Coffee heat rising

Health care, Woo-Woo, and the Spread of Superstition

Did you read where whooping cough has been declared epidemic in California? It’s an entirely preventable disease that kills little children. There’s an easy way to keep your kids from getting miserably sick or even dying from this disease: vaccinate them.

Sadly, Americans have for some years been resisting calls to immunize their kids against diseases that were once common scourges. Somehow folks have absorbed the idea that immunization is dangerous to kids, and that magically nothing bad will happen to children if they are not vaccinated. Despite solid scientific evidence to the contrary, some parents persist in imagining that childhood vaccines cause autism. Despite the indisputable fact that because of vaccination we no longer need to fear smallpox and polio, or typhus, tetanus, typhoid, cholera, diphtheria—horrible diseases that devastated populations—people have allowed unfounded theories to frighten them to the point of putting their children at serious risk.

Vaccines do not kill children. Whooping cough kills children. While it is true that the older version of whooping cough vaccine had some side effects, occasionally severe ones, the “acellular” type now in use does not bear much risk; in either event, the disease itself has always posed a greater threat to children than has vaccination.

Vaccines do not cause autism. No one knows for certain what causes autism, but it pretty clearly has something to do with genetics; removing thimerosal, the vaccine preservative alleged to have caused a purported rise in cases, has done nothing to reduce the rate of autism diagnoses. One thing you can be sure of, though: viral and bacterial diseases do cause death, long-term physical harm, and mental disability.

Why have Americans become so superstitious? Where do people get ideas so misguided that they are led to put their children at risk, in a country where universal education is required? Shouldn’t an educated populace be wiser and more aware of the facts?

Snake-oil-poster

One reason is that we are being blitzed with propaganda for so-called “alternative medicine,” an approach that, more often than not, amounts to snake oil. A friend of mine, hearing of the continuing pain from my three-month-old shoulder injury, gave me a large bottle of pills that, while legally required to be called a “nutritional supplement,” were sold to her as an anti-inflammatory. She remarked, in handing the stuff over to me, that although her friends had assured her it’s highly effective, it hadn’t done anything for her.

This product costs around $100 for a bottle of 800 pills. One is supposed to take six tablets a day—that’s considered a “maintenance” dose.

When I looked up the product on the Web, not one skeptical word about it appeared in page after page of Google results. High on the lists of results were blissful songs of praise to the stuff. We learn, to our mounting joy, that the product is a cure-all. Not only does it ease your aches and pains, it reduces the occurrence of injury among athletes; lowers blood pressure; lowers cholesterol; prevents strokes and heart attacks; treats pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, multiple sclerosis, and hepatitis; eases the pain of rheumatoid arthritis; supports your joints (whatever that means); and aids digestion.

A miracle.

The research supporting these claims? Minimal to none. The buzz about the stuff is emanating from purveyors of vitamins and dietary supplements, the product’s manufacturer and distributors, naturopaths, and various other “holistic” practitioners.
Try to find solid clinical studies of this product, and you come up blank. Some “research” is quoted here and there, but when you examine the sources, you quickly see it’s bogus. The NIH and FDA have done nothing, as far as I can tell, to look into the product, whose sales in Germany are second only to aspirin. Adding tags like .edu to a Google search does nothing to bring up anything resembling actual science.

Adding “scam” and “snake oil” to the product’s brand name will bring up a few reports showing that the stuff does nothing for MS—but even with that search string, the results are full of sales pitches and ecstatic testimonials.

That notwithstanding, when the pain flared up a few days ago, I tried the pills. True to standard snake-oil claims, the product was said to cause few or no side effects, although its manufacturer notes it can cause an upset stomach and diarrhea.

Well, yes. It made me good and sick to my stomach but did nothing for the pain.

