Monthly Archives: June 2018

Lichen planus: a case report

Health - opinions, Lichen planus

I am going to begin blogging data about my own  case… ultimately with data and slides and perhaps I can submit it to a journal where others can benefit from my observations.

So beginning with, yikes, i don’t like this condition, ha ha, itching is a seriously annoying entity, and scratching is not an option.  Basically I am not one who has ever been able to use, or even consider using, skin creams, antiaging formulas, junk for tanning, or removing spots. I have skin which is genetically “poor” by all standards so had I been raised in an age where there were products for sensitive skin, and had there been much knowledge about skin care in general (UV A, B, and C and their potential for causing skin aging and cancer) and had I been born to parents (whom I do not criticize here as the data were not yet defined) with any biological knowledge, things might have ended up differently..but they didn’t.

My children inherited their father’s skin for all I can determine, olive complected and not prone to burning and sun damage…so that is a plus, nevertheless I am/will/have  informed them all of what I understand about skin types and predispositions.

While this is just  “tip” for now…..  the itching of lichen planus is not easily remedied. I have found one very interesting thing (at least i think it is interesting and it works for me). Mary Kay cosmetics makes a buffing cream…I haven’t even read the contents, but i had a tube in my closet for 20 years at least and got it out about a week ago and wondered if it would help take the keratin layer off my lichen planus lesions.  What I found really startled me…in fact using this buffing cream in a soft circular motion over the lesions actually did NOT MAKE ME ITCH…. but it did give me some relief.  How odd is that.  In place of scratching, try using this buffing cream and cold water rinsing…. ha ha… who knew.

What!! We destroy earth, now we destroy Mars?

Rants

I heard one of the most demented things of all times on NPR today. Some group of scientists (i guess they were scientists, maybe they were businessmen? and I only heard about a fraction of the clip) suggested something like this.  Put a big reflector in orbit around Mars and melt the ice caps.  What…  !!  we destroy earth, and now we set out to destroy Mars.  Is humanity so egocentric that it thinks that any hairbrained idea it gets should be brought to bear, even though it sounds like the plan of a toddler who tears apart things but can’t put them back together.

There are many posts on melting ice on Mars…

This was understood way back in “star trek” time… ha ha…. it was the PRIME DIRECTIVE

Did someone photoshop RA Fisher

Rants

I love wikipedia, use it all the time, and appreciate the countless billions of hours that volunteers and staff spend to create this resource.  However, today, researching images for a presentation (that a friend will give) on Ronald A. Fisher, I happened upon two images of RA Fisher, one listed in wikipedia as 1912, the other a year later, 1913. There is LITTLE PROBABILITY THAT these were taken at different times… ha ha…. maybe someone photoshopped the image….  the face is identical, but the medal on his lapel is not there on one, and the collar and shoulder are differnet, no question, in the 1912 images…. BUT THE FACE is identical… view the two images, the highlights in the hair are a perfect match….  The shading is different…. thats an easy photoshop trick. …

It is ironic that the probability of two images that have such identical expressions and highlights in the hair is pretty remote — and i know it stirred up my suspicion right away. I dont have the desire or skills to figure out the “odds” of this happening in the real world.  ha ha…  but it would have been an easy manipulation with todays imaging tools.

Below see three images and those images on the right and left of center are the 1912 photos (or labeled as such) and the image in the center is the 1913 images.  Pay particular attention to the highlights in the hair, the shadow of the glasses…  the position of the mouth.  Ha ha… too funny.  I will say, that his eyes are just slightly different in the two images but this could be to shadows added in photoshop….  (of course the obvious change is the direction of the V of the necktie and collar…

Good grief!

Good Grief!, Health - opinions, Rants

Working with a friend and fellow emeritus faculty on a presentation about the birth of the field of statistics I ran across the statement that Ronald. A. Fisher had 9 children.  Two were male but seven were female.  Since the man was brilliant, and since he did experiments on sex ratios in offspring of mice and plants and chickens and other things….. do you suppose his wife (poor woman) was the unwitting, or perhaps willing, subject of some “in house” probability experiments, and the outcome was likely not what he expected.  Lest anyone forget, numbers alone do not tell the whole story.  Ha ha.

This reminds me of my time working with another wild-haired genius, Leland clark Jr. who in his investigations for artificial blood was willing to stretch out his arm and recieve a pint or two.

Scientists are an amazing breed.

And a word in addendum, this era presents a truly tragic story of a man who in an era of the beginning of dominance of scientific thought may have almost crossed the line into the extermination mentality, and white supremacy.  I retrospect it is perhaps alarming but understandable for the early 20th century to be steeped in the voodoo of the then newly discovered eugenics to think that there was a “superior” (that is superior in the darwinian sense) race, and “they” were it… since i have little doubt (but no absolute proof) that Fisher and Neyman were waging an antisemitic-white supremacist war all the while tragically recognizing their need to collaborate as two very great minds working on the same scientific problems.  To me that is tragic, yet comedic in the sense that we all give ourselves such credit for being the “fittest”  LOL.  sorry for my unschooled commentary on two statisticians… neither of whose work I understand, but whose motives are fresh and “in your face”.

