Covid vaccine aftermath

 We're only beginning to see the vaccine rollout in the UK, but we can begin to think about what may happen as time goes on.

In the near term, I expect many those who have been vaccinated will feel like they don't need to follow precautions anymore. What they don't consider is that they may still be responsible for transmission of Covid from one person to another. Perhaps like Trump, the attitude will be "that's their problem."

The other thing I haven't heard addressed yet is that there isn't necessarily a reason to believe this will be a one-time thing. In other words, those who have been vaccinated, and even those who have had Covid, are likely to need to get vaccinated in the future, since the immunity will last only so long, and this virus acts like it will be around for awhile, especially considering its worldwide distribution.

George Bancroft

I'm currently slowly working my way through the Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, which was published in the very late 19th century. This series eventually consisted of 45 volumes, although so far Project Gutenberg only has 1 through 16 (excepting 10). As a whole it's interesting, but some authors are more prosaic in their writings than current modern taste would appreciate. An example is George Bancroft from volume 4, and American, who wrote a HIstory of the United States. In one excerpt from a chapter on Lexington (as in the first shots fired of the American Revolution), he gets quite carried away with himself as he describes the first martyrs at Lexington:

"They fulfilled their duty not from the accidental impulse of the moment; their action was the slowly ripened fruit of Providence and of time. The light that led them on was combined of rays from the whole history of the race; from the traditions of the Hebrews in the gray of the world's morning; from the heroes and sages of republican Greece and Rome; from the example of Him who died on the cross for the life of humanity; from the religious creed which proclaimed the divine presence in man, and on this truth, as in a life-boat, floated the liberties of nations over the dark flood of the Middle Ages; from the customs of the Germans transmitted out of their forests to the councils of Saxon England; from the burning faith and courage of Martin Luther; from trust in the inevitable universality of God's sovereignty as taught by Paul of Tarsus and Augustine, through Calvin and the divines of New England; from the avenging fierceness of the Puritans, who dashed the mitre on the ruins of the throne; from the bold dissent and creative self-assertion of the earliest emigrants to Massachusetts; from the statesmen who made, and the philosophers who expounded, the revolution of England; from the liberal spirit and analyzing inquisitiveness of the eighteenth century; from the cloud of witnesses of all the ages to the reality and the rightfulness of human freedom."

Fortunately, one can easily skim such interludes and authors.

The dark side of this virus

With all the hanging of crepe about this virus, that it won't have a "season" like the flu, that it's likely to rebound this fall and/or later, one has to wonder if there is an even darker reality that we face.

Maybe the virus just isn't going to stop until we've reached some kind of herd immunity. And I wouldn't count on a vaccine to make that happen. I don't think we can keep up the austerity we're currently undergoing indefinitely. So at some point, we'll relax social rules, the virus will increase, at least some measures will be reinstituted, virus will go down, rules will be relaxed, virus will increase...and so on. Eventually we'll reach some point where some significant percentage of the population has had the virus and most of them are not shedding it anymore.

One might wonder if this implies that all these contact rules are worth it. What they're worth at this stage is in keeping the healthcare system from being overwhelmed.

Perhaps the reality is that this virus is going to win, one way or the other, either on a fast or slow timeline.

Oddities about COVID-19

One of the characteristics of this virus is its extreme variability in causing evidence of itself. This is highlighted by recent information from prisons. Testing for the virus in a prison in Ohio showed that most prisoners tested positive for the virus, even though 90+% were symptom-free. So what if most of the population already has the virus?
Another bit of strange information is that even after those infected with the virus recovered, had an immune response, some could still get the virus again. Surely this should damper the optimism that a vaccine is going to make some difference -- if the immune response to the real virus isn't so protective, why should the vaccine be any better?
I'm not one of those who thinks we should abruptly discontinue all protective measures, but this should begin to seep into the decision-making about this. At some point we will need to hand back the decisions about risk-taking to individuals instead of relying on governmental restrictions.

6 feet away

We're seeing this more and more. What strikes me about it is that although this is a recommendation by the CDC, it seems to have become something of a rule. I look at it more of a show of "following the rules" than anything.
For most places I shop, there isn't any way to maintain 6 ft from people. Typical supermarket aisles are lucky if they're 6 ft wide, so to try to be literal about 6 ft, you would end up playing some sort of chess game, waiting for someone else to move. Then everyone's shopping takes longer, the store fills up, then they're likely to invoke some control on the number of people in the store. So your shopping lasts longer, which translates into longer potential exposure to whatever is floating around out there.
I think there is reason to believe there is at best quasi-science which led to this 6 ft suggestion. Presumably it's based on studies showing how far particles can travel when someone coughs or sneezes, and then someone at CDC threw a dart and came up with this 6 ft recommendation. My experience since this whole distancing began is that I have yet to see anyone sneeze or cough while I was shopping. If I did go into some store faced with such behavior, I would probably turn around and leave.
As far as I can tell, there isn't going to be any way to assess all of these precautions we're taking after the fact. What we're likely to be left with is someone's assessment that "obviously, we needed to do all these things." And so next time we go through the same arbitrary rules. Curiously, we put up with flu every year with only some general suggestions about how to avoid it, then leave up the decisions to us individuals.

