I was going to call this post “nobody knows the trouble I seen” except that it seems ludicrously self indulgent to whine that one has been living through construction hell when the rest of the world has revolutions, civil wars, hurricanes and so on to contend with. (But, to paraphrase Will Rogers, everything is manageable provided it’s happening to someone else.) This isn’t to say my curmudgeonly instincts have been dormant . One particular item a while back had me seething.

“Sugary drinks are not so sweet”  was the headline in the Health section of the Globe and Mail (24 May 2013).  Apparently, drinking a sugar-sweetened drink a day not only rots your teeth and adds up to empty calories (with the added bonus that it makes New York’s Mayor Bloomburg crazy) but “may increase the risk of kidney stones”.  Gasp. I had to pause to take a sip of my ginger ale* while that sank in.

I puzzed and I puzzed, to reference one of my favorite curmudgeons, the Grinch. Didn’t make sense. How on earth could fructose cause blobs of crystallized minerals to form in the kidney? (To reinforce the point that sugary drinks are Evil the accompanying photo was of a surgeon with a scalpel. Someone had fun with that.)

The research cited was from 2007, published in a journal called Kidney International (2008, 73; 207-212).  The worthiest journal nobody’s ever heard of.  My curiosity got the better of me and I downloaded the article and read through the cringe-inducing prospective study; yet another data-mining expedition hoping to find a “link” between X and Y. (For more on my distaste for the term, see post.) The data? From – wait for it – the appalling Nurses’ Health Study, formerly used to “prove” that taking estrogen was just a boffo idea.  Here, the research cites some 19,000+ women along with some 46,000 men from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. Impressive numbers. Pity the hypothesis is so feeble.

Not of course to our heroes, researchers Taylor and Curhan, unspecified experts at a renal division/lab at Brigham Young and Harvard who engage in enough statistical jiggery-pokery to make the world go round.  (Pity nobody blinks when data gets tortured.)

Just a few problems here. As I explained, in often far too exhaustive detail in The Estrogen Errors, extrapolating to the general population from the Nurse’s Study is massively problematic. For starters, there’s its basic design, bi-annual self reports, which are notoriously unreliable. We’re all prone to error as any gibbon with half a brain knows: we forget, lie and generally get things wrong. Good grief, most of us stutter when they ask us how much we weigh when we get a new driver’s license. Plus, there’s the healthy user bias – people who respond to any questionnaire tend to be richer, smarter, better off, i.e., healthier than the average bear. Er, person. Often they’re white and frequently younger. All of which means they are not like the real at-risk population who, by and large, tends to be poorer, less educated, older, more diverse, less health and diet conscious, more stressed and sicker. Face it, d’you think you’d have time to sit around reading some blog if you had to work at two or more minimum wage jobs just to put food on the table and pay your rent? Could you even afford an iPad or even high speed internet?

This is on top of the fact that professionals in general can’t stand in for “everyone” and basing one’s conclusions of what these people do (or say) is what’s popularly known as being spectacularly wrong.

What really interested me, though, was what these researchers thought might be going on physiologically. In other words, how did we get from basic sugar metabolism to blobs of crystallized minerals in the kidney? Gremlins? Evil spirits? The authors do obligingly admit that the underlying mechanisms are “unknown” (ah, ya think?!) but postulate various processes, none of which make sense. Hence their masterful use of language:

“Fructose may also increase urinary excretion of oxalate, an important risk factor for calcium oxalate nephrolithiasis. Carbohydrates, along with amino acids, provide the majority of the carbon for glyoxylate and oxalate synthesis, and fructose may be an important dietary sugar influencing the production of oxalate.” (emphasis mine)

 The authors concede backing for their hypotheses are “sparse”; personally I would have said nonexistent. Rats make up the bulk of their research subjects in this section and the one study they cite using humans consists of eleven – yes, 11 – men whose pee was analyzed for calcium loss (versus calcium intake).  Fructose intake made no difference in the calcium these men excreted but the researchers still concluded that the reason fructose laden drinks caused kidney stones “may be related to the effect of fructose intake on urine composition”.  How they concluded this I have no idea. Maybe they were on a sugar high.

The only marginally plausible explanation had to do with uric acid metabolism and for a moment I thought, OK, this might make sense. Then I checked the reference and realized it only applied to people with gout, whose uric acid metabolism is already dysfunctional (that being the definition of gout). 

