We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Unless you give yourself 4 or more hours in the gym daily like an anorectic, no. For practical purposes, it is of no use for that.
All exercise which fatigues and stresses the body is good for mental health, fitness, and vitality, and it probably slightly raises calorie-burning and is better than sitting, but exercise alone can never help you lose 10 lbs of belly lard. It's wishful thinking.
Distance running, like any extended-time cardio (eg swimming, elliptical, rowing, bike, etc), procures no health or fitness benefits. Worse, distance running damages the body, often permanently.
If you must use running for the cardio component of a fitness program, two to four quarter-mile or even half-mile sprints per week is plenty. Treadmill sprints are kinder on the joints than a road. The comparable anaerobic sprint approach applies to any cardio exercises. For cardio, it is the spurts of max. intensity that matter, not time wasted.
(I am reminded to add that, for those over 75 or 80, aerobic cardio is great and much better than sitting.)
The best-organized and rational program I have seen is the New Atkins.
If you want to look good, have maximum vigor, and save your joints, back, and heart, it's a good tough program which will shrink your belly, your stomach, and your appetite.
Once you reach your target, the plan focuses on maintenance. Not easy in a world of temptation.
They are physiologically correct in general, and especially in noting the trivial effect of exercise on fat loss. Exercise is for strength and vitality for white-collar and otherwise sedentary people, but not for fat loss. Lose fat, exercise better, get stronger, feel better, and fight aging.
Medically, each pound of spare adipose tissue over-stresses your heart, and your knees and hips. Not good. Also, strong and thin is good for sex.
If you just don't care, that's fine too. It's a free country. Very few have the self-discipline needed to do hard things persistently and obviously many people do not care very much about how they look or feel.
I have no problem with overweight people. I just assume that other things are more important to them than physical fitness, and they are right about that. It is not for everybody.
It's not really new news, but getting fat at some point in life does seem to alter some physiologic processes for the long term. It seems to retrain the body for a high-caloric life, for a fat life; resets some homeostatic buttons including altering or almost eliminating satiety signals for some period of time.
Despite the interesting physiology, I feel the article overstates the thesis and minimizes the role of human agency, human choice. Resisting temptation, calculating consequences, etc. is what makes us different from other animals. For those who have been heavy at some point in life, though, that is more challenging. Mind over matter.
Moral of the story: Don't "let yourself go" because you may live to regret it.
I think of it as physician-eased dying, and I see no important moral issues in the topic at all. Anesthesia and analgesia are among the handful of categories of mercies which modern medicine has to offer and to deny the comfort these tools can offer terminal patients seems sadistic and immoral to me.
I read this short piece, Death and the Psychiatrist, and do not feel that it was worth publishing (or linking, except as an example of a weak essay). Of course, I saw plenty of dying during my medical training. There are many ways to die, but the worst one is to die in agony and terror. Nobody needs that.
It seems common enough these days to see terminally-ill patients tortured by heroic medical efforts. I hate to hear about this. Physicians, of all people, should know when to let go even if families do not. Hope is not a plan.
When your 104-lb body is packed with cancer and wracked with pain, would you chose one more round of chemotherapy, or hospice care where you would be gently eased out of it all, floating on a sea of morphine?
There's a belief gaining popularity that when patients seem to be nearing death's door, doctors should back off from aggressive medical care and let them die in peace. Providing "heroic" care has become a negative, and many doctors are stepping back from it. According to a 2011 study,[1] 42% of primary care physicians believed they were overtreating patients.
And yet some patients—even when debilitated by metastatic cancer, brain injury, or old age—still want to keep on fighting. They don't want the doctor to give up on them, and there are many documented cases when that extra boost has saved their lives.
But for how long, and with how much medical misery?
It's a complex dilemma, but the Brits figured it out. Offering opiates for patients with severe pain. it seems to me, is more worthwhile than worrying about the few who become serious addicts.
No surprise there. When government pays for something, there are usually political angles to it. The only consolation is that nobody but a nitwit would follow government guidelines for anything more than income tax forms. If you can understand them.