A new normalcy

Some years ago, as I mused on the development of "universal precautions" in hospitals that came about largely from the increasing HIV prevalence, it occurred to me that it would be useful and instructional if restaurants, like hospitals, made touchless dispensers of sanitizer available in a number of locations on their premises, i.e., not just in the restrooms.
The idea would be to encourage the employees and patrons to use them, the former on some fairly frequent basis, the latter at least once on entering the restaurant. These dispensers should be easily visible so that people can see they're being used, and so that managers could see that the employees were using them too.
There is also no reason not to have a hand sanitizer at the entrance to all groceries.
Right now, with the vast shortage of sanitizers, this is hardly feasible, but once we're out of this, I think this idea should be promoted. Even without COVID-19, we can expect our usual seasonal flu every year.
We run the risk that once all the current measures are no longer felt necessary, people will fall back into complacence about infections. Until the next one comes along.

Aftermath of the virus

A dilemma that we will face after the virus subsides is an analysis of what worked and what didn't. As far as I can tell, there is very little science on which measures are worth doing to fight the spread of viruses.
On a practical level, various cities, states, and countries have done various things, gradually tending toward more austere acts like stay-at-home orders. Even if we did nothing, there will be an increase to a certain point, a leveling off, then a decline and disappearance of the infections.
Things are compounded by the range of illness that victims express, death at one end, but apparently little or no symptoms on the mild end.
Even now, the estimated number of cases is a fuzzy number, the only question being how many times that number is the real number of infections. We can presume that the number of deaths is more accurate, and there might even be some tendency to overestimate death strictly due to the virus versus it just being a coincidence along with the real cause of death.
After the fact, there will be hardening of opinions, so that many will say, "we needed to do everything we did for as long as we did in order to conquer this virus". But I can't imagine there being any way of proving or disproving this contention.
About the only hard science will be with the statisticians who can easily say, "here is the point where the R value began declining, and here is where it became less that one." The R value is in index of how many others an infected person transmits the virus to.
On the plus side, observation suggests that we getting past the panic buying mode, since various items are at least temporarily reappearing on grocers' shelves.
At the same time, there remains extreme uncertainty on how long the current measures will last. It isn't helped by Dr. Fauci and Trump talking about 100,000 deaths in the US -- if we only have 8,500 so far, how long will it take to reach 100,000? Does that mean we're in for this for a year? Looking at some detail, there were 92 more deaths today compared with yesterday. A month of days like that is 2,760. Divide that into 91,500 (the remaining number to reach 100,000), and you get 33 -- that's approaching 3 years!

Correction: One always has to understand the data you're looking at. I was watching the daily counts of infections and deaths on The Guardian website, and only later realized that, rather than showing counts from the day before, the counts were for that day, and since I look at the site early in the day, that's why the counts were so low. 

Guy de Maupassant

I read every day from my tablet, mostly things downloaded from Project Gutenberg.
Recently I downloaded Volume 2 of the Works of Guy de Maupassant. He was a prolific writer of short stories in the late 19th century.

In the volume I read, there is a uniform morbidness of the story lines, with a series of unhappy stories, typically involving men cheating on wives or vice versa, and consequently very unhappy marriages. There doesn't seem to be what we might consider a "normal" family life in any of them. If there is any positive thing about these stories is that they're mostly quite short.

De Maupassant himself had a troubled life, said to have taken hallucinogens quite a bit. He eventually developed tertiary syphilis (may have been congenital) and died in a lunatic asylum at age 42.

I don't plan to read any more of his works.

Voltaire

I've read several books from Project Gutenberg about Voltaire. Here was a remarkable man for his time, and for all time. He took it upon himself to castigate so much about the ruling classes and especially of religion in the late 18th century.

While in many ways he might see current societies as vindication of his lifelong efforts, he would even now see much to be done. In place of the institutions of religion and monarchy we now have the ever-increasing power of the vastly rich aristocracy trying to rule our lives, while making fortunes from us. We still have efforts to marginalize the poor and ignore their suffering.

We tear up this or that part of the world in the name of some pretended attack on a despotic government, then turn our backs on the destitute populace we create.

One looks around in vain for the re-emergence of some Voltaire, but where is he?

Some readings (the number refers to the PG index of the book):

The Friends of Voltaire, by S. G. Tallentyre                             56618

The life of Voltaire, by S. G. Tallentyre                                56476

Voltaire: A Sketch of his Life and Works,                                39124
 by J. M. Wheeler and G. W. Foote

To use these, enter into your browser www.gutenberg.or/ebooks/nnnnn where nnnnn is the number you see above. 

Personally, I know nothing about cookies used on this site. I certainly don't use any. 

eReadings - Sailing

In the Track of the Trades - Lewis Freeman (1920)
Through the South Seas with Jack London - Martin Johnson (1907-1909)
Round Cape Horn. Voyage of the Passenger Ship James W Paige from Maine to Califormia in the Year 1852 - J Lamson (1878)

The first of these tells the story of a novelist cruising on a private yacht, starting out at Pasadena, California, then on to Hawaii, then southward to the Polynesian islands. There is never any explanation of how the author came to be on this ship. This was a ship well-captained and the sailing proceeded more or less as planned. Rough weather certainly occurs during the voyage, but is well-handled, with repairs as needed along the way. Even at this point in the early 20th century, there was some uncertainty of safety in Polynesia, still some evidence of piracy by local islanders, but nothing untoward occurs, and the inhabitants of the various islands generally treat them well.

