Margarita dermatitis

That’s the jokey name for a skin condition I’d never heard of. The real name is phytophotodermatitis. It’s a skin reaction you get if you spill lime juice—or grapefruit, lemon, celery, carrots, parsnip or parsley juice—on yourself, and then go out into the sun. These juices contain chemicals called furocoumarins that cause a skin reaction when exposed to sunlight. The reaction takes about 24 hours to show up. What you get is a rash and/or blisters.

I Googled images of this condition and some are rather horrific—huge blisters. Here’s one image—one of the milder-looking photos.

Apparently this condition is often seen in beachgoers who have been squeezing lime juice into their Coronas and have gotten a little sloppy with the squeezing. In the photo above, I can picture the guy holding his Corona over his leg and attempting to squeeze the lime juice into the bottle—perhaps while sitting in a boat. By the way, this condition often flummoxes dermatologists.

I had considered squirting some lime juice onto my skin then going out into the sun to see what would happen. But apparently this condition can be quite painful and can last a couple of months! Forget it.

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Pity the poor pharmacist

It never occurred to me that being a pharmacist might be stressful until I read an article about people who retire early. One was a pharmacist from Tennessee who retired at 38! He was making $150,000 a year but was miserable at his job. What he hated was the skyrocketing costs of drugs, dealing with sick people battling health insurance, the over-prescription of opioids, and the addiction crisis. He was constantly dealing with angry, financially stretched customers who often lashed out at him. “There were days when I had 12- or 14-hour shifts where I didn’t use the restroom, where I didn’t eat, because so much work was piled up on me,” he says.

I did a little research and discovered that being a pharmacist can be horribly stressful. One survey found that almost 70% of pharmacists experienced stress and work overload. A researcher at the Harvard Business School estimates that burnout in the workplace costs $125 billion a year in healthcare costs, and results in 120,000 deaths a year. Heavens!

In looking at online forums for people considering pharmacy as a profession, the causes of stress become clear. Here are some comments from pharmacists or ex-pharmacists:

• The big chains “own your ass…they are evil, they treat you like a robot or slave. The retail side of pharmacy will absolutely rape you to get a bottom line; i.e. overwork, understaff, cheat, etc.”
• “I've worked plenty of days where the pharmacist is crying in the back on their breaks.” (This from a pharmacy tech. They’re poorly paid assistants who help fill prescriptions.)
• “We must silently protect doctors and nurses from harming patients. The fact is and remains that the pharmacists are liable for the errors created by physicians, nurses, and pharmacy technicians.”
• “I have seen a steady decline in our profession. Now we are forced to give immunizations, (in between filling scripts) and it’s not going to get better. The corporate guys just watch the bottom line. Customers treat us like clerks."
• “Trust me, don't be a pharmacist, it sucks.”

Goodness! I hope it’s not so bad at our little family-owned pharmacy in town.

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

Reversing diabetes

If you have diabetes, your blood glucose (sugar level) is too high (hyperglycemia). It’s too high because your body’s cells have become resistant to insulin, the hormone produced by the pancreas that enables the cells to take up and use glucose for energy. Hyperglycemia can damage the vessels that supply blood to vital organs and can increase the risk of heart disease and stroke, kidney disease, vision problems, and nerve problems. The standard treatment for diabetes is medications.

The incidence of diabetes in the U.S. has risen dramatically since 1958. In 2015, 23.4 million people had diabetes, compared to only 1.6 million in 1958. My own opinion as to the cause of this rise is the misguided advice by the government and others that the bulk of our diets should consist of carbohydrates (bread, pasta, rice, and so forth). Carbohydrates readily convert to glucose.

