Jim Grisanzio

If you are over 50 get out and get your statins! It doesn’t matter whether you have high cholesterol or not or whether you are healthy or sick. Just get your drugs. The side effects aren’t so bad. What’s a little hemorrhagic stroke, muscle pain, liver and kidney complications, diabetes, and memory loss. It’s worth it. One of the researches behind this latest push to dump drugs down our collective throats is Colin Baigent, who sounds like one scary character. I think I’ll ignore absolutely everything he says, thank you very much. Now, there are some critics out there but the response is tepid at best and history shows that it probably won’t matter much. The drug pushers generally get their way eventually. And nothing on diet, exercise, stress reduction, or lifestyle changes? Imagine that.

I’ve not had any coffee in so long I can’t even remember. Almost a year now? Cut it cold one day way back. Just decided I didn’t need the five or six cups of crap in my body each day. I feel so much better for that one decision. I replaced coffee with about ten different types of tea, mostly green and red tea but a little black tea and lots of Japanese and Chinese herbal teas. Can’t imagine I’ll ever dump coffee in my stomach again. Just the smell of the stuff makes makes me sick.

I hope I’m flexible enough to eat my lunch in comfort on the concrete pavement in a few years.

Do you follow the authorities or their enemies?

I was in Beijing last week and was happy to find the hotel serving wheatgrass juice. Shocked, actually. I’ve never stayed at a hotel that had a ready supply of wheatgrass juice. So, I drank lots of grass. The juice was clearly cut with water since it was a bit weak, but it was better than nothing. No need to cut wheatgrass juice, though. Drink it full strength. And, yes, I know the grass below is rice. Close enough.

Live long enough and you accumulate a few close calls. That’s life. I’ve certainly had more than a few of my own over the years. Tonight was my latest. One foot to the right and I’d be dead. Or at least seriously injured. At best, really pissed off.

I was walking home from the pool. I had a great swim. And it was a nice, quiet, cold night. I was on the sidewalk and had plenty of space around me. Just as I was about to start jogging I heard a car coming fast on my right. The next moment I heard a crash as the car jumped the curb. I turned in reaction to the sound and the car was right there. Just a foot away. Going fast. I quickly jumped to the left and hoped I could move fast enough. A moment later the car slammed into a tree right in front of me. The entire thing took seconds.

The elderly women driving survived but she was in a great deal of pain. She was taken away on a backboard. The car just sat there. Totaled. Smoldering. After the police and fire truck left I started walking home. The only thing I could think of was that I almost died. This could have been my day. Had she hit me she would have thrown me into a concrete wall. Or perhaps run over me entirely. Or crush me between the car and the tree. Not a good way to go. Can’t get it out of my mind. Your life can be gone in a moment …

Ron Paul is the only U.S. presidential candidate talking about alternatives in health care. Shouldn’t people have some say about the treatments to which they are subjected? Seems reasonable.

Don’t eat refined sugar. It’s poison. Instead, drink it raw right out of the cane.

Why do people in cities rush all the time? Train stations in Tokyo are utterly frantic places. It’s difficult to walk slowly and mindfully among the cortisol-soaked masses buzzing by in every direction. But why? Out in the country among the trees no one worries about saving two minutes – literally — by diving on to that express train. Why the hurry? Are we that inefficient that we can’t take it easy getting from place to place?

It took 14 years to grow a new breed of broccoli with much more nutrition than the old broccoli. I eat a lot of broccoli and love it, so I’d like to give the new super green a try. The more nutrients the better, especially since so much of our food is altered and sprayed and processed and denatured and over cooked. The article also notes that the British researches did not use GMO techniques to create the new broccoli, which is good because I certainly wouldn’t want it otherwise.

It is well known that hospitals are filthy places. And since 100,000 people die every year in the U.S. from hospital infections you would think that the issue would be top of mind in the medical community, right? How about a little ozone and hydrogen peroxide to clean things up? Seems so simple. One wonders how medical facilities became so dirty in the first place.

An Electronic Eye on Hospital Hand-Washing. Cameras catching the dirty doctors in hospitals. I love it. Psst: Doctors, wash your damn hands! Far too many people die due to extremely serious hospital infections and you are directly to blame. Hospital administrators running hospitals like sewers are also to blame. And anyone else touching sick patients and then casually touching others — without even thinking about properly washing your hands. I know, I know. You’re busy. And you’re the Gods of American society so who are we to judge, right? But this is actually not difficult to understand. I’m glad the cameras appear to be working, but I’d much rather some aggressive district attorneys dump some docs in jail for this crime. That would help change behavior, eh?

Think you’ll be climbing trees eight hours a day to pick fruit when you’re 90? Or perhaps running in the local races on the weekend well into your 80s? It’s not too late. Better clean up your act or you won’t last. The Okinawans seem to know what they’re doing with all this. They’re a real kick. Farming at 100. Never spending time in a hospital. No drugs. How is that possible? They say their secret is simple: good food, good air, good people, good exercise. That’s pretty much it, really. It’s lifestyle. It’s no secret. And there’s no cash involved since the Island is the poorest prefecture in all of Japan. Their life is not based on sitting at a desk in New York or London or Tokyo for 40 years poking at a freaking computer and thinking they have a career. Career. Such a lie. Instead, they live life actively. They get the basics right. But it’s a shame their younger generations are following the example of the Americans, who obviously have massive influence on portions of the island due to the military. The result? Fat. Stress. Disease. Death. It’s really that simple. Oh, well. We all have to learn our lessons ourselves, right? I’ll visit soon and hang out with the old people. They seem far more interesting. Feeling nice and young are you?

I read The Checklist Manifesto a few days ago. It only took one sitting. Great book. Every project manager should read this book. Follow a checklist to implement your tasks and you have a reasonable chance at success. Skip the list and you will screw up — no matter how smart you think you are, no matter how much training you’ve had, no matter how easy your task appears to be. That’s the core message of the book — absolutely everyone messes up the things they think they’ve mastered. Even if these mistakes are small they add up to big consequences. And if you happen to work in a field where lives are at risk — construction, aviation, medicine — then people will die because of your mistakes. The science on this is persuasive to say the least, and Atul Gawande documents everything in great detail in a series of extremely interesting stories.

There is a disturbing part of the book, though. It’s the realization that the medical industry is really quite backward and immature in some critical ways. We think of medicine — especially technology-based emergency medicine in the United States — as the most advanced field on the planet. So many people are saved from life-threatening situation and we see this on our television screens every day. Yet the medical community also kills thousands of people due to totally preventable errors. Why? Arrogance.

To drag medicine out of the dark ages and help improve the safety and efficacy of medical procedures, Gawande looks outside his paradigm and explores the construction and aviation industries. Both aviation and construction realized long ago they needed to grow out of their go-it-alone individualism, that the level of complexity simply surpassed the capacity of any one individual to know and implement all parts of a process. Thus, they took more of a team approach, more of a systems approach, more of an approach based on checking lists. Medicine, however, still struggles with this concept in far too many areas. And to be honest, I find that unacceptable. Unfortunately, the era of the doctor as the all-knowing God dictating reality to everyone else is still very much alive and that’s pervasive throughout Gawande’s book. “I don’t have time for a damn checklist, get out of my operating room,” a surgeon would say. Right. Yet when other docs implement Gawande’s checklist lives are saved. So much for the so-called Gods. Get a clue, guys. You’re human. And you’re directly responsible for saving people. And killing them. Which would you prefer?

So, make a list. Use it. Test it. Repeat. Don’t be afraid to be different. That’s the only way things change.