Kidney stones, by the bye, are hardly that common and rarely if ever life threatening. Even Wikipedia’s overblown, hyperventilating piece on the topic, that sounds as though it was written by a nephrologist who had just passed one, admits that the incidence or number of new cases a year is “0.5%”.  (Of course it doesn’t specify 0.5% of what which is rather an important point, but let’s not nitpick at this late point in the post.)

How did this 5-year-old study even make it into the health news section? Having spent some years as a medical writer and journalist, I can tell you exactly how. A group of people in an editorial meeting, drinking coffee – or pop – were bouncing around story ideas and someone suggested a piece vilifying soft drinks, currently Public Enemy No. 1 (see NYC, Bloomburg).  So, they wrote the headline then they contacted the hapless writer who cast about for some new and nifty problem that could be blamed on aforesaid sugary drinks.  Everyone  knowing full well that the majority of people only read the headline and the first paragraph; it’s only mutants such as myself who check the original research and parse the methods section.

If sugary drinks do give you kidney stones, these people didn’t prove it.

There are a lot of good reasons to consider soft drinks a treat, not a staple. They’re empty calories; they rot your teeth and many of them contain fairly high amounts of caffeine which can make you nervy and insomniac. But kidney stones? Really?! We think not. And it takes stones to say they do.

* oh get over it. It’s summer. There’s construction outside. Yes, I have the occasional ginger ale or Coke. Sometimes, when I’m especially cranky, two days in a row. Sue me.  

Painkillers increase risk of car crashes proclaims the headline in today’s Globe and Mail. Apparently, researchers at the “Toronto based Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences have found a correlation between even low-dose regular opioid use (two Tylenol 3’s three times a day) and an increased risk of car accidents.

Not a huge risk, the head researcher David Juurlink, hastens to add; certainly nowhere near as high as alcohol, but a risk nonetheless.

Wonderful. Two of my favorite things – correlational studies and experts rambling on about opioids in the same piece with blinkered experts continuing on their merry way, all pleased and sending out press releases (don’t kid yourself, that’s the only way a paper from something called the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences that nobody has ever heard of would get a piece in the Health section of the Globe and Mail).

Um, did it ever occur to these geniuses that the reason people take those drugs, namely pain, might have something to do with those slightly increased numbers of car crashes? I use the term slightly advisedly: the risk increases between 21 and 42% according to the “scientists”. (Scientists in quotes because surely any scientist worth his salt knows that unless you know what you’re comparing something to a percentage – relative risk – is absolutely meaningless.)

Surely pain – which means someone gets more easily fatigued and could become less alert – could have a thing or three to do with it?

Oh no, it’s the opioids.

Of course by the same token, ice creams causes an increased number of drownings. Think about it. In the summer people eat more ice cream – and more people drown. QED.

Last March I wrote a post on Oxycontin and made some disparaging noises (OK, loud, angry noises) about the ado being made about addiction and pain killers. Notably, a Fifth Estate that had me virtually apoplectic with rage. Using largely American stories the CBC newsmagazine insisted that addiction to oxycontin was a  massive problem that we should all get worked up about, especially when it came to First Nations communities in the north.

By contrast, a few weeks ago I happened to come across a BBC mini-documentary about the same topic and the contrast could not have been more marked. I missed the start of the piece but what I did watch was superb. It was a program called “Our World” and the journalist’s name was Linda Sills. (I hope that’s how one spells it.) She had travelled to several communities in northern Ontario, spoken to various tribal elders, artists and addicted individuals and – wonder of wonders – had actually done some research and thought about the subject.

Sills, like the people she spoke to, all agreed that the problem was not opioids (in the ‘80’s it was alcohol and in the ‘90’s glue sniffing) but the situation. The environment. The socio economic conditions. When people are unhappy and hopeless they take solace in drugs, whatever is around, whatever they can get. Solutions are complex, multi-factorial and must emerge from the grassroots of the community itself. An artist who looked to be in his forties, addicted to oxycontin himself, talked of how his art was helping him reduce his drug intake (even though he genuinely looked as though he was still in pain, physical and psychic).

Opioids have been around for thousands of years. Officially they were discovered around the time of the Trojan War (war has always been excellent for medicine) but no doubt people knew of the pain relieving properties of the poppy long before that. They are the single most effective agent in treating pain and although we’ve tried to come up with synthetic variants (Demerol, Fentanyl) and alternatives (non-steroidal anti inflammatories) there simply has never been a drug that works as well, as consistently.

