Category Archives: health

When An HIV Vaccine Goes To Trial, It’s A Good Thing

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This is awesome news! And it’s Canadian! I know, weird eh?

The FDA has approved clinical trials for an HIV vaccine. This is huge news, and hopefully gives a little hope to those afflicted with the virus. HIV, in case you are unaware, is a shit little disease that should be punched in it’s face. And this vaccine offers the potential to defend us against it.

Now, I’m sure the anti-vax crowd will be moaning about the horrible, awful, no good AIDS vaccine, especially if we actually do something like (assuming it passes its clinical trials and proves to be a safe counter to HIV) letting it be a part of children’s immunization shots. Because children don’t have sex ever (or get transfusions, or come into contact with body fluids or use needle drugs) and so they should be taught to abstain from those activities. Let’s use AIDS as a warning for kids! That’s way better than actually helping them not die from mistakes. What kind of parents would we be?

Jim

Just Wow – I Am My Brother’s Identical Twin Sister

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So much about this story says wow. It’s the story of identical twins. Identical twins named Nicole and Jonas. They are 14 years old, and there’s a pretty striking difference between them, one that is much. One is a boy, and one is a girl. Physiologically, they’re both boys, but Nicole is on the road to changing that.

There’s wow in how different the two twins are. I mean, they came from the same fertilized egg. They share a good amount of DNA, which means that the building blocks began the same. Brain DNA changes through retrotransposons and I assume that means that there can be radical differences in brain chemistry even with those same building blocks, but it still seems amazing that two such completely different identities can come from those building blocks, and in such a short time. I imagine that the Christian Right would use this as an example of how God is bigger than DNA, except that God wouldn’t make a boy turn all homo in their eyes.

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Movember Madness

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From my buddy Steve’s FaceBook status today:

One unfortunate misunderstood fact about the “Movember” craze. If you’re not raising funds, you’re not actually doing anything.

I think a lot of people either forgot or never knew about what the Movember campaign was and is about. Yes, it’s about growing a silly mustache and looking weird for a month, but it’s also about men’s health. If you go to the Movember Canada web page, you’ll see that this is a month-long fundraiser to bring in some much needed cash for prostate cancer.

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I Am Stupid – How Not To Mangle Your Shoulder

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For the past couple of weeks, I have been in pain. This pain is a special kind of pain, because it is not big enough to deserve as much frustration as it has provided. If I had broken a bone or torn a ligament or had some cancerous growth eating my insides, I would feel justified to be in long-term pain. But it’s none of those things. Instead, I am in a little bit of constant discomfort that prevents me from getting good sleep and makes me swear a lot. And it’s my own fault. So, as penance for my stupidity, I thought I would write this blog post.

I’m a strong guy. I’m not super strong and I haven’t been in a gym in a long time, but I have great muscle tone hiding under the little bit of pudge that remains (I’m presently holding pretty steady at 65 pounds less than when I woke up one morning a fat kid) and I never really worry about if I’ll be strong enough to lift stuff or what have you. But I’m still not in great shape, largely because I struggle with balancing a healthy body and all the other stuff I do. Also, exercise has to be a routine for me, and I find that when my routine gets interrupted, I really struggle getting back at it, and I’ve been out of the exercise routine for some time.

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A Blast From My Past

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Once upon a time, I wrote a column for my college paper called Ask The Earthworm. Why The Earthworm? Well, because of Earthworm Jim. When your name is Jim, everyone else who bears the name Jim is somehow you. You become Jimbo, Jimbob, Jimminy Cricket, El Jimador, Slim Jim, and Hacksaw Jim just to name a few. Hell, my once-upon-a-time high school friend, Bronwyn, had a mother who referred to me as Lucky Jim. She was this daunting Australian woman with a rough voice that reminded me of dying of fright, and when she said “Lucky Jim”, she held the L uncomfortably long, and it sounded like her lips must have been raised in a derisive sneer. I’m pretty sure she hated me.

At any rate, Ask The Earthworm was my advice column, only it was intentionally bad advice, like a worst case scenario. Tragically, it didn’t run long and it wasn’t that good, but I enjoyed writing it. I love giving horrible advice, always with sarcasm dripping off of it, because people often ask me the stupidest questions. “I hate my job and I’m totally overqualified for it, so what should I do?” Well, stay with it, silly. You’re going to probably hate any job you have, and you’ll want something you can always bitch about being too good for. If you found a better job and it turned out you were crap at it, wouldn’t that be embarrassing?

