Davblog

In which someone you've never heard of writes about things you have no interest in

Archive for the ‘health’ Category

What Doctors Don’t Tell You

There’s a new magazine in the shops this week. It’s called What Doctors Don’t Tell You and I’m reasonably sure that no-one who reads this blog would be at all interested in reading it. If you think that you might be then try looking at the sample pages on their subscription site.

It’s all complete nonsense, of course. And many of the usual suspects are already hard at work debunking it. Which has led to a predictable reaction from the magazine’s editor. I hope she remembers what happened to the last people who tried to sue Simon Singh for libel.

As always with woo-mongers there’s a fatal flaw in their argument. Their argument, paraphrased, goes something like this:

People get bad service from medical professionals, therefore patients should turn to alternative treatments instead.

There are, of course, two elements to that statement. No-one would deny that the first half is accurate. Of course there are problems with the National Health Service. Some doctors don’t keep as up to date as they should with current research, big pharmaceutical companies have too much power, the government is trying to destroy it. No-one is going to deny these problems exist. I haven’t read it yet, but I believe that at least one of these issues is the subject of Ben Goldacre’s new book.

But those problems don’t lead inevitably to the conclusion that the woo-mongers draw. Just because there are problems with the NHS, that doesn’t mean that you should abandon it and put your health in the hands of people peddling unscientific nonsense. I don’t understand how anyone can reach that conclusion from our initial premise.

No, surely the only sane reaction to our initial promise is not to run to the arms of the woo-mongers, but to see what we can do to fix those problems. I have no easy answers. It’s not the kind of issue that can be solved overnight. But it’s never going to solved if we all stop using the NHS and replace it with magic water and prayer meetings.

I’m torn on the best action to take. Generally I think that we should all do what we can to stop people reading this magazine. I’ve emailed the relevant people at WH Smith, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose and a couple of times, when I’ve seen the magazine on sale, I’ve hidden it behind copies of Practical Parenting. But at other times I think that we should just let the gullible idiots read this stuff and use whatever treatments they like. Let Darwin take care of the problem.

The downside of that approach, of course, is that they’ll continue to use their magic potions most of the time, but will switch to using real medicine when it really matters. Or use both together and claim that it’s the eye of newt homeopathic remedy that cured them. So perhaps we should make them choose. Use whatever nonsense treatments you want, but don’t come crying to the NHS when you want real treatment.

Wow. That turned out quite a lot angrier that I thought it would be. Sorry about that.

Fitbit and Friends

Fitbit

Recently I’ve been using technology to help me lose weight. Actually, I have a bit of history of being most successful at losing weight when helped by technology – my last reasonably successful period was when the Wii Fit was launched.

This time my technological friend is the Fitbit. It’s really just a supercharged pedometer. You wear it clipped to your belt and it monitors your activity during  the day. It then automatically uploads the data to a web site so that you can keep track of how active you’ve been and how your activity changes over time.

You can get one from Amazon. At £80 it’s a bit pricy, but I guess there’s a lot electronics in that little plastic package. And you can use the price as an reason to get as much use as possible out of it. Something similar worked for me when I first got the Wii Fit – which cost about the same amount.

As I said, the Fitbit monitors your activity. It measures the number of steps you take, the distance you walk and the number of flights of stairs you climb. It recommends that you aim at taking 10,000 steps, walking five miles and climbing ten flights of stairs a day.

When I first got the Fitbit a few months ago I was doing nothing like that (well, except the stairs – that’s never been a problem). But by having targets and knowing how far you are falling short it becomes pretty simple to improve. These days I generally meet all of the targets easily. Well, except on days like today when I’ve sat at the computer all day writing a training course. On a day when I think I might be falling short, I just make sure I get up and walk around the office a bit more. Three or four times a week I try to fit in a two-mile walk – that will add 4,000 or so steps.

And talking about my two-mile walks brings me to my next technological friend – RunKeeper. With smartphones we now all carry a GPS around with us all  the time. And RunKeeper is a smartphone app that uses your phone’s GPS to track exercise like walking, running or cycling.  You can set targets by distance or time (“I want to walk for two miles” or “I want to jog for twenty minutes”) and break the activity up into intervals (“two minutes of walking followed by three minutes or running”). All the time you’re exercising the app will give you updates every few minutes telling you how you’re doing. At the end of the activity it will upload the details to the web site so you have a history of your exercises. And the whole thing ties up with Google Maps so you can see exactly where you’ve been going.