Treating pain with opioids allows people who suffer from chronic pain to function. To have lives. To work, interact with families and friends and feel like the are part of the world.  But in recent years, perhaps with the rise of right wing moralizing in the U.S. and what some people call the rise of the nanny state we have taken a sharp turn away from treating pain to calling individuals who need medication “addicts”.

Our reverence for numeric reasoning and bad statistics naturally hasn’t helped any; after all, what could be more qualitative and unmeasureable than pain, which, by definition, is whatever the person says it is?

Last week in Slate, sent along by my friend Maryse whose blog, Frogheart  covering nanotechnology, art, technology and so on is immensely popular (one tries very hard not to be too envious of her close-to-a-million visitors daily), based on an update in the respected Cochrane Review: how treatment of mild hypertension essentially useless.

What neither piece points out is that what we call “mild hypertension” today (systolic 140-159) was considered essentially normal a scant fifteen years ago. Well, 140 anyway. Or that thoughtful (often older) clinicians would not consider this hypertensive in older patients today.

Ah, it’s just a number people. A number, determined by a group of individuals, often cardiologists but also other “experts” (many of whom have ties to the drug companies who make antihypertensive drugs) as to what should be considered “normal”.

I’ve spent much of my research career debunking this notion of “normal”.  Particularly as it pertains to physiology, biology and humans, who, as we all know, tend to come in a variety of shapes and sizes and whose health status is determined by many variables, not the least of which is how much money they have and how happy they are in their lives.

Women, of course, have long been outside this matrix – normal consisting essentially of the male body without its circadian rhythms and cyclic hormonal elements, never mind pregnancy or menopause.  The vast majority of clinical trials, the gold standard of evidence as it has been called, excluded woman altogether and even when they tried to bring them in often women themselves wouldn’t play ball.

The reasons seemed complex, social, domestic, personal, economic and psychological.  Women generally have been socialized to be risk averse, which means if they are told they have condition X then they want the damn treatment. They don’t have time to worry about whether or not they’re taking the placebo. Plus, large multi-centre trials require the time not to mention transportation to get to those bi-weekly weigh-ins or tests or what-have-you and women, particularly women over 40 tend to be overwhelmed with children and grandchildren and ageing parents and work and housework and life. “Who’s got the time to enter a trial?” most will ask. “I’ve barely got time to sit down never mind volunteer my time at a clinical trial.”

No doubt there are other reasons but at this point I haven’t researched it. I just know that women are vastly underrepresented in what we optimistically consider evidence-based medicine.

I see something inherently male and American in this perspective, this enthusiasm for aggressive treatment (as the cultural critic Lynn Payer in her wonderful book Medicine and Culture once remarked, there has to be something culturally satisfying in the notion of ‘aggressive’ given how often the term is used in American medicine; even the recommendations for gentler treatment of newborns was advised to be pursued aggressively).  Or overtreatment.

Cross cultural studies have repeatedly shown that countries like Canada, which can’t afford as many cardiac surgeries and procedures as the U.S., as well as countries like Finland, which simply doesn’t believe in them, have the same outcomes as the U.S. In other words, Americans spend huge amounts of time and money doing things – cardiac bypass, cardiac catheterization, stents, etc. – but cardiac patients are no healthier than in countries where they do half the number per capita. All that activity doesn’t result in better health or lower morbidity or mortality.

Less is often more in medicine. And bodies are fragile. Drugs, surgeries, procedures, tests: these are not benign. They exact a toll on the body. And all for what?

All because somebody somewhere decided they know what was best and what magic number was “normal” blood pressure.  Or what an artery “should” look like in a person with no symptoms.

The worst part is that as patients we are complicit in this, increasingly believing that more is better – and reject the notion of watchful waiting, considering a physician who says, “just take it easy for a while, it’ll get better on its own” a quack. So, fewer and fewer physicians say such things. As a doctor once said at a conference I was at: It’s easier to just write the prescription that to take twenty minutes to explain to a patient (who’s not going to believe you anyway) why she or he doesn’t really need it.

But hey, we wouldn’t want to miss out on something that could be really terrific now, would we?!

Nobody likes a crisp, neat look more than I do – Ikea wouldn’t be the multi-gazillion corporation it is without my patronage throughout the years. I own pretty much every KASSETT and GLOK organizer doo-dad they make. (I like that they sound Klingon.) Given the sheer number of articles, blogs, television shows and companies on clutter (and its crazy cousin in the attic, hoarding) I am clearly not the only person with this particular fascination.