Lordie. We need to get out of Woo-Woo Land, both politically and intellectually. Part of the reason so many people subscribe to Woo-Woo is that our healthcare system is so poor. In quality of healthcare, the U.S. ranks at the bottom among developed nations. If you can’t get access to a doctor, you can’t get enough of her time to get diagnosed and treated effectively, or you can’t afford the treatment, you naturally seek alternatives. Unfortunately, many or most of these alternatives are unproven, ineffective, and sometimes downright unsafe.

Equally unfortunate, the products are aggressively marketed by profit-seeking entities (imagine the worth of a product that can sell like aspirin!) and touted by practitioners who may  sincerely, if naively, buy into the hype. They’re making a great deal of money from alternative products and treatments. And when you try to look into the facts, you’re run around in circles—probably because there are no facts, only unsubstantiated claims and anecdotal stories, all of them coming from folks who have already bought into the propaganda.

The fact that people don’t recognize when they’re looking at “research” whose sources have an ax to grind speaks to another cause of the widespread taste for credulity: the lack of real, solid science education in our school systems. People don’t understand what the scientific method is and why it is a more valid way of seeking verifiable facts than are anecdote and unsubstantiated theory because they don’t learn science in the public schools. To the contrary, the forces of superstition work against the teaching of real science—textbook publishing is dominated by parties who think science is a faith-based system of beliefs, no different in that respect from their own religion, which they believe should take precedence in educating everyone’s children.

The predictable result of weak science education is…well, exactly what we have. Ignorance leading to epidemics of preventable diseases that kill children, and a population of gullible consumers prone to wasting their money on highly profitable, untested nostrums.

Endless Costs of Homeownership: Palm Trees

Palm-tree-trimmer

Well, it’s past time to have the hideous Mexican fan palms cut back. In the late spring and early summer, these towering poles sprout long, husky rods packed with billions of brittle, sharp, pointy little flowers. These they shed all over the ground and into your pool, along with vast quantities of hard, BB-sized seeds designed to break pool equipment.

Every year, anyone who has a palm tree has to get the thing cut back. Otherwise the mess becomes intolerable. And they harbor insects. Right now they’re feeding the birds with legions of flesh-pink caterpillars. Cockroaches also love palm trees.

Some wise prior homeowner took it upon himself to plant four Mexican fans plus a desperately thirsty queen palm right next to the pool. Most guys charge $45 a tree to do the nasty, dangerous job of trimming them (every year at least one man is killed trying to do this job). That would be $225 that I don’t have.

Palm-tree-debris

Gerardo put up one of his pals to do the job. They not only cut back the four Mexican fan palms (I decided to leave the queen, because I can’t afford to trim all five trees), they also did some degree of “skinning”: cutting off the frond stumps often left on the trunk. When they’re left on there, they drop off in every high wind, and so all summer and half the winter the homeowner gets to pick them up out of the yard and off the street. They only charged $165. Couldn’t afford that, either, but it’s a lot better than two and a quarter.

It is incredible that the men will work that hard for so little pay. It takes several men to do the job: not only the athletic, tough fellow who climbs up the tree and hacks back the heavy, thorned fronds, but a man to spot him on the ground and another to pick up and haul the debris falling out of the tree.

The palm tree is one of the messiest, nastiest plants anyone could possibly be misguided enough to introduce into a yard. Mexican fan palms are particularly egregious, because they make neither shade nor edible fruit. It’s a critter that Easterners and Midwesterners think is quaint and exotic, so when they move here, they stupidly stick the things in the ground. Only after a few years do they realize what a monster they’ve adopted. An expensive, messy monster.

My neighbor Terri was grousing about having to get hers done, too. Like everyone, she’s feeling broke, and the annual cost of palm-tree grooming strikes her as onerous. Every year, the natives inveigh against palm trees, and every year, those of us who’ve inherited them with a piece of real estate consider chopping the darn things down. Terri remarked that she thought it would cost too much to have hers taken out. She did pay a lot to get rid of the rickety eucalyptus, which was threatening to cave in her roof.

