easy CFS test

I worked on the downstairs powder-room wallpaper removal a little while today, i was feeling so much better!  Afterward, i sat down with a glass of iced coffee and enjoyed the rest.  I came up with an interesting idea, too....

Which is the best answer to the following questions -- do you find:

• getting a great new haircut/style, exciting or ... exhausting;
• a walk on the beach with your beloved, romantic or ... exhausting;
• finding the perfect pair of jeans while out shopping, exhilarating or ... exhausting;
• a night out on the town with your friends, fun or ... exhausting;
• a romp in the playground with your kids or grandkids, GREAT or ... exhausting;
• a productive day doing work you love, satisfying or ... exhausting;
• dinner and a show with your husband or lover, one of the best things life has to offer or ... exhausting?

Life is supposed to be worth living, not something to drag yourself through.  Unfortunately, when you reach a certain point of illness, mustering the energy even to do things you SHOULD find life-affirming becomes almost overwhelming. This is ... bad.

HOW can the medical industry at all levels, GPs to the CDC, rationalize their point of view that people with this problem are MALINGERERS?  Who the hell WANTS to live this way?

...I don't see any hands in the air, here....

"seeking cures"

Oh brother....  If anything engages my gag reflex more than what i wrote about the other day, it's solicitations and races to help FIND CURES for what ails us.  It's not the concept of actually curing illness -- if only!!!  Alas, no.  What they want is to look like they're TRYING to do something constructive.

What they're actually trying to do is fund drug research in order to market something new -- it doesn't even have to be something effective!  Most pharmaceuticals have a piss-poor track record for alleviating suffering, especially in the psychiatric world from what i hear.  And "they" want to put statins in the water supply....

A dear friend was very recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and his prognosis is bad.  This has prompted me to revisit a few sites that discuss cancer from a professional and informed point of view, and ... what can i say?  The state of the union in the treatment of this sad illness is a bloody JOKE.  Same-ol'-same-ol' poisoning of the patient in hopes that they'll kill the renegade cells before they kill the host -- nothing more!  In other parts of the world they're "softening up" the cancer's defenses with enzymes before administering the poison, to give a little advantage to the victim but we don't want to do that here!  We want to pretend that American medicine is evidence-driven and state-of-the-art, and our propaganda machines have convinced the poor suckers that it is SO.

For chrisesake, if _I_ can find reasonable evidence that at very least a non-omega-6-based ketogenic diet, and the use of serrapeptase SUPPORT conventional treatment in a safe and cheap way, there's no f'ing excuse for the resistance that both get in the medical industry.  Doctors, alas, support each other in faith and confidence:  they give each other the secret handshake and assume the other guy knows what he's talking about.  They rarely suspect each other of ulterior motives or stubbornness or IGNORANCE of actual data -- more's the pity.

So "survivors" are turned into shills supporting the systems that let them down in the first place.  I pity them as enthusiastic suckers, while scorning them as deluded and indoctrinated, and so addicted to sugar that they aren't even willing to give up their fix to help their bodies heal.  They've been poisoned, and poisoned, and poisoned again; assaulted with knives and ray-beams, and they go on to praise their assailants and dig up money for them to continue doing it to others.

There are damn few "cures" in this world, mostly "treatments."  The treatments some doctors and researchers like best are the ones that keep the victims coming back for more till their resources run out, they're discarded by the system that didn't care about them from the beginning, and they die in misery.  People with respect for this appalling industry wonder why i despise it so much;  why, those annual cancer screenings they've been brainwashed into taking every year or so throughout their adulthood "saved their lives"!!!  Pardon my skepticism -- i don't necessarily believe that to be true.  I strongly suspect that these screenings are designed to scare the patient into undertaking procedures which are more harmful than helpful in an awful lot of cases.

The world of nutritional information about which i've become so passionate has taught me about far more than food and supplements.  It's taught me that the people who SHOULD be looking out for the health and well-being of their "flocks" are more interested in their incomes and reputations than THE REASON THEY THEORETICALLY WENT INTO THE FIELD (to help people) or THE OATH THEY TOOK UPON BEGINNING PRACTICE (to first do no harm).  Their outdated ideas and bad advice are killing people, and they don't give a shit.  Hell, if they were ONLY killing i'd be less censorious of them -- they're causing needless pain and suffering, and they just don't give a damn.  They could be ameliorating the lot of miserable people everywhere, and it's not that they can't, but a shocking proportion of them WON'T.

tying it all together

 What people call "having a life" can really disrupt one's train of thought.  ;-)  I was chugging right along on the subject of histamine/tyramine when a distraction or two caused me to lose control of the mental plates i was juggling  and CRASH -- the shards of ideas lying around my feet are quite a mess i need to clean up!

