This recent article in the New Yorker by Atul Gawande speaks to a central issue of the US Healthcare system which is broken at best - the overuse of medicine. And when it comes to your health in this case, more is definitely not better. The states with the most care ranked lowest in quality patient care.

In general surgery the gallbladder is known as the “golden thumb”. A quick, easy surgery that generates massive profits that is usually unneccesary with dietary changes and visceral manipulation to release the tension in the gallbladders compartment.

General surgeons are often asked to see patients with pain from gallstones. If there aren’t any complications—and there usually aren’t—the pain goes away on its own or with pain medication. With instruction on eating a lower-fat diet, most patients experience no further difficulties. But some have recurrent episodes, and need surgery to remove their gallbladder.
Seeing a patient who has had uncomplicated, first-time gallstone pain requires some judgment. A surgeon has to provide reassurance (people are often scared and want to go straight to surgery), some education about gallstone disease and diet, perhaps a prescription for pain; in a few weeks, the surgeon might follow up. But increasingly, I was told, McAllen surgeons simply operate. The patient wasn’t going to moderate her diet, they tell themselves. The pain was just going to come back. And by operating they happen to make an extra seven hundred dollars.

The New Yorker has published a comprehensive article on the effects of high-impact sports, particularly football, on the human brain. Penned by Malcolm Gladwell.

Upon closer analysis of brain plaques, particularly a trauma-induced scarring called tau, researchers have found considerable damage in the samples viewed. Only a post-mortem autopsy and proper staining can reveal the damage so the sample size is very small but the evidence is overwhelming.

Here are some notable quotes:

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.), which is a progressive neurological disorder found in people who have suffered some kind of brain trauma. C.T.E. has many of the same manifestations as Alzheimer’s: it begins with behavioral and personality changes, followed by disinhibition and irritability, before moving on to dementia.

…a man who had been a linebacker for sixteen years, you could see, without the aid of magnification, that there was trouble: there was a shiny tan layer of scar tissue, right on the surface of the frontal lobe, where the brain had repeatedly slammed into the skull. It was the kind of scar you’d get only if you used your head as a battering ram.

Gladwell ties in Michael Vick and the aggressive nature of dogfighting and football. It’s a strange comparison that in the end reveals much about the will and fight in the football players to go beyond their pain and sacrifice themselves for the good of the team, or in this case the dog being loyal to its owner.

…data suggest that, in an average football season, a lineman could get struck in the head a thousand times, which means that a ten-year N.F.L. veteran, when you bring in his college and high-school playing days, could well have been hit in the head eighteen thousand times: that’s thousands of jarring blows that shake the brain from front to back and side to side, stretching and weakening and tearing the connections among nerve cells, and making the brain increasingly vulnerable to long-term damage.

A professor at the University of Chicago called it a “boy-killing, man-mutilating, money-making, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport.” I can now agree with this statement wholeheartedly.

Sugar is fat. This simple relationship is revealed in this 9 part video series. You absolutely MUST watch this whole series. When sucrose and fructose enter the body the end result through various biochemical reactions actually creates new fat in the body. Featuring Dr. Robert H. Lustig, M.D. of UCSF Division of Endocrinology and Professor of Pediatrics - this lecture is not the over-simplified story of “increased calories from carbohydryates (sugar) of course makes us fat” but the actual hard science that has decoded the fructose mystery. Fructose in nature is embedded with super high levels of fiber. The industrial food companies have spent countless hours of research figuring out how to strip natural foods of this embedded relationship of sugar to fiber. Think of the sweetest food… yup -sugar cane. This plant is basically as fibrous as a stick! And don’t count on the FDA to help here - they are not getting anywhere near this. It’s up to you to educate yourself.

Dr. Lustig draws his conclusions that sugary drinks are the cause of the epidemic obesity levels in children in the US. Watch and be blown away. Fast forward part 6 if you are scientifically challenged.

I’m a big fan of the new Google Chrome browser, particularly searching without history with the “incognito browser”. The best trick this pony has is the dual split screen window with dual address bars. Writing side-by-side to my research is so much nicer (or like right now watching Louis CK on youtube on the right while writing on the left side of the page.)

Click on Chrome Plugins for code. And as an added bonus it should work on Safari too.

For individual address bars.