The second book, while similar in its course across the South Pacific, is a very different tale. The author was a young man in his twenties in Independence, Kansas, who answered an announcement that the author Jack London was going to take a cruise, and was looking for a crew. In spite of no experience whatsoever, he was taken on by Mr. London, initially as a cook, which he had no experience with either. He travels to California and stays with Mr. London and his wife while their ship is being fitted for the cruise. The original idea was that they were going to make a trip around the world. It seemed that no one on the ship had any significant oceanic cruising experience, and consequently various problems occurred along the way, crew members were replaced at various ports, and they were lucky to survive some of the weather they saw. Mr. London was apparently corresponding with a San Francisco newspaper with articles about their trip, and at one point they were presumed lost at sea when they hadn't been heard of for quite a while. Various ailments are acquired along the way, and eventually infections with yaws causes an end to the expedition in Australia.

The last book is a different sort of harrowing tale, showing how bad a cruise on a passenger ship could be in the mid-1800s. Early in the story we begin to learn how irascible the captain is, and matters don't get any better. He short-changes the passengers in regard to food, presumably trying to save money on the voyage. He gets into fights with some of his crew, and arguments with some of the passengers, the author included. Since this was before the Panama Canal existed, the only way to California was around Cape Horn, a very risky thing at the time. They manage to make it to California intact, and it's hard to imagine any of those passengers traveling by ship again.

Challenging my brain

I was thinking about it for awhile, and finally schedules aligned in way I could do it, but I've started a course in Basic Conversational Arabic. (!)

Not that I have any plans to visit some Arabic-speaking country, or even pass through. I wanted a challenge, to see if my brain could do this. I don't expect to become fluent, even if I take the next course (so far, the place where I am taking it only has 2).

Challenging it is! It starts with the fact that the Arabic alphabet is quite different from our own, though some sounds are similar. Next is that it's written right-to-left. Then there is the way that letters change their appearance depending on whether they are standing alone, the initial letter of a word, or a medial letter, or the final letter.

There are a few vowels, but to a large extent vowel sounds are implied between two consonants.

On a practical level, we're on two separate tracks at this stage (I've only had 2 classes), one being the learning of the alphabet and how to write it depending on its place in a word, and the other hearing and speaking Arabic, which currently relies almost entirely on phonetic spellings to help recognize and remember the sounds. Later, we'll drop the phonetic spellings, once we've sufficiently covered the Arabic alphabet.

eReadings - James Fenimore Cooper

• A Residence in France; with an excursion up the Rhine, and a second visit to Switzerland (1836)
• Recollections of Europe (1837)
• Homeward Bound, or, The Chase. (1871)
• Home as Found, Sequel to "Homeward Bound" (1871)

All of these books are available on Project Gutenberg, my favorite place to find free books I can download to my tablets. By the way, my current ebook reader of choice is Aldiko. Aside from having a very nice layout, good choice of font (and therefore good readability), I can use Aldiko with my Magic Catalog of Project Gutenberg E-Books, and have Aldiko automatically download my selections into its library.

The first two of these books I found to be very pleasant reading, since they represent narratives of Mr. Cooper's many years on the European continent. At this point he was obviously independently wealthy. I suppose that he may have done some writing during that time, but there is no mention of writing in his narratives, mainly his observations and various occurrences that happened during his travels.

It's interesting to read almost 200 years later how one traveled in those times. It doesn't seem that railroads existed as a mode of travel then, so travel came about with variably-sized carriages, pulled by horses and/or oxen. Most often one traveled by postilions, so that in other words, you traveled some distance, then had to stop for a change of horses. Often these places of horse-changing had taverns or inns, so you would catch a meal while you waited, and late in the day perhaps stay overnight. There was also sightseeing to be done, so depending on the location of your stop, you might stay a day or two and do some looking about at cathedrals and various ruins, and indeed, much of the books consist of comments on various examples of architecture.

He stayed with his family for some time in Paris, so there is much to learn about Paris of those days. This was, of course, a time not so long after the American Revolution and the subsequent war of 1812, but also after the French Revolution, its dissolution and reestablishment of the monarchy under King Louis Phillippe. Interestingly, Cooper found himself by various means able to attend various events of the upper classes, and even some which the King attended.

There is little mention of money or expenses in these narratives, but the style of living is interesting if not astonishing. Not only was there Cooper's family, but also various servants accompanied him. Thus he would rent out suites of rooms for months at a time, typically including all the furniture and other needs, with meals early in the day at these same locations, then dining at various restaurants during the day, and then often some dinner party in the evenings.

Something I particularly enjoyed while going through these books on his travels was Googling various cathedrals, or looking up locations on a Google Maps to follow their course as they traveled. In addition, one could look up historical events and personages of the time.

Cooper obviously saw himself as well-educated, and in particular found himself in a position to defend the United States from various misapprehensions of Europeans of the time, as well as go off on variable-length digressions on the nature of America and the principles by which it stood. One gets the impression that politics was a common topic of conversations with him wherever he went. These digressions sometimes get preachy and therefore tedious, but overall I found the narratives fascinating to read, especially since I don't think we ever were taught much about this time.