The short version is, when our bodies can't process properly what we put into them, repercussions spread far and wide.  Anything that hints to our bodies that things aren't going well causes stress hormones to rise and thyroid levels to fall.  Such simple things as too much exercise or glucose-yielding foods, environmental mold, extremes in temperature, and foods for which we don't reliably produce the right breakdown enzymes can set off a cascade of different symptoms.

To be fair, it's not surprising that doctors don't know how to diagnose a lot of the illnesses they see until they have a good deal of experience -- especially considering how many textbooks seem to be written by purveyors of pharmaceuticals, disease seems to be a kind of drug-deficiency to a lot of people.  The old days of young medicos going into practice with old-timers, thus having a sort of in-the-field apprenticeship, would appear to be over; doing apprenticeships in hospitals (as interns and residents) where illness is more of an acute situation wouldn't seem as sound a background for someone with an eye to General Practice.  Because of the current system, we end up with excellence in dealing with trauma and we totally suck at promoting actual WELLNESS.  If the difficulty can't be sewn up, cut out or killed with antibiotics, or if the dis-ease is too subtle or generalized, the medical industry doesn't know what to do with it.

And wellness is exactly what a lot of us want to be pursuing, in the paleo/primal/WAPF blogosphere!  This is why those of us whose difficulties can't be sewn up, etc., have turned into renegades and iconoclasts and have turned our backs on the mainstream medicine which is not interested in our goal.

If we want to be as healthy as possible, we HAVE to define what's best for us, usually by trial and error.  Then when that line is defined, we have to toe it to the best of our ability, realizing that every excursion from it causes pain and suffering commensurate with how far out of bounds we have let ourselves go.  Some can have the occasional "fling" with nutritional good-for-nothings and experience minimal repercussions, while others flirt with anaphylaxis merely by light exposure to some substances.  Some can have a "forbidden" treat occasionally, and others find one cookie can put them on the slippery slope.  It's all highly individual.

Having become alerted to how bad high-histamine foods can make me feel and the range of possible symptoms, i've started to notice histamine-related responses more.  This is a good thing!  Like other kinds of allergy, these responses are cumulative.  Balancing range-of-tolerance of foods with environmental conditions can make a huge difference to daily quality of life.

Robust thyroid function allows for the kind of energy that makes life worth living, and thyroid function can be tweaked hugely with diet.  ENOUGH of the foods which are good for the thyroid, like animal protein, and saturated and O3 fats, helps immensely, and excessive calorie-restriction is guaranteed to reduce production.  MINIMIZING what inhibits and puts excessive demand on our systems is equally important -- contrary to what euthryroid athletes believe, carbohydrates require more hormone to process and so put a strain on our resources.  Omega-6 fats make it difficult to get thyroid into our cells for use, and MUST be strictly limited.  Our digestive inadequacies make it doubtful that we can properly absorb or convert the critical nutrients we HAVE to acquire, and some kinds of supplementation can be mandatory.

Not only are grains and legumes problematic by way of the gut-damaging lectins they contain, but they also carry a large histamine load.  Large histamine load EQUALS stress, and stress causes us to produce, convert and use thyroid hormones in a less-than-optimal way.  Looking at the list of symptoms suffered by the histamine/tyramine-sensitive is almost a mirror of those experienced by the thyroid-challenged among us.

Tyramine is a breakdown product of tyrosine, which is the building-block of thyroid hormone (along with iodine) -- this was the point in my research where i was interrupted, and where i need to start regathering the tangled threads of ideas i was weaving.  When meat and fish have been processed for preservation (or simply kept around too long), some of the health-giving amino acid gets too far gone -- past tyrosine and into the irritating tyramine which behaves like those nasty histamines, setting off the alarms in our bodies which are so uncomfortable.  I strongly suspect that a lot of thyroid malfunction (both hypO and hypER) is inextricably entangled with this process.

physician, heal thyself

I frequently read certain blogs that i don't have on my OWN list (which is long already); PrincipleIntoPractice is one of them.  Her recent post reminded me of something that has always bothered me about the medical profession.

THE HOURS THESE PEOPLE WORK are just outrageous!  How do they expect people to do good work when they don't have time to sleep enough or eat right ... or go to the bathroom for chrise-sake?  Hell, if airlines made their pilots do this, the uproar of protest would echo from the welkin!

