Science and health

Ordinarily a subject line like 'science and health' would be followed with a note about how science was doing good things for health, or how we understood more about health because of some recent research. Instead, it's time for some reflections about looking from a scientific perspective at health issues that you might have.  Two things prompt this.  One, you're unsurprised to hear, is that I'm having a nuisance that has contributed to not being here.  The other was email I received recently about running with diabetes.  On the latter, it's important to note that you can run with diabetes.  You have to be more thoughtful and attentive about it than the usual beginner.  But it can be done.  That article was written by a runner with diabetes (Rob Carr).  The diabetes prompting him to start the running.

Whatever is at hand, you rapidly get taken to a chance to think scientifically.  My take being, remember, that science is about understanding the natural world.  Your body is a pretty important part of your natural world.  A different aspect of the consideration is that I think science, and thinking scientifically, enrich your life.  At least it does mine, and I think it's for reasons you can share.

I confess at the moment one of the attractions of the science is distraction from my body.  What happened is that I caught something in my eye.  Blown hard enough that it scratched the cornea.  It turns out that a scratched cornea is very painful, so looking at the anatomy and physiology of the eye is helpful for distracting me from that.  (Seriously: One thing that helps with pain management is aiming your attention hard on something else -- reading books, knitting, your left big toe (assuming that the pain is somewhere else, maybe the right.))

It turns out that there is very little guidance on exercising with diabetes.  So you have to do your own experimentation to understand what's going on and what you need to do, what you can get away with doing, and what you definitely cannot do.  It's imperative because exercise is an important part of managing diabetes, particularly adult-onset diabetes.

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Still kicking

Didn't mean to disappear and no, no problems were involved.  Just doing other things and didn't realize how much time was passing here.  One of those other things was making progress on my running.  Last week I reached 30 minutes straight running, having started with 1 minute run 1 minute walk in February.  Well, starting with physical therapy in January.

There are quite a few comments in the queue.  If you haven't seen yours, it should be coming up soon(ish).  Keep an eye at the 'most recent comments' section at the bottom. 

One of the things that brought my attention back to the blogosphere was an email from Coby Beck, who had mentioned my Does CO2 correlate with temperature?.  There was an interesting (to me at least) question from 'maxwell' which gave me the opportunity to mention a blog post a commentor to my article had made, and a professional article: David J. Thomson's Dependence of global temperatures on atmospheric CO2 and solar irradiance, PNAS, 94, 8370-8377, 1997.  My examination was intentionally pretty simple.  See Thomson for what it looks like when done professionally.  You might enjoy some of the comments in the thread at Coby's.  And, if you haven't already been doing so, take a look at his blog.