There are a number of diseases and disorders which can result in dementia, but Alzhemer's is the most common. It seems to be, basically, progressive brain rot. Its progress can be slow or quick. Dementia is not to be confused with the normal memory loss of aging: "Why did I just walk into this room?" "Where the heck did I put my iPhone?"
Anatomy Tutorial. This is the same as a medical school gross anatomy course, minus the cadaver dissection.
You can see one of their Youtube courses on any part of the body you might be curious about. In the process, you will get the idea of why medical students need to be expert and efficient memorizers. For an example of a med school exam question, "What is the origin and insertion, function, and innervation of the Sartorius muscle?"
I recently was at a conference having a conversation with the sponsor's Chief Revenue Officer, who is a friend of mine. He's very intelligent, has a Master's in Economics, a Law degree, and practiced for some time. His great love was negotiation, so he found himself gravitating back to sales and eventually into his current role. We were having drinks late in the evening and talking about different topics of interest.
He is deeply involved in holistic and alternative medicines. That, in itself, is no big deal. I know plenty of people who use these approaches, as I have from time to time (despite being the son of a doctor). My father once told me, "If it works, it doesn't matter what it is. Even placebos have a place in medicine." Of course, he wasn't all that thrilled about me seeing a chiropractor, but I figure that was just professional jealousy kicking in.
What the CRO said to catch my attention was this - "there is no incentive for the medical community to cure cancer because they make far more money by just treating it." From someone as highly educated as he is, I was shocked.
It's not like I haven't heard this comment before. I just never heard it from a person capable of thinking deeply about an issue like this.
His premise is based on the existence of one thing called 'cancer' which must be somehow curable. I tried to explain to him there is no single thing called 'cancer'. There are forms of cancer, and they are all quite different. In addition, we all have some form of 'cancer' within us, it's really just a question of whether the deadly or invasive form has been activated. Furthermore, the term "cure" isn't perfectly applicable. There are many ways of dealing with disease, such as prevention (one example is vaccines - the HPV vaccine should reduce the rate of cervical cancer over time) and altered diets and behaviors (there is evidence that healthier eating habits, reduced sugars can help slow some cancers from spreading - and even ending smoking or drinking can help). But even treatment is a form of 'cure' (many lymphomas are now 'cured' if caught early and treated aggressively). Regardless of how you approach the issue, strides are being made to find a 'cure'.
The idea that you "make more from treatment so you're not looking for a cure" is like saying "the attempt to cure the disease generates so much revenue, they aren't really trying to cure it." In other words, the money generated from 'curing' it isn't really an attempt to 'cure' anything. Which is a nice bit of circular logic I guess only a lawyer can get away with.
The truth is, many cancers may be 'curable', but because all cancers are such complex diseases there is no magic bullet. This, of course, makes Obama's State of the Union call a bit outlandish, and it also tends to forget that we've been trying to find a cure since 1971, when Nixon was the first president to declare "war" on cancer. This doesn't mean we should stop trying simply because we haven't cured all forms yet. However, it does mean we should keep everything in context. We've 'cured' several forms, we've made tremendous progress, and there is no value in ignoring everything which has happened to improve the lives of those with various forms.
If treating diseases generates so much money that 'curing' them isn't a goal, then I'd like to know why we do have so many curable diseases today? Treating diseases like smallpox, polio, and a host of other diseases generates plenty of money - why did we 'cure' them by finding vaccines?
In a way, the logic employed by my CRO friend is an application of Bastiat's "Broken Window Fallacy" - the idea that breaking windows makes us wealthier by keeping the glazier at work, and money changing hands. It's a logic that ignores the massive costs of lost value and misallocation of spending. Cancer's costs on productivity far outweigh the revenue any treatment can generate. 'Curing' all its forms is a goal simply because the overall gains in productivity will be greater than the revenues generated by simply managing it.
Here are many of the reasons that counting calories for weight-maintenance and weight loss does not work: The Calorie Is Broken
Unfortunately, they omit one of the more important considerations, which is that our bodies handle the calories in carbs differently from the calories in a juicy steak. All calories are not equal.
