Are you smart enough to perform a home pregnancy test?

In the old days (my youth) a pregnancy test consisted of providing a urine sample to the doctor who would send it to a lab for analysis. The lab would send the results to the doctor who would then inform the patient. In 1967, Margaret Crane, a 26-year-old product designer who worked for one of the labs (a pharmaceutical company), noticed the urine analysis kits and wondered, “why not just cut out the doctor entirely?”

That night she designed a user-friendly home-testing version of the analysis kit and brought it into the company, begging her managers to consider the idea. They all said no. For one thing, they imagined a scenario in which “a senator’s daughter, unmarried, found she was pregnant and jumped off a bridge.” Such an outcome would be the end of their company, they reasoned.

It wasn’t only suicides they feared. The opposition to home testing was multifaceted. To begin with, there’s resistance to giving patients control over their bodies, not to mention giving them the right to obtain private information about their bodies. What’s more, those in charge feared antagonizing doctors and aligning themselves with “fast women” who desired a fast test. They were also worried that frightened 13-year olds would be the main users of the test and questioned whether their patients could handle bad news. They also questioned whether patients were smart enough to perform a home test, saying, for example, they “have a hard time following even relatively simple instructions.”

It took ten years to break these barriers. Even though 1967 was the dawn of the sexual revolution, abortions were generally illegal and 26 states barred single women from obtaining birth control. The home test kit was not available in the United States until 1977—four years after Roe v. Wade and ten years after Ms. Crane proposed it. Too late for me.

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Cheap and effective diabetes treatment

Within minutes of eating food containing sugars or starch—which convert to glucose—your pancreas secretes insulin. If all is working properly, insulin prompts tissues to take up the glucose from the blood and either use it for energy or, if not needed immediately, to store it in your liver or muscles.  A steady diet of highly refined carbohydrates may lead to insulin resistance, a condition in which cells get tired of the whole business and fail to respond to insulin. If the cells fail to respond to insulin, they fail to take up the glucose. If the cells don’t take up glucose, it remains in the blood, a condition that leads to diabetes.

Two physicians who specialize in obesity and diabetes recently wrote an article in The New York Times touting a low carb diet for treating diabetes (it’s the old fashioned way). The idea here is to reduce the glucose in the blood by eating less of it. Seems like a no brainer, but most doctors, and even the diabetes association don’t recommend low carb diets. They’re afraid that patients will see their blood sugar fall too low. Instead, to lower glucose levels doctors either prescribe insulin injections or medications that increases their patients’ own production of insulin. “A patient with diabetes can be on four or five different medications to control blood glucose, with an annual price tag of thousands of dollars” the authors say.

These two doctors have succeeded in getting hundreds of patients off their medications as the result of low carb diets. For example, one man had been told by his doctor that he’d need to be on insulin for the rest of his life, but the drugs cost him hundreds of dollars a month—even with insurance. They put him on a low carb diet. “Within five months, his blood-sugar levels had normalized…and he no longer needs to take insulin.”  They also refer to dozens clinical trials showing the effectiveness of low carb diets in treating diabetes.

The doctors who wrote the article attended the annual diabetes association convention this summer and found not “a single prominent reference to low-carb treatment among the hundreds of lectures and posters publicizing cutting-edge research… Instead, we saw scores of presentations on expensive medications for blood sugar problems.” They also reported that recently 45 international medical and scientific societies, including the American Diabetes Association, called for bariatric surgery as a standard diabetes treatment. Bariatric surgery involves stapling, binding, or removing part of the stomach to help people shed weight. Seems a bit extreme to me.

Because my husband’s father had diabetes, we have been on a low carb regimen for about 25 years. So far, so good!

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Bribe of scientists by sugar industry uncovered!

Recently, a postdoc researcher was going through the archives at Harvard and other universities and discovered internal documents of the Sugar Research Foundation (now known as the Sugar Association) showing that they bribed three Harvard scientists to play down a link between sugar and heart disease and instead point the finger at fat. The scientists, who are now dead, were paid an equivalent of $50,000 in today’s dollars (the bribery occurred in the 60’s). At the time, research had begun pointing the finger at sugar. To counteract this direction, John Hickson, a top sugar industry executive, discussed a plan to shift public opinion “through our research and information and legislative programs.”