Some brave soul on the inside is going to HAVE to start a movement to remedy this situation.  Making it a virtue to work 36-hour days is not rational.  No wonder fatal mistakes by hospitals and doctors are so numerous.

I used the quote, "Physician, heal thyself" as my title today, but it should have been "heal thy profession."

before you go BELIEVING....

...that your doctor is omniscient, take this article as your grain of salt!  For all intents and purposes, this guy -- this HONCHO -- says, Okay, i was careless with my record-keeping, but i swear to god i didn't commit FRAUD!

I don't know about you, but i'm inclined to withhold credulity.

a real-life MYSTERY!

Of all the things that could POSSIBLY go wrong with human health, nutrition and the epigenetic ramifications it has should probably be among the first things suspected, along with infection and toxicity.  Why it isn't that high on the list for sufferers and their physicians is a subject for more knowledgeable writers than i am....

But no -- the medical industry would much rather hunt for chimaeras than rabbits.  And many patients would much rather consider themselves the prey of a mysterious disease process than come to the conclusion that their favorite foods (and other lifestyle choices) are causing their degeneration.  They'd rather take a pharmaceutical whose list of side-effects is as long as your arm, than even TRY taking grains out of their diets or give up their nightly Ben & Jerry's fix.

There's a reasonable chance that people resist the idea that changing their diets could improve their health because they've tried many other alterations and found them worthless.  I wish i could remember where i read this idea, so credit could go where it belongs....  It makes perfect sense that if Joe switched from french-fries to baked potatoes and fat-free sour cream, and it made no difference either in how he felt or how his blood-test turned out, he might be skeptical about switching from potatoes to turnips, as a "frinstance."  Certainly, if he followed mainstream health recommendations over the last half-century, any changes he made would have had little impact on his wellness, or his subjective sense of it.  If these "common sense" changes didn't help, why would Joe be inclined to try something that his conditioning would react to as illogical?

Poor Joe -- he believes that dieticians actually know what they're talking about when it comes to food -- they're SPECIALISTS, aren't they?  When it comes to weight-gain, it's all about the calories, and for health, it's vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.  Moderation in everything!  All saturated fats are alike, and BAD.  Macronutrient, schmacronutrient.  How cells in a petri dish behave is exactly how they do in the body.  Mice are excellent subjects, because their little bodies behave just like people's do, with a very short lifespan to allow us to see changes quickly.  [sigh]

There are libraries full of anecdotal evidence as to the efficacy of food to healing.  "Science" loves to pour scorn on this kind of information, because it doesn't fit the cookie-cutter notion of "HOW science works."  But for the n=1 seeker after health, this is probably the best place to start to work.  THIS worked for a sick human being.  THAT may have worked for a knockout mouse, but is of questionable applicability if you have only two legs and the chromosomes that Nature gave you.

Of course, conventional sources of "wisdom" don't want you to try to improve your health by means of your diet or supplements.  They want you to come in for blood tests, then tell you your values don't suggest that you could be short of things like B12 ... but an antidepressant might make you feel better! :-P

Our bodies evolved to be self-repairing.  IF one had health as a teen but in the 30s developed infirmity, the first thing to ask should be, what has acted upon this organism to make it go wrong?  In the absence of toxin, infection or injury, most of what acted upon the body was NUTRITIONAL INTAKE.  Figuring out how to reverse the harm done is not going to be as easy, and probably won't be simply stopping the damaging intake ... though it's a good place to start.  The next step is to see how other real people managed to mend a problem of a similar nature.

Thank god for google; I've found many answers online.  "Tried and true" beats the hell out of "might" or "may."

dawn of the challenge

The big news today is that Gary Taubes and Peter Attia have officially launched their new venture to challenge mainstream nutritional science, which has been such a dismal failure up to now.  Glad to say, even astrology is on their side.

After reading that, i started looking at today's posts on a list of blogs that i consider "second string" for my purposes, and immediately got riled by Dr. Freedhoff's article on the subject.  Not the first time -- i find some of his attitudes rather abrasive to my personality.  His style of food-culture-bashing and mine are ... different.  "What if everything you knew about nutrition was false?"  Whaddaya mean, "what if"?  IT IS FALSE ... if the "you" in this statement refers to CW.

Screw the "evidence" about Ewes AND Kitavans -- show me a culture in the MODERN world in which people eat like they do and stay lean IN MIDDLE AGE.  Young bodies can get away with almost anything.  Stress of city living screws up every tribe which enters it.  The confounders to all these hypotheses are mind-boggling.

