Wonderful Water

The view from my office window this morning looked more like mid-winter than spring!  Oh, well. Life at 7000 feet.  As I watched the snow fall, I thought again about the marvelous molecule water. In the winter when plants are dormant, it changes from a fluid to a solid that builds up as snow on the mountains. The snow is white and reflects the sun’s heat remaining in storage as the days get longer before turning back to useful fluid as the weather warms.   It’s perfect for our world of cold winters and warm summers.  It also expands when it freezes thus helping break up solids such as rock.

Wonderful water! It makes up over 80% of our body.  We drink it, boil it, run it, dump it, steam it, store it.  We need it!  Some suggestions about water and your health:

1.      Drink enough that when you go to the bathroom your urine is light colored. If your urine is dark, your kidneys are telling you you’re not drinking enough. Regardless of the time of year or the activity, this is a pretty good way to tell if you’re getting enough water. (This may not apply if you’re taking a diuretic for your heart or blood pressure – ask your doctor).

2.      Running a cool mist humidifier will help if you’ve got a cold, congestion or extra dry mouth at night. It will also help relieve symptoms of eczema (dry itchy skin).

3.      If you cut yourself – run the wound in tap water for 2-3 minutes. Studies show tap water rinsing is as good, if not better, than the rinsing we do with sterile water here in the clinic. I think it’s because of the volume of water you can move through a wound with it under a tap.

For those who like a lot of water – ski it, swim it, dive it, boat it – stay close to your life jacket and don’t forget how much kids love water!  Keep a close eye on those children when water is near.  Here’s looking forward to summer!

Water on Boulder Mountain

Blood Pressure: Why All the Fuss?

Blood pressure.   You hear it talked about a lot.  But why all the fuss?  If I feel fine, why should I worry? 

Blood pressure is the pressure generated inside your arteries from the beating heart.  The top number is the pressure generated when the heart contracts, and the bottom number is the pressure that remains between beats.  Low blood pressure causes weakness and dizziness and usually prompts a visit to the clinic.  High blood pressure, also know as hypertension, usually causes no symptoms.  Even though the blood vessels are under extra pressure and the heart has to work harder, the body compensates and we go about our normal lives.  However, the added work on the arteries and heart over the years increases the risk of heart attack, congestive heart failure, stroke, and kidney failure.  If your top number is running consistently over 140 and/or the bottom over 90, we need to talk.  If you don’t know where your blood pressure normally runs, please have it checked. Stay healthy!

Thousand Lake Mountain

Illness in the Otherwise Young and Healthy

Most of us realize if we live long enough our health will eventually fail. We can’t expect to maintain the health we enjoyed in our 20’s and 30’s into 80’s.  However, contrary to the opinion of my children, in my 50’s I still consider myself very young and I’m planning on decades of good health.  I believe this is a common optimism.  

But then disquieting events occur that remind me of my vulnerability.  Kirby Puckett, a famous baseball player about my age dies suddenly.  The non-smoking wife of Christopher Reeves loses her fight with lung cancer at age 44.  Closer to home, I see patients with really no risk factors diagnosed with cancer or suffering untimely heart attacks or strokes, diseases modern medicine is supposed to be helping prevent or postpone until the sunset of a long and happy life.  If I, a doctor who works around unexpected illness on a daily basis find this unsettling, I imagine many of you feel it even more acutely.  I wish to share my observations and offer some suggestions for the “young and healthy” who feel uncertain about their future.

Illness, injury and death are as much a part of our existence as birth, vigor and joy.  Despite its many advances, medicine is a “practice” that will ever be working toward, but never attaining perfection.  The variables of genes, genetics and environment are impossible to control or perfectly predict. Despite the many and wonderful advances made in medicine over the past one hundred years, we’ve only just begun to understand the complexities of physiology and disease.  I’m amazed at how much our understanding has changed just in the past 10 years!  But we’ve a long way to go. 

Some suggestions.  Have faith in modern medicine, but don’t “medicalize” your life.  Follow recommended health screening guidelines, take medications when prescribed, and return for indicated follow-up.  Seek medical care when ill or concerned, follow treatment plans when given, and when a cure can’t be found, move on with life and try to do the best you can.  Paradoxically, worrying about possible illness may well bring on the diseases you fear.  Unless already being treated for a chronic disease, the less you think about your doctor the better.  Health care professionals will do all they can, but remember, in most cases what you can do for your health is much more than we can do for you.  Eat right, exercise, lose that weight, stop smoking and get the rest you need; be involved with life and find joy every day!  Too much worry about tomorrow can rob you of the joy of today.  Yes, be aware of your risk factors for disease and do what you can to modify and reduce these, but ultimately, no one can predict what tomorrow will bring.  Live well today and tomorrow will be the best it possibly can. 

Horseshoe Canyon on a beautiful fall day