The scientists published, in the New England Journal of Medicine, a review of research--hand picked by the sugar people--that was skewed to make sugar look innocent and saturated fat look guilty. As Dr. Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at UCSF says, “It was a very smart thing the sugar industry did, because review papers, especially if you get them published in a very prominent journal, tend to shape the overall scientific discussion.” (The New England Journal of Medicine did not require financial disclosures until 1984.)

Thus, for fifty years, the role of nutrition in heart disease has been largely shaped by the sugar industry. Incidentally, one of those three scientists went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture where he helped shape the dietary guidelines. The guidelines put carbohydrates at the base of the pyramid, telling us that we should be eating 6 to 11 servings of bread, cereal, rice and pasta a day. No fat, but a heck of a lot of carbs, which, by the way, convert quickly to sugar.

The sugar industry’s influence (and that of other scientists, such as Ancel Keys, who also doctored his data) led Americans to choose low-fat, high sugar foods that some experts now blame for fueling the “obesity crisis.” For example, people didn’t eat much yogurt until the low-fat, sugared varieties came on the market. Now they are hugely popular. A six-ounce container of strawberry-flavored Yoplait, advertised as 99 percent fat free, has more sugar than a Twinkie.

I’m no purist where sugar is concerned, but I refuse to buy anything advertised as low fat. Which reminds me: one of the things that annoys me about this anti-fat business is that canned tuna—which used to be packed in oil—is now packed in water. I hate that!

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Your body image: it's more complicated than you think

When he was 19, Ian Waterman suffered a severe bout of viral gastroenteritis that left him with a terrible disability: he lost his sense of proprioception—the ability to sense where his limbs were at any given moment. The sensations from his muscles and joints that would normally alert him to changes in posture and movement simply stopped. Even though his motor functions were still intact, the disease rendered him nearly helpless. 

Ian is now in his sixties and has learned to function pretty well. Still, the only way he knows where his limbs are or what they are doing is to look at them. To control his movements, must consciously command his muscles to contract or relax. If he sneezes, he collapses into a heap. Likewise, if the lights go out when he is standing, he collapses into a heap. For him, without thought, there is no movement. He can never relax.

Can you imagine?! Be glad your proprioception is intact! If all is working well, sensors in your muscles and tendons are constantly supplying information to your brain, which does an amazing job of making sense of it all. For example, your brain compares signals from muscles that are flexing with those that are relaxing. It also constantly monitors the movements of your arms relative to one another, making it possible to align them for tasks. You don’t have to think about all of this like Ian does.

Proprioception enables us to form a kind of central map of our bodies—it’s both a sense of self and body image. Sometimes our brains' processing of sensory input gets out of whack and our body images become disturbed, as is the case with anorexia nervosa, in which people see themselves as overweight; or somatoparaphrenia a condition in which people deny that a part of their body, such as an arm or leg, actually belong to them (they insist on amputation); or phantom limb, where an amputated limb is perceived to continue to exist.

Now I'm going to put my feet up and relax. No problem!

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Are you a former cheerleader? You can be a drug rep!

If you’re looking to be a pharmaceutical sales rep, it’s better to have been a cheerleader than to have a degree in science.  I am not making this up. The cheering adviser at the University of Kentucky, where the cheerleading squad are national champions, says he regularly gets calls from recruiters looking for talent. The cheerleaders, he says, have "Exaggerated motions, exaggerated smiles, exaggerated enthusiasm - they learn those things, and they can get people to do what they want." The recruiters don’t ask about majors. Science? Who cares?

There’s such a demand for former cheerleaders that an employment firm, called Spirited Sales Leaders, specializes in cheerleaders and has a database of thousands of potential candidates. You can find it on the internet. The company’s web site features a picture of a cheerleader.

Cheerleaders are generally attractive. On weekends, some of the cheerleader/drug reps work the professional football games. If you’ve seen these cheerleaders, you can imagine that there’s undeniable sex appeal. If the doctor is a male, the cheerleader sales rep has an advantage. A former male drug rep remembers a sales call with the “all-time most attractive, coolest woman in the history of drug repdom.” At first, he said, the doctor “gave ten reasons not to use one of our drugs.” The cheerleader “gave a little hair toss and a tug on his sleeve and said, ‘come on, doctor, I need the scrips.’” To which the doctor replied, “OK. How do I dose that thing?”

If you must know, I used to be a cheerleader, but I am a terrible salesperson. At least I majored in science.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.