Vaping / eCigarettes

Escaping Vaping

When I was in 7th grade, we went on a school camping trip out to Mr. Seay's ranch in North Texas for a few days. While we learned a lot of important survival tips (the importance of a trowel, the ability to change the direction of smoke from a fire by shouting "I hate white rabbits", etc.), I'd say the biggest learning point came when Coach Sullivan (Yes, the same Coach Sullivan who was saying "That's what she said" years before it became popular) came back to the campsite to find all the cool kids sitting around the fire smoking a stick they'd found. Not drugs, just a large stick, and no I don't know how they picked it out.

As you probably guessed, I'm where I am now because I was not in the cool kid group and was excused to go wander the woods with the other nerds, but I could still hear him lambasting those guys in very colorful language about trying to figure out what kind of &*$* idiot puts an unknown substance into their lungs. There wasn't any more of that nonsense.

Well here we are a good chunk of years later and now everybody is talking about vaping or e-cigarettes. When asked the last few years, I've told people that we don't know much about the long term effects of it, especially as it's relatively unregulated and so nobody really knows what's making it in to the lungs or what the effects are.

If you haven't heard yet, there's been a rash of vaping-related lung injury reported lately and it does not look good as nobody knows exactly what the cause is yet specifically in the vaping product. It sounds like it's mostly been linked to use with cannabis products but also some cases with nicotine.

So while I used to just say caveat emptor, I'm now leaning more to say people should get off of them because while some studies have shown they can help with quitting smoking, maybe, they're also expensive and may be causing major lung damage. While that's only in a small number of cases, why take the risk?

Multivitamins

If you can get the lid off, you probably don't need them When I ask people if they are taking any vitamins, herbs or supplements, many people will say they are taking a multivitamin. When I ask them why they take it, I get a quizzical look most of the time. I think this is something that resonates from childhood and parental advice of the idea that we need vitamins to help our body develop. I'm not pediatrician so I can't speak to the effects on the developing child, but I will say that most non-pregnant adults without major medical conditions do not need extra vitamins. You'll be impressed by these labels promising 120%, 300%, 1200% of your daily dose of vitamin whatever it is, but the truth is that for most of these vitamins, if you take more than your daily dose your body needs, the rest just ends up in your urine. You are literally peeing money away in this case. There's been a new trendy vitamin every decade or so for the last 40-50 years; First it...

Kidney Stones

I've written about this previously , but it's often hard to explain to people what a 10 is on the "1-10" pain scale if they haven't been in that spot before. For women who have had children, they generally know what a 10 is, but for men it's a little harder. When I was a medical student on my psychiatry rotation, we had a patient calmly sitting there saying his pain level was at a 10 and our resident, who was an ex-military sniper with a large skull tattoo on his forearm and a crosshair through the eye, calmly leaned forward and asked, "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you could not be in more pain than you are now, correct?" The patient changed his answer. Getting to the point, a kidney stone is about the close I can come to describing a 10/10 pain to people who haven't gone through childbirth. The fundamental issue is similar - your body is trying to move a big solid thing through an opening that was not really desig...

NSAIDs

Advil and Motrin are ibuprofen, then you have Aleve (naproxen). Those are the over-the-counter ones. Prescriptions are Mobic (meloxicam), nabumetone, indomethacin, Toradol (ketorolac), diclofenac, Lodine, and the list goes on. All of these medications are in a class called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). I'm giving you this list because there is mounting evidence that these medications a) don't work as well as we'd thought and b) have some very serious long term side effects we're finding out more about. NSAID's act by reducing the amount of prostaglandins you make in order to reduce inflammation. However, prostaglandins have a ton of other effects and are involved in the maintenance of just about AIDs and also stronger if they are taken every day and/or around-the-clock. every other organ system that you have. The effect is stronger with higher doses of NS NSAID's work best and are best indicated for times when something is r...

Hey Doctor Scott ...

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