Apple Watch (Fitness Tracking)

In another month I will have been wearing my Apple Watch for two years. Not sure I could list all of the features I like about the watch and use a tiny fraction of what the watch can do. I do use the Health app on my iPhone to to remind me to take my medications at bedtime and last night I started browsing some of the fitness data that gets captured by the watch (without me doing anything). I then had Gemini provide some analysis. I was pleasantly surprised to discover I am in better shape than I would have guessed.(Some final thoughts in the comment section below) Continue reading →

Bluer blues. Whiter whites.

Pointless trying to describe this… sensation? Phenomenon? Can only be experienced.
Since my cataract surgery (two months ago) colors have gotten more intense. More so in the past couple of weeks? The feint yellow tint caused by the old lenses is gone. For some reason this is most noticeable with blues and whites. A clearer, brighter world awaits you.

Final lock-in

We’re going to remove the hardened, cloudy lenses from your eyes by breaking them up with an ultrasound device, and then sucking the particles out. We will then insert a flexible silicone based lens. Over the next eight weeks, we will use a special ultraviolet light device to change the shape of the lenses to give you the desired vision. For those eight weeks, it will be necessary for you to wear special UV protection goggles anytime that you are not in bed asleep. After the three adjustments are complete, will use the ultraviolet light device to lock in the shape of the lenses. 24 hours later, you can dispense with the UV goggles.

Gotta say it. Been a long eight weeks. It doesn’t appear that we achieved the glasses-free outcome we were shooting for, we got close. I uploaded my new prescription and the one from a year ago to Perplexity:

Your 2026 glasses prescription is dramatically lower power than your 2025 prescription, reflecting how the LAL+ has moved most of the focusing work into the lens implants instead of the spectacles. In 2025 you needed full‑time distance correction plus a significant bifocal/progressive add just to get comfortable reading. With the LAL+ lock‑ins, your intraocular lenses now provide most of the distance focus, so the new glasses are more like fine‑tuning for small residual refractive error and astigmatism rather than heavy lifting.

Pre-surgery I was using 3.5 (prescription) reading glasses for books, phone and laptop. Post-surgery I can see the computer and phone fine and making do with 1.5 readers for books. Jury still out on the all-important distance acuity. Hoping the new prescription (see above) will give me the sharpness and clarity I was hoping for.

About the photo above… For the last two months I had to wear special UV glasses whenever awake. Today at one o’clock I can ditch them. New glasses will arrive in ten days.

 

How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi

From an article in The Atlantic (that is behind a paywall):

“The (British) health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.

Incomes can be shockingly low: Junior doctors recently went on strike for the 15th time in three years over their salaries, which start at just £38,800; the median salary for British civil servants is £35,680.”

From my dentist friend, Bob:

No wonder so many come to the states.  Have a good friend  who is one of two radiation oncologists at (a local hospital) who just retired.  The other oncologist told (the hospital administration) since he was now the only one that he wanted a salary of 1.4 mil.   They told him see ya!  They’re now looking for two.   Pay much better in US but some are really greedy.  

Agentic AI Comes to Medicine

Following excerpt from Dr. Eric Topol’s Ground Truths:

“MIRA queried the patient’s history, the physical exam results, and could order labs, blood cultures, scans, medications, procedures, surgery, and triage for hospital admission. This was done in 500 emergency department established real cases with the MIRA results directly compared to 4 board-certified (BC) physicians, and also to a hybrid group of 2 BC physicians and 2 residents. […] The overall diagnostic accuracy for MIRA was 87.8% compared with BC physicians at 78.1%.”