The Novels

Homeward Bound, and Home as Found turn out to be novels, centered around a fictitious family and other passengers making their way from England to the United States after a number of years spent in Europe. As I began these books I had thought they might be continuations of the narratives I had read, and considering their timing, we must presume that Cooper's experiences fed this fiction to a great extent.

In particular, the story revolves largely around an American family, the Effinghams -- Ned, his cousin John, and Ned's daughter Eve, along with Eve's French governess, Eve's nurse and Eve's handmaiden. There is also John Effingham's servant Mr. Monday. This group has spent quite a number of years in Europe, and finally returning home to America. Early in the story there are curious occurrences, such as two cabinmates named Mr. Sharp and Mr. Blunt, an English baron and other assorted characters.

This beginning strangeness is then followed by a series of events of intrigue, starting with an attempt to separate a newly-married couple based on some legal proceeding in England, thwarted by the intervention of the captain, John Truck. Some time after this is resolved the ship is pursued by an English naval sloop, obviously in pursuit. The defiant Captain Truck then leads the ship into the chase that forms much of the story.

There follows a series of seemingly increasing events of improbability to the point that it all becomes rather tedious, especially so because of the great verbosity of seemingly everyone on the ship. Not only are there extended discussions of the unfolding events, but much in the way of philosophical debate on all sorts of topics. While it reminded me of the European narratives, in a novel this becomes exceedingly tedious.

Somewhere in the middle of this first book I had recalled a title by Mark Twain about Cooper, and went to find it. The book is entitled, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, which is a litany on what Twain considers to be the errors of Cooper's story-telling, mainly revolving around the unreality of the story lines, and the unrealistic language in Cooper's novels such as The Pathfinder, and while I did not spend much time reading Twain's book, I could immediately understand this criticism. Every single person in Homeward Bound expounds with great length, detail, and literary precision, in a way that just doesn't ring true in terms of understanding these people as real human beings. I can imagine that there are differences in how we converse now and how they did then, but the verbosity and complexity of language in the book is nothing short of astounding. Surely no one talked like this then, regardless of how well-educated they were.

Taken as a whole, since the book Home as Found is a continuation of what happens with these same characters, the story line is also incredibly contrived, with coincidence after coincidence, surprise after surprise, so that it seems all too much like a soap opera, and not such a good one at that. Of some interest is that the fictional country home of the Effinghams, Templeton, NY, seems to be a stand-in for Cooperstown, where Cooper lived.

In the end, I can nonetheless recommend these first two books, since they offer a window into this 19th century world as it was then, and in particular some of Cooper's comments on politics and the state of America of the time are quite interesting seen from the perspective of the 21st century.

Approach to Neurologic Problems - Neuropathies

There is a local and perhaps nationwide shortage of neurologists, so what this means is that it takes a long time to get an appointment to see one. What that means is that primary care doctors are sometimes doing what they can to initially evaluate and sometimes manage neurologic problems. There are anyway a number of neurologic conditions that are quite common, things like headaches, neuropathy (or neuropathic symptoms), and weakness, as well as particular sorts of pain syndromes. I would also add that not all of these patients need to see a neurologist, mainly because there is little to do and management is often quite simple.

Let's start out in this series with the category of neuropathies, then focus on diabetic polyneuropathy. I would often see patients referred for electromyography (EMG) before they had seen a neurologist. A basic thing one could say about an EMG for neuropathy is that if you didn't know what was going on when you sent the patient for it, the test is unlikely to hand you the diagnosis on a platter. Given that situation, let's step back from this and go back to the patient.

Neuropathic symptoms
The two main functions of peripheral nerves are for sensation and movement, in particular muscular strength. Loss of sensory function would cause numbness or loss of feeling in the skin, but there are other kinds of sensation which for example have to do with feedback from joints to inform about arm, leg, and body position, and also feedback from muscles which allow for a sense of how much effort is being made, as well as the results of that effort.

Sensory nerve functions can be divided into two categories related to nerve fiber size. Very small and unmyelinated nerves carry signals related to pain and temperature. With loss of these functions, patients may say they injure themselves and don't realize it until they see they've cut themselves, or they have a hard time judging the temperature of bath water, especially with their feet. Myelinated nerve fibers carry signals related to some aspects of pain, but mainly light touch, vibration, and position sense. Loss in these areas may reduce fine motor manipulation such as is required for buttoning, or trying to pick out a particular object in a pocket based on feel. Loss of position sense impairs balance or coordinated activities, especially in the dark.

There is another kind of sensory nerve symptom which we can think of as either a nerve signal that gets messed up, so that normal stimulation is perceived as strange, maybe painful (called dysesthesias), or where there is a nerve sensation in the absence of stimulation, like pain or tingling (paresthesias).

Sensory nerve symptoms are quite common. We all have had at least brief episodes of tingling or numbness, maybe related to pressing on a nerve somewhere for too long.

Loss of motor function leads to loss of strength, or early on may mainly cause reduced stamina. Almost universally, patients will not see the difference. Strength has to do with the maximal force that can be generated from a group of muscles. Stamina has to do with how long you can apply that strength. There is another confounding issue which is important to consider, and this is sudden weakness which relates to pain from activity or effort.

