Tag: medical

Magic Medicine

Ok, so this is the coolest story I’ve heard in a while… I’ve read about this being done with mice before, but this is the first human case I’ve seen.

Basically, this guy accidentally lops an inch off the tip of his finger. His brother, who is a medical researcher, sends him some powder and tells him to apply it to the finger.

A month later, the finger has completely regrown. Flesh, blood, vessels and nail, regrown in 4 weeks.

And this happened over two years ago.

The powder? An extract of pig bladder, called an extracellular matrix, which triggers the body to regrow itself.

Needless to say, there are a lot of interested parties, and tests are underway to see if it will regrow bones, removed cancerous areas, burned skin, whole fingers, heart tissue, and a number of other things.

The military, who happens to find itself with a whole lot of recently wounded soldiers, is going to test regrowing fingers that have been blown off. In theory, a whole limb could be regrown.

It’s things like this that make me think that maybe medicine is finally making some serious progress.

Medical Forms

I recently had some blood drawn to have my cholesterol and blood sugar tested.
The doctor sent me a letter summarizing my test results.

The letter was a form, with very few little info on it.
It basically said:

Total Cholesterol: 139 (Goal is under 200)
HDL (Good) Cholesterol: 40 (Goal is over 40)
Blood Sugar (fasting): 93 (Goal is under 100, 130 diabetic)
[x] Your results are normal.
[x] Continue current treatment.

Now, I appreciate getting the results back, but they seem a bit sparse.
First of all, only Total and HDL cholesterol are listed.
LDL cholesterol is *probably* the difference, but I don’t know if there are other factors, it would have been good to see it broken out as a separate line item.
Triglycerides are missing. They are usually part of the bloodwork – did it not get done, or did the doctor omit the result when he passed it along?

I’m disappointed my HDL isn’t better than it is, I’ve been taking fish oil to try and boost that. I’ll switch from taking 2 fish oil pills a day to 4 and see if that helps…

The form also doesn’t show much info about upper and lower limits, areas outside normal, critical ranges… basically it’s just the numbers without context.

To give it proper context, on Saturday I wrote a PHP script to generate graphical charts (using GDlib, I was too lazy to install ImageMagick). I then did some poking around online to find out what normal and critical ranges are for each item. I used the doctor’s lackluster letter, and vitals data from when I last gave blood (which was the day after I had the blood drawn for the labs).

Click here to see the resulting charts (triglycerides is a fake number, just to show how it would appear if I had data for it).

New STD Study

This infuriates me:
Study: 1 in 4 teen girls has an STD.

Do you know why that is? Basically because CDC has been in my opinion, extremely lax and lazy, and because Christian groups suck.

Let me explain.

The primary STD in question is HPV, human papillomavirus. It has been widely known for some time that it poses a significant health risk, mainly as a cancer-causing agent (according to one study, a TEN TIMES greater cancer risk than smoking).

Think about that, the marketing around the dangers of smoking, vs. the marketing around the dangers of HPV.

It can also TURN YOU INTO A TREE but that’s very rare.

However, there has been little in the way of efforts to increase awareness about HPV. So most people have never heard of it, and if they have, it’s probably from a drug company ad, not any sort of medical group getting the word out.

There is a vaccine for HPV, but Christian groups seem to think that STDs are God’s punishment for premarital sex, and therefore giving a vaccine to a young girl is an abomination. This is because they are all, quite frankly, hicks, in the worst sense of the word. Fucking retarded hicks.

But that’s only half the problem. You see, the CDC and medical community has a vaccine for women, but not one for men. HPV also can cause cancer in men, but THEY DON’T EVEN HAVE A TEST AVAILABLE FOR MEN.

Yes, that’s right. They have ignored fully HALF of the population. The vaccine for women would PROBABLY work for men as well, but we don’t know, because IT’S NEVER BEEN TESTED ON MEN.

Not only that, but if men ask about HPV they are basically patted on the head and told not to worry about it, despite direct evidence that it causes cancer in men.

Talk about your gender bias.

The CDC, AMA, and medical community in general need to shape up, in a major way.
Right now, when it comes to HPV, they are doing a marginal job for 50% of the population, and a truly, truly abysmal (one might even say criminal) job for the other 50%.