Morning Ed: Health {2017.07.27.Th}

31 thoughts on “Morning Ed: Health {2017.07.27.Th}”

1. Shower: Well, I always shower at night after working out. If it’s a particularly hot evening, I’ll shower again in the morning. Of course, if I’m not dirty of body, and I have someone who wants to take a shower together, ANYTIME is a good time to “get soapy”.Report

2. Of all the Kennedy’s, that one really needs to be fully marginalized. Have the more sane members of that clan publicly denounced him?Report

3. Shower: anyone with bad pollen allergies who has to be outdoors during the day learns that showering (and washing your hair, if it’s longer than 1/2 inch or so) at night is your friend.

   Honestly, there are some days in the summer when I shower TWICE. It’s like the old line from “To Kill a Mockingbird” about how ladies in 1930s Alabama bathed three times a day but were STILL sweaty by dinnertime.

   As for the “dirt and germs and immune system” thing – well, I pretty much rolled in the mud as a child, there were times my mom hosed me off, clothes and all, in the backyard before letting me in the house, and I am STILL allergic to just about everything, so I don’t know. Maybe I’d be dead if she didn’t let me roll around in the mud?Report

   1. filly,
      Did you go into anaphalactic shock during the allergy test? 😉
      There’s allergic, and then there’s “systemic shock likely”Report

      1. No, never gone into full shock. (I had a case of chills and hives once, and my bp dropped).

         But I am miserable all summer long – sneezing, hives, scratchy throat, dysphoria. I am taking as much antihistamine as is safe/as I can still function on.Report

         1. filly,
            My husband lost consciousness. Sneezing and scratchy throats are good days for him, bad days he’s getting systemic issues, which leads to poor decision making and overall sleepiness…Report

            1. I am at the point where I will not try any food I have not eaten before if I am alone. In the past five years I have started to have reactions to anything in the cucumber/melon family, worse reactions to celery and its relatives, sometimes reactions to strawberries, and I suspect I am now sensitive to peanuts and peanut butter (so don’t eat it any more). I also have to read the labels of all the cosmetic/bathing products I use – no cucumber extracts or chamomile extracts.

               I am also on a beta blocker which adds another layer of worry because my doctor told me it’s harder to bring someone out of anaphylaxis when they are on one – something about epinephrine “not working.”

               My fear is I’ll live to see a day when all I can eat is (maybe) rice, chicken, and lamb (supposedly 3 of the least allergenic foods)Report

4. Coca Cola is phasing out Coke Zero. What in the nine hells are they thinking? It was one of their only growing product lines- also the only diet soda that doesn’t taste like dish detergent.Report

   1. I noticed the Safeway generic brand of Coke Zero was no longer being put on the shelves a couple of months ago. Now I know why.Report

   2. A growing product line gets shut down?

      There must be some very bad news coming down the pike. Like “we’ve found that some mixtures of potassium benzonate and acesulfame potassium cause a rate of increase in prostate cancer with a p > .05 if there is a presence of caffeine” or something.Report

      1. And Jaybird finds a way to make the news worse. Not only are they discontinuing my favorite soda but turns out it was poison all along. Thanks Jay, you are my sunshine.Report

         1. Maybe we’ll luck out and it’ll turn out that this is a boneheaded move like “New Coke” instead of a calculated attempt of a major corporation to act in accordance with what it sees as its own best interests.

            There are precedents for the former, after all.Report

            1. I’m still going to hoard bottles and cases of the good stuff.Report

      2. That was my initial thought as well.

         Another possibility: The animal they run through the juicer to make it has gone extinct.Report

         1. Like the Ribwich on the Simpsons? “Think smaller, and more legs…”Report

   3. John Scalzi has been covering this beat:
      http://whatever.scalzi.com/2017/07/26/is-this-the-end-of-our-hero-coke-zero-part-ii-the-zeroening/Report

      1. While part II was amusing part I was mightily informative and I feel better about it simply because it sounds like a large part of this is likely to be branding than taste changes. We’ll see what it tastes like.

         I’m still hoarding a stash before August though.Report

      2. They should license the Doctor Who theme for the introductory commercial.Report

      3. You are me and I claim my five pounds.Report

   4. Scalzi has this covered. They’re doing repeal and replace – they’re going to be phasing in Coke No Sugar, which they’re already selling internationally. It’s apparently also from the main recipe family, as opposed to Diet Coke which carried on the taint of New Coke.

      So don’t panic. Yet.Report

      1. Maybe the Republicans should consider outsourcing conservative healthcare reform to the Coca-Cola company. They seem to do the entire repeal and replace thing better than the Republicans do.Report

   5. @north

      I’ve tried the new version, its basically the same.Report

5. Re: Taking your own medicine
   So, let’s see: Either the science writer doesn’t know jack about this (likely) or the researchers haven’t read half the research on the subject (also likely). You can use probiotics to repopulate the gut (of course you can!) — it won’t be the same as when you started, of course, and some of the more effective “repopulate your gut” stuff isn’t bacteria at all. But when you’ve got enough noxious bacteria living down there, the procedure is “flood it with anything that’ll grow” — like freezedried yeast.Report

6. Okwerekwu’s piece reads a lot more brightly if you substitute the mentally deficient (um? What’s the right word here? I don’t keep track)… But of course, then you’re arguing that it’s a matter of human rights to have mentally deficient doctors [to be perfectly clear: I assume that there are fields where a doctor could be decently of service without having full mental capabilities].
   Fun Fun!
   (Note: We still have laws on the books about getting the mentally handicapped pregnant, and about allowing them to carry babies to term.)Report

7. As physicians get stretched more thin

   At what point will the powers that be say something like “we need more physicians!” instead of “we need better insurance that covers more people!”?Report

   1. Pols are all over the fewer people should have health insurance and access to care. It’s been in all the papers.Report

      1. Well, then, let’s continue ignoring the whole “doctors are getting stretched pretty thin” thing and argue over universal coverage.

         “There aren’t doctors anymore. There is only WebMD and hospital administrators.”
         “Well, at least I no longer have to worry about coverage.”Report

8. If you enjoy conversations about rescheduling drugs, here’s one that happened on Capitol Hill the other day:

   https://youtu.be/v_1VcPt-8y8

   Edit: looks like “yesterday”.Report

9. I’ve never really understood this fixation some people on the right have with cutting insurance costs by allowing people to opt out of coverage treatment for whole categories of afflictions. It seems to me that this is completely orthogonal to the best way to control costs, which is to opt out of coverage for low-value treatments across the board, while maintaining coverage of high-value treatments. There are many expensive treatments that are only marginally more effective than much cheaper treatments. Part of the reason that insurance is so expensive is that the government limits insurers’ ability to offer plans that don’t cover these treatments.

   The ideal system, from this perspective, would be one where different insurance plans are tiered according to the clinical value of the treatments they cover. For example, a discount plan might cover treatments that on average cost no more than $25,000 per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) added. A stardard plan might go up to $50,000/QALY, premium up to $100,000, and the Cadillac plan would be the best money can buy.Report

   1. Brandon,
      I think you could get a LOT of liberals to sign onto plans like that, and happily too.
      “we’re busy working to find the best treatments… and this will incentivize THAT”Report

   2. @brandon-berg

      The problem of course is that makes the money-life trade-off too explicit. “Successful” healthcare system obfuscate this relationship as much as possible.Report

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