Diabetic neuropathy as an example
This is probably the most common neuropathy most doctors will see. Diabetic patients are certainly aware of it, and at times I have had a hard time getting a patient to describe symptoms, since I keep getting responses like "I have [diabetic] neuropathy". What are your symptoms? "Neuropathy." Considering that diabetics can certainly have other kinds of neuropathy, this is important information. Start with the basic categories of location, kind of symptom, whether it occurs (mostly) at some time of day, any causative factors, any alleviating maneuvers.

It actually turns out that there are several different kinds of neuropathy. The most common is the symmetrical, distal neuropathy, where there is a progressive loss of nerve fibers, especially the small, unmyelinated fibers, so as expected there is loss of pain sensation, temperature sensation, and in some but not all there can be pain mostly or especially in the feet. Typically a burning character is described or acknowledged. I try to get patients to offer their own words for their descriptions before I suggest burning, sharp, dull, electric or some other type. There is a predilection for the burning to be worse or maybe only occur at night or bedtime. Often it is said to be especially bad after being on the feet or walking a lot during the day. Severe diabetic neuropathy may cause weakness, but much more often there is none or only loss of stamina.

Diabetics may also have focal neuropathies, often related to pressure. I consider diabetes a condition that sensitizes nerves to pressure, so you may see neuropathies at the elbow or knee (foot drop) more often in diabetics. Another much less common neuropathy is called diabetic amyotrophy. Although the name suggests only that there is muscle atrophy, it was shown some years ago that it is pathologically a kind of proximal nerve ischemia which produces most commonly proximal leg weakness, without prominent sensory symptoms. One of the happy days I had in practice was being able to "undiagnose" ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) in a patient who actually had diabetic amyotrophy. At least in some cases, improving blood sugar control can result in much recovery.

The exam features that are important to document would be condition of the skin (evidence of trauma/ulcers), signs of muscular atrophy in some particular distribution, including the intrinsic foot and hand muscles. We're not expecting to see focal or asymmetric features in typical diabetic polyneuropathy. Much is made of loss of reflexes, though areflexia tends to be a weak element. With the sensory exam, you want to evaluate a mix of large fiber and small fiber functions. The former would be tested with light touch with some light stimulus (I used an aesthesiometer in practice, though in diabetics this can be difficult to interpret), and also proprioception -- how do you test that?

Proprioception involves in part the sense of where joints are or whether they have moved. The simple way to test is to hold a limb steady with one hand, then very slightly move a particular joint while the patient looks away. Do a series of repeated small motions, asking for a response of "up" or "down" with each movement. If you don't watch the movement yourself, you can compare your own sense and direction of movement as your benchmark. There is a learning curve for the patient, so expect to throw out initial errors as the process is demonstrated. Start with distal joints in fingers or toes, then as needed (if there are a lot of errors) work up to proximal joints of digits, then maybe even wrists or ankles (most of the time you won't get that far). Without labelling it as malingering, there is a certain instance of factitious reporting. Severe loss of proprioception (as high as the wrists or ankles) should impair function. This is the purpose of the Romberg test, where you have a patient stand with feet together, first with eyes open, then eyes closed. Impaired ankle proprioception will result in a positive Romberg with eyes closed (falling over with eyes open is something else completely). If you also have them hold their arms out, you watch for arms or hands drifting in unusual ways (drifting down and pronating the forearms only is a subtle sign of weakness, typically of CNS origin).

What about vibration? Yes you can test this, but here is a confession: I stopped assessing vibratory sense with regularity many years ago. Why? The biggest problem was that so many people have gradual loss of vibration sense as they get older, and the second biggest problem was that if that is the only thing on exam, it's almost worthless diagnostically. The standard way I was taught is also I think flawed. This was to smack the tuning fork on something, then hold the bottom end on a joint and have the patient tell you when the vibration goes away. There are uncertainties here. The first is that you know that by the time the patient indicates absence of vibration, some brief delay occurs from when the sensation stopped to when they spoke. Secondly, with a continuous vibration, you are likely to have persistence of perception at various levels in the nerve pathway. Here is a better method: on, off. Smack the tuning fork, then use an on, off technique asking the patient to indicate each time if they feel the vibration. As the vibration naturally decays you get a sense of amplitude from your own hand to compare. Don't forget the null stimulus -- some patients will say yes in the absence of vibration!

Small fiber function is mainly tested with sense of pin prick. The best instrument for this is a straight pin, and you only need to lightly touch the skin; no need to make a hole in it. Start distally and work your way up the arm or leg, perhaps 2 or 3 times to verify some level at which the pin becomes sharp, and in some way document that level for future reference. Even when it is felt sharp distally, there still may be a gradient of feeling as you come up the leg in particular. Some patients are hypersensitive distally. You can also test temperature sense, though I tend not to be too religious about this when the pin sense findings are sensible (sic).

