Lieberman is gone, group is DEAD, no reason to post here

You have a good chance to get him back. He has an ice cream store near He has penchant for (dark) chocolate chip.

A bribe disguised as gift certificate from the local dispensary might just bring him back.

(the original) I suggest everyone that has an interest order a gift certificate for him.

Good luck, Mikek

All true. However, I'm rapidly gaining mass and have decided to cut back on ice cream, chocolate, sugar, and anything that tastes good. Meanwhile, I've been gratiously accepting bribes from customers. One customer just subsidized half of my purchase of a Google Nexus 7 tablet. Lunch today was most of an apple pie from a customer wanting me to drop everything and work on her machine. I pretend to forget the other bribes I've accepted. Please don't tell the IRS or they might insist that I declare such bribes as income.

Maybe next year:

Not to worry about eating anything that tastes good. Pesach (Passover) starts next week...

I've been on niacin for a few years. Cheap enough, especially if you watch for the specials at Costco and stock up. The twice a year medial tests are more expensive that the pills.

The was a KQED forum within the last year with a UCSF physician making the case that statins are over-prescribed. I think this is the episode, but I haven't played it to check:

Taking niacin for boosting HDL is what they call a pharmacological dose. You can take half a gram without medical supervision. I'm on two grams. The FDA safe limit is 3 grams.

It is hard to control LDL with diet, and HDL is barely boosted with exercise, at least in my case. I got a HDL over 50 on my last test, and if I get a reading that high again, I'm going to ask if I can reduce the dose.

You need to consider two things (at least) regarding cholesterol. First, about a third of those that get a heart attack have no cholesterol issues. Second, just because you take a drug that makes you "read", i.e. pass a test, like a healthy person, it doesn't follow that you are as healthy as a person that has naturally good cholesterol readings. That is, often a doctor is treating the test results rather than the patient.

One side effect with me regarding taking niacin is I now remember my dreams, or probably more accurately more often.

That's interesting, I rarely remember my dreams, I might try niacin just for that fun fact. Mikek

~ In Jeff Liebermann writes: ~ ~ >All true. However, I'm rapidly gaining mass and have decided to cut ~ >back on ice cream, chocolate, sugar, and anything that tastes good. ~ ~ Not to worry about eating anything that tastes good. Pesach (Passover) ~ starts next week...

Make your own! Cane sugar, cream, milk, maybe eggs, vanilla ... no chometz or even kitniyot in there. (Can't pour bourbon over it though.)

mmmmmmm, eggs... cream... just add chocolate and you've got a chocolate egg cream!

And yet you're posting here. How odd.

Remind me not to get an egg cream at your place.

Elijah

------ milk, seltzer, u-bet's chocolate syrup, stir

DevilsPGD wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

This has been a one person group every since I can remember. Only one who gives any decent answers is Liebermann and he's not any more so I only check here once in a while. No reason to even contribute with questions since most here cannot answer them and the few that can won't. Suggest group name be changed to wireless.brokenrouter.donotwasteurkeystrokes Maybe they're all too sick to answer, but they sure are hypochondriacs, ha!

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: snipped-for-privacy@netfront.net ---

Ouch. Can you tell if the pains are in the muscles (statins) or in the nerves (discs)? You could also try an experiment by not taking statins for a while and see if that helps.

That's what the cardiologist prescribed for me and which I was taking for 9 years. Initially, he prescribed some expensive drug (name forgotten) that turned out to be a combination of Lovostatin and Niacin. I looked at the ingredients, and determined it would be cheaper if he prescribed each individually. Both eventually went generic, saving even more cash.

There's been some research on the interaction between statins and Niacin. Most of it revolves around side effects and compatibility with other maladies. Otherwise and to the best of my limited knowledge, as long as you're not seeing major side effects, they're safe to take together.

The pharmacy may have just changed pill vendors to get the lower dose. Different vendors have different prices. You might try cutting the

500mg pills in half. Then, take a 500mg and a 250mg dose on alternate days to get the equivalent of 375mg. The half-life of Vicodin is about 4 hrs, so this will probably produce somewhat of a roller coaster ride. Maybe split all the pills to 250mg and stagger when you take them or just take them as needed. Dunno.

I got tired of replacing my drug store splitter every month because the blade got dull. So, I made one that uses an ordinary razor blade. The blade doesn't last any longer, but at least it's cheaper to replace. All the pill splitters I've tried or built produce crumbs. I use one of the plastic 1 week pill boxes, so I just dump the crumbled pills into the appropriate section.

I'm on Metoprolol 25mg, a beta blocker. My BP is just plain weird. I have a BP machine in the office and at home. I record the BP at erratic intervals. It's always high, currently averaging 147/82. Yet, when I go to the doctors office, and they measure the BP, it's usually well under the target 120/80. When I drag my BP meters to the doctors office, and compare results, the BP results are also low. This is backwards from what is suppose to happen, where a nervous patient yields a higher blood pressure.

