Trocaventure

In the midst of all the debate about environmental issues, we are too often distracted by the hot button climate change. Yet controlling carbon emissions is only one of many different concerns about how we live our lives and the impact our lifestyles have on our environment. If we are to hand over a habitable planet to our children, we have to start thinking about every aspect of the systems currently in use and how we might make them safer. One of the less obvious questions is how we dispose of our unwanted drugs. There are a number of quite different issues. One day, you open the bathroom cabinet and find unexpected rows of half-empty bottles and packs of pills, all of which have passed their use-by dates. For a moment, you pause and wonder whether you should do something. Then your eye catches the toothbrush and life goes on for another month or so.

Why worry?

Well, the statistics are interesting. In some parts of the country, more people accidentally poison themselves, become hooked on addictive drugs or die of drug overdoses than die in traffic accidents. That should give you pause for thought. The number of deaths from traffic accidents is already an epidemic but, when you collect the statistics from emergency departments around the country, one of the largest groups of people admitted for treatment is suffering drug-related problems. Children are common admissions. Instead of having lockable cabinets, parents store drugs in places easily accessible by children and family members, friends and neighbors with addiction problems. Children are often tempted by brightly colored pills, thinking them candy. Adults can raid your stash of unwanted drugs to feed their addiction. But how should you dispose of these pills?

The temptation is to flush them away. Except this dumps a cocktail of drugs into the sewers that drain into our rivers and seas. Downstream, the water is drawn out by another city or town but the water purification plants cannot remove all these chemicals. The result is that the downstream population consumes a dilute mixture of your drugs. Fish and animals you might eat also drink the water, treated and untreated, so there’s a big circle of life with drugs recycling through the food chain. [...]

There is a wonderful idiom, several times used as the title to a movie and offering the comparative warning, “It shouldn’t happen to a dog.” It refers to some proposed act or omission that is so unpleasant to humans, it should not even be wished on a dog (being a mere animal, it might be expected to bear most things, but not this). Human culture has grown up with animals a part of our lives. Whether as pets, living as one of the family in our own homes, or as working beasts, we value them for “who” they are and what they can do for us. This means treating them in much the same way as humans. If they get sick, we give them our medications. Sometimes, they retaliate by acting as incubators to encourage viruses to mutate and, as with “swine” or “bird” flu, return the favor by passing us infections to which we have no resistance. But, in general, we worry about them. Even the animals we propose to eat are stuffed full of antibiotics to keep them fit and healthy. So, keeping this real, there are many protections we have put in place for our animals. The most carefully monitored rules affect horses. These powerful animals have become a key part of the gambling industry, running in races for our excitement and jumping fences for our admiration.

As with most sports, the fear is that horses dosed with stimulants and other drugs might run faster and/or jump higher. Think Barry Bonds and the debate about the use of steroids in Major League Baseball for an understanding of the passion in the world of racing and equestrian sports. At the top of the sport, the International Equestrian Federation (FEI) carried out detailed research in the early part of this century and concluded it was unsafe to allow horses to compete if they were relying on painkillers. In 2004, the Federation moved toward a zero-tolerance policy. This was approved by the Veterinary Committee and representatives of the different national bodies. The risk of seriously injuring the horses was too great and this protective care was strongly endorsed by horse-lovers around the world. Horses should only be used when they are completely fit. It’s therefore somewhat surprising to see the FEI change the policy to allow the use of a range of painkillers. Indeed, the decision has provoked outrage. [...]

One of the ways in which the government attracts our attention is by having a series of steps to move from “no reason to panic” to “run for your life!” The classic example of this is the Homeland Security’s “Advisory System”. This moves from a Low Green, through a Guarded Blue, an Elevated Yellow, a High Orange to a Severe Red. For those of you who have lost interest, we are currently at yellow when we walk around the streets of our cities, but orange the moment we take to the air. The same thing recently happened with swine flu that was rapidly renamed the H1N1 flu to avoid the sale of pork dropping through the floor. The World Health Organization ratchets up the warning through eight phases, taking us from, “It’s mainly just the birds and animals dying”, to “Now humans are dying too” through “It’s a pandemic” to two phases where we gradually get back to business as usual. In case you were sleeping, we are currently still at the pandemic level of alert even though not many are dying. Actually, when you think about it, this sounds a bit hard-hearted but, in a regular flue season, thousands die. We have apparently been lucky the H1N1 outbreak proved mild.