The point of the motor exam, muscle strength testing, is to combine some measure of amount of strength with the overall distribution of any weakness. Years ago I used to see examiners referring to strength somewhere being "50%", but what does that mean? There is a tried and true method, the MRC scale, in which strength is assigned a number from 0 to 5, 0 being no ability to even tighten a muscle, 5 being normal strength. 3 means that the muscle can operate with full range of motion against gravity, so for the quadriceps/knee extension evaluation would be tested with patient seated. Any small addition of resistance by the examiner does not allow full range of motion. 4 means that some resistance can be overcome, but strength is less than normal, and 2 means there is some motion against gravity, but less than full range. Grade 1 is some tightening of the muscle without motion. Typically you want to see if there is a mainly proximal distribution of weakness, or distal, and furthermore, when weakness is distal, it tends to be worse in the ankles than wrists in neuropathies. A proximal pattern of weakness suggests something other than diabetic polyneuropathy, and is a hallmark of the various demyelinating neuropathies. There are patients who will not give a steady strong effort, or will suddenly give away. This cannot be graded, though sometimes a brief strong effort is long enough to use for reasonably good grading of strength.

Something worth saying about this exam is that you get better at it the more times you do it. To develop and maintain a sense of what is normal for different ages, you should do parts of this in patients without neuropathy symptoms.

In summary of the history and exam features of diabetic polyneuropathy, if you see a diabetic patient with loss of pain sense and perhaps painfulness at nighttime, associated with some loss of pin sensation on exam, and preservation of light touch, proprioception (position sense), and little or no weakness, they have diabetic polyneuropathy. An EMG is not going to add anything, and typically for my own patients fitting this picture I don't even order an EMG.

Curiously, there are nondiabetics who also have this same picture. Some of them will develop diabetes later, but others never do. The approach is no different.

Management and some curious features
A newly diagnosed diabetic of course needs that managed as appropriate. Curiously, there doesn't seem to be any good correlation between the severity or duration of the diabetes and the severity of the associated neuropathy. There is not always a correlation between degree of control of sugars and the likelihood or severity of the neuropathy. One paradoxical thing I have seen is a worsening of neuropathic symptoms with better control of sugars. This is typically temporary and occurs when sugars have been severely out of control. I think this is because severe hyperglycemia has some anesthetic effect on nerve function. Even though there is this discrepancy of severity of diabetes and severity of neuropathy, I still believe that for the individual patient, they will do better with better sugar control, not the least because of the other various complications of diabetes.

I'm not going to discuss management of painful neuropathy, but save this for the next post. One thing to say in summary so far is that for the typical diabetic, there isn't such a great need for a neurologist, at least to make the diagnosis. One can save time and money by not getting EMGs routinely on these patients.

A Reminiscence

For some reason this memoir from a long time ago in a galaxy far away just occurred to me.

I grew up in a small town in Ohio, so small my graduating class was 25 persons. There was a special moment I had, back there in the pre-computer, pre-social media days. Our math teacher set up some advanced math classes for a few of us, maybe 6 people out of my senior class (or was it junior?), and we got exposed to things like different bases for numbers (our decimal system is "base 10", binary "base 2", but you can have whatever you want), some precalculus, some plane and spherical geometry. We just worked our way through the material, wherever it went.

In the latter part of the school year we took a test run by the GTCTM, the Greater Toledo Council of Teachers of Mathematics. I came in second out of that whole area. I never knew how many students took the test, but keep in mind this was advanced math, nerdville.

So I went to Toledo, received my recognition and a prize of a slide rule, a very fancy one (made by Keuffel & Esser as I recall). I had no idea what it was for, but when I went to college in those precalculator days had plenty of use for it later. I still have it somewhere.

I felt the honor of this, but it seems like it should have been a bigger deal to me, this small town guy besting out a lot of math students in the Toledo area (except one). At that time I suppose that there just wasn't such an interest in math (and maybe there still isn't).

A sad addendum
I found my slide rule, but it became immediately apparent that the case had gotten wet, since inside parts were rusted, and in particular, the slide with the hairline had become detached, and as far as I can tell can't be restored. 

Gregxit

It's an interesting and at times rather confusing process, this retiring from practice. I speak in my case of someone working for a health care corporation, so I didn't have to shut the practice down, just my own part of it.

As things went along, there was little in the way of spontaneous information coming my way, so I had to ask questions about my health insurance, my liability insurance, and so on. I found out quickly that everything stops at midnight on your last day. Since I'm over 65, I wasn't eligible for COBRA (except for dental care).

I already had Medicare Part A, since you must sign up for that, but struggled a bit to understand Part B. I registered on the Social Security website, but it takes a lot of fishing around to try to understand the process. I finally called the local SS office and received forms for my employer to fill out. This ensures I don't pay extra for signing up for Part B late.

One thing that working in rehab has taught me is that you need to have supplement insurance. You don't want a Medicare replacement policy, just a supplement. If you get a replacement policy, you hand over all the decision-making to these private companies. Here, our experience has been that Anthem and Humana can be a bit flaky with approvals, so I decided to go with a UnitedHealthcare supplement through AARP, which seems to behave pretty well. But you're not done yet, since there are standard Plan types that each company must offer. I chose Plan C, which has some additional bells and whistles like travel insurance. At this point you can sign up online, and there are links from the Social Security website for that.

I wasn't, and still am not, absolutely certain I won't go back and practice in some way, though an eye opener was learning that to pay for my current malpractice insurance would cost me $13,000 per year(!). There are some alternatives that might be more like $8-9,000, still a chunk of money, meaning I'd have to work that much just to break even. For now I just have a "volunteer" policy (costing $100), which says I can see patients as long as I don't charge them.

