Healthspan Blog

If you don’t want kids now, but you’re only pretty sure you don’t want kids in the future, you might be wondering about the posibility of having a Vasectomy Reversal. According to his website, Dr. Schow’s has a 95 percent success rate over his last 500 vasectomy reversals. Success means “restoring more than 1 million motile sperm to the ejaculate.”

I’m not sure if a million sperm is considered good or not (good for having a baby that is). Perhaps one of our readers can comment on that.

Vasectomy reversals are done at MMHC’s National Vasectomy Reversal Center. Dr. Schow performs 4-6 reverse vasectomy surgeries each week at the center.

Dr. Schow, the Vasectomy Reversal Doctor has worked on a Fellowship in Male Infertility and Microsurgical Vasectomy Reversal at the University of Minnesota; on Urological Surgery at the Medical Center Hospital of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont; as Staff Urologist and the director of The Center for Male Infertility and Microsurgery at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas; and at the Southwest Impotency and Infertility Center in Van Buren Arkansas.

Dr. Schow now directs the Minnesota Men’s Health Center and its National Vasectomy Reversal Center. I’m not saying you should make a decision based on this website I’m linking to, but I think you would want to call Dr. Schow to discuss your case.

Question: I woke up this morning an my lower back is all in knots. Ive been trying to stretch it out for hours and nothing is really helping. I need to spend the next 3 days in a computer lab writing papers for finals week and there is no way I can do that with my back in its current state. Anyone know any tips or secrets to loosening the lower back? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1: Healing Back Pain by Dr. John E. Sarno. Get it. Feel better.

Answer 2: The heated patche are great. Soaking in a hot bath - as hot as you can stand it - is even better. Stretching exercises will help. 2 that work well are:

Get on all 4rs and wiggle your hind parts (ok wiggle may be the wrong word) basically rotate your hips left and right. It’s a tad embarrassing in front of others but it is a very good lower back exercise.

The other is to lie on your stomach and do a push-up making sure to keep your pelvis on the floor. It’s a stretch so go slow and don’t overdo it.

Answer 3: A chiropractor or acupuncture might help. If you have no time or money try “lying on a tennis ball” - put a tennis ball under you. and roll around on it. I think the deader the ball, the better. It is a great way to get the knots out. If it’s too much pressure on your back, you can use the tennis ball method against a wall

Answer 4: If you must be active, take some Advil. Per my dentist, who is also an M.D., it is the best OTC pain reliever for muscle pain. Another friend of mine, who has a Ph.D. in Pharmacy, says four Advils are roughly equal to one Vicodin. My wife has seen her down four at once for severe muscle pain, so we know that’s OK.

Any excercise that tightens the stomach and abdominal muscles is likely to help, but this may not be possible if you are really hurting.

I’ve also found that some lower back pain is psychological, often stress induced. Get rid of what’s bothering you and the pain may subside.

Answer 6: As others have mentioned, the Sarno book is good but I think you aren’t looking for reading material at the moment. Stress is one major cause of back pain. As it sounds like exam time, you are probably doing a lot of standing or sitting in one position for a long time to go along with your stress. Heating pads work great to loosen the lower back muscles and increase blood flow.

Also do plenty of stretching but focus on the hamstrings as they contribute alot to back tightness and are much easier to stretch well. The lower back is tough to stretch because of the limited range of motion one has. Good luck with the back pain and the finals.

Answer 7: Finals week stress is the worst. I used to hit the sauna and whirlpool on campus for study breaks - helped a lot. A low back stretch that I do is - lie on back, grab right knee and pull quad towards chest. Repeat left leg. Then touch each knee to the floor across your body, while extending your arm in the opposite direction (carefully). Another description here.

It’s common in Yoga which can also reduce stress and stretch out the back. Don’t take too much advil or stuff like that or your liver will be unhappy. You’re probably damaging your liver enough in college as it is.

I’m sure most have heard about the lawyer with TB who went on his honeymoon to Europe recently. I don’t want to get into the morals of that here - there are some opinions posted on that over here and maybe here - I want to talk about the cost of treating TB:

Speaker’s tuberculosis was discovered when he had a chest X-ray in January for a rib injury, Huitt said.

His care — which could also include surgery — could cost between $250,000 to $350,000, she said.

The air ambulance flight and other costs of transporting him from Atlanta to Denver on Thursday morning totaled another $12,000, said a spokeswoman for Kaiser Permanente, Speaker’s health insurer, which paid the bill.

Keep in mind that the guy is 31 years old. I hope he has good insurance and that no one else got sick from him.

I’ve touched on suing for medical reasons before, so now I plan to talk about mesothelioma lawyers.

Mesothelioma is a very serious form cancer that seems to affect people who have inhaled asbestos particles. The cancer attacks the mesothelium, the protective sac around many internal organs.