I don’t know what it would take to remove a palm. For me, the problem is there’s only a few feet of room between the pool and the block wall along the lot line, which is where my trees reside. If they’re taken out, what on earth could take their place? A shade tree would need a lot more space—crammed into that tiny strip, it would quickly heave the wall and probably would break through the pool, too. It’s hard to picture what could tolerate the heat and cramped space, and without the palm trees, the pool area would look mighty bare.

Houses are sure expensive to own. Mine has been quiescent for awhile—just a couple of minor plumbing bills over the past year. But still, there are the regular costs of ordinary maintenance: trim the trees; cut back the palms; drain and replace the stale, mineral-thick pool water; get the yard guy in here to beat back the weeds every couple of months; touch up the paint; maintain the central heating & cooling unit; maintain the pool filter and pump.

As usual, the fronds dropped into the pool. As usual, the palm tree guys broke one of my aluminum pool wands fishing heavy, ungainly fronds out of the drink. And as usual, they left an ungodly mess in the water.

Gerardo helped me clean out the pool—he ran the hose bonnet and got out all the pieces of junk that would choke the pool cleaner. And then some: he really went above and beyond the call of duty, retrieving almost all the small stuff that settled to the bottom. Offered to pay him, but he wouldn’t take a dime.

So now the pool is cleaned out, Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner has swept up the last of the litter, and the water has been hyperchlorinated, turning the thing into a puddle of Clorox. The stains from the seeds, dust, pollen, and flowers that sifted into the deep end have bleached away. And maybe by this evening or tomorrow I’ll be able to go swimming again.

The pool is cleaned out. So is my wallet.

Update: Vacuum cleaner adventures

You may recall that not so long ago I was agonizing over whether to buy a little Shark upright bagless vacuum cleaner, shortly after having bought a Eureka model that I grew to loathe more with each use. Well, I finally capitulated and bought the thing at Costco, where I paid about $20 more than Amazon is now charging (at the time of the purchase, Costco was underpricing Amazon).

Mwa ha! Click for link to Amazon!

This is a terrific gadget! I love this machine!!! Best vacuum cleaner I’ve ever owned, and by golly, when you’re a survivor of the Pleistocene you can remember dragging a leaden Electrolux on sled runners around the house. You can, that is to say, remember owning a lot of vacuum cleaners.

What I like about it:

It’s wonderfully lightweight. Easy to push around and easy to maneuver.

The brush head thingie on the bottom is narrow enough to get between the bathtub and the toilet and to weasel in between furniture legs.

The suction defies belief! This thing is astonishing. And when you run it along the baseboard, it picks up bits of debris and dog hair all the way right up to the wall. The hose is as effective as the floor vacuum part. If it gets ahold of your leg or your hand, it gloms on like a lamprey eel. Check out how much dog hair it sucked up in just one vacuuming adventure:

Dog-hair-in-vacuum
Cleaned this out before starting to vacuum!

And Cassie isn’t even shedding much—there were no major dog dunes on the floor when this housecleaning episode started.

It does not blow dog hair up into the air as you’re moving around the tiled floor. A miracle!

It has a generously long attachment hose to begin with, and it comes with an extra length of hose.

Its attachments are sturdy and intelligently designed. The crevice tool is very long and slender, letting you get deep into narrow spots.

It has a good long cord.

It runs pretty quietly, especially in the “bare floors” mode.

Possible drawbacks:

I thought I’d prefer a model that uses bags, having emptied the dirt out of altogether too many old-fashioned vacuum cleaners. The Shark, however, is easy to open and clean out, and so far I haven’t ended up with the dirt all over me instead of inside the trash can.

The cylindrical canister that houses the dustbin and motor is bulky, obviating rolling the vacuum under the bed or other furniture.

It doesn’t have a lot of space for onboard attachments. IMHO, that’s a good thing: I’ve always hated having to haul all that junk around the house willy-nilly.