My recent success may be making me a little cocky, but the data from my body, and that which JM is currently reporting, AND what Wooo has been talking about for YEARS is all on the same page:  if you're "of a certain age" OR have never had the physiological perfection of someone living in a technologically-limited tropical backwater, extreme carbohydrate restriction may be the only thing that could save your health!

Personally, i wish the best to NuSI -- they've got a tough row to hoe, because a lot of industrial-food money as well as the moribund weight of the medical business are against them.  :-/ They even have the problem of Mr. Taubes' unpopularity to deal with, and Dr. Atkins could tell them what that's like....  I don't agree with everything the former and Dr. Attia have written, but they're SO MUCH closer to the mark than the ADA, it isn't worth quibbling.

plant rant ;-)

I tend to smirk when i hear of recommendations that our diets be of "mostly plants."  WHY?  Because this is a sop to nutritional powers-that-be, a sort of middle ground we can all agree on?  (Tra-la-la....)  A gesture that shows how reasonable and moderate we are?  A tipping of the hat to agriculturalists and the vegetarian agenda?  Screw dat.

I just began to read "Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice, and the Physiology of Digestion" by Dr. Beaumont in 1839.  I'm already amused, just from perusing the table of contents.  Then there's this:  "The facility of digestion of different articles of diet, and the quantity of nutrient principles which they contain, have been subjects of some discrepance of opinion among physiologists.  They have settled down, however, into a belief, probably as near the truth as practicable, that animal food is more readily assimilated, and affords more nutrition in a given quantity, than vegetable or farinaceous food."  IF WE KNEW THIS SHIT BY 1839, WHY ARE PEOPLE STILL ARGUING ABOUT IT?

Because convincing us that peasant food is good for us, keeps us peasants.  Weak, dumb, sick, docile ... and pouring more and more money into the pockets of people who sell us the cheap carbohydrate foods, who are in bed with the doctors and medical researchers, who are in bed with the pharmaceutical companies, who are in bed with politicians on every level and in every field.

How i and a growing number of others in the VLC community eat is a slap in the face to the "health-" and junkfood-promoting portions of our societies. We refuse to play.  We won't dance.  We WILL NOT participate in their weakening, pathology-producing rituals of mutual acceptance and social bonding over CIAB.  We're renegades.

Our WOE gives us power, and societies HATE individuals with power.  We can do without the "kool-aid" so where can they come at us, to subjugate us again?  I'm sure they'll try to think up something.

Oh -- when we end up in the concentration camp being fed "their" diet, remember what we learned from the Kitavans:  eat your carbs in one big meal in the evening, so when the glucose/insulin levels go down you can burn fat for the other 22 hours of the day.  ;-)

stepping back to write THE INTRO to the intro to hypothyroidism

What i planned to write next was a list of the nutrients we hypos need, but which we either aren't getting or aren't absorbing even from a theoretically-good diet.  This is trickier than it sounds, as i found in the past, when troubleshooting my problems.  There are COUNTLESS sites full of advice and information for the "thyroid sufferer" but unfortunately, almost all of them include something which i know from sad personal experience to be DEAD WRONG.  A gazillion nutrients ARE important for proper function, but some of them are pro and some anti, and some websites get the two lists hopelessly confused.

If you're new to the hypothyroid label, you have my very deepest sympathy, because OH BOY do you have a lot of learning and experimenting to do before you can feel normal again.  Don't believe ANYBODY all the time, because your situation is absolutely positively unique.  Take everything you hear with a grain of salt, especially information from a card-carrying endocrinology-specializing doctor, because he THINKS he knows it all ... but he doesn't know YOU.  No matter what the lab test reports, if you don't feel right over the long term, your medication is wrong.

But getting back to the nutritional aspect....  One big problem in hypothyroidism is that once the imbalance is in place, it's self-perpetuating.  Iron makes for the perfect example:  you need iron to make thyroid hormones, but if you're low on either one, your digestion won't be up-to-snuff, so you'll absorb less iron, and you'll make less thyroid, and you'll have worse digestion, so you'll absorb less iron, so you'll make less thyroid ... ad infinitum.  Some people will cut to the chase and supplement thyroid hormones, and they'll feel better for awhile, but then another imbalance will make itself known.  This is the fast-lane to spending half your life waiting in doctors' offices and getting blood tests, and frankly, i have much better things to do with mine!

