HEADLINES [click on headline to view story]:

The Doctor's Consultation

Agony Column

Camera Class by Snapshot

Dogs - Man’s best friend

Money Matters

Life in the Laugh Lane

The Doctor's Consultation: How safe are “natural” remedies?

Unfortunately, despite all the advances in medicine, it is still somewhat of an inexact ‘science’. We do not have the cures for all ailments, in fact far from it. But we have not given up. We continue to try, to experiment and, most importantly, to test. Regular readers of this column will know that I have mentioned the acronym EBM many times. This stands for “Evidence Based Medicine” and is a key factor in modern medicine. It just means we test until we have the evidence that any drug or treatment really does work. This all takes time, as the evidence cannot just hang on one person who got better. It required huge series, across the globe.

However, as patients, or sufferers of any complaint, we want that “cure” right now! Consequently, with all medical conditions where we cannot give the patient the “wonder drug” there is then a tendency for them to try something else, anything else, hoping for the relief that conventional medicine has not promised or delivered. For the musculo-skeletal conditions, for example, the “alternatives” are multiple, from magnets to mussels from New Zealand. But do they really work?

The problem with the non-pharmaceutical mainline pills and potions industry is in unbiased scientific testing. The tablets that Roche, Parke-Davis, Bayer and all that lot produce are rigorously and vigorously tested. Not only do the drug companies have to show that their pills actually work, but they also have to show what side effects they can produce and whether or not they interact with other pills and potions to make explosive mixtures. The “alternative” pill and potion manufacturers have not had the same degree of scientific scrutiny.

There are those who will claim that because the pills come from plants, that the ingredients are then “natural” and therefore OK for us humans. This is pseudo-scientific nonsense. Extracts of plants and herbs are chemicals – and some chemicals can kill, that is why wild animals can die after eating the wrong plants. So can you!

So let us look at a few of the alternative treatments and analyse just whether they are indeed efficacious. Willow Bark is one that is used for arthritis, because it was imagined that since the tree grew in damp environments, and arthritis was thought to be caused by “damp” then treatment with the bark was “logical”. The herbalists got the right answer, however, no matter how wrong the reasons! Willow Bark does have an effect because it contains salicylates – more commonly known these days as aspirin! Other “natural” sources of aspirin include Poplar tree bark, Black cohosh (a North Ame-rican plant), pansies, violets and meadowsweet. Aspirin works!

Have you heard of Devil’s Claw? This South African plant has been studied to see if it has any anti-inflammatory action in arthritis. The small studies that have been done show no effect, but it is an analgesic (pain killer), so those people with arthritis do feel better when they take it. In fact, demand is now outstripping supply – but they would do just as well with a strip of paracetamol tablets. And cheaper too!

Another of the well touted treatments for arthritis is the green lipped mussel. According to the pundits, this form of treatment has had numerous clinical trials,
and unfortunately, the same number of clinical failures! However, I believe they are quite nice steamed with garlic, ginger and shallots!

One other niggling problem with the “natural” therapies is that for musculo-skeletal problems, most of which are of a long standing chronic nature, even less scientific work has been done to see what happens when you take these medications for a protracted period of time. Until long term safety has been ascertained, I would counsel caution, and beware mixing pharmaceutical drugs and over the counter “alternatives”!

Reactions to pharmaceutical items are still reasonably rare and well docu-mented. I cannot say the same for the “natural” remedies.

Agony Column

Camera Class:  Better mousetraps do not guarantee better pictures

by Harry Flashman

Over the past decade, we have become very aware of technological advances. Hands up all those who have just ‘had’ to buy the latest mobile phone, even though all it does is makes calls and takes calls, when you boil it all down. The rest is technological whizzbangery.

It is the same with cameras. All the way through history, man has been trying to build a better mousetrap. Photographically this is still the case. From the old box brownie of 70 years ago, we now have the all singing, all dancing, electronic marvels of today. Cameras that will even “think” for you and work out the required shutter speeds for the kind of shot you are going to take. With these sorts of mousetraps we should all be wonderful award winning photographers. Unfortunately we are not.

