My neighbors left for Europe vacation. They brought me their fridge’s contents; Several cheeses, Greek yogurt, two kinds of deli, a bread, milk. Which is kind of them. But we don’t eat food like that.
What is a woman to do? Should I throw it out – as is my initial impulse? The daughter delivered the bag of food with words that encouraged me to depose of the things if I didn’t want it – somehow, they knew these are not items I usually put on the table … Or should I hand it to my cleaning ladies who certainly would be happy to get nice things for free?
Only that those things are not “nice”. - Dairy is inflammatory, makes one fat and sets a person up for hay fever, and so much more. The deli is from unhappy cows, and highly processed. The bread we can’t eat because of gluten intolerance.
They are not “free” either. Down the line, because of the addictive nature of milk products, they cause health care costs. Someone will have to pay: The eater with pain and disease; the community for doctor.
Knowing myself, I anticipate that I will give the food to my cleaning ladies – I grew up after World War II in Germany – and wasting food is against my upbringing.
What would you do? Read More
Blog: On Health. On Writing. On Life. On Everything.
A Last Look At The Body
June 7, 2012
Vienna, in the nineteenth century: At his teaching hospital – the Allgemeines Krankenhaus der Stadt Wien – a pathologist named Karl von Rokitansky institutes an autopsy on every single patient who dies there. After the autopsy, clinicians and pathologists sit down together to compare notes: The Morbidity/Mortality Conference is born.
New diseases were found, old diseases became better known, medicine improved greatly, and Vienna became a magnet for physicians who wanted to learn there - it still is Europe's biggest hospital. My father spend some semesters studying medicine in Vienna. In Europe, one is not as wedded to one's alma mater as one is in the USA; in Europe, it behooves everybody to seek out good schools and good teachers to learn as much as possible. For instance, I studied in Nuremberg (Nürnberg), Brunswick (Braunschweig), Kiel and Hamburg, and finished degrees in mathematics, philosophy, social sciences and medicine. Here, if you change schools, you are frowned upon. – Both methods seem useful in their own way – I am not sure which one I prefer.
Back to pathologist Rokitansky. For about a century after he made them mandatory, autopsies were the norm, especially at teaching hospitals. Now they are the exception: Barely one in a hundred dead bodies get a second look, to find out what the cause of their demise was. Autopsies are not “cost-effective”, and different imaging procedures, done when the patient is still alive give the patient a better chance to stay alive.
But medical knowledge and skills are in decline – and patients complain. It seems as if physicians don’t want to be confronted anymore with their mistakes. Before, a physician learned from every case. Now the physician just tries to handle the case load.
This time it seems it is up the patient to demand an autopsy … Read More
Sebastian Kneipp Wins – I Lose
November 28, 2011
Traveling earlier this month in Europe, I missed my daily swimming in the pool so much that I filled a bathtub in the hotel with water to the brim and got in. Now, it happened to be Frankfurt/Main in late fall, and the water was cold. How cold? I don’t travel with a thermometer but it was definitely colder than my Californian pool.
But I enjoyed it. I got in to my neck, and stayed for a while. As it turned out, I stayed too long. Although the rest of my body heated up soon after I had toweled myself off, an ice-cold area over my kidneys the size of a football stayed with me – literally for days.
Uh-oh! I had overdone it! And Sebastian Kneipp had told me so. He used to warn that one should not exaggerate cold exposure. And as difficult it is to give exact numbers for the time frame of “too much” – if one stays cold in the kidney area for days after, as it happened to me, one clearly has gone too far.
Originally, he had cured himself from consumption (tuberculosis) by jumping into the winter-cold Danube River several times a week. When he later tried his method on other people, he quickly realized that not every body was not made for such endurance test: The older people were, and the thinner, the less cold they could handle – and he adjusted his theories to this insight.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine “qi” is the life force, and is generated in the “kidneys”, which is actually what we call the adrenals. In Western Medicine it is known that that the adrenals produce a hormone/neurotransmitter called adrenalin, which is an energizer. If you stimulate the adrenals a bit, it will give you that desired energy jolt; if you over-stimulate the adrenals, you get a downer.
Now, after two weeks of down time, when I didn’t dare to face the cold again, I swam again in the pool today. The temperature was 15 degree Celsius (59 Fahrenheit). I only swam one lap – wasn’t brave enough for more.
One lap might be too short to induce brown fat in my body, but it was exhilarating, and when I got out, my kidneys felt fine! And I restarted in time to strengthen my immune system for the winter. Read More