Who has felt a “brain itch”

Health - opinions, Rants

brain itch or something like it
WHO has experienced brain itch… ha ha i found a rock band with that name so i guess someone else in the world has experienced it. For me it is like having eaten MSG and then trying to sleep…. my brain just itches.

 

 

So I googled it….. not a lot of good scientific stuff out there on the sensation of a crawly itchy brain.  Some data below… nothing noteworthy.

“too much pressure”  throw this one out
“recovery from drugs” the drug responders disagreed
“brainitch facebook” ha ha, from california, what else
“i guess a brain itch is a song that repeats in your head over and over” i have had this

“itch and pain are entirely separate sensations, transmitted along different pathways” ok with this
“… a type of nerve that was specific for itch. A single itch fibre can pick up sensations over more than three inches away. The fibres have slow conduction speeds….
A distinct area lights up for itch activity in the sensory cortex, and the region that governs your emotional responses, and limbic and motor areas that process serious urges which equates to the really vigorous desire to scratch an itch”

basically I did not find the “itch” i was looking for, but it is a symptom similar to having eaten too many glutamines, or some MSG, and it is just a weird state of feeling

“the jury is still out”  on this one and google didn’t find me much of value to explain this sensation

I found a website that had some interesting stuff….one quote that is disturbing just because it shows how “self absorbed” we are with our appearance and skin “Psychosocial distress is a natural, normal response to skin symptoms, especially in our society. Americans spend more on their appearance than on social welfare, health, and education combined”…these facts i did hot fact-check, but sounds very much like american humanity

And the following by Dr. Frank Lipmann —i will underscore completely!!!
What are the biggest problems you see with the way Medicine is practiced today? Here is my list, I am sure there are more:

1. Modern Western Medicine is based on a narrow “scientific” model, and arrogantly ignores and rejects therapies and entire medical systems that don’t fit this model.

2. Doctors are trained in hospitals in “crisis care” medicine, not to take care of the “walking wounded,” which is the majority of people. They need to be trained to take of the “walking wounded” as well.

3. Instead of treating the underlying causes or imbalances, Doctors often merely manage symptoms.

4. Symptoms are seen as something to be suppressed rather than a pointer to some underlying imbalance.

5. Doctors see the human body as a machine with separate parts that can be treated independently rather than as an integrated whole. In addition the mind and body are also seen as separate independent entities and emotions are often ignored.
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6. Man is not seen as part of nature, and how what happens in nature effects humans.

7. We look for a magic bullet instead of all the possible factors that make up the total load which are causing the underlying imbalance. There is no understanding of the total load.

8. No belief that the body has a self-healing capacity and no ways to boost that capacity.

9. Everyone with the same disease gets treated the same way, patient uniqueness ignored.

10. We treat the disease, not the patient.

11. There is a reliance on numbers and tests rather than how the patient is feeling and what is found on examination.

12. We don’t take into account the importance of diet and lifestyle on health. How could we? We get a total of 6-8 hours of nutrition lectures in medical school.

13. We don’t recognize or understand the correct use of supplements to optimize health.

14. We don’t recognize the importance of toxicity on our bodies nor know how to boost the body’s own detoxification systems.

15. The Doctor patient relationship is not emphasized and the role of the patient as a partner in their own health care not encouraged.

16. The placebo has a negative connotation and ignored. The placebo is really the body healing itself and should be encouraged.

17. The Drug Industry is too enmeshed in the medical system The Pharmaceutical Industry has WAY TOO MUCH power and is “bribing” Doctors to use their drugs and researchers to produce positive results for their drugs.

18. More than 80 percent of all medical treatments used have been untested by rigorous peer reviewed study, yet the Medical establishment insists that alternative health treatments must undergo these before they can be used. The system of evaluation needs to be changed.

Origin of monogamy:

Rants

I just had a thought and from that googled the biological origins of the practice of monogamy. here is the first that popped up on google. I think they both got it wrong.

Because we know that the selection of a mate in early adulthood has to do with the not so conscious desire to even out the gene pool with bad traits that one might be carrying, the mate selected early on is the proverbial “opposites attract”.  I think that the opposites attract for that reason, and it makes it tough to finish out a 50 year marriage with someone who is definitely not your soulmate.  So how about this… because it was observed early on (those old guys knew a lot more than they are given credit for) that selection of a mate in later life, that is, when one gets past the “opposites attract” stage, and finds a mate that is more compatible in terms of temperment and drive, and in other ways, that the offspring sometimes got the worst end of the deal.  Too many “hyperactive genes”  to much “depression” not enough “energy” etc.  So the second-choice marriages produced offspring that were less able to “survive” and be “fit”.  Do you think that perhaps those observations may have forced the coupling of early mates, to insure a better gene distribution.   Ha ha… just thinking here.  No way to prove (no desire to prove either) just thinking out loud.

