Review: Silent Pain

I grabbed this book on a bit of an impulse. I suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, so a testimonial of somebody who has recovered completely from the condition is obviously going to be intriguing for me. That was the claim made, although a closer reading of the text made me realize that the author, Helen Germanos, had just barely recovered when she wrote the book and as I can tell her from bitter experience, relapses are all too common.

Silent Pain is short, only 81 pages, and some of that is just filler. Germanos gives a brief personal history, reviews the causes and symptoms of CFS (multiple, with a configuration that is different for each individual), and informs us, based on the reading of a single study, that the cause is damage to the vagus nerve, which connects the brain to virtually every system of the body. She then discusses treatment, with a very heavy emphasis on esoteric methods. I confess to a great deal of skepticism in this regard, but her point that among the multiple causes of CFS, emotional and spiritual problems could also play a significant role is well taken. I can't entirely dismiss her recommendations because she has made a remarkable recovery from a very severe case of CFS. I will mull the whole thing over. For what it's worth, I have also made a good partial recovery by discovering a couple of my root causes and dealing with them: a very severe iron deficiency and an undiagnosed intolerance to grains and legumes, especially wheat. I am still trying to pin down other causes, which explains my interest in this book.

Should you read it? Well, if you are relatively uninformed about CFS, it might be worth going over it so you can understand how diverse and multiple the causes can be and some of the channels worth exploring in seeking improvement. If talk of karma and chakras and subtle bodies turns you off, you had better not. That's where the bulk of the emphasis is. The book is not exhaustive, definitive, or authoritative, but as a summary of one person's experience, it is of some interest.

Disclaimer: I received a free temporary electronic copy of this book from NetGalley for review purposes.

Author's website

The Walrus Diet

It's really very simple. If you can't get your hands on fresh walrus steak, you don't eat.

Why are you looking at me like that? It would work, wouldn't it?

Okay, maybe not. In all seriousness, I have decided to go against my principles and go on a diet. But my kind of diet. And I fully expect it to work.

Why are you looking at me like that? Yes, you heard me right. Dieting violates my principles. Primarily the principle of not banging my head against a cold, hard wall. Let's face it. 99% of the people I know and know of who go on diets, especially the ones who get spectacular results, pack it all back on in record time, with a few bonus pounds as a penalty for deluding themselves.

The reason for this is simple. They haven't learned to eat properly as a lifestyle. They have the discipline to deprive themselves for a time, but not enough to eat only what they need for the rest of their lives.

I, on the other hand, have the opposite problem. My weight has changed very little in the last twenty years. I'm really quite good at eating healthily and in reasonable amounts. What I'm really, really bad at is depriving myself long enough to take it off. Exercise isn't a good option for me because of my chronic fatigue. More than a certain amount of exertion and I am too tired to do anything else. And guess what? Then I tend to eat too much. So while I do try to get moderate amounts of exercise for other health reasons, I can't step it up enough to make a big difference in my weight. So what's a gal to do?

Enter the next important principle in why diets don't work. Dieters tend to plateau after about three weeks, even if they are following their diet religiously. The reason for this is simple too. The body gets the message that it's famine time and slows down the metabolism. You burn fewer calories and get kind of slow and stupid. The standard way around this - and it's a good way too - is to rev up the metabolism through exercise. Again, not a good choice for me.

But then I got to thinking. Another way to beat this problem would be to quit dieting before the three weeks are up. And to make very sure that I didn't gain the weight back. And to do this repeatedly. Diet a bit. Lose a little weight. Go back to normal eating.

Sounds like a plan to me. So for the first fifteen to twenty days of every month, I will diet. For the rest of the month dieting will be strictly verboten. So will putting the weight back on.

To implement this, I bought a decent scale. (Like the one in the picture, but round.) I'd been using my clothes to let me know if my weight was going up or down, but that's not very effective at monitoring day-to-day progress in increments smaller than 5-10 pounds. I needed mathematical accountability.

My diet plan? Well, it's very simple. I'm eating smaller amounts, less often. The small indulgences I normally permit myself are out, for the most part. I keep my mind busy with writing and the Internet (and I do them as far from the kitchen as possible) so I don't eat out of sheer distraction. I started a little late this month, but so far I've lost almost four pounds. (If you think I am going to tell you what the starting number was, you are out of your mind.) I'll take it up to the twentieth, and then I'll eat my normal way, keeping a daily eye on the scales to make sure I don't slide more than half a pound either way from my new weight. If I keep this up, a year from now I'll be forty to fifty pounds lighter.

