Chronic Pain: Observations as Patient and Provider About What Works (…And What Doesn’t)
Dr. Grace Dammann, medical director of the Pain Clinic at Laguna Honda Hospital, and seven of her colleagues talk about what does and does not work in the treatment of chronic pain. She talks as both a patient and a provider. There is also a discussion of various non-pharmacologic and complementary medicine modalities to treat pain.
From a Wall Street Journal book review by Daniel Akst:
At the center of the attack on those of us born between 1946 and 1964, days when the U.S. birth rate was extraordinarily high, is our supposed radical individualism. Its roots are said to be found in the excesses of the 1960s, a decade for which “boomers have become fall guys.”
Ms. Bristow, to her everlasting credit, isn’t buying it. “What about the two catastrophic world wars that had dominated the first half of the century; the cynical hedonism of the ‘Roaring Twenties’; the parasitism of colonialism and racial segregation?”
Ms. Bristow, a sociology professor in England, shrewdly situates this new resentment in the context of today’s vogue for collective responsibility and the transmission of guilt across many generations. “Generationalism,” as she calls it, “has come to find its most comfortable home within identity politics, that shrill sentiment of victimisation and grievance that has become an increasingly powerful cultural force.”
To read more click on the following link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-mugging-grandma-review-defying-the-boomer-bashers-11565651816
From a U.S. National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health release:
In people having lack of Vitamin D, the muscle strength of waist, back, neck decreases. Decreased muscle strength can cause herniated disc and cervical discal hernia. All of this is reflected in the patient’s pain. We wanted to pay attention to the necessity of considering the lack of Vitamin D in low back pain (LBP) which is one of the common complaints of our patients.
LBP and lack of vitamins are the most common health problems in our country and all over the world. The synthesis of >90% of Vitamin D in the body occurs under the influence of sunlight. Vitamin D, taken with foods, does not have a significant contribution, especially after a supplement is not taken. Seasonal and geographical changes are inevitable in the synthesis of Vitamin D in the derailment as the primary source is sunlight.[18,19,20] The average prevalence in Vitamin D deficiency prevalence studies in the USA is reported as 41.6%, which is 82.1% in Black people and 69.2% in Hispanics.[21] Hovsepian et al.[22] reported a 50.8% prevalence of Vitamin D deficiency in the young adult population.
To read more click on the following link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6157211/
Feom a Wall Street Journal Arts & Entertainment article:
Seventy-five years ago, “Double Indemnity” opened in theaters across America. It was an instant hit, and remains to this day a staple offering of revival houses and on cable TV and streaming video. Yet little journalistic notice has been taken of the birthday of Billy Wilder’s first great screen drama, a homicidal thriller that nonetheless had—and has—something truly unsettling to say about the dark crosscurrents of middle-class American life.
Directed by Wilder and co-written by him and Raymond Chandler, the celebrated mystery novelist, “Double Indemnity” is the story of a restless insurance salesman who helps a sexy, frustrated housewife murder her husband for profit. Though neither Wilder nor Chandler realized it at the time, it would later be acknowledged by critics and scholars as the first fully developed example of film noir, in which a flawed but basically innocent protagonist is presented with a moral choice, makes the wrong call, and is plunged into a violent after-hours world of passion and crime.
To read more click on following link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-film-noir-icon-turns-75-11565637941
From a Wall Street Journal Off Duty Travel article by By Matthew Kronsberg::
Choosing a landscape for a car is like choosing a wine for a meal. The Country Squire—which, I discovered, handled with all the nimbleness of a riverboat—felt like a natural pairing for the Mississippi River valley south of the Twin Cities. The curves would be gentle, and the views sweeping: high bluffs on one side of the car, water on the other. My family and I would pick up Highway 61 in St. Paul, hopscotching between it and Wisconsin’s fantastically scenic Great River Road, exploring the small waterfront towns along the way. We’d stop for the first night in Red Wing, Minn., and the next in Alma, Wis., 98 miles downriver. The car came with a 150-mile-a-day allowance, and a request that we not venture farther than 100 miles from Minneapolis, should anything happen.
