The worst experience I ever had was after my accident that wiped out my memory. I was on the operating table for eight hours without anaesthetic, because it was a head injury and they were sewing my lip together. I passed out from that. Then they spent 4 hours sewing the lip together, and four hours filling the massive hole in my head. They used cat gut or something like that to replace the flesh that was torn out and then sewed me up. The head scar was bright red for three years, but the lip was pretty good within weeks.

One day when I was at work and scratching my forehead a strand of gut fell out. So I asked one of the directors if I could go to hospital? I was asked why? It only took the lifting of my hair line to expose my forehead to get permission. It was visible from twenty feet away so pretty gruesome. In A&E I used the same lift hair to get through triage and the surgeon was about and was very pleased with the out come. My lip scar was almost invisible. A quick snip and a plaster was all that was needed to patch up the wound.

Thanks for the kind words guys. Am back at work. I had problems with weeing. If I didn't push hard enough, it wouldn't come out but when it did come out, it was painful. Spent Monday learning how to control the bladder so the flow was enough to come out but still control the pain. Yesterday was a bit better. Constipation has eased and as a result my general abdominal pains have settled. The pain on urination has pretty much gone but I'm still hesitant to go full flow.


As per local anaesthetic, the pain fibres are the smallest/narrowest and hence are affected quickly by an anaesthetic agent. Touch fibres are thicker and take longer to respond. Hence why you could feel movement but no pain.


I am honestly surprised they continued. I would have stopped and given more local anaesthetic. Lack of adequate anaesthesia can have far reaching consequences and some people have had post-traumatic stress disorder type symptoms afterwards.


Have you had blood tests and an endoscopy for coeliacs? Gold standard in the UK is a biopsy. However, some people are wheat intolerant and feel better without wheat products. Other people just end up with a healthier diet and think they are wheat/lactose intolerant when they aren't.

I am going back in a couple of weeks for more tests - first blood work-up and some other "awake" tests, I also have to take 3 stool samples over 3 days, before I go back.

Then in February, I go in for colonoscopy under anesthetic. I'm hoping my other half can arrange the morning off to drive me back home afterwards, otherwise it will be an expensive taxi ride.

This was an interesting read:
http://io9.com/5968164/why-you-should-probably-stop-eating-wheat

It just kicked off my Goldacre Reflex.

I call [LIFTED] on that article. Humans have been cultivating wheat for 10,000 years. The difference is whereas what we would eat would be made from coarse ground wheat, we now eat refined wheat loaded with sugar.


If I remember my A-level Biology correctly, starch consists of amylose and amylopectin. Both are found in wheat, rice, potatoes - staple foods. Isn't it just a miraculous coincidence we have amylase secreted not just by the pancreas but also the salivary glands! It's almost as though we're designed to digest starch. Seriously - get a piece of bread and keep chewing it - you will begin to taste its sweetness as you breakdown the starch into glucose. This is biological efficiency and not some monstrous/disasterous thing.


As long as they're properly cooked, the lectins are removed from the food.


Two things here: phytates are reduced by cooked, and it would only lead to anaemia and osteoporosis if you solely lived on phytate containing foods.

As I stated originally, the problem is the modernisation of wheat. Instead of coarse ground breads, we now consume wheat in the form of white bread, pizzas, pastas, doughnuts, cakes etc. If wheat was such a bad thing, then why do people in rural areas in Asian countries not develop heart disease and diabetes. Yet they all seem to when they migrate to Western countries?

I remember being told a long time ago that Wheat and Dairy were the cause of many ailments. If you look east to where they have only recently been added to the local diet, they are seeing all kinds of medical issues previously only common the west.

The idea you can account for those kind of health shifts and societal changes to the introduction of a single food class is.. fanciful, at best. There's just way too many degrees of freedom to control for.

The only study I've seen in that area that was anything like scientifically valid was the study of the introduction of refined sugar products into the inuit communities in Alaska. There you're talking about a very limited,isolated community where you can assess the effect of several changes at one time because the community is otherwise almost geologically stable. You simply can't do that in a population the size of a large country, let alone a continent.

Jon

It's more than that though, it's the strains of wheat we're eating, which are behaving in ways we're not evolved to cope with yet.
If we went back to the more traditional grains we've been eating for thousands of years, I doubt if there'd be much of an issue. The rise of various pest resistant crops and wheat intolerance does seem, at first glance, to make sense.



The Inuit diet is practically unique though, so extrapolating any data from that study across the wider population is just as pointless, no?

I wasn't extrapolating from it, I was using it as an example of the how unusual the conditions required to get a diet study that actually gives scientifically valid results are.

The thing, well one of the things, with statistics is the bigger the populations you choose the smaller the change you need before it becomes 'statistically significant'. Our statistical machines assume that large populations change less and that random chance is less of a factor. Essentially, population size is an inertia factor, so almost any change in a big enough population can appear to be significant of something or other. A change which in a population of 100,000 would be dismissed as random chance is seen as 'provably significant' when you look at a population of a million.
The really hard science is the next bit - figuring out which change in conditions has caused which portion of the change you see. The pie graph of causation, as it were. There are very few statistical tools that will do that for you reliably on very large populations and even then only in certain circumstances. This is why a lot of science is actually about control groups and subject populations - it's about eliminating extraneous variables to make that latter part of the work as easy and as verifiable as possible, while keeping the sample size in the 'goldlicks zone' for the statistical devices you have available.

Dealing with the populations of nations is almost the worse possible circumstances of this - you have a 'test' where almost any change at all is going to come out as significant due to the way the maths works but you have almost no tools to establish control mechanisms and limit the number of variables in the sample. The best you can hope for is a 'natural control' - a portion of the population which hasn't been exposed to the specific change you're interested in studying which allows you to do reasonable comparative analysis.

This is why most real scientists scoff at the notions of conspiracy theories of population control and stuff like the Foundation trilogy's pyschohistory. We pretty much can't tell with any certainty yet why any population bigger than say a city does anything, let alone be able to change or control it, in anything other than the most clumsy and obvious way.

Basically put, if someone tells you that a certain specific change has affected the population of a country, let alone a continent, be sceptical. It's possible to show it under certain conditions but those conditions are rare. It may be what they are telling you is actually right but proving or disproving it is pretty much beyond our current capabilities as scientists/sociologists. At best you're getting what people think is the case, which may be an educated guess but is still subject to all sorts of biases.

I conducted a test of sorts this evening.
I ordered a small Domino's pizza, with the gluten free base.
I did not experience the usual pizza bloat that comes with such gluttony.
But my lord, that base was terrible.
I think I'd rather have ordered the regular base and eaten less of it in fact, but that would've meant binning some.

Could you not have ordered a small pizza instead of a regular one?

It was a small, 6 slice pizza. They don't do a gluten free base in any other size.

Damn, now I want pizza.

I think that is the point. The article did say that modern wheats are different from what we are used to.