I started by using it to track my two-mile walks. But over the last week I’ve finally got round to starting running. So now it tracks that for me too.

Of course, exercise is only one half of the equation. You also need to address your diet – both in quantity and quality. And technology can make that easy too. Calorie counting is too hard when you have to remember everything you eat and work out the calories at the end of the day. Now there are smartphone apps which will make that easy.

I’ve been using MyFitnessPal. A lot of these apps have food databases that are very US-centric. MyFitnessPal contains a lot of British information too. And a smartphone comes with a barcode scanner. So if you’re eating or drinking something that comes in a packet with a barcode then it’s often just a case of scanning it in order to get all the data you need.

Calorie counting can be a pretty soul-destroying activity. I’m trying to stick to a pretty aggressive limit per day – which often leaves no room for treats. But MyFitnessPal can be linked to Fitbit so that if I do more than my base level of exercise, MyFitnessPal knows and will give me some more calories to compensate. On a day when I’ve walked a long way, I can get up to 600 calories added to my allowance. Which is enough to sneak in the occasional bar of chocolate.

So, there you have it. That’s the technology that I’m currently using to lose weight. Three smartphone apps, all of which have associated web sites. And all of which are happy to share information with each other.

So far it seems to be working. In the last couple of months I’ve lost a stone. It’s not as fast as it could be, but steady progress is more likely to be a permanent change. More noticeably, I’ve had to buy a new, smaller, belt. I’m happy with the way things are going.

Oh, and being web sites they all have a social aspect. If you use any of those sites and you want to become my friend and share my pain, then please feel free. Find me on Fitbit, RunKeeper and MyFitnessPal.

A good book for finding out about this stuff is Fitness for Geeks. I highly recommend it.

Update: I’m on Fitocracy too. I’d forgotten about that one.

1970 Calling

Nadine Dorries seems to be writing her blog today from about forty years ago. She’s talking about single mothers.

I like the idea that we can introduce a structure that will capture 16 and 17 year old girls and teach them parenting skills, help them to acquire the knowledge which will enable them to run a home, manage a budget, cook meals, feed
and nurture a baby and learn to value and respect themselves.

How you got that? Parenting skills, running a home, cooking meals and looking after babies – that’s all woman’s work. Presumably the men are all too busy off hunting mammoths.

Oh, she mentions boys too. But only insofar as we should stop them getting young girls pregnant. Of course the whole thing is driven by Dorries’ belief that the way to stop children having sex is to stop sex education classes in school. Because, of course, without measured and practical advice from school children would never get the idea to experiment with sex. I mean they’d never get that idea from, oh pretty much anywhere they look in society.

The people of Mid Beds elected her to represent her. If she’s at all representative, then I’m really glad I don’t live in Mid Beds.

Oh look. Now I’ve gone and got all angry.

Update: A far more measured dissection from Sara Bedford.

Discharged

If you were reading my blog three years ago, you’ll have read several posts about my brush with a condition called Sarcoidosis.

I haven’t written much about it for a few years because there hasn’t been anything interesting to say. I started taking steroids, they cured my symptoms (almost overnight) and then I spent a year or so weaning myself off the steroids. Since then I’ve been going back to St George’s Hospital for regular check-ups with the consultant.

This morning was one of those check-ups. And at the end of it, the consultant discharged me. I still have evidence of the condition[1] but they haven’t changed for over two years, so basically he said that he didn’t want to see me again unless I had any further problems. A recurrence is apparently possible but unlikely.

So that’s all very good news.

And if you’re ever in the Tooting area and find yourself in need of a chest consultant, then I highly recommend Dr Adrian Draper at St George’s Hospital. He knows his stuff.

[1] Shadows? On me lungs? Oh god in heaven help me!

Organic Fruit and Veg

From the “stating the bleedin’ obvious” department.

Organic fruit and vegetables may be better for you than conventionally grown crops, US research suggests.

I mean, really, how much research did that need?

On the Scales

Our bathroom scales gave up the ghost recently. Well, so would you if you had me standing on you every couple of days for ten years. But replacing them gave us a wonderful opportunity for consumer overkill. Not for us a simple set of mechanical scales. No, we bought the Tanita BC-543 Body Composition Monitor. Because you can never have too much data about how overweight you are.

The Body Composition Monitor isn’t actually as complex as you think. You tell it your age, sex and height and it measures your weight and your body fat percentage. I think it measures your body fat by pushing a small electric charge into your heels and measuring your body’s resistance. Armed with this data it then gives you a barrage of information about your body and its imperfections.