I'm taking the slower route to optimizing my health, BUT I DON'T RECOMMEND MY WAY TO OTHERS.  That would be utterly irresponsible of me.  Unless you're a stubbornly-self-governing, long-experienced old fanatic like me, what you need to spend your energy on is finding a competent, progressive, open-minded doctor who knows how to listen.  There have got to be some out there!  ...At least ONE?  ;-)

But nutrition is profoundly important.  Now that i've got all this off my chest, i'll go back to work trying to make some sense out of it.

drugs and their rationale

"...To check healthy people’s blood to find deviations from normal is the freeway to unnecessary medication."  (Uffe Ravnskov, MD PhD)

Does anybody but me think that it's weird to be constantly visiting doctors and testing things, when there is no feeling of illness prompting it?  At what point were we brainwashed into thinking the "annual checkup" was for OUR benefit rather than for doctors' financial well-being?  Could it have been around the time that the rich-office-practitioner golf-playing paradigm took over from the hard-working house-calling-country-doctor stereotype?

And do all the obsessive crossfitters, constantly reporting their lab values of this, that and the other thing REALLY go in for that many blood tests?

Honestly, the constant testing does tend to puzzle me.  Maybe it's one of the few things they CAN do to add that little razzle-dazzle to the office procedure.  "Ordering tests" sounds so important....  Besides weighing one, taking the blood-pressure, making one sit around barely covered for quarters of hours reading the fine print on framed documents to pass time, poking various tender portions of anatomy -- hmm, what can we do that will seem significant and will be simultaneously painful and expensive?  I KNOW!  We'll install a very fat needle under your skin and wiggle it in/out/side-to-side occasionally.  At least it's not as humiliating as lying there with one's feet in aerial stirrups....

And to what end?  So that some BigPharm-educated pusher can write yet another scrip and earn his kickback.  Prescribing statins for women.  Viagra for 80-somethings.  What a joke.

It's amazing -- since i took charge of my own health a few years ago, i've NEVER been healthier.  I don't get colds or flu worth mentioning -- maybe once or twice lightly in the last half-dozen years (and then, only when i've been around sick grandchildren).  Worst i've ever felt since i went low-carb is when i've fallen off the wagon.

Remember the reputed quote from a retired Merck CEO -- that it was his dream to sell drugs to healthy people so that he might expand his market....  I for one am not going to cooperate with this travesty of "health care."  Not going to give the pill-pushers a MODICUM of respect, because they've forfeited any claim to our good opinion.

thyroids and diets

The Wheat Belly blog is talking about thyroid issues as associated with weight loss today.  I tried to reply to one of the ladies' comments, but the spam-inhibiting system over there is really funky and i gave up.  However, this subject is important to me, so i can't resist saying a word or two.

Not being in the medical community myself, i'm not hindered by my ortho-education.  Whatever they ARE taught is obviously all about drugs or surgery.  High TSH with low T, and they medicate; high T and they 'ectomize.  Like a lot of allopathic medicine, i think it's lousy and half-assed.

When the "shortage" of natural thyroid happened a couple of years ago, i got mad (with "upset" as an intermediate step).  There were no fewer pigs, sheep and cattle than there were before, so it's a "feckin lie" that there was a shortage -- Armour simply wanted to change their formulation, and they were hand-in-glove with the bloody idiots who think that Synthroid is just the same as natural.  It's distinctly possible that some entity bought up supplies and dumped them out of the country or in the ocean, too.  Some people sneer every time they hear a hint of what they consider conspiracy theory, but there wouldn't be a name for it if it didn't exist.  I FIRMLY believe in conspiracies when it comes to parting fools and their money.

At that point, i did what any good internet-lover would do -- MY HOMEWORK.  Since then, i've learned a hell of a lot.  The way MY situation turned out, i take a generous handful of supplements and no prescription drugs -- though there are those who really ought to take both.

One of the most telling things i learned comes from my much-referenced source, "Strong Medicine."  Gettaloada THIS:

"At times thyroid extract can increase the cooking flame in the body, just as new sparkplugs may increase the efficiency of an automobile engine. It used to be thought that feeding it in small quantities might help to burn off excess body weight. With the exception of about four per cent, that happened regularly to people with the disease called exophthalmic goiter. They would usually melt away under the load of too much thyroid hormone in the blood. But it didn't work in simple obesity. Because so many thousands of fat people still uselessly take thyroid extract to lose weight, the subject needs to be more generally understood."*

Didn't work in simple obesity?  This was very interesting to me, on account o' because, "logic" dictates that increasing metabolism burns more calories, and increasing thyroid increases metabolism so WHY DOES EXTRA THYROID HORMONE NOT CAUSE WEIGHT LOSS across the board?

