Aug
31
Neurology examination
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I started experiencing strong pins and needles in my feet in December, and subsequently strange aches and pains, including a burning pain in my thighs that exerted a pulling effect on my kneecaps.
I tended to let it ride since I have little faith in doctors, and found the routes on the Internet hard to digest. But I eventually saw 4 doctors, and had 3 different sets of blood tests that yielded no problem.
So I was referred to a Neurologist in March. Today, over 5 months later, I had the appointment, which I will recall here since I was troubled by its shortcomings.
First, he asked me why I was visiting. Yet he had pages of notes about me in front of him. Maybe my doctor had failed to say why I was visiting him, but this seems an odd omission.
I was given a urine test, and passed with flying colours. As I did blood pressure.
He asked about my symptoms, and essentially nothing else. He failed to ask if I had the symptoms before, if I had had an accident that might have been a precursor.
His physical check was extremely quick, and from my perspective, superficial - two of the doctors I had seen earlier had carried out more comprehensive neurological investigations. Basically, he tapped my arm for a response - on my right arm there was none and in my left there was a disntictive response, but he seemed to carry out the test with no conviction. He tested thumb strength. He tested that I could detect a cold object on my legs and arms, but so fast that I had no time to answer properly - there was no enquiry as to whether the legs were more or less sensitive than the arms.
I did not have to take my socks off because he did not bother to even look at or touch my ailing feet.
He very confidently announced that there was categorically nothing neurologically wrong with me. I pointed out that this did not resolve my problem, and what should I do next. He suggested low impact exercise, yet had failed to ask about my lifestyle early, from which he would have discovered that exercise had no healing effect on the condition over the last 8 months.
It might be that I am being harsh on the man, but the tests he carried out could easily have been carried out by a neighbour of mine. His position of expertise seemed to manifest only in the speed of test, and the speed and resolute nature of his conclusion. His words were ‘There is absolutely nothing wrong with you’ as far as I can remember.
What do you think? And where do I go next? The Internet articles on the symptoms tended to lead to amputation or death, so I gave up reading. None yielded any action that I could take.
May
2
Rollercoaster
Filed Under Health, Life | 3 Comments
Many who know me actually do not know me. They know a little about me, but mostly allow my apparent superficial, over chatty ways to blind them to anything deeper. And they allow my regular frailalties to label me a hypercondriac. Whilst I agree that I can focus too heavily on ill health and injuries, this is hard to avoid when emotions are triggered so readily by such. To give a sample of health derailment that I have to suffer with, and have to suffer mostly in silence because no one takes my ailments seriously, here is the story for this week.
Wednesday I start feeling a dead ache in my left arm. I ignore it and get on with my day, but it does not fade away. Ignoring ailments and getting on, by the way, is anti-hypochondriac. The ache is so much at night that it badly affects sleep. Again, I try to relax and ignore it, but am only partly successful.
Thursday, I am hanging with tiredness, but continue working on my writing, but by late afternoon feel overly tired.
Friday sees me full of life by mid morning, and become hyper. Overly energised, I work flat out on my book, but know that I need to calm down or the hyper state will get out of hand. As I calm down, my heart paradoxically starts to race. I ignore this as much as I can, although the anxiety that is almost certainly causing it makes me feel very very unsettled. I start to feel frustrated by this rollercoaster of conditions.
Saturday I awake with a pain in my right knee. It may be caused by anxiety, but when it makes walking down stairs difficult, then I have to pay creed to it. I feel somewhat down in mood after the previous two days, but look forward to football in the afternoon, even though I have an mild but irritating left achilles tendon problem from two weeks ago. I play badly, and this injury and the sore knee makes running difficult. And before I leave the pitch, I sustain a right calf strain. Believe me, this is the last thing I want, and again, I accept my fate and limp home, and then to a coffee shop to read a very interesting book on the brain, but feel depressed in the evening.
Sunday I awake with a headache, depression, and a burning feeling in both thighs, but decide to just focus on enjoying the day.
That has been the rollercoaster of the last few days. Even if I am a hypochondriac, what could I actually have done differently to avoid that emotional and physical journey? It is simply a delusion to say that I did not feel the aches and pains and tiredness and depression. It might be that my attitude created these ailments, but if so, I really struggle to work out what I did wrong - each day I tried to just get as normal. If I did think or act in a wrong way, then the consequences were certainly enormously disporoportional to the cause.
After 5 months of strange leg problems, I still await a neurological examination courtesy of the NHS. I mostly get on with life and do not worry about the leg problems, but for 5 months they have compromised what little football abilities I have, and made the games less enjoyable. However, there has been one gain in all that time - 16 years of mostly daily tension headaches are almost a thing of the past.
