Your eco-friendly afterlife

A few years ago, I decided I didn’t want to be cremated. Here’s why: cremation uses the same amount of energy required for a 500-mile car trip and releases 400 Kgs of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as well as other pollutants. In early 2018, I made inquiries about green burials in our area. At that time, no cemeteries allowed it. Now two of them do.

Last week we attended a green burial seminar at a local (Santa Cruz) funeral home. To begin with, there’s no embalming and no chemicals involved in any green burial methods. As to body disposal, here’s what we learned about the options:

Burial in the ground: Your body is either wrapped in a shroud or put into a biodegradable container, then buried in a licensed cemetery.

Burial at sea: Your body is put in a shroud or biodegradable container, weighted down, and dumped far out to sea.

Composted: Your body is put into a steel cylinder (compost bin!) along with soil, wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. After several weeks, it turns into soil that family members can use for planting or whatever. This method is available in Washington state. Colorado, Maine, Oregon, and California will probably follow soon.

Alkaline hydrolysis: Your body is put into a sort of pressure cooker filled with water and potassium hydroxide and heated to 320 degrees. In about four to six hours, it's broken down into its chemical components. The process isn’t available everywhere, but Wikipedia tells me that Benjamin Tutu was “aquamated” per his wish in South Africa.

One more thing: we learned about mushroom burial suits, in which mushroom spores are sewn into the fabric. The spores help decompose your body. Here’s a picture:  

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Misery in a nursing home

 My friend (college roommate) Susan, who lives in New York State, had her leg amputated above the knee. Three days later she was transferred to the Helen Hayes rehabilitation hospital, which is entirely devoted to helping people gather the strength and skills to manage their post-trauma lives. Because Susan had been an occupational therapist and knew a thing or two about rehabilitation, she was seen as “the queen of the rehab units.” More importantly, she was given three hours of rigorous therapy a day—learning to function on her own, such as getting from wheelchair to bed, or hopping on one leg.

Unfortunately. Medicare would pay for only about twelve days at the Helen Hayes Center, and Susan was transferred to a “sub-acute” nursing home, where everything went south. To begin with, she arrived during a serious winter storm which, supposedly, prevented many staff members from coming to work. Her physical therapy sessions dropped to less than 30 minutes average for the first five days. As Susan says, “When you are recovering from an amputation, every minute of Occupational and Physical Therapy counts because insurance pays by the day.”

What’s more, she says, “My roommate never turned off her TV, her lights or her phone and the neighbor next door rarely stopped screaming so I was not getting much sleep. My wheelchair came with a broken brake so it was taken for repairs and I was given an inadequate substitute. One week into this situation I was given a team meeting where I voiced my concerns. All was quickly remedied with protestations of, ‘We didn’t know,’ and, ‘You should have told us.’” She’s getting out of there before her insurance-allotted time is up.

Apparently, most of the other patients at Susan’s nursing home are suffering from dementia—the cause of the neighbor’s screaming. According to a New York Times article, to control such behavior, nursing homes medicate such patients with antipsychotic medications, which they can legally do by declaring the patient to be schizophrenic. At least 21 percent of nursing home residents are on antipsychotic medications. Of course, this is not right and should be corrected. But if I were in Susan’s situation, I’d be in favor of anything to get some peace and quiet.  

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

Fiber Fueled

 Fiber Fueled is the name of a book recommended to me by a friend who’s a vegetarian. I don’t usually write about diets, but I think the information in this book is worth mentioning. The author, Will Bulsiewicz, is a respected gastroenterologist who, through the influence of his wife, became a true believer of the benefits of  eating fiber from a variety of plants as a way to maintain a healthy gut. His opinions, like that of many others who study such things, were developed as a result of new technology that has made it possible to identify the DNA of microorganisms in our bodies. The point is: the more diverse our gut microbiome, the better. We do this, according to him, by eating a diverse plant-based diet. (I wrote about the science behind a fiber-rich diet in an earlier post.) In addition to fruits and vegetables, plants, of course, include grains, nuts, and seeds.

Bulsiewicz refers to the work of Dr. Rob Knight, the founder of the American Gut Project, whose research has resulted in a massive database of gut microbes and their effects. What doctor Knight has concluded is that the more diverse our diets, plant-wise, the more diverse our gut microbiomes: “The single greatest predictor of a healthy gut microbiome is the diversity of plants in one’s diet.” Knight’s recommendation is to eat thirty different plants a week--a number that he found was the greatest predictor of microbial diversity. According to Knight, this doesn’t require being a vegetarian.

In my opinion, Bulsiewicz goes overboard with his advice, admonishing against eating dairy and meat. The menus he suggests include meals such as tofu scramble and citrus and mint salad, or quinoa chili with kale salad. This would never fly at my house. Still, I think the goal of eating thirty different plants a week is a good one—something to think about and shoot for. You don’t need to buy the book. It’s all you need to know.

Last week I tallied up the plants I ate, counting every little thing, such as two kinds of lettuce, two kinds onions, two kinds of peppers, herbs, garlic, nuts, and so forth. I hit the thirty plants mark!  

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

 

Unsatisfying doctor visits

 One of the problems with doctor visits today—as I’m sure you’ve experienced—is that, because of the insurance reimbursement requirements and/or strictures imposed by their medical institutions--doctors are limited to fifteen-minutes per patient and sometimes less. I try to be sympathetic with their plight. Still, it makes me mad. In their rush to move on to the next patients, doctors often fail to listen to and consider everything a patient has to say.

A 1999 study of 29 family physician practices found that doctors let patients speak for only 23 seconds before redirecting them. In the study, only one in four patients got to finish his or her statement. Here’s an example reported on the PBS News Hour: a woman with an acute sinus infection went to see an ear-nose-and throat specialist who, she said, “…looked up my nose, said it was inflamed, told me to see the nurse for a prescription and was gone.” When she started protesting the doctor’s choice of medication, “He just cut me off totally,” she said. “I’ve never been in and out from a visit faster.”

Even if a doctor listens to what you have to say, they often ignore your words, mostly, I suppose, because they are the experts and you are not. Ignoring a patient can lead to misdiagnosis. In her memoir, Smile, Sarah Ruhl tells of developing a terrible itch all over her body after she became pregnant. When she called her doctor about it, she writes, “…he told me that sometimes pregnant women get itchy. It’s normal he said.” She did an Internet search, found a condition (cholestasis of the liver) that matched her symptoms. It turned out she had the disease--one that can kill unborn babies.

Dr. Jerome Groopman tries to help doctors become aware of their thought processes when diagnosing a disease. Among other research findings, Groopman notes that “…research shows most physicians already have in mind two or three diagnoses within minutes of meeting a patient, and that they tend to develop their hunches from very incomplete information.” In other words, they jump to conclusions.

Sometimes you're just on your own--with help from the Internet.

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