ladder, all that was left was the weight of the aluminium ladder itself. I was now falling face down off one end of the platform, with my left leg caught between two rungs on the top of the platform. My weight, and my trajectory, caused the whole platform to lift and pivot around the legs of the ladder at the end that I was falling from. Had that pivot not occurred, there would have been a very nasty snapping of both my tibia and fibula.

 

I lay there for a few moments (going "ow-ow-ow-ow", "shit!" and variations on that theme) before I thought that I probably should check to see if I had broken my leg. Fortunately, I hadn’t, although there was a small gash where the flesh had got trapped between the tibia and the ladder rung. However, now I have a painful leg and currently reduced to hobbling around. The rest of the hedge will have to wait.

 

What really makes me feel stupid is that I’ve always known this accident could potentially happen. I’ve spent hours standing on the plank on the ladder platform. All it took was one momentary lapse of concentration, and the laws of physics kicked in. However, it could have been worse.