On reflection, I realized I seem to have accumulated quite a few Shark gadgets. When my ancient Rowenta warhorse iron finally wore out, I bought a cheapo Sunbeam, which worked fine but got way too hot around the grip. After burning my fingers on the thing, I picked up a Shark steam iron. The price assuredly was nothing like what a Rowenta costs, and yet it works just about as well. The stainless-steel is good and tough—so far it hasn’t scratched up at all—and you get a lot of control over the amount of steam emitted and the heat levels. I would call it very comparable to the Rowenta at a far more reasonable cost.

Then there’s the Shark floor steamer that I finally found to replace the beloved old Bissell steamer, a gadget that could not be beat—never has been, never will be. Shark’s steam mop comes pretty close, though. If you have a lot of tile flooring, this is the contraption to own. With no stinky, toxic chemicals, it steams the dirt and grease right up. You end up with your floors clean, with no eau de dirty mop perfume in the air after you’ve finished the job.

Its only drawback is that the pad that comes with is almost useless. It’s too thick, and it doesn’t stay attached. And they only give you one. I’ve solved that problem, however, with those microfiber rags you can buy in the automotive department at Costco and, presumably, at auto parts stores like Checker and Auto Zone. I just clip one on neatly, using a couple of clothes pins. These things are highly washable, and because you can buy a great stack of them, you can switch them out as you move from room to room (my entire house is tiled), giving yourself a clean mop head at all times.

I was mildly surprised when I realized my house had been invaded by a school of sharks. Since I’m kind of picky about the gadgetry I use for cleaning, it must mean the Shark products are OK. Maybe even a little better than OK.

🙂

Happy Hoarder’s Handyman Hint! Frugal Junk Use

Make that “handyperson hint.” 😉 For the first time in recorded history, a piece of the junk that’s hoarded in the garage actually came in handy! It just became part of a hand-crafted fancy-Dan paper towel holder. A frugal fancy-Dan paper towel holder: today’s out-of-pocket was nothing.

Trying to find places to stash the Lifetime Supply of Costco Paper Towels, I had one roll left over and realized the hated plastic paper-towel holder over the washer area, installed and abandoned by Satan and Proserpine, was empty. Problem is, like all cheapie grocery-store plastic paper-towel holders, the thing won’t hold a roll of paper towels, especially if you have the temerity to try to tear a towel off the roll. Every time a roll of paper towels falls off, it tumbles into the utility sink below, which is often full of water. That’s why the thing has been empty for a long time.

OldPaperTowelHolder
True Junk

Out of the blue, a lightning bolt of inspiration: if a person had a pair of those wooden curtain rod hangers, the kind that come with 1970s- and 80s-style wooden dowel curtain rods, said person could attach them to the wall, cut a piece of curtain-rod doweling to fit, scoot it through the towels’ cardboard tube, and…well. You get the idea. Not to say voilà!

Interestingly, I happened to have a pair of pretty ugly wooden curtain rod holders, stashed inside a dusty shoebox under a hoard of old wooden curtain rings that somehow just never quite worked out.

Not only that, but an old wood-dowel curtain rod, part of the didn’t-work-out project, was collecting dust atop the garage cabinets. And I also happened to have a saw…

DustyCurtainRod

The holes that Satan drilled and countersank in the drywall were not far enough apart to accommodate a paper-towel roll between the inch-wide curtain rod holders. But there’s a lot of electric and plumbing where the plastic thing is hanging. So I decided to use the screw hole he’d put on the right side, which really is dangerously close to the pipes that go to the sink, and then drill new holes on the left, where I think (hope) there are fewer obstructions.

Attached the wooden hanger things to the wall, leaving plenty of room to hang the roll of paper towels.