So now I have my coupon booklet for making my supplement premium payments, and Medicare tells me they will bill me for 3 months at a time. Once I sign up for Social Security, I understand they will take the premium for Part B out of that payment automatically.

The Social Security website is a pretty good one for finding out a lot of details, but still this was piecemeal work I had to do myself to fully understand what I needed to do when.

On to retirement!

The neurology of fireflies

Last year and this one, I've have a chance to sit out in the summer evenings in our sunroom and watch the day turn to dusk, then to dark. And then out come the fireflies this time of year.

What I've noticed is an interesting phenomenon, interesting to me anyway. We know that the male firefly is flashing its light to attract the female, but there is something in particular I've noticed about this. In the vast majority of cases, the firefly is on an upward flight while it flashes, and many times very close to a straight vertical flight. When you can see the firefly after the light goes out, there is an immediate downturn in the flight trajectory when the light goes off.

I suppose we might hypothesize that, well of course, the firefly "wants" to increase the likelihood of some female seeing him, and how better to do that than to fly upward? Or maybe flying upward is a sign of "male robustness" and therefore of a fitter male. Seems dubious to me, as if we're assigning a lot of cognitive activity to a firefly, or invoking Darwinism to explain this.

What I wonder about is whether there might be some more simple neural connection here. For example, does the neural activation of the lighting mechanism (release of the chemical) cause a spillover of neural activity that increases wing flapping and therefore upward flight? Or perhaps increasing wing activity is a necessary precursor to this. I know from experience of catching and putting fireflies in a bottle as a kid that they can light their lights without flying, but maybe when flying and lighting happen at the same time there is some neural synchrony...

I tried googling this, but not surprisingly this seems to be quite unmentioned or unnoticed.

This also reminds me of a former patient of mine who had ALS, and a very colorful man he was. One visit he told me he was sitting in his backyard one evening, and wondered if he should grab fireflies and eat them to try to counteract the disease. We laughed about it, but then a few days later he mailed me a copy of a newspaper report indicating that scientists were using fireflies in order to try to understand some things about the human nervous system.

The time has come, the walrus said...

As I was saying a couple of years ago, I was contemplating retirement, and now I've decided. It will be this year, a few months from now.

It wasn't exactly a difficult decision when I finally came to it. The main thing was that I was enjoying medical practice less and less, finding the relief of the weekends too short, and the dread of the coming week on a Sunday more and more.

For the short term, I'll have plenty to do, with various things around the house to catch up on. In the longer term, there is some uncertainty, but I look forward to being away from set schedules, all the various messages demanding answers, and so on.

People ask me if we'll be traveling a lot, but we've traveled quite a bit over the years, so nothing out of the ordinary is planned. Occasionally I have seen something about some trip that might last a couple of weeks that formerly I would never have considered, so maybe that will change.

Perhaps I'll find more time for this blog.

eReadings 20 -- World War I

No, I didn't stop reading since the last eReadings post. I've actually read a LOT of things since then. Of course, I'm talking about on my Kindle, not other reading, of which I do a lot also.

What I fell or drifted into in the last year or so was a series of books about World War I, written at the time. What follows is a somewhat ordered list of what I have read so far.

My Four Years in Germany
James W Gerard

Mr. Gerard was appointed the US ambassador to Germany in 2013, before there was any inkling of war breaking out. To be sure, there was a lot of militarism in the world, especially in Germany.

This is a personal account of his time there, which of course ended when the US declared war on Germany. He describes in great detail the structure and operation of the Kaiser's court, and of Germany in general. Once war was finally underway, he became the representative for Britain and several other countries.

This was very interesting to get this insider's view of the prelude and beginning of the war.

From October to Brest-Letovsk
Leon Trotsky

This is Trotsky's account of the Russian revolution, going on of course as Russia was involved in World War I. As the communists come to power, they have more pressing things to do, and sue the Germans for peace.

What I found interesting was how rapidly Lenin and his followers adopted totalitarianism, control of the press, and created a ruling group. There was never any plan to give any real power to the proletariat, who were supposedly those for whom the revolution was carried out. An interesting item in the negotiations with Germany was that both sides formally agreed there would be no independent Ukraine.

What is Coming? A Forecast of Things After the War
H. G. Wells
Wells describes himself as a futurist, and aside from the various novels we are more commonly aware of, he also published works describing things as they were and trying to predict where they were going. This book was written as WWI was being waged, and as such contains some interesting insights.

He anticipated that Germany would lose the war, though how confident he was at the time is hard to gauge. He nonetheless expected that Germany would not be seriously damaged by this war, and would be able to wage war again, and thus felt an important outcome should be removing the Kaiser from power. He was a strong advocate of a world government and saw that England needed to reach out to learn more about other important countries. At a time before the Russian revolution, he was suggesting that England should become closer to Russia, even teaching Russian in English schools.

There is therefore a lot of his predictions which were quite off base, but considering they were written in 1914, very interesting in that context.

Mille et un jours en prison à Berlin
Henri Severin Beland
Ok, showing off a bit. This book is in French (1001 Days in Prison in Berlin). I've spent some time with my Kindle working on my French (e.g., simultaneously going through Candide by Voltaire in French along with its English translation), and a couple of years ago translated a French book on Scribus to English at the flossmanuals.net site. Somehow I was able to read this book pretty comfortably (with the occasional help from Google Translate), perhaps because this is a chronicle rather than a novel.