To read more click on the following link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-road-trip-with-retro-charmand-a-car-to-match-11565352147
To rent the Ford Country Squire: http://morriesheritage.com/cars/1966-ford-country-squire/?portfolioCats=1077%2C1078%2C1079%2C1081
Filmed, Edited and Directed by: Michael Fletcher
Music by: Luke Richards (“It’s Happening”)
Whale Shark footage by: Oliver Oldroyd
Filmed whilst travelling on the M/V True North through the breathtakingly beautiful Wayag Island chain in the greater Raja Ampat region of West Papua.
Now a marine sanctuary, the Wayag’s are number one in marine biodiversity throughout the world. For this reason it is a mecca for marine biologists and recreational divers.
Website: https://www.facebook.com/Fletcher-Visuals-322799744798520/
From a Wall Street Journal book review:
When Diana, Princess of Wales, attended the Met’s Costume Institute Gala in 1996, a black-tie-clad Mr. Barelli was at her side. “I wasn’t nervous, but the pressure!” he said. “You don’t want anything to go wrong.” The princess had one request: that he keep an eye on the black lace shoulder straps of her midnight blue Dior dress and adjust them if they slipped. “I almost told her: ‘Yeah, right, I have to touch your dress.’ That’s all I have to do. I think my wife would be a little upset,” he recalled. There was no wardrobe malfunction and the evening went off without a hitch, although Mr. Barelli remembers security concerns putting a damper on the fun-loving princess. “We couldn’t let her dance,” he said.
Mr. Barelli, now 70 years old, devoted much of his tenure to less-glamorous work, such as disposing of artifacts from would-be donors. In 2007, a curator in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas received two shrunken human heads in the mail. The cardboard box had no return address, just a note donating the contents, which the sender said had come from friends in Ecuador. “They did have an odor,” said Mr. Barelli, who ultimately consigned the package to the city morgue.
To read more click on the following link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/royalty-a-naked-visitor-and-shrunken-heads-at-the-met-11565521202
From a Wall Street Journal article by Jen Murphy:
Mr. Aiona paddles with his club on Tuesday and Thursday nights and Saturday mornings for 90 minutes to two hours.They alternate between sprints and endurance paddles of up to eight miles in a six-man outrigger canoe. They also work on paddle technique and do huli drills. “Huli is Hawaiian for turn over,” he explains. “If you flip your canoe there is a very precise process for getting everyone safely and efficiently back in. We call out positions to make sure no one is underneath.From a DesignBoom.com online review article:
designed in the grand tradition of open-air sportscars, the brand new vintage electric roadster presents riders with an impressively fast 36-mph throttle bike that offers top-shelf performance with eye-catching styling. vintage electric founder and lead designer andrew davidge says, ‘the new vintage electric roadster is our take on applying the thrill of a canyon-carving convertible sportscar to our respective ev bike segment. we set out to combine best-in-industry performance with a grand aesthetic inspired by the simple, yet powerful, european and american sportscars form the 1950s and 1960s eras.’
To read more click on following link: https://www.designboom.com/design/vintage-electric-roadster-throttle-bike-08-07-2019/?utm_source=designboom+news&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=vintage+electric+introduces
From a BioRxiv.com online news release:
Antibiotic resistance is a global threat for public health. It is widely acknowledged that antibiotics at sub-inhibitory concentrations are important in disseminating antibiotic resistance via horizontal gene transfer. While there is high use of non-antibiotic human-targeted pharmaceuticals in our societies, the potential contribution of these on the spread of antibiotic resistance has been overlooked so far. Here, we report that commonly consumed non-antibiotic pharmaceuticals, including nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories (ibuprofen, naproxen, diclofenac), a lipid-lowering drug (gemfibrozil), and a β-blocker (propanolol), at clinically and environmentally relevant concentrations, significantly accelerated the conjugation of plasmid-borne antibiotic resistance genes.
To read more click on following link: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/724500v1.full
Boomers Daily 