“Take it all back. Life is boring, except for flowers, sunshine, your perfect legs. A glass of cold water when you are really thirsty. The way bodies fit together. Fresh and young and sweet. Coffee in the morning. These are just moments. I struggle with the in-betweens. I just want to never stop loving like there is nothing else to do, because what else is there to do?”

~ Pablo Neruda

A new study shows that patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) do not progress to dementia if they drink enough coffee! Gotta love it. I'm going to start drinking a whole pot, by golly. The researchers in this study think that it's the caffeine, and not the anti-oxidants, that has the anti-dementia effect, but according to mouse studies, it has to be coffee. Those patients with a little MCI who java it up enough to have a plasma caffeine level of 1200ng/mL did not go into dementia. 100%. The caffeine appears to inhibit an enzyme used in the manufacture of beta amyloid! They're also tracking cytokines in the plasma and finding that there's a particular profile assorted with conversion to Alzheimer's disease (low IL-6, IL-10, and G-CSF). In the future we might consider testing for those cytokines to detect impending dementia in healthy patients.
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This study had a sample size of nearly 400,000 adults and lasted for 13 years. They had to adjust the findings for cigarette smoking, which is of course prevalent among coffee drinkers.
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Further analysis of the Women's Health Initiative data has revealed that women who drink 4+ cups of coffee per day have 25% less risk of endometrial cancer than women who drink one or less. Drinking 2 or more cups of decaf per day was associated with a 22% risk reduction but the sample size was too small to have statistical significance. The strongest inverse association between coffee drinking and endometrial cancer was among obese women.

SOURCES
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/754053?src=mpnews&spon=16
http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/early/2011/10/03/1055-9965.EPI-11-0766.abstract

There is also a strong inverse association between coffee and suicide (up to 7 cups). We know that caffeine increases serotonin, so this should not be a surprise.
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http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/745359?src=mp&spon=34
is a review on this study:

Wilson KM, Kasperzyk JL, Rider JR, et al. Coffee consumption and prostate cancer risk and progression in the health professionals follow-up study. J Natl Cancer Inst. 2011;103:876-884. Epub 2011 May 17.

but this study
http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/50/21/6836.short
found no correlation at least for survival of fatal prostate cancer, between coffee drinkers or not.

( ...and... coffee drinkers have higher testosterone! text here. video at link above.Collapse )

Finally it is done. I shook when putting in my final IV today, just as I shook when I put in the first one. But now I can remain calm and get the job done, even though my hands are shaking. They don't start shaking until after I have stabbed the vein, and usually not until after I have inserted the catheter into the vein. It is when I am taping the catheter in that the shaking really gets bad. But I've learned. I can do it anyway. I dreaded this class. I do not like needles. But I have come to enjoy the challenge. I have gotten good at palpating veins. My lover has great veins; he is fun to palpate. I look at people on the bus, people in restaurants, people on the street, and I am assessing their veins. I never knew I'd see people in terms of their veins. Saw quite a few injection drug abusers in the clinic---those are some tattered sclerosed veins, surrounded by abscesses. The damage done by needles is nothing next to the emotional pain.

It is a relief to be done with this part of my education. Drawing blood, injecting nutrients, numbing tissues, doing IV pushes and drips..... all these needles. Somehow I made it without sticking myself. My lab partner today stuck herself trying to pull saline from a bag. It is easy to do. The first time I did an IV push was in the clinic--on a patient with Hep C--and I told the doc I hadn't had the class yet but he didn't care, said just do it, so I did. The patient had poppers for veins so it was no problem. No active injection drug use. I think I have scars in both of my antecubital veins now, from repeated venipuncture. By rookies. Some missed, some stabbed all the way through and out the vein to the back. Some yanked upward and tore the vein. Some caught the outer edge of it and stretched it. I have experienced many of the mistakes that one can make when playing with needles. I suppose that is the purpose of this education. I know the story from both sides now. I have scars on my veins to prove it. And I will leave fewer scars as a result.

This class was supposed to be taken in the 3rd year of this education, but I dropped it. I had started out drawing blood in second year with great confidence, but lost my confidence when I began to shake. I didn't shake at first. The shaking started after a few blood draws. I still don't know why. I started having trouble just keeping the needle in the vein while I plugged in the various vacutainers. I did better with a regular syringe; something about working the plunger helps me not shake as badly. I have learned to drink less coffee--or none--on days that I must work with needles. And I seem to do better when I support my endogenous acetylcholine. I often will shake less on subsequent punctures, when I do several in a day. I think if I did it all day long I'd get to where I wasn't bothered at all. It is also possible that my adrenal response to being stuck contributes to my shaking while sticking. Maybe if I didn't have to get stuck so often, and were able to dissociate sticking from being stuck, I'd have less bodily agitation.

To be a warrior is to experience life on our own two feet, without the companionship of habitual patterns. In order to engage in bravery, we must be willing to be free of deception. The Shambhala tradition regards any aspect of life as a potential path of warriorship. But if we use our activities as a buffer that prevents us from being, those same activities become a nesting ground for habitual patterns and cowardly traits — elements of deception that allow us not to be fully present.
--The Sakyong Jamgon Mipham Rinpoche, in Bravery without Deception, Feb 2011

Test will be case based multiple choice and matching.
The test will be for 30% of your grade. Lecture will start at 9:10 on GI health.
( original from KP, revision in process, goldmine here, dig for conditionsCollapse )