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Blood, What's in it?


Anemia & Iron

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Electrolytes

Y'all Water Tread Lytely or Urine Trouble I think most people kinda understand how your body works with water and salt, but not always enough to make the right choice as to what the body really needs. Your body has a complex way of controlling the concentration of things in your bloodstream.  As concentration is based both on how much of the solute (in this case lets called it sodium or salt) and solvent (water) you have mixed together, there's a lot of ways to mess around with the concentration. You've probably seen some reports of runners who end up very sick from drinking too much water - what happens for them is they lose a lot of salt and water through sweating but if they only drink water to replace it, they end up with a comparatively larger amount of water than salt in their bloodstream and so their sodium concentration can drop to dangerous levels.  The same sort of thing can happen when you get very sick and are only hydrating with water and not salts (like...
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GERD/Heartburn/Acid Reflux

Let's talk a little about heartburn because it is amazingly common. So what's the problem?  Think of your stomach as being like a soda bottle, which would make your stomach acid the soda (which actually has about the same level of acidity).  That bottle is well designed to deal with the soda in it swishing and swashing the same way your stomach lining has evolved to be very thick so it can handle all the acid. Occasionally, or frequently, you open the bottle and drop something in so it can start dissolving and moving in to your small intestine.  That bottle cap is called the lower esophageal sphincter (LES) and it is an involuntary muscle (so you can't control it) that relaxes and contracts to allow food to come in.  But it also is there to keep stomach acid from splashing up into the esophagus BECAUSE the esophagus does not have the same kind of thick walls the stomach does so it is easily damaged. There are a number of ways that the LES can be interfered w...
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Pain

Sorry to be a pain I would say about 90% of the comments I hear from people about their pain threshold is that they think they have a high pain tolerance.  Which is statistically impossible unless I just attract people who have a high pain tolerance. We traditionally ask people to rate their pain on a 1-10/10 scale and while we hear a lot of 9's and 10's, I would say that, having been present for a number of them, a 10/10 would be giving birth to a first child.  For those who haven't experienced that, my old psychiatry resident described it as "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you would not be in any more pain than you are now" (he was also a former Marine sniper which might explain that). But this is pretty pervasive throughout the medical system and got me wondering as to how people's understanding of what their pain threshold was matched up to what it really was.  Fortunately, there were researchers who had a yen to poke peopl...
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