This is the story of a French Canadian physician, who was travelling through Belgium as WWI broke out. Initially he offered his services to a local hospital as it began to treat war casualties. As conditions worsened with the German occupation he tried to be allowed to travel to Holland so that he could go back home. The Germans initially sounded like they might acquiesce, but eventually higher ups had him sent to detention in Berlin, in a former prison, which by then had a number of people from various countries.

Repeated petitions for release to return home were ignored, though he did manage to get some privileges due to the fact that he assisted the prison's physician in taking care not only of the other prisoners, but also the German soldiers who worked there.

Mr. Britling Sees It Through
H.G. Wells
When I started this one, I had no idea that it would have anything to do with the war. After some preliminary chapters describing Mr. Britling as an essayist, perhaps something like Wells was himself, suddenly the war is upon Britain.

Mr. Britling was too old to fight in this war himself, but there are close friends and his son who do get involved.

Much of the book purports to be his ruminations about the possibility of war, the onset of war, and its conduct plus the effect on British society. As such, his ruminations seem entirely too wordy to be believable even for someone of high intellect.

Aside from this, it offers an interesting glimpse of wartime in England from the perspective of those not directly involved with it, yet having to deal with a variety of the war's effects and side effects.

Exit Strategy

It wasn't that long ago that I honestly told people that I had no idea when I might retire.

Somehow things have changed. In some future posts I would like to explain this a bit, but let's just for the time being say that I'm in the process of finding a way to stop doing what I'm doing as a physician.

My "Uncle Doc", my grandmother's brother, some years ago told me that he "retired too soon." This coming from a man who retired from family practice at 84yo. But what he meant was that he had no exit strategy. He didn't take the time, take the bother to develop some outside interests, some idea of what he was going to do when he retired. So when he retired, he spent his days, first of all stopping by the office where he used to practice to chat to his former staff, then he'd swing over to the hospital he used to attend at and sit in the doctors lounge and chat with colleagues.

I can't see myself doing that. Sure, I may stop and visit at times, but that's not going to define my days, and from his experience it's just as well.  He died not long after that visit I had with him.

I don't find medicine as envigorating as it once was. Yes, I enjoy my time in the hospital, facing some unknown issue, getting a history, doing an exam, putting together some hypothesis about what's going on, what to do about it. But I am more bothered by episodic interruptions, by getting the names of new consultations in the mornings. Not that I see things I don't know what to do. I've seen so much it all just happens now, the differential diagnosis, testing, empiric and other treatments. And it's not boring.

But still this dread of having to go in every day, not knowing when the next new thing is coming. I think it's time to look for the exit from this.

Getting back to my uncle, what's next? I have a lot of interests. Many of them involve computers. I have this blog, but the time since my last post says a lot about how invested I am in this. I help with the development of Scribus, an open source software program. My job is mostly documentation.

I'm thinking I need to carve something else out. Maybe something I haven't done before, or maybe only dabbled in. I have some interest in, but not necessarily a lot of faith in the various things you find out there for "preventing dementia." Do these things work or just identify people who were low risk in the first place?

But I like learning new things anyway, so this will probably be part of my strategy. I like to travel, and no doubt will continue that to some degree, but I also know that travel is irritating in various ways, so I don't see spending a lot of time on that. Maybe I can now take some trip that might last a couple of weeks or more, something I haven't ever considered in the past. You take two weeks off work and the mountain that piled up while you were gone is amazing.

There are any one of a number of charitable things I could do in some way related to medicine, but right now I just don't see these as options. Maybe I just need some time away to see their appeal.

So here I am, still at the beginning or the middle of this. The reason I'm blogging about it is that I think it's true that one of the ways of working through a dilemma is to write down your thoughts about it. The process of turning a lot of competing, well- and ill-formed ideas into something you can understand yourself begins with making some coherent piece that lays it all out so you can create and reread it later.

Further notes on the Nexus 7

Battery Life
I've read some articles suggesting a battery life of about 11.5 hrs for the Nexus 7. This is of course with continuous usage, but this isn't how I need to or actually do use mine.

Typically I shut it down at night, since I don't use it then, and even during the day I am mostly leaving it in suspend, then periodically using it -- I turn it on about 7:30 in the morning, and then shut it down at about 8-9 pm. I'm not streaming video or music, not doing a lot of emailing. I find I can easily use it for 2 days without recharging, and even at the end of the second day there is still 30% or so of the charge left. So this means a typical day runs about 30-40% of the battery down.

Keyboard
The external keyboard I bought is mostly unused, but this doesn't mean I wish I hadn't bought it. When I got my new "black bag", I was carrying the keyboard in it, but space was a bit cramped, and after I noted that I rarely needed it, thanks to the TouchPal soft keyboard, I took it out, so my black bag is that much lighter -- not a lot, but clearly noticeable.

Jota+
I was on the verge of buying the Pro upgrade of Jota+ (simple text editor), but then I saw that the ONLY benefit is being able to load more than 2 files. I'd rather fish around for more feature-full editors, but in the meantime, 2 files at a time is adequate.