Ginger

Last night I made myself some homemade ginger tea which was simple boiling 3 slices of ginger and adding some sugar. I have this book called "Food: Your Miracle Medicine" and looked up ginger and found that it has a structure similar to aspirin, helps with join pain, thins blood, and kills bacteria. Sounds like good stuff.



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There was an article about diabetes and hypertension in the issue American Family Physician that was in my mailbox yesterday. This is what I learned:
-Going down from 140/90 to 130/80 cuts the risk of major cardiac events in half.
-Diastolics less than 60 are not recommended in patients with CAD.
- ACE Inhibitors are good, but thiazides were surprisingly listed as second line meds leaving beta blockers and calcium channel blockers as third line. I was a little surprised that beta blockers aren't higher up on the list given their improved mortality in patients with CAD which a lot of diabetics have. Also an increase of 30% or less in GFR is okay for ACE Inhiitors.
- They also make a distinction between to dihydropiridine calcium channel blockers and the non-dihydropyridine calcium channel blockers. I had to look up which ones were in that category since the amount of pharmacology I've retained doesn't go back that far. So it looks like Dihydropyridines include norvasc, nifedipine, and nimodipine. And the non-dihydropyridine ones include verapamil and diltiazem. This is important because the non-dihydropyridenes shouldn't really be combined given the risk of bradycardia and heart block.
- The thiazide diuretic chlorthalidone is good for diabetics with isolated systolic hypertension. The ALLHAT study showed that it did just as well as lisinopril and amlodipine preventing fatal heart disease, nonfatal MI, and total mortality.
- carvediol (coreg) had alpha and beta blocking properties and is the beta blocker that is least likely to worsen insulin sensitivity.

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A high school classmate of mine posted an blog entry called "Winning the War on Cancer". It reference the Journal of the National Cancer Institute which states that for the first time since 1971 (when the war on cancer developed) the rates of cancer is declining. This is attibuted in a large part to less people smoking as lung cancer is the number one killer in the United States. Unfortunatley, there is less sucess in the Midwest and the South with quitting smoking. Also, the article mentions that the next epidemic is going to be from obesity.