Sawed off 20 inches of the doweling (could’ve made it shorter but am not going to do it over again right this minute). Drilled a hole in the center of the newly cut-off end. Removed the finial from rod’s long remainder and screwed it into the new hole. And…

WoodenPaperTowelRod

It works! The paper towel roll fits, exactly as promised, over the dowel. To reload, all you have to do is unscrew one of the finials, take off the empty cardboard tube, slide a new roll onto the dowel, and reattach the finial. Not bad for a garage, eh?

FinishedPaperTowelRod

Don’t ask about the wiring draped over the washer faucets! It’s better than the Romex Satan had draped back and forth across the garage door opener chain!

This was strictly a spur-of-the-moment job. If I were going to make a paper towel holder for the kitchen, I’d set the curtain-rod hangers closer together, so they’d just clear a standard roll. And then I’d cut the rod so that it would fit more snugly.

Sometimes I’ve wished I had a paper towel holder in the bathroom. It occurs to me that you could replace the metal hardware-store towel rods with lash-ups like this for your bath towels, and then add a matching paper towel holder. Depending on your decor, of course. And your ambition.

Yakezie Roundup

So, what are those Yakezie folks up to? Thought I’d take a little stroll through that country, and here’s what I came upon:

A lot of stuff is going on over at My Journey to Millions. Evan and Mrs. E are expecting(!), which inspires some existential thinking about wealth, spending, and one’s tastes and character. He also  has an interesting post on defining the client relationship in your side job—or, we might add, in any profession where what you’re selling to a client is essentially your time.

Consumer Boomer has an article of interest to everyone, even those who aren’t yet in the pre-retirement set: Boosting Your Mutual Fund Performance.

With a whole lot of tap-dancing, Little House in the Valley and her DH managed to knock $63 off the monthly recurring bills. w00t!

Over at Out of Debt Again, the incredibly green-thumbed Mrs. Accountability has posted another of her mouth-watering photos of her garden produce. You have to live through a string of 110-degree days to realize what an accomplishment this is. My tomatoes are invariably fried by this time of year. Mrs. A has also begun a series on using Quicken, which starts off with an introduction to the program’s sophisticated ability to download transactions from a bank account.

Frugal Zeitgeist has got a good conversation going with readers over the question of whether we should care where a given consumer product comes from. An expat living in Egypt, FZ has been contemplating cheap places to live, most recently 2010’s cheapest countries.

BTW, Frugal Z— Any way you could shuck the program that sends commenters an e-mail asking them to accept “information” from your mailing list? It’s frustrating to take time to write a comment and then get a “request for information from the [the blogger’s] mailing list,” which apparently will automatically create a subscription.

Miss Thrifty, a lively Brit, has a highly entertaining piece titled “A Week in the Life of Austerity Britain.” Things are rough over there, but maybe not so rough as to keep one from purchasing…what else? The new iPhone. Nevvermind that you may have to patch it with the Home Handyman’s Secret Weapon.

At Cool to Be Frugal, a new baby has arrived. Mwa ha hah! There’ll be some changes made…

My Money Minute gets a conversation going about the scheme to charge shoppers for bags (in D.C., he was charged for a paper bag!). More behavioral legislation, comin’ your way!

Ten p.m. and neither the pooch nor I have had dinner. Time to pack it in, ladies and gents!

Update: Shoulder fiasco

Okay, so on Friday I get hailed in to the Mayo for an MRI. Dutifully show up at 12:30, as requested, bearing an author’s review copy of a novel I’m supposed to be copyediting (don’t ask how copyedits happen at the ARC stage; just be thankful this one is very clean).

Almost two hours later they call me in for the test. I’ve spent this entire time, undressed, in a small waiting room with a damnable television nattering away, rerunning the local morning show, over and over and over and over, telling us all about the weather and the traffic conditions and the six-hour-old news. Focusing on my work over the yammering voice of the woman DJ or whatever the hell she’s supposed to be is passing difficult.

This gives me lots of time to get tensed up.

By the time they finally get around to calling me in for the MRI, this fat lady is ready to go home. I’m hungry, irritated, and would like never, ever, ever to have to hear the inane chattering of some inane blonde talking head on the television again. Or, come to think of it, of anyone. What I would like is silence.