A new year-long study, conducted at the University of Indiana, treated 262 people who have type 2 diabetes. The “treatment” consisted of low-carb diets along with continual care that consisted of monitoring the test subjects’ biomarkers, such as blood sugar, and around-the-clock consultation and supervision. After one year, here’s what happened to the test subjects:  

• 60% reversed their diabetes, meaning their average blood sugar dropped so low that they no longer could be diagnosed as diabetic
• 94% reduced or entirely eliminated reliance on insulin.
• On average, the group reduced their body weight by 12%

Meanwhile, a control group that followed the American Diabetes Association’s standard (high-carbohydrate) diet saw no improvement in health. (At breakfast with a diabetic friend, I was surprised that she had coffee cake and granola for breakfast.)

Admittedly, a San Francisco company called Virta  funded the study. For a fee, the company provides you with the resources to accomplish such results. For sure, a low carbohydrate diet would be involved. You'd be burning fat instead of glucose for energy. If I had type 2 diabetes, I’d go for it.

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Curing yourself using worms

It’s called helminthic therapy. Helminths are worms, such as hookworms, tapeworms, and pinworms. Some people are infecting themselves with these worms to cure themselves of allergies or autoimmune diseases. Most commonly, people use helminthic therapy to treat Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease, multiple sclerosis, and asthma.

Here’s the deal: These types of diseases occur only in industrialized societies. Scientists who study this therapy believe that such diseases are caused by the loss of species diversity within our bodies—species with which we co-evolved millions of years ago but which we have eliminated by modern sanitation, water treatment, and medical practices. The absence of species from our biome leaves our immune systems in a hypersensitive state which, when combined with environmental triggers and genetic predisposition, leads to allergic and autoimmune diseases.

Scientists have long noticed the absence of allergic and autoimmune diseases in less developed countries and had considered the idea of reintroducing helminths into patients in the hope of rebalancing their immune systems. In 1976, a researcher infected himself with hookworms and succeeded in putting his own seasonal allergies into remission (as reported in the Lancet scientific journal).

Desperate people are turning to helminthic therapy. Unfortunately, a doctor can’t help: helminthic therapy is not approved as a medical treatment anywhere in the world. But there’s plenty of information on the internet. The best is a Wiki site. It is extremely thorough and includes everything you need to know, including lots of testimonials. Here’s one, contributed by someone who used the therapy to treat Crohn’s disease:  “When I began taking helminths my gut was in awful shape and my GI doc wanted to preform another surgery. I chose to begin helminth therapy hoping that it would save me and my gut. Helminths did what no stop gap surgery or drug could do, it put my CD in remission (after 30 years of coping) and has controlled it since then. It will be 10 years in Jan. 2016. Best choice I have ever made.” 

Of course, the worms can make you sick, too. But if I were continually having chunks of my intestines removed. I’d go for it.

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

Hay fever: only for the well-to-do

Well, that was the case in the mid-nineteenth century. In March 1819 Dr. John Bostock reported the first case of hay fever—his own—to a medical society in London. More cases were soon reported. In looking into this new phenomenon, Bostock noted that the condition appeared only among the upper classes. “I have not heard of a single, unequivocal case occurring among the poor.”

Because hay fever was associated with affluence, it became a rather fashionable affliction. In the U.S., entrepreneurs capitalized on this effect and established “retreats” for the sniffling, sneezing gilded class. One attendee noted, “Only individuals of the highest intellectual grasp, and the strongest moral fibre have the disease.”

The reason only the upper classes were affected is that they had begun to clean up their environments. Cities in both the U.S. and U.K had begun to institute major sanitary reforms. For the first time in human evolution, certain microbes and parasites were being removed from the human organism. Our bodies would never work quite the same way again.

Our immune systems evolved to anticipate certain types of microbial and parasitic input—the bacteria, worms, etc. commonly found in vegetation, mud and water throughout evolution. Lack of exposure to these agents suppresses the natural development of our immune systems. It’s not just allergies that are affected, but also autoimmune diseases and many others.The way this works is enormously complicated and scientists don’t agree on some of the fine points. But nobody disputes the facts that people who grew up on farms have far fewer allergies than those who did not.

There’s not a lot you can do to ameliorate this situation (probably too late to take up farming), although some desperate people have taken to infecting themselves with worms. More on that later.

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