I sometimes think that if I could just create a prefect, clutter-free world then, as Buckminster Fuller suggested, everything I wrote and worked on would be effortlessly beautiful. Of course I sometimes also think of  Roswell and of the aliens that live among us. So it’s not like I’m totally sane all the time.

Some things are inherently messy and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.

Take disease/illness and the complexity of patient care, all of which I have gone on about ad nauseum.  Much as we would like to make it all iPad-neat and high-tech cool the reality of surgery and hospitals and elder care and whatnot just isn’t going to be minimalist-zen. And trust me, if you’re a patient you don’t want it to be because if your clinical team decides you’re just a carbon copy of everybody else you’re going to get shoddy care.

Right on cue enter a medical director at the  Birmingham University Hospital in Britain who, enchanted with the local BMW plant’s “flawless”, failure-free operation, wondered how the hospital could duplicate the plant’s figurative tracking down of every “loose screw”.  (Yes, I am biting my tongue.) One assumes the director hoped patients would leave the hospital all shiny with that new car smell …

So, mixing everything from metaphors to minds, a “bespoke computer system” was ordered – no doubt to bring German engineering to an off-the-rack hospital. The cost? Some 4 million pounds sterling or approximately $5.4 million U.S..This computer’s claim to fame was that its operation actually mimicked the dashboard of a car, presumably that of the aforementioned BMW. The dashboard thingies became standard issue at the hospital; their point to “catch” problems before or as they evolved, problems ranging frompost-surgical infection levels and falls to bed sores. Which sounds sensible you might think. Except you’d be wrong.

A computer that posh couldn’t possibly stop at patient problems; where’s the fun in that? So those bedside dashboards also have dials to let managers and ward sisters know when efficiency (“benchmarked against comparable wards and recent performance”) falls, even as response time is recorded to let higher-ups know who and what might be doing poorly. Ouch. So not only is Big Brother watching but his name is HAL.

The mind boggles. German engineered hospital care run with military precision – oops, that has nasty militaristic WWII overtones. Rephrase, rephrase …

(For more see The Economist, 16 June 2012.  http://www.economist.com/node/21556924)

Admittedly it is tempting and attractive, to believe that better health, better post surgical and treatment outcomes, fewer medical errors as simply being a matter of organization and method. Problem is, Sherlock, people go into hospital for a reason – and that reason is that they’re sick, injured or otherwise poorly. These days, given cost containment issues, hospitalized patients tend to be really sick. Often they are also old, which means they are frail and have a lot of other things wrong with them: from cardiac issues to arthritis and various and sundry ailments.

True, we do much better with acute care than we did even 40 years ago – brain tumours that would have killed your grandfather can sometimes be removed, e.g., – but the reality of patient care is that some people do get worse and some people die. Even the ones who do all right and go home are rarely if ever  good as new. Surgeries cause scar tissue and pain and a host of other problems. As they used to say, the only really safe surgery is the one they do on the other guy.  No nifty BMW dashboard can change that.

A few more staff nurses might but that’s another story.

So, boys and girls, can anyone tell me what some issues with this perspective might be? Anyone? Anyone except Tiffany? Sigh. OK. Tiffany. That’s right.Human bodies, physiology, biology: these are complex, messy, hard to classify and all too often problems that arise are  idiosyncratic and incomprehensible. Funny that, but bodies don’t tend to have read the textbooks. Many people do well but some do not and each case is different.

True, the medical system does screw up (as America’s Institute of Medicine never stops reminding us) and sometimes errors and problems do lie in systemic, functional issues that ought to be fixed – like that ICU checklist everyone’s so keen on or better labeling on medications and so on. But an over-focus on process and a lack of understanding of the underlying messy complexities of medicine not only aren’t the answer but are increasingly becoming part of the problem.

Talk to any person who’s recently experienced hospital care and what you hear is just how vigilant you have to be and just how essential it is to have someone there with the patient to ensure the clinician walking into the room actually knows who the patient is and what his or her problem might be, what drugs s/he might be on, etc.

Comparing medicine to aviation or to BMW’s is ridiculously reductionist and ultimately counterproductive since one of the basic aspects of physiology is that it is not simply what is done to the patient but what the patient does back so to speak. With drugs, it is not merely the effects that the drug has on the body (pharmacodynamics) but what the body does to the medication (pharmacokinetics). The arrows, should one care to diagram it, go back and forth and every which way.

Treating people like units of production was exactly how this mess all started. And Ikea simply doesn’t have an organizer for that.