If you want to try the Walrus Diet, any healthy dieting method at all should do the trick. Just don't go over twenty days at a time. If you do, let me know, and we'll do some commiserating.

I'll make the occasional update, either in the comment trail or in new posts so you can find out if the Walrus Diet actually works. And so I have the extra motivation of not making a fool of myself in public.


Technorati tags: Diets

And you thought The Fugitive was fiction

I will confess to not liking pharmaceuticals. I have never trusted them. I have never trusted the FDA, because I thought it was in bed with the pharmaceuticals.

Now I have really good reasons to. If you are a parent, make sure you read this and ask your pediatrician some hard questions. If you're not a parent, read it anyway.

By the way, it's easy reading, in spite of the fact that it's a hard topic. Served up in nice, bite-size pieces with lots of pictures which are often bleakly funny. More often scary.

Technorati tags: Pharmaceuticals

Evaluating Harper: patient wait times

Part five in my evaluation of the Harper government, Conservative priority number five: working with the provinces to establish a Patient Wait Times Guarantee.

Hmm, this won't take too long to comment on. Even the Conservatives are not pretending they have accomplished this yet and wait times have actually lengthened ever so slightly since they have been in office.

Of course, it is always a very tricky thing for the federal government to wade into the whole health care issue, seeing as that is provincial jurisdiction. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop voters from blaming the feds for whatever is happening in health care, so Ottawa is politically obliged to make appropriate noises. Seeing as they do actually contribute to provincial budgets, they have to try to leverage that influence in such a way as to impress voters without enraging provincial governments. It's not surprising that this was the last of their five priorities, as it will probably be the most difficult to implement. I don't know if they'll get a chance to try before the next election.

I'd be somewhat tempted to throw rocks at them for even making promises in this area, but really, this is a case of voters getting what they deserve. We shouldn't be holding the federal government accountable for something under provincial jurisdiction, but we do. This is pretty much a no-win situation for any party.

Havings said that, I would dearly love to see some new dialogue in the whole area of health care in Canada. It is time to start thinking outside the box and getting past old orthodoxies here. I am heartily sick of the "American system" red herring waved around with great mock indignation at every election. Every time a (Conservative) politician makes the obvious observation that we have problems with our health care system, the Liberals and NDP trot out the same hysteria. And it's a (I'm trying to think of a polite way to express this, as I am basically a polite person, but it is truly challenging...) um, logical fallacy. We are not restricted to two choices and two choices only. There are other things in the world besides the Canadian and American systems and even if there weren't, we could invent something new. It's time to get our heads out of the sand and start questioning the way we do things. This is going to be very difficult with so many different players, but somebody should start. This probably would fall to a province with some guts - probably Alberta - to just strike out and do something different and demonstrate that it can work. Alberta is the best candidate, first because they have never felt obliged to kowtow to Ottawa or the other provinces and second, because they have the budget to pull it off without help.

As far as Harper's government is concerned, I'll let them off with a neutral mark. Something to the effect of "not evaluated this term", like I have seen occasionally on my kids' report cards. There is only so much you can expect from a minority government in less than a year. In the somewhat unlikely event that we still have the same government a year from now, I will be less accomodating.

Technorati tags: Stephen Harper, Health care

And you thought SARS was scary...

Europe is fighting its own superbug, drug-resistant tuberculosis. A new Stop TB Partnership has been launched in Europe to try to fight the disease.

Markku Niskala, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said the message for EU leaders was: "Wake up, do not delay, do not let this problem get further out of hand."

"The drug resistance that we are seeing now is without doubt the most alarming tuberculosis situation on the continent since World War II," he said.

The WHO has found high levels of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in Baltic countries, Eastern Europe and central Asia.

Le Figaro reports that 70,000 people die of it yearly. OK, so how many SARS deaths did it take for the world to boycott Toronto? I assume TB is a little less contagious, because otherwise this makes no sense at all.

Technorati tags: Tuberculosis, SARS