But I reckon they’ve missed a couple of tricks.

Firstly, nowhere in the mass of information does it include your BMI. Now I know that BMI isn’t a particularly useful measure, but it’s certainly popular and they have all the information they need to calculate it.

But it’s the second omission that has me thinking. Tanita have a web site where users of their equipment can input data and track their health. But that’s all too much like hard work. You need to write down the numbers that you get from the monitor, go to a computer, log into the site and then type in all the numbers. Where’s the fun in that? We have computers to do all that drudgery for us.

What they should be doing is putting a wireless networking connection in all their products. Then when the monitor is used, it can use the local wireless network to transmit the data directly to the web site. None of that tedious transcription with its potential for errors (or for cheating). Each time you stand on the scales, your data is instantly available on the web site. It’s a lazy person’s dream. And let’s face it, anyone who is using one of these to monitor their weight is very likely to be a lazy person.

I shouldn’t be blogging about this. I should be running off to the patent office. Or, at the very least, writing code.

I’m Loving It

Writing in today’s Guardian, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is understandably happy to hear that McDonald’s are closing twenty-five of their UK branches.

Even McDonald’s European boss, Denis Hennequin, is struggling to put a happy face on the situation: “The UK has been in negative territory for a couple of years now,” he admitted. “The brand 15 years ago was very trendy and modern. It is now tired.”

It’s probably over five years since I’ve eaten anything from McDonald’s I’ve never been a fan of their products. And this isn’t really for either healthy eating or anti-globalisation reasons (although these are both, of course, perfectly good reasons for not eating there). In my case it simply comes down to the fact that I’ve never enjoyed any McDonald’s products that I’ve eaten[1]. I really can’t see the attraction. Most of their food tastes disgusting. I honestly can’t understand why people find it so appealling.

[1] Ok, I admit it, except for their thick shakes.

NHS Waste

I haven’t written anything about my health recently, so let’s combine that with a little rant about NHS wastage.

The consultant is very happy with the way that the sarcoidosis is going and wants to slowly cut out my steroids. We’re doing this by taking 3mg a day for four weeks then 2mg a day and finally 1mg a day. This is compared to the 30mg a day I was on when the steroids were first prescribed.

I’m currently taking 1mg tablets and because prescriptions tend to be in four week blocks these tablets come in packets of 28. So I need 168 tablets – or six boxes.

We phoned my GP last week to get the prescription filled. My wife went in to pick it up. She noticed that the doctor had made up a prescription for 100 tablets – which isn’t enough. She went back to the doctor and pointed out the error. The doctor said she was happy to correct it and changed the prescription to 200 tablets. Rapidly losing the will to live my wife decided not to argue and just took the prescription.

So now I’ve got 200 tablets. That’s 32 more than I need. Almost 20% wasted. All because the doctor couldn’t be bothered to do some simple arithmetic. Actually she didn’t even need to do that. If she had just written the dosage instructions on the prescription, the pharmacist would have done the maths.

I needed six packets. I’ve got seven. And because 200 isn’t exactly divisible by 28, I’ve also got another little box containing four tablets cut out from another packet. I hope they can use the rest of that packet for other small amounts prescribed by doctors who can’t be bothered to give sensible prescriptions.

Oh, and because the prescription didn’t contain any dosage instructions, the boxes all have “take four tablets daily” written on them. Not sure where that came from. It’s a good job I’m clued up enough to remember what the consultant told me. I’m sure there are plenty of people who would have forgotten that and just taken the pharmacist’s word.

Bone Densitometry

Back St. George’s this morning. This time for a bone densitometry examination. This is just a safety measure as the steroids I’m on can reduce the calcium in your bones and lead to osteoporosis. I’m on a calcium supplement to counter that but it’s always good to know for sure.

Hospital Again

I spent last night back in St George’s Hospital. Yesterday evening I started getting a bad pain in my stomach. It got so bad that at about 11pm my wife called an ambulance and they took me to A&E (my first ride in an ambulance!)

Why do these things always happen at night? By the time I had got through triage and had been prodded and tested in various ways and had finally been given a bed for the night, it was almost 4am. Even then, I didn’t get much sleep as the pain was to bad.

So it seems that it’s a side effect of the sarcoidosis. Or, rather, a side effect of the treatment. My calcium levels are too high and they think this is causing a build-up of acid in my stomach. But they sent me home this morning with some pills that seem to make me feel a lot better.

All in all, not much fan.