health

In addition to one of the standard Surgeon General’s Warnings, packs of Natural American Spirit cigarettes are labeled:

Made with 100% additive-free, whole leaf, natural tobacco. No reconstituted sheet tobacco. No processed stems. Up to 25% more tobacco than other king size cigarettes.

All of that would, in some convoluted way, probably lead a smoker to believe that these cigarettes are “better” for you than — one would assume — all the other brands of cigarettes. But the fact that these cigarettes profess to contain more tobacco than competing brands is somehow made to seem like a good thing. So the company helpfully adds:

No additives in our tobacco does NOT mean a safer cigarette.

Their website is actually running a promotion right now asking people to send them “Smoker’s Stories”, cute little anecdotes about how much fun people have had smoking, sharing cigarettes, and loving the joy of being a smoker. Conveniently absent are any stories about not being able to climb a flight of stairs, bad hygiene, watching someone you love battle lung cancer, or wasting thousands of dollars on a terribly unattractive habit.

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With my special training program, anyone can eat 100 treadmills in 7 weeks.

From a Special Report in the June 2008 issue Men’s Health magazine:

Research has shown that a few puffs of cigarette smoke plug fully half of the brain’s natural receptor sites for acetylcholine … After as little as seven cigarettes over the course of a single month, a nicotine virgin’s brain has begun compensating by sprouting additional receptors.

Think smoking is cool? Go read Why Are Men Still Smoking? and learn about how “big tobacco” is spending millions to make you think that.

Awesome. When I woke up today I thought to myself, “I really hope that there is someone pounding on the other side of the wall behind my head with a hammer all day.” It looks like my wish has been granted!

I uploaded some gnarly photos — of the sudden, random eye infection I got this morning — to my Flickr page. I’m fine now, thanks.

The author of The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook, writes a weekly column for ESPN.com called Tuesday Morning Quarterback during football season. I didn’t get a chance to read it Tuesday because I was still in Vegas. I love Easterbrook because he’s not afraid to tackle social issues in the middle of discussing the merits of good run-blocking. Buried in the middle of this week’s football news he wrote the following:

Last week the British Medical Journal, a technical publication, released a survey in which physicians said sewers, not antibiotics or vaccines, were the greatest public health advance of the past two centuries. Those who live in the favored cities of the West should never take sanitation for granted. The construction of sewage systems in European and American cities, beginning in the late 19th century, dramatically lowered rates of disease, to say nothing of making cities more livable; lowered disease in turn helped Western nations grow more productive and affluent. Today much of the developing world is held back by the fact that its citizens are often sick, and thus not productive. Open conduits of sewage run down the streets of many large developing-world cities; raw sewage pours directly into the Ganges, where bathers are supposed to go for purification rites. In many developing nations the No. 1 need is clean water: clean drinking water, buried sewer systems and modern wastewater treatment plants. The United States appears to have wasted nearly $1 trillion in Iraq. That sum could have brought modern public sanitation to the 25 largest cities of the developing world, and made America the hero of the world’s poor for generations.

My best friend’s wife’s mom — which sounds like many more degrees of separation than it really is — was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. This is definitely something to file under “Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?”, and I truly, truly despise that folder in my life. His wife is going to participate in The San Diego Breast Cancer 3-Day to generate support. Do me a favor — c’mon, do I really ever ask you for anything? — and help them blow away their goal. They’re already almost half-way there.

… Pam was diagnosed with INFLAMMATORY BREAST CANCER on March 29, 2006. She always had NORMAL mammograms until one day when she noticed swelling in her breast, no lump! She went to the doctor who ordered an MRI which revealed nothing significant. They opted to do a surgical biopsy which revealed the malignancy. Since her diagnosis she has shown such grace. Her mission is to educate women that even when you don’t have a lump, if something doesn’t feel right, go to the doctor, educate yourself and be persistent. If she wasn’t aggressive to check this out early, we may not have had this fighting chance!

So I went to the doctor’s today. I have what is probably the twentieth sinus infection I’ve gotten since I moved to LA 5+ years ago. This one is really killing me, especially since I thought that I had gotten over it last week. I am on Round Two of antibiotics. Blech.

The doc took six x-rays of my head, which was pretty cool. It’s rare that I get to see my inner workings. I barely remember the last time I was x-rayed; I was in my early teens I think. I remember thinking that it was awesome to get to see your own bones. This time I was wondering about whether it was safe to bombard your brain with radiation. Didn’t M. Curie die of radiation poisoning?

It’s way cool to see an x-ray of your own skull. I have — and I quote — “abnormally large sinuses”. Just the top ones, mind you. The lower ones, under my cheeks, are about average. But the ones sort of in the forehead, over the eyes? He said they were just really huge compared to most people’s. I asked him if that was something good or something bad. Like, could I brag about it at work? He said, “No, it’s just interesting.”

“Herrion was 6-foot-3, 310 pounds — fairly average for an NFL lineman, but considered obese within standards routinely accepted by the medical community.”

Fish Oil Supplements: Is The Brand You’re Taking Safe?
(from Oceans Alive)

I don’t know. It just sounded like a funny title for an internet article to me — like the pathetic teasers for the 11 o’clock local news or ’50s horror movies about coffee and / or pre-marital sex. Interesting to see that K-Mart was a “worst pick” for fish oil supplements. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. Silly K-Mart.

“Suspended Florida State quarterback Wyatt Sexton was taken to a Tallahassee hospital on Monday evening by local police after causing a disturbance in the street, then identifying himself to police as ‘God’ and the ’son of God.’
Sexton was not arrested.”

Here’s one for the “weird” file: GIANTmicrobes! I always wanted a stuffed rhinovirus!

We make stuffed animals that look like tiny microbes — only a million times actual size! Each 5-to-7 inch doll is accompanied by an image of the real microbe it represents, as well as information about the microbe.

link via 8 Ways to Sunday

An Illinois man has won the right to sue his ex-girlfriend for using his sperm to impregnate herself without his permission. Richard Phillips, a family doctor in Chicago, says he never had intercourse with Sharon Irons, also a doctor. They did, however, have oral sex three times during their brief affair; Irons apparently saved some of Phillips’ semen and secretly impregnated herself with it. Phillips broke off the relationship when he discovered Irons had lied to him about being divorced. Two years later, she sued him for child support, and DNA tests showed he is the father. While the Illinois Appellate Court ruled that Phillips can sue for emotional distress, it rejected his claims of fraud and theft, agreeing with Irons’ lawyers that “when plaintiff ‘delivered’ his sperm, it was a gift …”
from Wired Magazine

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“Three-dimensional tubes of living tissue have been printed using modified desktop printers filled with suspensions of cells instead of ink. The work is a first step towards printing complex tissues or even entire organs.”