I think you'll find it helpful to make a spreadsheet of your BP results in order to see trends and averages. Everyone's BP swings over some range of values, sometimes extreme. Looking at mine, there was one reading of 196/120. Methinks trying to stabilize these short term excursions is somewhat futile and that you should concentrate on the long term average BP. I can email my spreadsheet to you if you want an example and starting template.

According to the subject line, the group and I are both dead, so this would be an improvement.

Thanks, but rumors of my demise might be somewhat premature. If I see a decent question, I try to answer it. I haven't seen any good questions in a while. Also, I haven't been very active in wireless technology an politics for many years, and am therefore somewhat behind on the latest and greatest. Wi-Fi has also become a fairly cheap commodity product, making hardware replacement a better alternative to do-it-thyself systems and elaborate troubleshooting.

They call that white coat syndrome. BTW, back in the day, 147/82 would have been fine. They have lowered the numbers over the years. This is either to improve your health or sell more pills.

I don't have a BP machine, but when I've tried them out, the Omron models seem to match the doctors office the best. Being averse to lawsuits, if I were to market a BP machine, you can bet I would make it fail in the direction of reading a bit too high.

Wifi is still expensive on the enterprise scale, let alone silly overpriced crypto boxes. But I don't have the need to implement wifi to fill a stadium. Supposedly that new football stadium in Santa Clara will have wifi for all. Hey remember, there are only 13 minutes of actual play in a football game. You have a lot of time to kill.

This is just the normal doc's responding to whatever the last study says. The people that put together the guidelines actually raised the numbers a couple of weeks so you can now improve your health and sell fewer pills.

Yes, but I do it backwards. The BP is suppose to INCREASE in the doctors office, not decrease. For me, it's very consistent and repeatable among several doctors offices. I've asked if they've ever seen it like that before, whether it's important, what to do about it, etc, and received no useful answers.

True, but situation is a bit different. Since I almost had a heart attack, they want to drop my BP and reduce my cholesterol to below what is considered "normal" allegedly to prevent future incidents. I can see the logic, but fail to appreciate the methods. One cardiologist spelled it out for me quite clearly. If he wants to see perhaps 130/85, he will have me aim for 120/80 or less, and be quite happy if I don't quite make it. Incidentally, one problem with that method is that I tend to be rather sensitive to most drugs. Half the usual dose is sufficient. The initial prescriptions sent my BP down so far that I was starting to pass out during various exertions. I vaguely recall a BP of something like 90/50.

I have 4 assorted BP machines, all from Omron. One was purchased new, while the others are thrift shop purchases for about 20% of the new cost. I bought them mostly to get the better functioning cuffs. I built a crude pressure tester, which shows that they're all quite accurate. For fun, I sometimes put one on each arm, and run them simultaneously. My right arm is always lower by about 5 mm-Hg. I've also done comparison tests at the doctors office, which shows good accuracy. While all this testing was mostly for curiosity sake, I wanted some assurance that I could use any of my various BP testers interchangeably. The cardiologist is impressed with my BP data, graphs, and correlation with activities, drugs, diet, and exercise and has always asked for copies to study.

Yeah, defensive medicine is in fashion. It's going to become more interesting as more health monitoring gadgets hit the market. Most are tied to smartphones and tablet computahs for data collection and making pretty graphs. I think it will be a big thing in the future, but at a price. If you thing the medical profession is rather isolated from the patient today, wait until a mess of high tech portable diagnostic tools are inserted between you and the doctor. Right now, none of my various doctors spend more than a few minutes looking at my file before prescribing a cure all. With computerized diagnostics, they will spend even less time with the patient. Remote medicine will make it even worse. Then there's the privacy problem, where the doctor and probably the insurance company, knows everything that you do, everything that you eat, how much exercise you really get, and where you've been going. Optimistically, the benefits of continuous monitoring will outweigh the detriments.

Here's the tip of the monitoring iceberg:

(Using the brand name Tylenol in the subject since it's better known than the generic acetiaminophen)

[snip]

Actually it was an FCC mandate. Err, make that an FDA mandate. Bit by bit they've been acknowledging the _very serious_ risks of acetaminophen and have been both mandating (where applicable) and "suggesting" steps that are reducing the general population exposure to it.

One recent order was... reducing the amount of it in drugs where it's a contaminant, (officially a "combination", but there's no good reason whatsoever for it to be mixed in) down to a maximum of 325 mg.

- I've been trying to get them to approve/suggest/encourage a compound that would include the (loosely speaking) "antidote" in the same pill. The Brits used to market it under the brandname "paradote". It ain't available in the country, but you can get the same beneficial effect by taking n-acetylsteine ("nac") along with the liver destroyer. NAC is available over the counter at, sigh, health food stores.

- this is a real issue. Acetaminophen destroys lots and lots of people's livers. It was the way Dr. Bruce Ivins, as in the Amerithrax anthrax letters, suicided.

Wow, and thanks. I didn't realize that there was a problem. When I was dealing with yet another kidney stone, I was chugging Vicodin without keeping track of the dosage. I think only my natural aversion to popping pills kept me from an overdose.

Heavy, heavy duty. If APAP came on the market today, it would probably be prescription.

Check your personal e-mail for a note in a moment..