The Day After Yesterday

Oh you won’t forget a beautiful brunette with eyes of chocolate.

I’m breaking two streaks with this post. The first is JC’s six posts in a row as well as my normal Wednesday rambling. I was busy last night and therefore, will have to give you all my useless weekly thoughts today. Does anyone really care? Good, I’ll move on.

Thanks to everyone who has called to check-up on me. I appreciate it, but you need not concern yourself with my pansy nature. Thank you though. I heard someone say yesterday, “Just like a kidney stone, this too will pass.”

As Chris and I talked on Tuesday we confirmed that it was indeed National Ass-hole Day. This realization stemmed mostly from my annoyance with individuals who merge onto the Lodge at 30 MPH. Hit and gun baby. I want to be up to 70-75 MPH by the end of the on-ramp. That’s how I roll. That’s the Dominic Hasek School of Driving. Thanks to Chris reminding me of the national holiday my freak-out/road rage was minor.

I recently made a CD. It’s not my best effort and according to EKG none of my mix CD’s are good anyway. But what I like about this disc is the first five songs encompass a total of eleven minutes and the last two songs are roughly thirteen minutes long. Now that’s rock ‘n’ roll…if rock ‘n’ roll was defined by the length of a song and me…which it’s not.

I hope I never get HIV/AIDS because I’m pretty sure I’m a carrier of toxoplasmosis. I’m sure I have drunk out of the same cup as my cat on accident.

The New York Times recently reported a paper written at the University of Michigan that questioned the National Cholesterol Education Panel (NCEP) and American Treatment Guidelines (ATP-III) treatment recommendations for cholesterol levels. Previously, treatment guidelines were to lower low-density lipoprotein (LDL), the bad cholesterol, to below 130 mg/dL. After the release of NCEP and ATP-III the new recommendations were to lower LDL to less than 100 mg/dL with the option to treat below 70 mg/dL with high-risk patients, such as those with coronary heart disease (CHD) or a CHD risk-equivalent (diabetes). The authors questioned these guidelines stating there is really no randomized controlled clinically trials to support these numbers. Although there is no dispute LDL and total cholesterol should be lowered, it raises questions as to why these numbers were chosen. I recently read an article in the New Physician and the authors stated pharmaceutical companies and their strong lobby have pushed physicians to lower treatment and diagnostic guidelines in order to increase the medications being prescribed. I’m not too sure there is an elaborate and sinister plan like the New Physician author was suggesting, but I do believe the diagnostic criteria for disease has been lowered. By doing this there is an increase in the sensitivity, but the specificity suffers. Thus, there are too many false positives, that is individuals who are diagnosed with a disease but do not actually have it. I recently brought this discussion up over dinner to my parents and sister. They were just as bored as I’m sure you are. So I’ll stop…but I could go on. Suffice to say, medicine is in a constant state of change and it is always important to stay on top of the literature.

I believe this post has over stayed its welcome.