Our general rules:
- If you work out hard over 3 days/wk and are happy with your physique, eat enough carbs for energy and eat enough protein for muscle repair. Not a ton, but some. An egg or two and 2 slices of meat daily is plenty of pure protein for the average-sized hard exerciser who works with weights. Not enough for Rocky Balboa. Adults who do not do much hard muscle work do not need much protein except for enjoyment. - If happy with your weight and condition, eat whatever you feel like. Pizza is good. So is ice cream. - To lose weight efficiently, quit all carbs except for a little yoghurt or a glass of milk or something like that. Focus on protein and veggies as fillers. - Don't bother counting calories. Dietary fats and oils have plenty of calories, but can not make you gain body fat. - Cardio exercise is good for conditioning, but you can't lose weight by doing it unless you do it 6 hrs/day. Only anorectics do that.
I am not sure why it is a mystery. Everything decays, wears out. Entropy is like gravity, and I doubt that humans in a natural environment were ever designed to live much past child-producing years (knees, ovaries, penile weakness, heart valves, loss of collagen, cancers, etc,). But we do, now. Most of us.
You are probably aware that "gomer" is a technical medical term for an elderly human with too many chronic medical problems, usually including cognitive decline. The female term is "gomere."
It's an acronym for "Get Out of My Emergency Room." In the classic black-humor but realistic medical memoir of an internal medicine internship (House of God - which was Mass General I believe but sort-of named after NYC's Mount Sinai), the phrase "Gomers go to ground" was popularized.
The idea is that gomers always find a way to fall - while walking, falling off a gurney, falling out of bed, having mini-strokes or heart attacks, falling off the toilet, falling out of wheelchairs, etc. Victims of gravity and decay.
If you read the book you will never want to get near a famous teaching hospital. There is plenty of sex with nurses, chaplains, and social workers, etc in it, which is sort-of an intern ritual and the gals are all hot for fresh young interns. At Amazon:
The House of God is a mesmerizing and provocative journey that takes us into the lives of Roy Basch and five of his fellow interns at the most renowned teaching hospital in the country. Young Dr. Basch and his irreverant confidant, known only as the Fat Man, will learn not only how to be fine doctors but, eventually, good human beings. Samuel Shem has done what few in American medicine have dared to do - create an unvarnished, unglorified, and amazingly forthright portrait revealing the depth of caring, pain, pathos, and tragedy felt by all who spend their lives treating patients and stand at the crossroads between science and humanity. With over two million copies sold worldwide, The House of God has been hailed as one of the most important medical novels of the twentieth century and compared to Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith for its poignant portrayal of the education of American doctors.
Thus I found it amusing to see this sign in La Gomeralast month (I will post my pics of La Gomera and Tenerife when I get to it):
Correction: Reader is right I think. Boston's Beth Israel.
Doctors are physicians, not "care-providers." If your doctor does things by the book, then he/she is not focusing on you.
Dr. Accad wrote a letter to medical students, but it captures most of the sorts of things that thoughtful phyicians think and worry about all the time, through their careers.
There are two ways to get rid of ugly, burdensome, hip-and-knee-damaging, heart-damaging fat.
The easiest way is carb restriction, or zero-carb diet. Fat will melt away just to fuel normal life. Remember, all carbs = sugar, and excess carb/sugar gets long-term storaged as fat in case of starvation conditions.
Cancer is a common eventual development in every life form including plants. Like cardiovascular disease, it is a "normal disease" of aging. For example, 50-80% of men in their 80s have prostate cancer cells on autopsy studies of men dying of other causes.
The government experts are 30 years behind current knowledge. I am not sure why this is a governmental task anyway. People can read on their own and make up their own minds.
The best-organized and rational program I have seen is 
It's not really new news, but getting fat at some point in life does seem to alter some physiologic processes for the long term. It seems to retrain the body for a high-caloric life, for a fat life; resets some homeostatic buttons including altering or almost eliminating satiety signals for some period of time.