I’m putting this post up today and leaving it throughout the weekend because I believe it is so important that everyone watch the videos at the bottom.

These long must-watch videos are in two parts: the first part is by a defense attorney discussing the unbelievable complexity of the law, especially federal law, and the difficulty of simply going through life without knowingly or unknowingly breaking some kind of law.  And he discusses the dangers of talking to the police without a lawyer present.  The second part is a talk by a police detective confirming everything the attorney says and, fascinatingly, discussing his own tricks, learned in over 25 years of police work, to get people to talk to him and even to confess to crimes.

I’ll probably alienate any readers who are involved in law enforcement, which isn’t my intention.  I’m sure that if any law enforcement officials were suddenly under investigation, they wouldn’t say a word without their lawyer present.  The rest of us need these same protections.

I’m not presenting these videos for any criminals who may be reading, but for the average citizen who happens to get crosswise with the police.  Every single police officer I know (and I know a half dozen or so) are hard working, dedicated, responsible, and even kind-hearted folks, but they can make mistakes.  I make mistakes, so I figure they can too.  The officer speaking on the last part of this video says that he doesn’t really interrogate people that he doesn’t think are already guilty.  So, you are basically assumed guilty if you’re under investigation for whatever.  And if the officer is mistaken, you can be in real trouble.  You can’t talk your way out of it; you can only make it worse.  When you watch these videos, you’ll see what I mean.

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I frequently mention in my posts that I find interesting papers by trolling through the medical literature. It dawned on me that maybe others would like to do the same, but really don’t know how to access or search the medical literature. I looked around on some academic sites and found an easy tutorial so that anyone interested can learn.

Before we get to the tutorial, let’s take a look at how I go through the literature. I have a number of journals that I look through every month (or every other month or weekly or however often they are published). Most of these journals are listed in alphabetical order on the Journals Page of our Protein Power website. By clicking on any of these journals you will be taken to the journal’s website and be able to read the abstracts of all the articles. Some of these journals make full text versions of their articles available after a time, usually a year. Most of these journals have an email service for their table of contents that you can sign up for, then you will receive an email listing the table of contents (or TOC, as they refer to it) whenever the newest issue of the journal goes online. If you keep up with these journals, you will be abreast of 90 percent of all the newest nutritional research.

I’m often sent links from articles in the mainstream press about new research. If you find an article you would like to know more about or see if the reported reported it correctly, you can use PubMed (a government-funded data base available free to anyone that contains all the medical literature) to get to the abstract from the journal. Here is an easy way to do it.

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When I took my parasitology course in medical school I was exposed for the first time to all the loathsome diseases that are unheard of here but are a part of daily life in other parts of the world. Here people go nuts and rush to the emergency room if they find pin worms in their kid’s stool; there having a Loa loa worm creep across your eye is a common occurrence and only a minor bother.

I was fascinated with my study of liver flukes, roundworms, tapeworms and all the other parasites afflicting primarily those in tropical areas. The most vile yet amazing of these creatures was to me Dracunculus medinensis, the Guinea worm. This parasite causes untold misery to those it afflicts, and is now, as this BBC piece relates, on its way to extinction. For people living in areas the Guinea worm infests, I’m sure this is wonderful news.

What the BBC neglected to mention is that the eradication of the Guinea worm has been effected in large measure by none other than our former president, Jimmy Carter. Carter, in my opinion, wasn’t much of a president, but he has been a terrific ex-president when he avoids politics and sticks to humanitarian issues. This Carter Center he and his wife founded has been instrumental in educating people in areas where the Guinea worm is common to take the needed steps to intervene in the parasite’s life cycle and disrupt its ability to reproduce. The BBC reports: Read more »

Since I seem to be on a roll writing about rear ends (politicians and fatty stools) I might as well go ahead and post this piece now that I’ve gotten all the results in. As near as I can figure, I’ve got about 7,000-8,000 people reading this blog daily, so given the percentage of people who are afflicted with hemorrhoids, this should be of interest to at least a couple of thousand. If you don’t have a hemorrhoid, if you don’t know anyone who has a hemorrhoid, and if you don’t think you will ever get a hemorrhoid, you can quit reading now.

When MD and I were in Dallas a month of so ago visiting our kids, I went to visit (as I usually do when in Dallas) a friend I’ve known for years (let’s call him Jack, not his real name). As we were talking he was squirming around on his couch, looking like he was in some kind of discomfort. I asked him if he was having a problem, and said no. At that point his wife, who was bringing us some coffee, said, “Tell him; he’s a doctor for God’s sake.” Jack then sheepishly told me that he had a bad hemorrhoid that was intensely painful. I asked him all the appropriate questions and diagnosed him as having a thrombosed hemorrhoid that needed treatment.

Jack said he would call is doctor and try to get in. I told him that I had fixed countless thrombosed hemorrhoids, and that if I had the tools I needed, I could fix it for him in a flash. I made a couple of calls and found out that I could get all the necessary equipment at a drugstore nearby. Off we went to gather the stuff. We returned with a latex gloves, a scalpel, a couple of syringes and needles, a bunch of gauze 4X4s for packing after the surgery, and a bottle of xylocaine (an injectible local anesthetic). I recruited Jack’s wife as my assistant, and we got him down on the bed. I had his wife spread his cheeks so that I could get to work. I immediately realized that I had made one of the cardinal errors of doctoring: I had failed to examine the patient before I made the diagnosis.

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I’ve read the paper that is the topic of today’s post from beginning to end five times. Not because it is a brilliant, enlightening paper, but because I found it so worthless I kept thinking there was something I was missing. If this paper had been published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association or some other third tier journal I wouldn’t have thought so much about it. Were it published in a second tier journal such as Metabolism, I would have wondered a little more. But it was published in the October issue of the venerable American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, a first tier journal for sure, and, arguably, the most prestigious nutritional journal in the world.

I’ve decided to use this paper entitled “Arterial endothelial dysfunction in baboons fed a high-cholesterol, high-fat diet” to demonstrate how totally meaningless research can find its way to the best of journals thanks to a built-in bias among the “peers”? who are reviewing such research and to show how to interpret a scientific/medical article.

Critically reading a scientific paper is a piece of detective work. One has to discover motives, obfuscations, biases, and sloppy work and put it all together to get the real picture, not just the picture the author of the paper wants to be seen. Just like a good detective who assumes everyone is lying until stories are corroborated, so it is with the scientific literature. One must always corroborate, probe, compare and dig deeply because almost nothing is as it appears on the surface. As Sherlock Holmes says, “These are very deep waters.”? In the case of the study we will in due course explore, the waters are very deep indeed.

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