Putting this another way, it was the intention of the DHS to worry us. If we are vigilant, we may identify unusual behavior in those around us and help prevent a terrorist attack. Equally, the WHO wanted us to take the threat of the flu seriously and protect ourselves by wearing a mask, washing our hands frequently, and so on. People only modify their behavior if you give them a reason to change. To that extent, some worry or anxiety about terrorism or the flu is entirely rational. But it can become irrational where, if the news headline is that ten people have just died of flu in Indonesia, you break out in a sweat, your heart races, your stomach churns and your bowels threaten to open. This is not in any way to suggest we should not be sad if people die in foreign countries. But to showing an overreaction suggests generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). The latest research estimate is that about 5% of the US population suffers GAD. Except there will be a range of behavior from background worry to disordered anxiety, and where people fit into the range is likely to change from day to day and their diagnosis will depend on when a doctor sees them. [...]

When people start speaking about insomnia there’s usually a lot of confusion involved. Some people think that it’s a very serious health condition that threatens the patient with no sleep for weeks, months and years. Others think that only by using strong prescription drugs and going to the doctor on a regular basis will help overcome this condition. But if you save yourself from the common beliefs and start operating with pure facts, it’s much easier to understand what insomnia really is and how it can be treated. Here are seven facts you have to know about the most common sleep disorder that affects millions of people in US alone each year:

1. Insomnia is not a uniform sleep disorder. In fact, it has different gradations and specialists classify three most common types of insomnia: transient, short-term and chronic insomnia. Each type of insomnia has different duration and periodical characteristics that make it easier for the doctors to classify and treat these sleep disorders.

2. Insomnia effects go far beyond the simple lack of sleep and poor concentration abilities the next day. Things like bad mood, irritability, impaired coordination, drowsiness, memory problems, loss of focus, low stress threshold, loss of appetite, depression and hallucinations are just a part of the whole list of problems you can experience while not getting enough sleep for a long period of time.

3. There’s a wide range of conditions and factors that can be the actual cause for insomnia: jet lag, stress, work shift changes, depression, bad sleeping space, use of medications, substance abuse, health conditions, overexhaustion, poor diet, improper food or activity schedule, and much more. [...]

It’s never a happy thought, but we are all getting older. Those of us boomers are into our sixties now with the rest of the pack starting to catch up. This is the time when things really start going wrong with our bodies. Most of us have been lucky up to now. But despite the best efforts of medical science, there’s no pill to slow down the years. Worse, the most likely first symptom of age is going to be erectile dysfunction. All those high cholesterol meals we crammed away will come back to bite us as layers of platelets build up on the walls of our blood vessels. Some call this arteriosclerosis, others artherosclerosis. Whichever name, the result is the same. The muscles in the walls of the arteries needed to dilate start to fail. Without the dilation, there can be no erection. It’s an unhappy thought, but loss of sexual power can be the first symptom of a lifestyle with too much fat and too little exercise. When someone invents a time machine, we can go back and give ourselves good advice. Until then, we have to make the best of our golden years.

Curiously, the world is growing old with us. When we were young and living through the fifties, the television was a novelty. Replacing the radio and its world of advertiser-sponsored programs came the future with moving images and all the new ads. They were simple sales pitches, very naive by modern standards. But they got the message across. And what were those messages? Well, for the most part, housewives were told what food to put on our plates, what drinks to offer us. Then came the things to make the household run smoothly and the latest model vehicle to get us from A to B. In between were sometimes disturbing news reports which grew worse as we came into the sixties and the Russians took over Cuba as a missile base on our doorstep. In some senses, it’s actually more relaxing to have the modern coverage of world events. For the most part, our media have forgotten the need to tell us what’s happening outside our shores. It’s more important to package our local politics as the news and give us the messages most important to those controlling the content. The ads have changed as well. The networks have decided the silver-haired crowd has the buying power. We boomers hold what’s left of the purse strings. So we need to know about the adhesive to keep our dentures in place, heat wraps to keep the arthritis pain under control and the latest pills to keep Alzheimer’s away. Oh, and the pills to keep our sex lives going. [...]