1965 Gramps was visiting America for the first time. We were in a HoJo, Howard Johson’s, when a young woman called him “gramps”. He was very much a gentleman and could not stand it. My parents rubbed it in. He came to love being called gramps. It stuck.
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My brother was diagnosed with Burkitt’s Lymphoma, a supposed “childhood disease,” in his mid-30’s. Scary disease. No one is sure how he survived it, with the doctors calling it a miracle, not knowing how he was still alive given the levels of critical components to his blood. The power of stubborn refusal to give in to death allowed him the time needed for the meds to work. Though I’ve never seen the reference, he was supposedly put in medical textbooks for this “miracle.” This same stubborness unfortunately translated later in life to believing he could cure himself of prostate cancer with flax seed oil and cottage cheese, which as one can imagine, did not end well, progressing to bladder and bone cancer.
There is so much we can do for ourselves, like eating a good diet with plenty of fiber, but also need to listen to the medical professionals with an open mind when they suggest treatment/testing. I also wish that open mindedness were a two way street, with medical professionals looking at determining the root cause of a problem and treating that, not just the symptoms. There needs to be more focus on prevention, which is why I am a fan of the reason for diagnostic tools like colonoscopies, if not a fan of the procedure itself.
IP
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Flax seed oil and cottage cheese enemas?? When CathCoy used to rattle on about that nitwittery on the H&N board I thought it was just blether of the usual type. I never imagined anyone actually went for that “Budwig Protocol” (hard to imagine I even remembered it!!) Just goes to show the perversity of human nature, I guess. Poor brother to get caught up in that.
The interesting thing about prevention though is that >95% is in the hands of the individual…at least, as far as preventable diseases go (>99% is probably more accurate but I’m allowing for a bit of leeway)…and needs to be applied well before the disease process has taken hold. As much as folk do go on about it, you only have to look around to see that the majority of folk aren’t even utilising current knowledge to that end.
I guess I shouldn’t complain since Bad Habits/preventable diseases have secured our financial well-being, but still…
Burkitt’s identification of the Epstein Barr virus’s role in non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is one of the earliest recognised associations of an infectious agent and a cancer (mentioned here in his obit in the BMJ). Hugely consequential at the time as, back in that era, virology as a discipline was really in its infancy.
Commonly associated with infectious mononucleosis here in the west and naso-pharyngeal carcinomas in SE Asia. A real life interplay of genetics and environment.
I read somewhere that the research that unraveled this was supported with a Medical Research Council grant of a whopping £24!! How times have changed.
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Just to reiterate, though, as useful as screening colonoscopies are, the real worry with this new proposal for an apparent across the board requirement for endoscopies is that it applies to diagnostic, treatment and surveillance procedures. Meaning finding out what’s going on, dealing with it and monitoring afterwards. Much more worrisome than screening in the general population.
IP,
Sorry about your brother.
Similarly I have a very dear friend who keeps going online for his own self care. He is 82 and he is sort of okay for now. It took far too long for him to work with actual doctors. He was taking every supplement known to man and now it appears to very little avail.
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I think he just consumed it, but it wasn’t something we discussed in detail. He got enough of our sister the nurse coming down on him that I tried to veer away more towards supporting him.
Bro was genius level IQ, something I have been very grateful not to have been saddled with, as it seemed to come with a deficiency in common sense. It’s a fine line between holding medical professionals accountable and assuming you know more than they. I am reasonably sure some of our doctors wish I would go away, particularly DH’s cardiologist, but it just feels as though they are making knee jerk if then statements with his health based on total cholesterol alone, rather than looking at the big picture. Such as If total cholesterol >A, then take statins, regardless of ratios, triglicerides, calcium scores, particle size, etc. I dumped my ortho guy pretty quickly when he said there was nothing that could be done to mitigate the progress of arthritis that was being caused by cramping big toes…just come back in a year or two when surgery would be needed, and in the mean time wear a metal plate in my shoes. That was 5 years ago, and didn’t really fit with my active lifestyle. Google came up with the solution to the cramping, and while it certainly does not fix the arthritis, it has stopped the cramping that was actively causing it to get worse. Doc couldn’t have easily charged me for Mg supplements though.