The MRI machine is one creepy-looking gadget, a huge donut-shaped affair reminiscent of a flying saucer stood on edge. It’s confined to a large room roped off with yellow “danger” tape, not very inviting. While it sits there waiting for you, it makes a weird otherworldly tweeting noise, like some sort of manic canary on meth.

The MRI techs pack me onto a kind of cot that can elevate the victpatient into the contraption. They tell me I can’t move—as in not budge and try not to breathe deeply—during the time the images are being taken, which will take about 20 minutes. I’m told this is a relatively brief exposure to the thing. Then they stuff cotton in my ears, which does nothing to dampen the sound of their voices, wrap my head with earphones through which some sort of treacly Muzak is pumped, cover my eyes with gauze, and tell me (only after I ask) that I can expect to be bombarded with a noise that sounds like a jackhammer.

holy. mackerel.

Well, I lasted about 30 seconds in there. They didn’t even get the thing turned on before I was asking to get out.

Creepy. Absolutely, indescribably creepy.

I didn’t feel afraid. I just felt so uncomfortable and so creeped out…sort of like having to pay an extended visit to a cockroach nest under the refrigerator…that I knew I was not going to be able to stand to stay in that thing for 20 minutes.

More to the point, a single cogent thought entered my mind: All these “stress attacks” I’ve been having—and there have been many, many more than the good Dr. Daley knows about—have never been satisfactorily diagnosed. There is some chance that those episodes could be minor cardiac events. If that is the case, then twenty minutes of uninterrupted, rather extreme stress could cause a heart attack.

Eff that, say I, only more explicitly.

Now they want me to consent to going back and letting them drug me with Valium or an intravenous sedative.

i. don’t. think. so.

The techs adjudged me “severely claustrophobic.” Not to be repetitious, but I don’t think so. Though it’s true that one reason I dislike flying in commercial jets is being jammed elbow-to-elbow with strangers (yech!); and it is true that I truly, truly hate the Flagstaff Ice Cave because it’s totally dark, totally devoid of light in there and you can’t find your way out without a flashlight or a lighter and we got in there one time without either of those and I was, yes, freaking scared; and no, I don’t like elevators, “severe” as in “disabling” is not the term I’d use.

Besides, I have a good reason to prefer stairs to elevators. I was once in an elevator that fell 11 stories before we could stop it. That’s 11 out of 13 possible stories…

Since then, if the climb is less than six floors, I’ll take the fire escape, thank you.

The inside of an MRI machine is not dark. It does not go up and down. It does not make you sit next to some odoriferous stranger with a screamy child. And it apparently poses little risk. It’s just creepy. Very creepy.

The fact of the matter is, the shoulder is on the mend. When I called the P.A. yesterday and reported that since the last time I saw him—quite recently—two days passed with almost no pain except for one out-of-the-ordinary position, and that I now can do the hold-your-hand-out-at-shoulder-height-and-pour-the-pop-out-of-a-soda-can maneuver with no pain at all, he remarked that it takes about three months “for the dust to settle.” It may be that given my age and the fact that I can’t take any over-the-counter anti-inflammatories, it simply has taken a long time to heal.

Yesterday after I got home from this entertaining experience, the kitchen sink clogged. To clean that out, I had to hold the plug down tight in the righthand sink and, with the injured left arm, pump a plumber’s helper vigorously in the lefthand sink. This caused exactly zero pain. It’s hard to imagine that if any very serious damage were lurking inside the shoulder, I could pull that stunt without repercussion.

At the moment it feels somewhat like a typhoid or cholera shot, only most of the time slightly less painful.

And frankly…some things are worse than chronic mild pain.

Images: MRI, shamelessly ripped off from a website now disappeared from my computer’s memory.
Elevators at 240 Sparks, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. GNU Free Documentation License.