I’ve come to you with a tale of a doctor who cried wolf. I’m drowning in comments, and I can no longer keep up with personal responses. I know, I know, I’ve said that before. That’s where the crying wolf part comes in. When I wrote those words before, I tried, but I couldn’t let go. I felt compelled to answer at least 95 percent of the comments.

Right now I’ve got over 100 comments stacked up – the preponderance of which aren’t really comments, but are questions from readers expecting answers. Unlike my good friend Anthony Colpo, I don’t know everything, so I often have to spend effort reading or pulling papers to give an intelligent, accurate answer, all of which takes time. A lot of time. Often it boils down to do I take the time to write a new post or do I take the time to answer the comments (read: questions)? Because I can’t do both. And I can tell you, I would prefer to post.

I get about 60 comments (questions) per day that I have to deal with. And since this blog contains so much content written over the past two plus years, I get a lot of readers through the various search engines. When these readers enter the blog, they often hit on older posts and submit comments (questions) on those older posts. So if you see that a new post has only 20-30 comments, that doesn’t mean that’s all the comments I had to deal with that day.

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Looks like Dean Ornish has taken time out from pimping for McDonald’s (and KFC and Pepsi Co.) to write a new book out titled The Spectrum: A Scientifically Proven Program to Feel Better, Live Longer, Lose Weight and Gain Health.

I haven’t read the book, but I assume it’s a recycling of all the Dean Ornish stuff we’ve seen before. Although, he does have a photo of a piece of salmon on the cover, so maybe he’s graduated from vegan to beady-eyed vegitarianism.

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I’ll give you a taste of what it’s like to be a physician and try to interpret what people tell you on the phone. And why it’s always good to look at the patient. People often get mad when doctors won’t treat them without seeing them – this post may give you some idea why physicians always want to see the patient. And why I don’t answer specific medical questions in the comments section.

A little after midnight last night I get a call from Scott, our #3 child, who tells me that he has fallen at an ice rink and cut his head. I ask him where, and he told me that the cut was right along his brow ridge. He hadn’t been knocked unconscious, and he wasn’t having any neurological symptoms he said. Only a lot of bleeding. I asked him to describe the cut.

Many people fall and cut the area right above their brow ridge. It’s a fairly common injury and usually requires stitches. What happens is that the weight of the falling head compresses the skin between the ground (or ice) and the bone of the brow ridge resulting in a kind of a burst injury in which the skin ‘bursts’ open. There is a lot of bleeding and a full thickness injury of the skin that requires some kind of closure.

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First, scroll down and put the video you’re hearing on pause. I couldn’t figure out how to post it without its going off when you log on. I’ll explain what it’s all about shortly. (If someone knows how to get this to play on demand and not every time one logs onto this site, let me know and I’ll fix it.)

I’m sorry I’ve been so dilatory in posting and answering comments. I’ve been up to my eyes in a couple of projects I’ve got going on. I was dragooned into helping MD with her first concert as president of the Santa Barbara Choral Society, which went off terrifically well. The above photo is of MD making her president’s speech to a packed house while waiting for the singers to file in and take their places behind the orchestra. I’ve also been swamped with other projects as well, one of which I’ll blog about later this week. And MD and I are making an unexpected trip to New York for a few days next week, so our time has been telescoped because of that.

Enough whining about all the reasons I haven’t posted. Let’s get on with today’s topic.

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I’m kicked back with a hot cup of tea (a mixture of Irish breakfast tea and lapsang souchong, a mixture recommended to me by my long time golfing buddy Jim Hickman) with the Dallas-Jets game on the TV in the background (I’ve got my money on the Jets +14.5 points. It’s half time right now and the Cowboys are ahead 21-3, but I think the Jets will probably get a cheap touchdown near the end to cover for me.) and MD puttering around in the kitchen putting together Thanksgiving dinner. We’re heading over to our son and DIL’s house for the actual dinner, but MD is fixing her part of it here.

I’ve always loved the above painting by Norman Rockwell. It was done during the WWII years when the outcome was not all that certain. The painting titled Freedom from Want is one of a four part series Rockwell did for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. I loved staring at paintings as a kid, trying to figure out how the artist worked his/her magic. I had a little art talent and painted and drew myself, so I was always trying to learn something about technique. The thing that always bugged me about this Rockwell painting was the matriarch’s arms. Look at the painting. This elderly lady is manhandling a platter holding what looks to be about a 16-18 lb turkey like it is a piece of cotton candy. As a kid I tried to hold a platter with with a medicine ball on it to see if I could do it so effortlessly. No way. Either this grandmother has been doing Slow Burn for many years or ol’ Norman messed up a little on this one.

In reading about the painting I discovered that the model for the grandmother was Mrs. Thaddeus Wheaton, the Rockwell family cook, who, I am sure, posed with an empty platter. Rockwell painted what he saw, and what he saw was an elderly woman holding an empty plate, not one struggling with a massive turkey. As I say, this always irritated me because my own artistic tendencies were in the direction of super realism, and I just couldn’t understand how a real artist could make such an obvious mistake. Why I was even thinking about this as a kid instead of the things that normal kids thought about, who knows?

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