Dec
13
Correlations and causes
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As explained so intelligently in “The Diet delusion”, much advice by Health ‘experts’ treats correlations too glibly.
1st, a correlation does not necessarily mean a causal relationship
2nd, even if there is a causal relationship, this also does not mean that you should treat the symptom directly.
For example, damp in a house will cause fungal growth, but drying out the damp is not enough - you need to find the source of the damp, or the cause will persist.
So it is with the obesity myth. That overeating was falsely seen as causal in the majority of cases, and that undereating should be the treatment. The cause is the balance of the food not the quantity, coupled with a metabolic proneness to that food imbalance. And, sadly, the correlation between obesity and overeating is not that strong anyway. Sad because obese people become stigmatised.
Nov
29
The scientific method
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A diabetic friend of mine rejected the advice proffered in a book on health that I lent to him. His argument was that no trust could be put into advice from the single author. I assumed I knew what he meant, but on reflection, I am not so sure. Did he mean that only books with multiple authors had legitimacy? Or did he mean that the man was not affiliated to a medical organisation?
I assume the latter. Barry Groves was the author of the book (’Trick and treat’), and essentially from chemist to self financed researcher into nutrition and health. But my friend missed the salient points were that this man was not only free from the influence of the medical powers, but that the book was the result of no less than 26 years of full time research into health and nutrition research. A meta research that precised decades of scienitific research by others.
The only way in which I feel that this impressive position of authority was that Barry was always looking to research that endorsed his own personal nutritional approach.
However, it is well established that bias blights a large percentage of scientific research. To suppress the human instinct to ‘find what weare looking for’ is a hard task indeed.
But let’s step right back.
The scientific method is held in an almost sacred esteem. It is de rigour in the West. But a more practical and holistic view of the World dominates in the East of course. And Worldwide, there is also the additional matter of empirical result. All approaches have pros and cons, but I want to focus on the cons of the Western view first, by way of an example.
Consider the testing of drugs. The highest level of the scientific testing is to perform a double blind, placebo controlled study, where both the testers and the subjects are unaware of who is receiving the drug and who the placebo (sugar pill). For a drug to be approved for marketing, it must outperform the placebo. More often than not, the drug will be effective to varying degrees in a number of subjects, the placebo less so, and those who took no pill, there were some smaller improvement of symptoms.
But the whole point is that it is all a matter of degree. The approved drug will undoubtably not have worked at all for some of the subjects. The approval is also subject to some observation of side effects, but they are not the main focus. And often, side effects only manifest themselves after sustained consumption of a drug, often beyond the time period of a trial.
The net effect is that for some people, the approved drug will not only fail to help their condition, but will also cause unwanted side effects. The approval is essentially a statistical one. And this is a key flaw in the use of the scientific method for testing drugs. A single tick for approval for 100% of people when that drug was not proven effective for 100% of subjects.
And the key point I want to make is that just as Barry Groves was giving the viewpoint of one person, when you take a drug, you too are only one person. No matter how large the percentage efficacy of a drug, if you are in the wrong percentage, you will become more ill.
The double blind testing method helps you not one jot if the drug does not work for you. Yet we tend to blindly accept the one-size-fits-all advice we get from the medical industry.
The frailty of it all is actual quite funny on one sense - a New Scientific article revealed that one group of experimenters discovered that the administrationof morphine to patients in pain had no effect if the patient was unaware of the administration of the drug. They make a strong case that the double blind test method even more fundamentally flawed. There should be an additional group of subjects who receive a drug unknowingly (in their food or drink). How many drugs only ever got approval because the placebo effect was making the drug work by the power of the mind?
I talked with a district nurse of some decades experience yesterday. She confirmed something odd that I had read a while ago. That for some people, morphine fails to kill pain, and induces a state of agitation instead. Yet morphine would sail through scientific testing because of its high percentage efficacy. You just don’t want to be the one who gets agitated.
One final point, on the emprical method. The method that is so universally dismissed as being too anecdotal to be valid. Yet the whole point is that it has a similar weight of statistical vailidity to the scientific method. But it also has a much bigger weight of support in that it is often an assessment of a method over years and decades. Nutrionists giving food advice to thousands of patients over many years build up a huge amount of empirical knowledge, tweaking their methods to suit the reality of the feedback they ge. Often, they conclude that certain individuals require highly specific treatment. And adjust their observations and subsequent advice accordingly. Compare with double blind testing, which leaves marginal cases as mere statistics.
In conclusion, years of practical experience has a higher real World value than a short lived double blind test.
Nov
9
For reasons that totally elude me, I am currently struggling with up to 6 days a week of variable mixtures of headache, excessive tiredness, anxiety and low blood sugar symptoms. And a sore throat.
If this is, as it should be, an alien cocktail of ailments, then just appreciate that fact.