Yet, every month some camera manufacturer is releasing yet another ‘break-through’ technological mousetrap marvel. Take for example, the Konica Minolta DiMAGE X1. This is a digital camera with around eight megapixels, but has no focus assist lamp to allow placement of the subject matter in low light situations. All the technology, and hit or miss pictures!

Getting back to why technology doesn’t make instant great photographers. The reason for this is simple. While the modern camera can get the exposure close enough and the correct shutter speed for the type of shot, it cannot arrange the items to be photographed in the correct position. Nor can the camera position itself in the right place relative to the subjects to be photographed.

To illustrate what I mean, take a look at the two shots this week. The brief is to photograph someone on their trip to Thailand, and show them in front of the hotel they stayed at. Now I actually see this shot being taken every day, and every day the photographer on holidays, complete with shiny new mousetrap, takes the left hand side photograph and ends up with a tiny person in front of the large hotel. This was not the shot the photographer had in his or her mind - that shot is the one on the right. One of the principal “rules” of photography is to remember just who or what is the “hero” in the shot. This is one (of the many) things the better mousetrap does not know. It is not a mind reader. You have to arrange the items and compose the shot to make the subject the hero.

With these types of “people in front of a special place” shots first you have to compose the picture by moving the camera into place so that you have all you want of the special building, for example. Having done that, now put your subject in front of the camera and you will instantly note that the person (if human) will immediately move backwards to be closer to the building, almost as if making sure of ruining the shot for you, before you begin! What you now have to do is to look through the viewfinder and call the person forward till they fill at least half of the viewfinder. Even go for a waist-up view to get the person even larger in the photograph if you wish.

Another “rule” that I have to continually have to tell new photographers is
the “Walk several yards (metres) closer” approach. More good shots are rendered useless by being too far away from the camera, than by being too close to the lens.

While it would be nice if the better mousetrap could ring a bell and tell you that you are too far away - it’s electronic “brain” isn’t that good yet. You have to use yours. That is one reason why good photographers will never be replaced by better mousetraps. The technology may belong to the camera, but the “eye” is yours. Just remember to use it!

Dogs - Man’s best friend: General Health Care: External parasites, the most common ones

Nienke Parma

Healthy animals have a natural resistance against parasites. The body’s acid-alkaline balance is such that it doesn’t make a good home for viruses, germs, or other parasitic infestations. Therefore, when the animal shows any illnesses caused by parasites, especially when it is recurring, it’s advisable first to question the cause of it’s weakened immune system. Often an insufficient diet is at the bottom of it, like cheap commercial pet food.

The common exto-parasites can be divided in surface-dwelling parasites which can be seen with the naked eye like fleas, lice and ticks, a fungi called ringworm, and those that live under the skin-surface: sarcoptic and demodectic mange mites.

Fleas are black-brown blood-sucking insects that rapidly moves through the animal’s fur. If there are only one or a few fleas it’s hard to find them. Their black, sand-like droppings indicates their presence. Cats, street and stray dogs can suffer severe flea infestation.

Lice, much less common, are slow moving and are light-colored. They are found particularly on the earflaps, but can spread all over the body. There are two kinds of lice: biting lice that feed on skin scales and blood-sucking lice.

Ticks are usually found around the head, neck, ears or feet, but also on other body parts. Two main kinds of ticks can be distinguished: the ones with a flat ‘hard’ protective shield or plate on the back and more round ones with a ‘soft’ shield. The latter are greyish of color and the hard shielded ones are brown. It’s the female that can swell to the size of a pea when feeding on the host. Ticks thrive very well in hot and humid climate and, although, not so common on cats as they groom themselves well, to dogs they can be a real plague.