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Opting Out Of Birth Control

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Those wacky Christians… Now that the US government are going to allow contraceptives to be covered without a co-pay fee in the US, they are pushing for exemptions based on faith. Now, if I understand this correctly, it means that employees of churches will not have the same access to health care as other people, and now Catholic groups are trying to broaden the reach of that exemption.

For realsies.

I’m curious to know where the line is drawn. If my employer’s religious opinions control my access to health care, what other services should I be prevented access to? If my employer is a Christian Scientist, should my access to any health care be revoked? Since when have we been okay with a person’s faith dictating anything more than their personal decisions? If a Catholic wants to buy birth control pills, that is ultimately something they have to reconcile. The fact that they have to reconcile it at all is funny to me, but their dogma is theirs to enjoy. Just as my employers have no ability to control my actions in the off-hours of work, so too should Catholic employers. I don’t care that you are a Catholic hospital. The decisions I make are mine and mine alone.

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Stem Cells To Lou Gherig’s Disease: SEE YOU AT WRESTLEMANIA, PUNK

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Sorry, ever since my cousin Senor Basso Profundo the masked wrestler from Mexico moved into my house and started jamming with some of my friends’ cousins in a band called The Dead Benoits, I’ve had wrestling references on my mind. But that’s not the big news. The big news comes from Tel Aviv University, where a new stem cell treatment for Lou Gherig’s Disease (ALS) is in a clinical trial. The idea behind the treatment is to use stem cells to produce neuroprotectors, which are proteins that protect the brain against a variety of neurodegenerative disorders.

As interesting as that is, what I found really interesting was the way that they dealt with the moral issues of stem cell research. This is an ideal area for embryonic stem cells to be utilized, but that is a political hot potato. The idea of using fertilized embryos for anything at all has most politicians foaming at the mouth. Personally, I could give two shits. If a fertilized embryo can stave off the onset of motor degeneration in someone with ALS, I say go team embryo. But there are plenty of people who can’t get over the fact that the embryo could one day be the next Beethoven (they never think about it being the next Dr. Mengele, or even the next Jerry who works at the gas station) and freak out. Those people have a far louder political voice than I do, and the anti-scientific Conservative leaders in the West seem particularly attuned to the needs of these types of people.

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Return Of Old Friends

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Some old friends you miss, and some you don’t. For example, I don’t miss the little weasel used to be my good buddy and got me to start playing in bands. That prick is such a self-aggrandizing monster, absolutely certain that he is responsible for every decision I’ve ever made because once upon a time he told me to buy a bass guitar. Also, I hate having friends who get so drunk that they tell you the only reason their brother doesn’t rape your children is because his psychic powers are holding the evil brother away. Yeah, not missing him. But on the contrary, I very much miss my friend Ian, a truly great person who enriched my life for years before going a bit off the deep end and killing himself.

I bet China thinks polio would be more the former than the latter. But when that weird old friend shows up, you really are stuck with him until you can figure out a fix.

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Ghouls

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The Lovely Lady got a phone call today from her bank. They wanted to sell her insurance. But not life insurance or car insurance. They wanted to sell her woman cancer insurance. Seriously, they were offering her insurance against the “seven female cancers”. I assume that this means cervical cancer, endometrial cancer, fallopian tube cancer, gestational trophoblastic disease, ovarian cancer, uterine cancer, and vulvar cancer. And me, I think that’s awful ghoulish.

According to the CDC web site in 2007, 80,976 women were diagnosed with gynecologic cancer of some kind. This chart on the CDC web site focuses on cervical cancer, and shows that the 2007 incidence rate ranged from around 12 per 100,000 to around 7 per 100,00 depending on race. That is obviously just one type of cancer (the others are described in other sections on the site, I just got lazy) and that means that while this is an awful disease, the odds on getting it are not staggeringly high. The rate for Colorectal cancer are strikingly higher.

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Soggy Colons

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I’m not speaking of that great jazzy/bluesy song of the same name (“Don’t know why / There’s no sun up in the sky / Soggy colons / Since my man and I / Ain’t together / Keeps cleansing all the time”) but instead about colon irrigation. And I will gladly express in doing so that I am no expert. However, I find the notion a bit disturbing, and I just read an article that has some scientific legs that coincides with my concerns and provides data to back it up.

My largest concerns about colon cleansing have always been around the cleanliness of the equipment (which is something that can be managed) and the magic cure-all (which is not). People seem to think that a nicely cleaned colon can cure a myriad of health concerns, but they never seem to cite specific studies or other scientific proof. I may at the time have fully accepted the divinity of a God, but at least when it came to medical claims, I was keen on making sure there was reason to believe.

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