No More Water Slides?

Last week I took my daughter and two of her friends to the Six Flags “Hurricane Harbor” water park in Largo, Maryland. One of the perks of being a parent is getting to act like a kid every once awhile. I’ve found that water parks generally afford that opportunity.

One of the rides the girls wanted to go on was called the Tornado. This ride entails lugging a four person raft up a 75 foot stair tower and then plunging down a chute into what resembles a giant funnel laying on its side.

It was a blast! The girls had fun and I had fun.

At the end, however, as I went back to retrieve the flip flops I left at the foot of the slide, I noticed this sign. I guess I should have read it beforehand.Hmmm. I wonder what they infer by “heart conditions?”

Prior to my cardiac event I never gave a second thought to signs like this. Now I’m supposed to pay them heed?

I don’t think so. Not this heart attack guy anyway. The way I see it, the most stressful part of this ride is lugging the raft up the steps. As long as I keep myself in shape, I figure I can continue to enjoy the rides.

And that’s the thing; I am in better shape than most men my age. Still, I get friends who come up to me with a look of concern and say “how are you doing?”

I always respond, “I’m doin great, how’re you doin?”

Oh yeah, by the way, this was my first and last visit to Six Flags. The whole time we were there not one single staff person smiled. Most were sullen. It was not a happy place.

Good Food Gone Bad

Number 7

I sometimes wonder if I have been put on a “list” of people who’ve had heart attacks. I am referring to the kind of list that direct mailers use like people who own cats or people who subscribe to The New Republic. In the last few months I have noticed that I seem to be getting more mail from firms or organizations that deal with health, or more specifically, heart health.

A few weeks ago I received just such a mailing from the Nutrition Action Healthletter. This particular mailing caught my eye with a headline that read “We Name Names!”

Now I wasn’t sure whose name they were naming and why but I suspected it had something to do with bad food choices. My suspicion was correct.

Why is it that all bad food is so freaking good?

That was certainly the case with this list. There wasn’t one item on the ten item bad food list that didn’t sound delicious.

Okay, maybe I could pass on the Pepperidge Farm Roasted White Meat Chicken Pot Pie. I’ve never been a big pot pie guy anyway. That was number one on the list.

On the other hand, number four was Dove Ice Cream. With half a cup serving containing 300 calories and an average of 11 grams of saturated fat, the Nutrition Action Healthletter says it “will fill your heart all right…but not with love.”

And who only eats half a cup of ice cream anyway?

How about a Chipolte Chicken Burrito?

How bad can chicken beans and rice be?

How about a whopping 950 calories and 2,900 mg of sodium, and that’s only if you are trying to be good by passing on the sour cream and cheese. With those two ingredients added it tops out at 1,180 calories and 19 grams of saturated fat. The newsletter succinctly sums it up with, “Yikes!”

The newsletter isn’t all about what you can’t eat though. It does offer another list of “Ten Super Foods” for our consideration. The problem is that most of them don’t sound very super to me unless you happen to have a thing for sweet potatoes (number one) and kale (number 10).

So here’s the deal my fellow cardiac challenged readers. You can save yourself the ten bucks it costs for a subscription to this newsletter by just remembering this simple tenet; if it sounds delicious it’s probably bad.

The Heart Scan Scam

I can easily imagine one of those “good news bad news” jokes coming out of this.

Doctor: I have some good news and bad news.
Patient: What’s the good news?
Doctor: The results from your heart scan look great.
Patient: That’s fantastic. What’s the bad news?
Doctor: As a result of all the radiation from the heart scan you now have cancer.

This past Sunday, the front page of The New York Times featured a story entitled “Weighing the Cost of a CT’s Scan’s Look Inside the Heart.” According to the story, these CT (computed tomography) scans “expose patients to large doses of radiation, equivalent to at least several hundred X-rays, creating a small but real cancer risk.”

And here’s the thing, the benefits of these scans is somewhat dubious. The article claims that these CT heart scans "have never been proved in large medical studies to be better than older or cheaper tests.”

That hasn’t stopped some docs from prescribing them for their patients though. In the past year alone over 150,000 people have been given CT scans for their heart.

So why would a doc prescribe a test that may expose his patient to a cancer risk?

The answer is quite simple. Many of the docs prescribing these scans hold an ownership position in the equipment being used. A CT scanner costs around a million bucks so a doc would need to perform around 3,000 scans to pay back his or her investment.

It’s not just the docs either. Hospitals that have invested in CT heart scanners are also motivated to recoup their investment.

It kind of reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Elbert Hubbard. “When a fellow says, “it ain’t the money but the principal of the thing,” it’s the money.”