Ringworm is one of the most common fungal diseases of dogs and cats and highly contagious, also to people. It is not a worm, but a plantlike growth that lives on the most superficial outer layers of the skin and the nails. Diagnosis can be done through microscope examination of skin scrap-ings, fungal cultures or under an ultra-violet lamp where the affected skin will glow green.

Mites are microscopic little insects. Sarcoptic mange or scabies is another highly contagious disease that also can be transmitted to people. The mites are spider-like insects that burrow tunnels a few millimeters under the kin. Most dogs get the Demodectic mange mite early in life from their mothers. They live in the hair follicles and look a bit like a little spider with a worm-like body.

For more information on pet’s health, dog and cat boarding, dog training
and behavior please visit www.luckydogs.info or contact LuckyDogs: 0 9997 8146.

Money Matters:  Early winter is here (Part 3)

Alan Hall
MBMG International Ltd.

Last week we wrote that, armed with flawed research, Alan Greenspan told a European bankers conference in Frankfurt that, “Current account deficits, even large ones, have been defused without significant consequences, (but) we cannot become complacent.” When you see all this, the question has to be asked about American policy, how on earth can you rely on a Gaelic Greco-Iberian financial model for American and global economic salvation?

The point is that at some stage the available liquidity to provide this funding to the US will be exceeded by demand, unless of course the available credit is reduced before that.

According to Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley, “The enormous US trade deficit should be a wake-up call to America and the rest of the world. It is a direct manifestation of a lopsided global economy that remains biased toward unprecedented external imbalances. As long as the US continues to live well beyond its means and as long as the rest of the world fails to live up to its means, this seemingly chronic condition will only get worse. The imperatives of global rebalancing are reaching a flashpoint.”

That is quite tame in comparison to the warning issued by Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration Paul Craig Roberts - “The dollar’s value and status as reserve currency cannot forever stand the trade and budget deficits that are now part and parcel of America’s economic policy. Unless there are major changes soon, America’s economic future is a third world work force
with a banana democracy’s worthless currency.”

Robert Rubin forecasted some time ago that one of the first symptoms of impending doom would be an interest rate spike. In the last 12 months that has already substantially taken place. Another harbinger would be the widespread selling of US$ assets by creditor nations (if you lend money to the US government you do so by buying Treasury Bills - effectively fixed-interest bearing loans redeemable at a future point). Therefore, coun-tries that have been lending money to the US have been “buying” US dollars in the process. If they started selling dollars that would indicate that they were reaching the point where they were prepared to say “enough is enough”.

Australia and New Zealand have already diversified their foreign currency reserves from just US$. “By selling U.S. dollars, securities and assets denominated in the U.S. currency, Russia is diversifying its currency reserves, which is in line with the policy pursued by the Central Bank of Russia,” Andrei Illarionov, adviser to the Russian president on economic problems, told Itar-Tass News Agency in November last year.

In February this year it was reported that Korea’s central bank will diversify its currency reserves and, according to The Financial Times, 29 out of 56 central banks surveyed by Central Banking Publications Ltd., a London- based publisher, between September and December 2004 said they had reduced exposure to the dollar. On our doorstep, even the Bank of Thailand has announced that it’s considering reducing the proportion of its $50 billion reserves held in dollars from 80 percent to 50 percent.

More importantly, Japan is also at the point where it looks likely to start selling rather than buying US$ denominated assets. The big news here may be China’s move of the yuan from a dollar peg to a currency basket - this would reinforce estimates by Lehman Brothers that the Chinese Central Bank started to sell dollar assets around the end of the first quarter of this year (they’d actually let slip their intention to think about dumping some of their 515 Bn greenbacks as early as the Davos World Economic Forum last year).

Not only might it no longer be so attractive to these nations to fund the US deficit - as the accumulated debt gets bigger and bigger then the proportion of the new debt that is required to service existing interest commitments gets larger and the proportion available to spend reduces. This makes additional lending less attractive to Asian exporters who have really treated the US as a client in what Saul Eslake of ANZ calls “the greatest vendor financing operation that the world has seen”.