Is this another case where companies knew they were exposing people to hazardous conditions but cared more about profit than the safety of their workers? In some cases, yes. That’s where the lawyers come in.

For example one court found auto companies responsible for $25 million in damages because a man who worked on asbestos filled brake lines got mesothelioma.

Before you say that’s too much consider the healthcare costs and the pain caused by treatment of mesothelioma:

Fake has mesothelioma, a disease in which cancer cells form in the lining of the chest or abdomen. It’s nearly always the result of asbestos exposure. Fake, who worked as a boilermaker for 35 years, learned he had the disease on April Fool’s Day 2005, and soon after came the removal of his right lung and its lining, as well as his diaphragm and pericardium, a tissue sac that surrounds the heart. He underwent 30-minute radiation treatments every weekday for two months, leaving him with fourth-degree burns at the radiation site and literally “cooking from the inside out” as the right side of his body blistered, Marilyn Fake said.

Are you going to sit there and say any maount of money is enough to compensate a guy for 4th degree radiation burns? No, if his employers didn’t do everything in their power to keep him safe, they should have to pay. According to one mesothelioma lawyers’ website, finding the right attorney is everything in these cases - I hope Bill Fake finds an attorney that can help him.

If you have any big lumps that your doctor is telling you not to worry about, I recommend a second opinion.

About a year ago I had an infected sweat gland removed from my upper back, near my neck. It was a big, hard lump that I had had for years. In high school I was worried it was cancer but a doctor told me not to worry about it so I didn’t. I wish I had talked to a better doctor…

Eventually (many years later) my wife and I thought it just looked too weird and it had to go.

The surgery was fairly minor - they used local anesthetic, showed me what they took out (it looked like a fleshy ping pong ball), and sent me home.

I had one other infeected sweat gland that no one paid attention to (I knew it was there) because it was on my lower back just below the waist line. Somehow I managed to pop this one. It turned red and became painful.

The doctor who removed my first one saw it and said I’d better come in for surgery right away. 2 days later I had gotten my EKGs, bloodwork, urine tests, etc. done to make sure I could handle my first ever general anesthesia. Because this one was popped and deep and whatever they were going to knock me out.

I spent a couple days in the hospital recovering. They couldn’t stitch up the wound completely because of the infection so I have a little tube sticking out of the wound to drain all the bad stuff. It’s very hard to get comfortable (not surprising when there’s a hole in my back) and I have trouble sitting and sleeping. I can’t bend my back.

Anyway, if you have an infected sweat gland or two (or just a couple of round bumps that could be anything) see about getting them taken care of before they cause you extra trouble. Now that doesn’t mean go get surgery. My father in law has had one of these bumps for 50 years or so and if it never bothers hims than not getting surgery was obviously smart.

I’m just saying find a doctor who can tell you what it is and the advantages and disadvantages of getting it removed. Because if knew then what I know now I would have gotten both of mine removed last year - thus avoiding the second, more serious surgery with its longer (I can’t work out for 2 weeks) recovery time.

I don’t want to sacrifice too much protein to get a bar that tastes great, but I don’t want to be eating something that tastes like concrete mix. I don’t want too much sugar in my protein bar either. It’s the amount of sugar in the bar that you have to look out for.

1) Cliff’s Builders Bar has 19 Grams of protein. Not entirely healthful, there is a fair amount of saturated fat. The proteing source is mainly soy. Taste good, and come in four different types. An acquaintance of mine is going through chemotherepy for cancer treatment, and still trying to work out. Refered him to this Cliff’s Builders Bar and it’s about the only one that he finds palatable enough to keep down. It’s like 25% of RDA of saturated fat or some such. So if you only eat one or two you’re OK. If you ate like six or seven it’s probably not a good thing.

2) Detour Bars by Designer Whey are pretty good, and I always like a Balance Bar when I am in a pinch for a quick snack. Today I just tried one of those 42 Gram Protein Shots that are out now - Great boost of Protein to spike a meal if you’re trying to intake at least a gram per pound of bodyweight but the taste leaves alot to be desired. Anyway, Detour bars are pretty good and they make low sugar ones that taste ok. The peanut caramel tastes like a snickers. Detour bars were rated best protein bar like 5 years in a row, very high quality protein and very healthy. Instead of sugar they use sugar alcohol.. keeps it tasting good but healthy because ur body doesn’t digest sugar alcohol.

3) DeFranco Energy Bar was created by DeFranco who trains NFL athletes.

4) Nitro Tech is my favorite.

5) Out of the 10+ brands I tried Universal Hi-Protein Fudge Brownie bars are the best, bar none. Taste delicious, they’re soft enough to where you won’t struggle to chew them, and they pack 33g of protein (300 cals) in one bar. They also have the best deal price-wise, as $22-26 dollars (depending on the site and how hard you want to Froogle) gets you 16 bars, as opposed to 12. The brownie is damn good for a protein bar, though. I would think the peanut butter is on the same level (never tried it), just comes down to if you like peanut butter and chocolate or straight up chocolate more.

