I drink quite a bit of caffeine, which poses a problem come Yom Kippur each year because of the 25-hour fast (food and drink). Every year I start ramping down the caffeine on Rosh Hashana (10 days earlier), try to reach zero caffeine the day before Yom Kippur, and soldier through. But I always get a caffeine headache anyway. Somebody once ( Read more... )

As I gather is increasingly common in larger US companies, my employer tries to entice people to actually get annual bloodwork by offering a discount on insurance to people who cough up some basic stats -- cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar, and a couple other things. (Assurances of confidentiality are made; cost-benefit analysis is left to ( Read more... )

Out of curiosity, how long "should" a typical dental cleaning and check-up take these days for an adult with no special considerations? (I mean time in exam chair, not time in waiting room.) My visits got faster when my dentist's office switched (regretably IMO) from hand-scraping tartar to using an ultrasonic gizmo, but even so I was surprised ( Read more... )

Oh phooey -- we ate that yesterday, "possibly" exposing us to listeria monocytogenes (warning: I cringed while reading this). But kudos to Giant Eagle for calling and telling me; store affinity cards do bring privacy issues, but it's nice to know that the tracking of purchases can produce good outcomes too. Unless it were to make the news ( Read more... )

Thanks to siderea for pointing me to this post about problems with Purina pet food (dog and cat, at least). After seeing this I read the last several month's worth of consumer-affiars complaints, and older ones about the specific foods relevant to me. (Warning: can be gross.) This goes well beyond "ew, yuck" to "get that stuff out of the house before ( Read more... )

At the Giant Eagle pharmacy ( Read more... )

I don't understand the drug industry. Ok, ok, nobody does. Let me be more specific: I don't understand what's going on with one of my glaucoma drugs, Xalatan ( Read more... )

This is the weirdest cold (?) I can remember. It started with a mild cough Saturday night (after I'd performed, fortunately). That continued Sunday, and I applied tea, ginger root, and steamed milk (not concurrently). Nothing productive -- just the motions of a cough. Sunday night I started to get a mild runny nose (non-productive, i.e. the ( Read more... )

A recent mailing from my employer's department of reducing health-insurance ( Read more... )

My doctor says that my "bad cholesterol" is a smidge high (good's fine ( Read more... )