Today, after the initial and inevitable waking headache unexpectedly faded away, I was left with a surge of energy and a clarity of thought that was hugely empowering. So I set about making the most of this with a long day of work.
Now you might thnik that I would necessarily be most happy to have recovered my health. Indeed, not so much recover as over-recover - I felt massively energsied - work was effortless.
But days like this, by nature of their rarity, are tinged with some negative aspects. First, that the comedown that my brain most likely has in store for me tomorrow is, by contrast, deeply frustrating. True, sometimes I get 2 good days in a row. But essentially, I know of no mechanism for sustaining today into tomorrow - and I have tried many many methods of doing so.
So what happens, as it did today, is that I end up in a manic rush, trying to catch up on all the complex, involved jobs that my brain is simply incapable of tackling on bad head days. There is a great sense of accomplishment, but also a bitterness that I have little choice - use my functioning brain now or wait another week or so for the next similar day.
At 10 am this morning, builders started work next door, making a hell of a din, and thereby making concentration tough. And also frustrating - I asked my neighbour how long it would last (should I go out and get a coffee), but when I start to explain that it is a ‘good head’ day for me, I get the inevitable blank stare. It means nothing to Bob, my neighbour and a real gentleman, and nor should it. But every fibre of my being was wanting to say how sacrosanct a day like this is and could he get the builders to do the work tomorrow.
Of course, I said no such thing, and fortunately, the noise abated at about 3pm.
I is 5:30 pm now, and I am taking a break to get this off my mind. I also know that I probably should meditate to calm my manic state down. But the torture of 6 straight days of bad head makes today an oasis, and it is terribly tempting to work like a nutter to squeeze all I can from my brain.
You see, not only is my head clear, but I mostly suffer not one jot of fatigue, working 10 or so hours. What is it about 15 years of tension headaches and a myriad ofrelated symptoms that can temporarily go into complete abeyance like this? The implication is that I should be able to switch off my headaches on an onging basis. But how on earth do I do that?
Oct
7
It’s not what happens to you
Filed Under Health, Life, Psychology | 6 Comments
Life for both humans and animals is periodically beset with mishaps, difficulties and challenges. The established wisdom is that :
It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to what happens to you
a sentiment I entirely agree with - crying over spilt milk does not unspill it.
However, reality does not often match the simplicity of such proverbs.
First, I will question what is meant by you. In the simple sense, it is the entire you as a human being. And here in lies the problem. We experience our lives as only a small part of this whole, via our subconscious mind. It is only a small part of our brain. So I will rephrase the proverb :
It’s not what happens to you, but how your conscious mind reacts to what happens to you
And now we introduce a complexity, because your conscious mind is made aware of what happens to you via the subconscious interpretation of the input from the senses. The amygdala (the emotional organs of the brain, as it were), part of the primitive brain, vet the situation before it arrives at the conscious mind. This allows us to pull our hand away from a burning hot plate before we are consciously aware of the danger.
The amygdala can set up an emotional state that it deems appropriate to handle how it assesses what has happens.
When the conscious mind is duly made aware of what has happens, it then has to handle both it’s own judgement of the event, and the parallel surge of emotions in the background.
If you have suffered trauma, or have acquired phobias, the emotional reaction to what has happened can swamp you - your subconscious goes on red alert. I call it emotional hikacking. The adrenal glands can flood you with adrenaline and cortisol. Until that dissipates, you are very much at the mercy of the effect of these chemicals on the body.
Regardless of the rationality of your conscious reaction to the situation, you as a whole being is reacting intensely, and it is simply draining and distressing. It can takes hours or even days to recover.
Those whose emotions are well contained can have no real conception of what can happen to those emotionally hijacked. Nor, indeed, really appreciate their freedom. They live a proportional life.
Please feel free to give your own thoughts on this.
Aug
2
Nutrition update
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After 3 months on a low-carb diet, I have lost 1 stone (14 pounds) of weight. This was not my aim.
Unlike traditional dieting, with which I was surprisingly successful - losing a similar amount and keeping it off for a few years - I appear to have retained my muscle mass. My waist gets thinner and thinner - close to it’s shape when I was 20. I am very curious both why the diet induces weight loss (does it occasionally prefer to burn body fat instead of the dietary fat I intake?), and when such loss ends. I strongly suspect that I have a way to go, and that my ‘natural’ body shape is wiry. Or skinny, as I was as a boy.
But recently, I have put on noticeable fat on my sides. Just a little, and I feel that I know why.
On a number of occassions recently, I have experienced blood sugar crashes at unexpected times - sometimes fairly soon after eating. So I have ‘topped up’ with nuts and cheese and avocado. Delicious, but it did not feel stable.