Families belong together

Rants

Just read how popular (NOT) this current administration (TRUMP’s) policies on catching illegal immigrants at the southern border are. WE ARE just maligned as a nation because of this man.  How many years will it take to undo what he has done in 1.5 years.  This is SO NOT WHO we are, and if you agree with his policies, probably it would be wise for you to check your attitudes about race, gender, nationality, and bigotry.

For little 74 year-old me to go to downtown cincinnati for a political rally against his policy (which by the way has little to do with Obama or Democrats but Trump’s own bull-headed and maniacal way of pushing his exclusionary agenda) on June 30th Families Belong Together rally –is a statement.

Anamnestic – does this describe some lichen planus variants? Random thoughts

Lichen planus, Ultimate order, the cell

 

The following paragraphs are just random thoughts and articles that might shed some light on the disease that is lichen planus (thinking too some variants of the disease like hypertrophic lichen planus and lichenoid drug-induced eruptions (which i would rename lichenoid like dermatoses) with various environmental triggers. I found a relatively old publication in the 1990s that clearly felt environmental factors were important in LP, but with passing years and changes in research-topic “runway-fashions” the environmental influence gets less attention.

Reading an article on histologic distinctions between lichen planus and lichenoid drub-induced dermatitis (link reference given previously) I think it is a perfect description of what I have experienced and a perfect expression of the gene environment interactions that go along with other cases where the immune system decides to make massive amounts of antibodies to a “wrong thing” — as the online definition of anamnestic states so beautifully “an enhanced reaction of the body’s immune system to an antigen that is related to an antigen previously encountered”

I cant wait (but am apparently going to wait a long time) for my condition to clear so i can go back and test if my assumption about mortar, grout, cement, concrete and additives are the “guilty-by-association antigens” that cause this disease.

AND here is a new tack. duh, i should have thought this up a long time ago. I have been slightly aware that potatoes (not sweet potatoes or yams) might cause an increase in itchiness of my lichen planus spots. I did cut out potatoes and peppers for a while, but then on June 6 2018 (that is about 9 months into the flare up of this disease in my) I went back to eating peppers tomatoes and potatoes (all nightshade family members). Yesterday i cut out potatoes again…. so Then i googled, nightshade plants and immune response and find again, what i knew once, that those have “lectins”. Make the connection here. Lung cells (in particular, alveolar type II cells) secrete surfactant protein A… the latter is named a surfactant protein, and it does in fact participate in the formation of tubular myelin in the alveolar spaces but one can live just fine and had sufficient lung function WITHOUT surfactant A. That said, there are immune consequences because surfactant A is a C-type lectin (lung reaction allergens) and

“Antigen-presenting cells can capture antigens that are deposited in the skin, including vaccines given subcutaneously” (Flatcher et al, J. Invest. Derm. 2010 Mar;130(3):755-62. doi: 10.1038/jid.2009.343).
Aside: shame on whomever called lichen planus a benign situation… ha ha.. clearly never had it. Bless the person who describes the causes of lichen planus as “undefined” because clearly there is a cause, and likely a multitude of causes, and I add, many are going to be environmental… mistaken identity immunity, or inappropriate immune responses. Bless the guy who mentions adhesion molecules in this disease…. i have no clue how the extracellular adhesion molecules in epidermis can tell the difference between “sheer” (rubbing) and patting (e.g. patting dry an area of lichen planus eruptions) but the cells know… a tiny bit of sheer tension and it triggers highly intense itching. It only took one google search to find this article which actually mentions extracellular adhesion molecules in Pemphigus, so this is not far from responses in lichen planus.

And another article here which describes roles for langerhans cells… goodness, maybe direct access of environmental materials (as in my case, cement, mortar, thinset mortar grout, and whatever was present on acorn debris thrown up into my shins from my lawnmower) was opsonized by the langerin (C-type lectin) surface protein in my epidermal langerhans cells… ha ha… so much fun to learn this stuff… and to suppose what processes might have occurred.

One observation is that LCs induce some form of contact hypersensitivity though the immunostimulatory capacity of langerhans cells depends on the quality and quantity of the environmental stimuli. “Immune responses can be markedly enhanced when antigens are ‘‘targeted’’ to uptake receptors on dendritic cells and administered together with  inflammatory stimuli.” (quoted from an article  “Changing Views of the Role of Langerhans Cells NikolausRomani, Patrick M.Brunner, GeorgStingl”
I also saw where antigens (example was arsenic) could be captured by langerhans cells directly is damaged skin (like dry skin? perhaps)