health weblog

One of the world’s leading medics specialising in doping, Dr Robin Parisotto, has gone on the official record. There are now new uses for existing drugs (and some new drugs) that will fly under the radar of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s tests. But even if it’s true, we’ll never know about it.

So what are these new techniques? Well, let’s start with the go-faster tattoos. I love these ideas. Researchers at the Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum - the cancer research center in Germany - have shown that tattooing is sixteen times more effective than injections in delivering a drug into the body.

But the most interesting ideas are the use of Cialis and nitrous oxide gas. The point is that both operate as vascular dilators - they open up your blood vessels. Yes, friends, inhaling laughing gas makes you go faster, jump higher, and so on. Blood flows increase and bring more oxygen to those working muscles faster. The advantage of Cialis is that it stays in the body for longer - it’s not called the “weekend” pill for nothing.

So the next time you see a runner coming down the street towards you covered in tattoos, popping pills and breathing from a gas canister, this is your next Olympian in training.

The European Pharmacological Federation began a discussion of the medicinal role of cannabis. It is routinely used for controlling nausea among patients on chemotherapy and for encouraging appetite among AIDS patients. It is even used to treat some cases of sexual orientation disorders. It is now licensed for the control of neuropathic pain in adults suffering from cancer and multiple sclerosis.

Why does this work? Because the human body naturally produces cannabinoids and has cannabinoid receptor cells in all parts. Science is now designing medications that focus on the parts of the body affected by disease and not the central nervous system. So, for example, when the body is injured cannabinoids are naturally released in the affected area and reduce pain. Unfortunately, the effect is very short-lived. Thus, research is now aiming to produce more medications that maintain cannabinoid levels in the affected areas for pain relief and for the control of anxiety and depression. The converse treatments are also working well for dealing with nicotine addiction and obesity. One of the problems with cannabis is that is tends to be addictive and it causes the “munchies”, i.e. it encourages users to eat more. So, medications like acomplia that block the cannabinoid receptors help to reduce addictive behavior and reduce appetite. Acomplia is now a front line treatment for obesity in Europe, second in effectiveness only to the use of gastric bands or surgical bypasses (which reduce weight by an average of 30%).

The July conference heard news that one constituent of cannabis, THVC, may offer a better way to reduce appetite than acomplia and, more importantly, may be effective to treat neurodegenerative disorders like Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Why is more not heard about these advances? Possibly because of the prejudice that cannabis is a drug that should be banned. It is a shame society cannot see beyond a name to the good results science can produce. By coincidence, the French health authority Afssaps also released new statistics confirming the safety profile of acomplia in relation to depression. People with no history of depression show no adverse symptoms. Others only show an increase in depression at the beginning of a course of treatment. This can easily be monitored and compensated for.

Shopping online is good because it’s convenient and your privacy is protected most of the time you’re spend shopping. Whether people should be allowed to buy drugs over the internet is more controversial. One or even two thousand men with dysfunction were divided into two groups. One bought Cialis online, the other went to see their local health providers. The results of the research make interesting reading.

The headline is that buying Cialis online was “safer”. Obviously, both groups got the drug in its full strength version. There were no problems in delivery. The key advantage to buying online lay in “patient education”. People buying online received targeted email messages about the product and how to use it safely. Combined with the more general introductory material available online, patients were better informed than those who went to see a physician. Amazingly less than half the patients who had a face-to-face discussion with their physician were given any instructions on how to use the medication safely.

It’s alarming that physicians should prove so bad at communicating with their patients. Some allowances can be made because those in general practice are under great pressure to see sufferers quickly. But, not to give proper directions on safety. . . Well, everyone should make the change. It’s official. Buying Cialis (or any drug for that matter) online is better. This will reduce the number of patients asking for prescriptions and give physicians more time to do a better job.

Why this post? Well, I’ve just had a déjà vu moment all over again. When I was just starting out in IT back in the 70s, one of the standard tools was ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) - a code for characters, numbers, symbols, etc. Every day, almost every minute my mail box gets another of those annoying spam messages telling me how wonderful Viagra is (or how many times Paris Hilton has had sex with the russian hockey team). Gone are the days when I could just tweak the filter to include the latest permutation on Viagra. Now these clever spammers are into jpgs and all kinds of other tricks to get through the mail servers. Images are hard to filter out. It’s not that I mind being reminded every now and then what the wonderful little blue pill can do. After all, there was that time a year or so back when I had a bad patch and found out how good Viagra is. But to have something every few minutes is just egregiously bad. And what did we clever people do when we got bored? We made pictures out of all those characters. And guess what’s just popped into my inbox. You got it. It’s a headline, “Viagra - $1.10″ with the message built out of ASCII. So it made me sit up and take notice - just like taking Viagra really. Those spammers have found a new way to beat the filters.

Poison ivy, the prototype of the cyborg-killer in the comic book Blame, now is blooming. And just so you can keep calling global warming a myth, poison ivy is one of the plants responding well to the increases in temperature, humidity and the level of carbon dioxide. You can see it spreading along hedgerows and into your back yard. It’s very unpleasant to touch his leaves or other parts for a man who have some allergic reactions. This plant is bursting with an oily resin called urushiol. If this penetrates your skin, you’ll almost certainly get blisters and, in due course, a rash. Only a very few people are immune. For more serious exposure, you’re going to need the cream plus Prednisone. Two final thoughts on removing a patch of poison ivy from your yard. Lay in a supply of antibiotic and, wearing gloves, cut the vine and throw it on a bonfire. You must be careful. Heat and smoke can lift urushiol particles into the atmosphere so don’t stand down wind of the fire. Goats love to eat poison ivy.

Once upon a time, long long ago, there were five young ladies who were called the Spice Girls. One of them, born Victoria, was given the kind nick of Posh (a word meaning classy and elegant which she was until she opened her mouth and spoke). Now, her claim to fame is that she’s married to a footballer who can’t kick the ball in a straight line. Anyway, Posh is prone to get acne - not quite what you would expect of someone so, well, Posh. But she’s finally found the cure. While the rest of the world fights acne with Accutane, the footballer’s wife is mainlining natto. This is a favorite of the Japanese who make the stuff by fermenting soy beans. Guess what? It’s full of essential vitamins that fix scarred skin. Now, I gotta tell you. Natto has a taste that’s best not described and it’s best approached from up wind because it’s not overflowing with natural perfume. We’re all waiting for pictures of Posh downing her beans. For those of you not into has-beens, there’s still Accutane for acne. No smell and swallowed whole so no taste problem but, hey, you can’t have everything unless you’re either rich or Japanese (or both).