Not only that, the debt burden in the US has already reduced the effectiveness of this from the point of view of their creditors and it may be that the economic performance of the likes of China is starting to suffer. If so, they would be less able as well as less willing to keep the funding going as of right now.

Behind the facade of its export sector, China’s domestic demand has already star-
ted to slow. Credit demand is down, direct foreign investment growth has slowed, and import demand growth is now flat. Credit and investment have been key drivers of China’s growth – the current slowdown in both cannot be dismissed. It would seem that the Chinese economy is slowing down. This would end Chinese funding for the US deficit and spark the US recession that we fear.

So from the point of view simply of the sustainability of the current levels of
credit needed to keep the US economy afloat, we think that you should be worried. Very worried. However, that is only the thin end of the wedge. We’ll cover more of it next week.

The above data and research was compiled from sources believed to be reliable. However, neither MBMG International Ltd nor its officers can accept any liability for any errors or omissions in the above article nor bear any responsibility for any losses achieved as a result of any actions taken or not taken as a consequence of reading the above article. For more information please contact Alan Hall on alan@mbmg-international.com

Life in the Laugh Lane: The Stupidest Thing I’ve Ever Done

by Scott Jones

Standing half-naked, half-awake in my half-outside kitchen, I suddenly hear and feel “Splat!” as a large tree frog leaps onto my upper arm and sticks there. (If this had happened to my daughter, she’d have let out an operatic scream shattering every window in the bungalow and expired right on the spot.) After hanging out for a minute, it leaps across the room onto the wall. I’d love to have this skill: jump into a party naked, then spring onto the 40th story of the next building just as the police arrive. The smaller frog in the photo lands on my foot, apparently escaping from the jaws of the neighborhood cats and hangs on for life as I walk around my deck. Semi-chewed but safe from its savage hunters, it dies peacefully 20 minutes later, clinging to the foot of a giant. Butterflies and bees land on my shoulder. Two toads continually hide in my jacket hoping I’ll take them into town for a night out.

Wild, cold-blooded creatures have always had an attraction to me which may explain my marriage to my ex-wife. I relish intimate contact with my woodland friends but in the swamps of Avery Island, Louisiana, I hope I learned my lesson while doing the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

Home of the famed Tabasco Sauce gardens and factory, Avery Island is lush and exotic, stocked with birds, plants and animals from around the world including a plethora of alligators, many more than three meters long. A dock-type boardwalk stretches across a remote pond, some 20 centimeters above the water. No railings, no signs, no warnings. As we walk out, several alligators, about as long as I am tall, slip silently towards us from both sides and pause a meter from the boardwalk. Deciding to feed my new found friends, I get a tin of canned chicken from the car. As I flick pieces of meat into the water and onto their snouts, they lay motionless in the water, beady eyes glinting in the sunlight. I take a lump of chicken into my hand and hold it out to one of my new buddies.

I will never understand why. I’m a piano player, a college graduate and used to think I was a member of an intelligent species on earth. Did I quietly, quickly and completely lose my mind? Was I trying for an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records as “Stupidest Person in the Known Universe?” Did I need a new promotional twist to my tour? “See El Stupido, the One-Armed Artist, slap the keys with his stump!” Perhaps I was possessed by the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi as I imagined the alligator thinking, “Such a kind man to share his lunch with me! I love him.” His thoughts were actually very simple - FOOD - although they undoubtedly got more complex: “What the? FOOD is extending a piece of flesh, tender on the outside, crunchy in the middle. Am I hallucinating or is this my lucky day?” Choosing the lucky option, he lunges violently towards FOOD like in a Crocodile Dundee movie, no special effects required. Somehow I lunge back receiving three red cuts on my wrist from his top row of teeth. The only good news? FOOD didn’t plunge backwards off the boardwalk into the drooling jaws of his cousins.

If this column disappears and you read about some guy strangled by a snake in the jungle, you’ll know it was me hugging my new sweetheart Ann Aconda.

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