Likewise, I have had a worsening of the leg and foot cramps that characterise the early stages of the change from carb to fat burning.
I believe that I have simply not beeen taking in enough liquids.
In a semi-dehydrated state, the fat does not get metabolised well. It passes through or gets stored as fat. The shortfall in energy may impact on the protein processing, aggravting its metabolism. The cramps are a result of mineral loss caused by fat rather than carb fueled protein metabolism, I believe.
Yesterday evidenced a distinct example of these problems - my fluid intake was irratic since I was photographing a Wedding. By evening, my legs were achy, and my head was painful.
Today, I hydrated well and found that a small lunch at 1:20 took me through afternoon football comfortably to an evening meal at 7:30. After which, I felt bloated with food. No room for nuts. And a greater stability in mood and general well being all day.
Often, with great schemes such as a change of diet, there is a much stronger focus on the glamorous aspects, and too little emphasis of the details, such as hydration in this case. And on exactly how to manage hydration and the tell tale signs of poor regulation.
Jul
20
New project
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Started a new project. A meta project. Like a PhD really, in a crude sense.
To revisit the books that have had a major influence on me and :
- Extract the key matters of interest to me
- Follow up selected references and see where they take me
- Link different threads across books into themes
- Write the findings as a book
As an example, an underlying theme to Taoism is to liberate oneself from one’s Ego, and to accept what is. The pronunciation of Ego is the same as the Japanese for the game of Go (but spelt Igo). Progress beyond a certain level in Go is not possible without accepting setbacks within games. If your ego holds onto failing positions, they become worse, and the ego becomes enflamed.
So a parallel here between the attitude in an Oriental board game to attitude to life, as exemplified in an Oriental philosophy.
My research today has been on the 2nd reference on page 1 of 58 pages of references of ‘Trick and Treat’. The reference took me to a web site that followed on from the research in the reference. One nugget gleamed from that site was the discovery that liver is the most nutrient dense food you can eat. Amazingly good for you, and highly prized by many peoples still adhering to ancient ways.
Not many people like liver. I am happy that I love it. But many people eat it raw. Now that takes a bit of getting used to I feel!
This project is something of a long, ongoing one. But having started it, I feel energised. Takes my mind off my lost passport - which I need in order to get an American Tax Id which I need to start publishing directly to Amazon.com. I want to write some more books this Winter and that route yields very favourable retail prices. Ridiculously low retail proces in fact.
If you are interested, that self publishing route is via CreateSpace.com. I have a book in proof with them I wrote in 2008 - I need the tax ID before it goes live.
And if you want your book designed and published, I am happy to help for a low cost.
Jul
13
Occam’s razor revisited
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This is a light, and possibly flippant blog, so treat with appropriate disdain. But it may have value.
It is fairly well established that vegetarians tend to struggle to replicate the nutritional value of red meat, often missing out on the odd amino acid.
And it is probably well established that homo sapien and his forefathers ate red meat as a staple diet for large parts of the previous few million years.
Yet, red meat is treated as a ‘dangerous’ food in anything other than small quantities.
But this is not my point. Nearly there.
Now picture your average stone age man hacking apart a culled bull, and tucking into this massive source of food. Now the edible parts of such a large beast principally comprised muscle, fat, and vital organs.
Occam’s razor would say that the most likely scenario was that all of these were eaten. It is extremely unlikely that only the lean meat were eaten. Experiments on a protein only diet yield severe health problems with days.
The fat and vital organs are up there with the protein in terms of edible value to the stone age man.
So why, then, the additional widely broadcast aversion to the dreaded saturated animal fats? Precisely where did stone age man get his fats? Did he ignore the fat of the animal to seek out avocados and nuts?
To my mind, it makes eminent sense that the fat of an animal is equally valuable as the protein. It makes too little sense otherwise.
Jul
9
Nutrition update
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I’ve been eating a very low carbohydrate diet for 11 weeks now, replacing the energy from the lost carbs by an increased amount of fat. Fat derived from meat, fish, nuts and vegetables such as avocados.
In that time, I have been playing football once or twice a week. My legs are getting stronger, and, coupled with 12lbs weight loss, I can zip around a football field much like I did some years ago.
But the salient matter is that I have incurred not one muscular strain or tear in that time. It is not a long time, but I have had years recently when I incurred 15 new injuries in one calendar year.
http://www.buffalo.edu/news/
To me, this makes enormous sense. Beef is a dry meat without the fat. It is in fact muscle. So muscle short on fat is also dry, and therefore less flexible. This is simplistic, but you get the point.
Of course, impact injuries are not covered by the fat levels now in my diet. But recovery from them is. Good fat levels accelerate healing.
It is highly likely that the transient osteoporosis I suffered with in my left hip years ago was caused by a fat deficit in my diet.