Other bars off the top of my head that I tried (Protein Grams):
Universal Animal Snak (32g) - it’s a got a great peanut butter taste, and the bar is soft so its easy to eat, but the bars are absolutely loaded with sugar
Met-Rx Protein Plus Peanut Butter (32g) - decent taste but really hard to chew the damn things
Met-Rx Protein Plus Chocolate Chunk (32g) - see above; decent taste but hard as a rock, making it an annoyance to eat
Detour (30g) - these bars are dry as hell and require at least one full bottle of water to finish
Pure Protein Brownie, Smores (32g) - Brownie was dry, Smores was atrocious
Met-Rx Colossal 100 (35-40g) - Tried the cookie dough bar , tasted like unsweetened cookie dough. These things are meal replacements, however, and contain a ton of carbs, fats and calores

6) The U-Turn is also very good - sister product to the Detour bar is the U-Turn, which is more like a Three Musketeers bar. I preferred that to the Detour.

7) Pure Protein blueberry and strawberry shortcake bars are really good. I must be the only one who hates those Detour bars I really didn’t like them. They tried to be a Snickers, but something is really off to the point where I can’t eat them at all anymore. I know the general consensus seems to favor them though.

Concrete mix: I tried some protein bars but agree they taste like gunk. I just get some whey scoops in a drink easier, tastes better. But for energy, Oatmeal Raisin Power Bars (any supermaket) are awesome. Bout 40 Carbs, 10 g protein, loads of B vitamins.

I recently heard from a consultant to the pharmaceutical industry whose wife is a physician. This is what he has to say about healthcare in the US:

The healthcare system is broken. The people with good insurance think it’s just fine - who cares about the people who can’t afford it, the people out of work, those with a catastrophic illness that outstrips their insurance, etc. This is too big a topic to cover in a few paragraphs, but every citizen should have as much a right ti healthcare as they do to military defense, roads, education, a police force, etc. People shouldn’t die or become disable because they don’t belong to the privileged class. Nobody thinks the government will make it more efficient, that’s not the issue, the issue is the right to be able to continue with life and limb no matter what your income status.

The opposing point of view would go something like this:

A “right” to healthcare? Hospitals are already forbidden to deny lifesaving care to indigent patients. What you’re saying is that the people who made education and employment decisions that resulted in their getting healthcare are obligated to pay for quality care for those who did not.

There’s actually not much debate on that point but there is still plenty of debate on what the real point is:

You’re right about the “indigent” population, in fact I can testify that many of them actually abuse the system. What I am talking about are cases I personally know of involving college educated people, out of a job, and unable to get care or medication for chronic conditions such as lupus, because although an emergency room will take care of them when they reach an acute or critical stage, they will still get a bill for thousands of dollars and be in debt for so long that it doesn’t pay them to ever get a job. So they risk their health and well being until they have no choice and wind up in an ambulance. This is a bunch of garbage spouted by people who are well insured.

One thing I haven’t gotten into much is the legal side of healthcare. For example, where would you go if you suffered from Nephrogenic Systemic Fibrosis possibly caused by gadolinium dyes (used in MRI scans). Obviously you’d go get treatment, but you’d also want to explore your legal rights.

Many people say that America is becoming too litigious, and we shouldn’t try to sue someone every time something goes wrong but we need some way to punish corporations (and doctors and hospitals) for ignoring our health in their pursuit of profit.

Everyone quotes that famous McDonalds burn victim lawsuit as evidence that America is too lawsuit crazy but McDonalds needed to be punished. They kept their coffee close to boiling to keep it fresh longer. They had done studies examining the costs of paying for lawsuits because they knew their coffeee would injure people and generate lawsuits. They were evil and didn’t care - it was cheaper to pay for a few lawsuits then to brew fresh coffee more often.

So if someone screws up your health, don’t be afraid to sue. Talk to a lawyer and see if the case has merit.

Actually, I’ve pretty much made up my mind to get LASIK at some point. The question for me is when. I think about waiting because I figure the surgery is becoming less risky as it evolves. For example I have a friend who did it recently and she is very happy with the results. I also have a colleague who did it several years ago and she sees a glare at nide. She calls it a side effect. Obviously I don’t know what she sees but it sounds pretty irritating.

The site I linked to above has a lot of Lasik information. This FDA site also has good information and warns that you need to be extra careful if you’re had a correction in your prescription within 12 months. Tha means I have “refractive instability and should discuss the possible additional risks with (my) doctor.”

Hmmm. I guess I need to keep thinking about it. But at least I have time since you’re never too old for Lasik according to at elast one study.

Another thing to consider is cost. I know that a book called Patients Beyond Borders talks about getting Lasik abroad and saving money that way. My friend who had it recently had it done in South Korea…