IP
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HA! My experience was a little different. First time I recall mention of my"borderline high cholesterol" was when applying for a new life insurance policy in my mid 50s. I don’t remember thinking much about the issue before.
My husband was a bit miffed as we’d had a physical a couple of months before and our internist (a a colleague of his) hadn’t mentioned anything noteworthy so the assumption was he’d missed something. Another round of bloodwork…including HOMA-IR and hs-CRP …and even then, the opinion was that my level of “risk” didn’t warrant statin usage or anything beyond what I was already doing. Everyone likes the sound of that…a physician looking at the big picture. A nicely high HDL-C and low triglycerides, hs-CRP .8 so that total cholesterol of around 230 and LDL-C of around 130 mg/dL were mitigated by my healthy lifestyle choices.
Of course, on reflection, I think all the above were actual smokescreens and, if I had the identical lipid profile but pitched up hefting an extra 50lbs bodyfat, claimed a sedentary lifestyle and smoked, I would’ve gotten that prescription for Lipitor early enough to have kept my coronary arteries a bit clearer.
Of course, I have no idea what the folk at primary care/general internist level usually see by way of lipids in their practice demographic. Maybe the numbers were close enough to what was considered a healthy range back then (certainly not now) but still, I hope I would’ve been a bit more curious as to what was going on with that LDL-C as a physician. Sometimes it’s worth considering zebras when you hear hoof beats.
VeeEnn,
In my 20s till late 40s I had such cholesterol. Only after getting to 250 lb and becoming T2D did I get on a statin. I have no arterial problems. It is just standard medicine and quite smart. It was unnecessary before that.
Everyone is different. The stats are next to worthless.
So you had a lipid profile similar to mine when you were in your 20-40s? Whilst I can understand back then that no one took much notice because the ASCVD risk calculators aren’t usually applied until around age 40…even in folk who show signs of heading towards metabolic syndrome and with other risk factors…this is the faulty reasoning that surrounds lipid management in a disease that develops over the long haul.
A lipid profile that shows a low risk of cardiovascular events over a 10 period isn’t tremendously helpful in decision making to a 40 year old (most surely are thinking longer term than age 50) Even assuming no change over a longer period and without further excessive bodyfat gain and descent into T2D, that exact same lipid profile would look much greater at age 70 (when most rational folk still aren’t ready to accept that their time on this Earth is close to an end) This is easy for anyone to test for themselves using the many online calculators. This phenom is similar to the power of compound interest when planning future finances…except it isn’t beneficial at all.
The disease process that resulted in your non-zero CAC score didn’t begin when you reached the magic number of 250lbs any more than your T2D. The departure from healthy homeostasis began long before.
It’s not hard to see why “heart disease” is still the World’s #1 killer…a stat that really can’t be refuted.
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My 163 CAC score is not a disease process. It is common enough. You keep insisting but my cardiologist would entire disagree with you in my case. He is a cardiologist so stop telling me you know better.
I do not have heart problems or artery problems at all.
My triglycerides were 422 for a while and commonly in the 320 range. No problem.
I have insulin resistance which is much more hormonal because of the fat. That spiraled out of control. Still my sugar has never been higher than 128 fasting. My A1C never over 7.0.
Currently the numbers are really excellent. All down and excellent.
Must add my HDL was 25 for most of three decades. No problem, seriously.
I am not you. Nor does anyone else have to be you. The stats do not matter.
What I will give you is my losing 50 lb has recreated my personal odds of living to over 90 years old. That was common on my maternal grandmother’s side of the family and equally common on my maternal grandfather’s side of the family. Yes my hormonal imbalance because of fat would have taken me down much sooner. The cause would have been stroke after age 75. My mother’s side of the family is stroke prone after age 87. My weight was going to get me there and get me there sooner. There are also members of the family over age 87 who never had a stroke.
I get the relationship of strokes to arterial disease. Of course I will give you that but because of my family history the time bomb was ticking ultra slow. We also do not have much cancer at all looking at the four sides of my family.
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