“A new study finds that nearly 9 in 10 people who go for a second opinion after seeing a doctor are likely to leave with a refined or new diagnosis from what they were first told. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic examined 286 patient records of individuals who had decided to consult a second opinion, hoping to determine whether being referred to a second specialist impacted one’s likelihood of receiving an accurate diagnosis.”

“Among those with updated diagnoses, 66% received a refined or redefined diagnosis, while 21% were diagnosed with something completely different than what their first physician concluded.”

The study was published in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice.

While waiting for my car to be serviced yesterday morning, I watched a few minutes of a CBS News feature on how patients in the early stages of ALS are preparing (to the extent that’s possible) for the later stages of the disease.

“Before her speech becomes severely impaired, Hubner turned to speech pathologist John Costello at Boston Children’s Hospital. He gives patients a voice recorder and tells them to think of phrases that reflect who they are.”

As I watched the woman making notes and recording simple statements I found myself thinking about all the things I say during the course of a day (“Hey, Lucy. You want to go outside?” “Hattie! Come sit to the couch and get some loving’” “Have I told you today how much I love you?”) and what it would be like if I could no longer say those things.

In the CBS piece they entered the patient’s recordings into a computer so she could play them back with a keystroke. As I watched I wondered what would I want to say if I could no longer speak the words. Whew.

A list of things I take for granted would be too long to list here, but the simple act of speaking would be high on the list. How many spoken thoughts have I wasted? What would I say if today was my last day to speak?

The woman in the news story was writing down things she wanted to record. Not a lot of negative or mean things on that list, if I had to guess. Probably not a lot of political comments or complaints about waiting in line.

In an ancient blog post I imagined getting a printed transcript of every word I uttered in during the course of the day. With a red pencil I crossed out everything that didn’t need to be said. What would I be left with? If I could say only 20 things tomorrow, what would I choose?

“27.6% of American adults are current tobacco users and 8.9% of youth reported using tobacco in the previous 30 days. Use of multiple tobacco products was common among both adult and youth users, with cigarettes and e-cigarettes being the most common combination.”

Science Daily

Missouri highways are encrusted with nasty-ass billboards from border to border. Our claim to shame. Yesterday we spotted a board for PlasticSurgery.com When I got home I got curious and clicked around a bit until I found a list of procedures. A few that caught my eye:

• Body Contouring – Removes loose, hanging skin from the body, after gastric bypass surgery, stomach stapling or gastric banding (gastric bypass).
• Buttocks Augmentation – This procedure is designed to enhance the size of the buttocks. Buttock augmentation can be done by using silicone implants or fat from a person’s body, known as fat transfer (or “fat grafting“).
• Eyebrow Lift (for the person who questions everything)
• Fat Grafting – This procedure will remove a patient’s own fat to re-implant it where needed.
• Jaw Implant – sounds painful
• Forehead Lift – This procedure softens the angry or tired look caused by a wrinkled brow. Most forehead lift patients are between ages 40 and 60 years old.
• Threadlift – Although a threadlift can raise droopy areas of the brow, cheeks, jowls, and neck, it will not produce the same dramatic results as a facelift or brow lift.

“The survey asked people to choose the activities that they find the most restful. The results show that the top five most restful activities are those often done alone:”

• Reading (58 per cent)
• Being in the natural environment (53.1 per cent)
• Being on their own (52.1 per cent)
• Listening to music (40.6 per cent)
• Doing nothing in particular (40 per cent)

More than 18,000 people from 134 different countries took part in the Rest Test, an online survey to investigate the public’s resting habits and their attitudes towards relaxation and busyness.

“The physician population is aging even faster than their patients, a lot faster, in fact. Fifty-two percent of orthopedists, 54% of cardiologists, 60% of psychiatrists, and two-thirds of oncologists are 55 or older. This will be the first year that more doctors retire than start practicing. […] The Association of American Medical Colleges projects that by 2025, the U.S. will face a shortage of up to 90,000 doctors, and a dearth of specialists will account for most of the shortage.”

“On average, family doctors got a $27,000 raise in the past year, from $198,000 to $225,000, for a 13% increase. Doctors in the two other primary care categories, internal medicine and pediatrics, also had great years. Each garnered 15% bumps to $237,000 and $224,000 respectively.”

Full story at Fortune Magazine

In Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat, science writer Marta Zaraska does a great job of exposing these claims as myths.

“Vegetarian animals ranging from gorillas to water deer, she reports, have bigger, sharper canines than we do; our canines aren’t specially meant for processing meat. What we lack dentally is more important, in fact, than what we have. Gently open a (calm) dog’s jaw, and there at the back will be the carnassial teeth, “blade-like and sharp and perfect for slicing meat.” Lions and tigers, racoons and house cats — all carnivores — have them too. We don’t. All the high-quality amino acid proteins we require are readily available in plants, Zaraska says, listing soy, buckwheat, quinoa and potatoes as examples.”

“Neal Barnard of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine even notes that when people switch from meat-eating to plant-eating, their intake of vitamins and other nutrients improves.”

Full story from NPR

I’ve never had a serious illness. I had most of the childhood stuff (measles, chickenpox, etc) but never more than a bad case of the flu as an adult. Three or four days of feeling shitty.

In November (2015) I came down with some kind of upper respiratory thing and after a week I went to see a doctor who said I had something called parainfluenza. Different from garden variety flu and not prevented by my annual flu shot. This dragged on for a few weeks before an X-ray showed I had “a nasty case of pneumonia.” They gave me a serious antibiotic which helped but a followup X-ray two weeks later showed I still wasn’t out of the woods. New/different antibiotics did the trick and as I write this I believe I’m out of the woods. Feeling much better.

Seven weeks. Better part of two months. According to Wikipedia, it can take as long as 12 weeks for folks over 65 to fully recover from pneumonia. That is a long fucking time to be sick. I like to think there is something to be learned from every experience, especially the bad ones. But it’s too soon for me to say what that might be with this one. I’ll let you know.