Short answer:  overweight people have messed-up metabolisms.  Something "different" is happening within the obese population Donaldson describes -- their bodies are not behaving normally in the presence of a metabolic stimulant.  Something in the thyroid-hormone domain has gone haywire, just as their energy-mobilizing/utilizing domain is also awry.  Thinking this through simplistically:  either the patient is getting T4 only and it's not getting converted to active T3, or there is so much rT3 in the system it's blocking the receptors of T3 so the latter is not getting utilized.  Then there are the adrenal complications which are only now gaining a degree of credence....

This is where the nutritional tweaker gets to be creative.  What nutrients are needed to make T4?  T3?  What competes with those?  What inhibiting factors hinder creation, conversion and usage?  What can we do to optimize every step of the way?

This is also where being a passive patient, popping pills instead of making lifestyle changes, will never make you feel your best.  If you're not getting enough sleep, you can take all the Synthroid your sources will allow and you'll be wasting it all down the rT3 slippy-slope.  It's like the diabetic woman who thought she could eat danish and take her insulin and everything would be all right -- no!

NO!  One has to make efforts to eat an appropriate diet, get appropriate exercise, and take appropriate supplements for anything one may not absorb, convert or synthesize adequately.  The hypothyroid body has distinct limitations on what it can absorb, convert and synthesize -- that's why i take so damn MANY supplements, why i take some together, some on an empty stomach, etc.  You have to do your own researching and testing.  Nobody else has your exact physiological situation.  Hop to it.

_____
*  Donaldson says a lot more about the subject, and i encourage readers to look at it themselves here.

"Son, you're on your own!"

Fred at Philosophy of Weight Management has a column that's very much to the point, today.  Everybody and his dog has something to say about obesity -- where it comes from, what to do about it, and who's at fault.  Few, however, are actually helpful.  Further, there are a great many entities which have a great deal to lose if a "cure" is widely available -- and these entities are frequently the most vociferous about what we should be doing.  (It's obvious how effective their advice is, too....)

How can anyone trust the advice of those who are making a lot of money out of the overweight???  But people do.  [eyes rolling]

We have to make ourselves responsible for our own health, because nobody else really has a stake in it.  If you must have a doctor to help you with some aspect, you should do your homework and see if his/her philosophy jibes with yours.  There ARE low-carb-sympathetic doctors out there, just as there are those who have had weight problems of their own.  Some of them have licked their weight challenges; i can only imagine that they have a little more insight and empathy than the always-lean ones -- but if they succeeded through starving and running marathons at the age of thirty, and you're 55 and female ... who knows?  ;-)

I'm sure i'm preaching to the choir when it comes to those who read here often.  I just hope that any newcomers will be inspired to think about it on my suggestion....

"I must keep in good health, and not die."

Ten points if you recognize the quote!  :-)

At least the first part is what springs to mind, when one contemplates the MESS that the medical industry has become.  I'm not afraid of what would happen to me if i were in an auto accident, i'm "afraid" of what could happen, were i incapacitated enough to go into an institution for the long term.  Modern medicine does wonderful things for trauma patients (if they don't die from infections first), but what it considers a healthy diet, i consider a catastrophe.

The nurses who blog and comment give us a very depressing picture of institutional life; even if a nurse spots a mistake in a doctor's protocol, s/he may not dare mention it.  THAT is appalling.  Mistakes can be knowingly made, and that's just tough beans for the patient.  Going outside the customary "chain of command" has got to be nearly impossible too, i'd wager.

Is it the culture of "i'm-okay-you're-okay" that allows acceptance of such incompetence in the world?  My husband, an engineer, sees a lot of this lack of performance-standard in his work, too.  "We didn't accomplish what we REALLY needed to, today -- OH WELL!"  Somehow, this just does NOT cut the mustard with my sense of "rightness" ... and it drives HIM crazy.

Somehow, we've got to create a sense of responsibility in people, and it HAS to start in childhood.  Unless there is some accountability for non/mis/malfeasance in homes and schools, it's hard to see how it can be developed in society at large.

As for the competence and accountability of those self-anointed "gods" of the medical industry, let them learn a little humility and sense of personal responsibility, let them not be afraid of being alerted to a possible error by their "inferiors" -- arrogance and delusions of invincibility can set one up for a hell of a fall.

Another quote (same source):  "The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely intrusted."  No doctor i've ever heard of has been perfect, let alone divine.