When I began writing these musings on the general idiocies going on all about us I wrote something to the effect of, “well, somebody has to say something”. (see post). Too true. So. In recent weeks you may have noticed some rumblings about Oxycontin, an opioid painkiller being discontinued; the replacement drug is similar but apparently less easy to abuse (OxyNeo).

The drug manufacturer has kept the price the same. Government health plans do not appear to have been as circumspect; my understanding is that there are plans afoot to delist the new drug and make it harder for people with chronic pain to have their pain meds covered. Terrific.

Just as noxious is the addiction narrative that has taken over  all discussion around this subject – with all its moralistic, judgemental overtones.  I keep waiting for a nice Puritan gentleman in a stove top hat to mince up and stick a big red A on someone.

A promo for the CBC’s Fifth Estate proclaims that addiction to Oxycontin costs us all, as taxpayers, untold amounts and they’re shocked, shocked, that this has been going on for so long.

Um, exactly what nefarious something has been going on? People in pain had some access to a medication that could provide a bit of relief? People in hospital who’d had surgeries and procedures were able to survive without being in agony? How did pain become a crime – and that tiny fraction of people who take a drug for purposes other than what it was intended for turn into such objects of scorn?

So yet again, another abbreviated history lesson. About 50 years ago we began to realize that how medicine treated pain was stuck in the Dark Ages. How that happened was some physicians who realized their post-surgical pain relief was a giant joke. (And being doctors didn’t give them any special status – which must have come as a real shock). They realized what patients went through, being accused of faking or exaggerating or being drug seeking addicts when all they had was pain.

Medicine’s treatment of pain was a “cool and callous disgrace” according to one doctor writing at the time.

With time things gradually changed, a bit. There was research and Melzack and Wall’s seminal book on pain and major scientific effort (see the International Association for the Study of Pain, IASP, site for more.) We began to understand that if  acute pain was well controlled the odds of it becoming chronic went down. That sometimes chronic pain happened – sometimes for no reason (hence the term ‘idiopathic’ which essentially means who-the-hell-knows) and sometimes because of underlying conditions like rheumatoid arthritis or scar tissue from a former injury. (Occasionally even as a result of iatrogenesis – caused by medical intervention, in other words. Some test or procedure gone wrong.)

Heck, we didn’t even realize until maybe 45 years ago that children felt pain. Infants.  Which explains those bone chilling videos from some years ago where baby boys’ screams as they were being circumcised were simply attributed to, I don’t know. Joie de vivre?

We didn’t even concede that post surgical and post traumatic pain was worse at the start (right after the surgery) and better a few days later. Hence PCA – patient controlled analgesia – where individuals can give themselves a programmed amount of medication when they feel pain rather than waiting for the requisite number of hours to have passed before the nurse could give them a dose.

We even realized that we could give the dying a modicum of dignity and autonomy by controlling their pain. Because really, who on earth would care if a dying person got ‘addicted’ to morphine? Which they don’t but that’s another story.

Most important we began to realize that there’s nothing ennobling about pain. Pain just hurts.

Not that you’d realize it these past weeks as the moralistic jingoistic nonsense carries on in the media with the Oxycontin issue. Nope, the real issue is addiction. Tsk tsk.

Lost in all this is any sophisticated thinking or mature discussion as we forget the complexities of pain; how physical pain is exacerbated by stress and fatigue and hunger and other conditions. So that phrase we bandy about: ‘most common in northern communities’ might actually have its basis in what actually goes on in those northern communities.

First Nations reserves without gobs of mineral reserves and cash where individuals live  socio-economic conditions most of the rest of Canada would find unacceptable. After all, if your community and your culture are not valued; if your hopes are few and your living environment horrid – perhaps addiction might be the natural result. So Sherlock, perhaps addiction is the symptom, not the underlying “disease” (if we wanted to reduce our argument to mere medical parametres).

For a lot of people opioids (oxycontin, morphine, methadone, codeine or the synthetic variants like demerol and fentanyl)  – especially in conjunction with other techniques like exercise, self hypnosis, pacing oneself and other such things – allow people with chronic pain to function. Unfortunately, pain clinics that give people that broader perspective and help them learn not to rely solely on drugs have slowly been disbanded over the years (we prefer spending money on high tech toys) so now more people rely solely on medication to help them cope with pain.

I had thought, erroneously as it turns out, that we had matured somewhat when it came to our attitudes towards pain; that we understood that pain is the one condition that unites us all – wherever we live, whoever we are. But I suppose all that thinking was giving us a headache, and without any Oxycontin on hand ….

(to be continued)