Of doctors and meds

[murstein]

I just had my first post-release appointment with my regular doctor. It's a bit interesting how my understanding of what's happening is evolving

Comments

[stormdog]

The astounding level of helpfulness to be found in public institutions never fails to boggle me...

[valsharess1]

I wonder if there is any home kit you could conduct some experiments with to determine the vitamin k level in a particular food, like you can with calories.

[murstein]

The best I've found on Google, is a university looking to sell a kit to measure vitamin K in the bloodstream, if they can only find a manufacturer. Plus, of course, a lot of labs telling what their requirements to run the test are.

Re: beer a week

[murstein]

It also means I need to plan ahead for some occasions. For example, if I want to split a bottle of rose petal mead on Valentine's Day, I need to make sure I don't have a drink after February 8th.

Re: beer a week

[murstein]

Doctors have a job to do. Since I don't particularly like them working on me, I figure it's my job to reduce the need for their services. ;)

[etumukutenyak]

Well, the USDA is tasked with oversight of agriculture and animals, not with drugs -- that's the purview of the FDA. I'd actually be more cautious about the hospital document, as you don't know who wrote it and you don't know who did the quality control on it. I've found simple errors in veterinary nutrition textbooks that were basically dropping a "not" from a sentence and completely reversing the meaning of the original statement.

In any case, what you do is go to multiple trusted sources and find out what the range is for those foods. You can also search on PubMed, and if you find any interesting looking abstracts, send them to me and I'll get the articles for you.

Here's a few places to start:

NIH Clinical Center (yes, another public institution, devoted to helping people get well)
the Army's SAMMC handout (oh, another federal bureaucracy, but still..)
eMedicine (this one's for health care professionals, but includes a list of the foods again as well as an overview of Warfarin)

[laureth]

Oooh, thanks! Those are very helpful! :D

[etumukutenyak]

Any time! Us Federal employees are here to help. ;-)

[murstein]

Thank you.

I had figured out that, in this instance, I wanted numbers from medical, rather than agricultural, sources. Beyond that, I wasn't sure where to go, and I know how highly something shows up on Google is a function of its popularity. Most of the time, I can tell which is probably reliable and which is obvious nonsense from what I already know. This is one of the instances where I don't know enough of the subject at hand to do that.

[murstein]

My next brewing task, as soon as I'm up to the lifting involved, is to bottle something that's been neglected in the basement for far too long. Precisely which carboy of mead -- or, possibly, cider that may have turned into vinegar -- that will be, will be decided on the day I do it.

Had I been a bit wiser, I'd have quit starting more carboys of mead after I was laid off. Come March, the oldest one will be four years in the carboy.

Something I mean to do Real Soon Now, is start a maple mead. Just to see what sort of beverage Miles was drinking up in the mountains. Being the sort that I am, though, I'll probably just use the maple syrup instead of honey, and otherwise stick to my usual meadmaking methods. I'm certain they're not how they'd do it in Silvy Vale, but it's a reliable way of making a beverage I enjoy.