The cure for canker sores in two paragraphs, but first, a little education: I’m talking about canker sores , also known as apthous ulcers, found inside your mouth. I’m not talking about herpes sores, which are usually found around the lips or on the genitals, or syphillis chancres, or chancroid, yet another similar-sounding STD. Canker sores probably have an unknown viral or bacterial cause from what I’ve read, and are not STDs , for the damn record.

If you get canker sores recurrently like I do (mine are generally from stress), you’ve probably tried every possible cure. I’ve tried vitamins, amino acids, yogurt bacterial cultures that you have to keep in the refridgerator, mouthwashes, toothpastes, numbing agents, and anti-viral drugs, with absolutely zero success. When I was in high school, I had 17 in my mouth at one time. I’m not kidding. (Thankfully I’ve learned to de-stress since then.)

But I’ve finally found a cure (for me at least), thanks to the doctor at the student health service: triamcinolone paste (it’s a corticosteroid). The stuff works wonders. Spread the gospel, please. Dry off the canker sore, put the paste on the canker sore just before bed, fall asleep, repeat for a couple days, and it’ll hurt less and heal much faster. Your doctor can easily prescribe it, and it’s a generic, so it’s cheap.

Please appreciate this advice, I’m probably sacrificing my kissing-attractiveness by posting this one.

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Yours truly made it onto the stage for Hardball, and sat right behind The Governator. Arnold’s a politician all right; he was able to dodge and laugh through most of the tough questions. I was particularly disgusted with Arnold’s handling of steroids:

MATTHEWS: Are steroids bad for you?
SCHWARZENEGGER: What?
MATTHEWS: Are they bad for you?
SCHWARZENEGGER: Steroids can have side effects, if people don‘t do it under supervision with a doctor. I‘ve seen people in our own sports that have died because of it.
MATTHEWS: Yes.
SCHWARZENEGGER: That have had side effects, health side effects.
MATTHEWS: Right.

Even though he’s publicly admitted it , I’m sure he’d like to try to bury that 1977 article if possible. Steroids have plenty of side effects (note: HIV and hepatitis are on that list due to IV injections, they are not directly linked). I remember being really confused about steroids and my brother being “prescribed steroids” for his asthma, so I thought I’d take a minute to procrastinate explain what people mean by steroids .

Okay, so technically, a steroid is just any chemical with a certain structure. But the body uses 3 main types of steroids. Physicians usually prescribe one type, body builders usually use another, and while the third type is very important, you probably won’t run into it much. All three are made in the adrenal glands . And here we go:

1. Glucocorticoids. These are what are generally prescribed by physicians. They’re usually prescribed to lower a person’s immune system. Cortisol, hydrocortisone, prednisone. They reduce inflammation. They’re commonly used for autoimmune disorders, or transplant patients-both need to supress their immune system, because it’s either hurting them or their transplanted organ.
2. Sex hormones. These are the steroids you hear about all the time: testosterone, estrogen, progesterone. First, testosterone . Body builders will use testosterone to get bigger muscles. This is the “anabolic steroid”-anabolic just means metabolism that builds, like building muscle. Other chemicals can work too-either things that the body can turn into testosterone, or things that look like testosterone, so that the body thinks they’re testosterone. These have a number of scary side effects-“roid rage,” shrunken testicles, gynecomastia (male breast tissue development). Not hot. There’s also estrogen and progesterone . These are the hormones found in birth control pills and hormone replacement therapy during menopause. These are also the hormones involved in RU-486 and “the morning after pill.” These are made in the adrenal glands, but they’re also made in the ovaries and testicles. (And yes, men and women have both in their systems, just different amounts.)
3. Mineralocorticoids. These you probably won’t hear a whole lot about. Aldosterone is the main one, and it makes your kidney reabsorb water and sodium. If you’re getting dehydrated, your body releases this to tell your kidneys to make less urine, so you save more water and sodium. Some people’s diuretics (water pills) block aldosterone, so you pee more.

So there you have it. Now it’s back to neuropharm for me.

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5-10% of alcohol is removed from the body through the breath. This fact, of course, lead a classmate to ask if you can sober-up by hyperventilating. “Theoretically, yes,” said the lecturer.

Seeing as though this’ll be Valentine’s Day #2 without a significant other, I may just have to try it.

Speaking of V-Day, there’s a really nice piece at the end of this week’s This American Life about Johnny Cash, his wife, and the song Ring of Fire . Told by Sarah Jewell, one of my favorite contributors. It starts at about 47 minutes in, and it’s so sweet and romantic that it even made me feel a little less jaded and bitter about the whole thing.

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Aldehyde dehydrogenase is the enzyme in your liver that helps you get rid of alcohol (actually, it’s the second step in the process, but I digress). Some people of Asian decent have less of this enzyme, so when they drink alcohol, they can turn red; in most texts, this is a mutation that decreases alcohol metabolism.

Turns out that everyone else is the mutation. If you look at animals’ versions of aldehyde dehydrogenase, they’re more similar to the Asian version of the enzyme; so somewhere along the way (Germany? Russia? England?), I evolved the ability to drink more. (Disulfram, a drug that can help alcoholics stop drinking, blocks this enzyme, making you flush, and not enjoy the alcohol as much.)

So no, I can’t control the weather, shoot force beams out of my eyes, or read minds… but I can drink more alcohol. Better than nothing, I guess.

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Twelve to twenty-four hours of heroin withdrawal can make a person restless and develop goose bumps. That’s where “quitting cold turkey ” comes from.

Twenty-four to seventy-two hours of heroin withdrawal typically leads to flu-like symptoms, and thrashing and flailing of the arms and legs. That’s where we get “ kicking the habit.”

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One of the leading Eli Lily researchers on PTH spoke to us yesterday about PTH and its actions. A good lecturer, but raised a couple thoughts in my mind:

• Should companies be able to patent drugs (hormones) we make naturally in our own bodies? Sell it, fine, but patent it?
• After he talked about the wonders of PTH (and glossed over calcitonin), I would’ve appreciated it if he had told me that it’s been found to cause osteosarcoma in rats . While there’s no indication that it causes bone cancer in humans, it seems a little suspect that we had to learn the fact from our pharmacology lecture today.

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Been wanting to post this for weeks, but as I’m feeling just crappy enough to justify not studying, now’s the perfect time.

I use Lippincott’s Illustratred Pharmacology for a study tool-it’s an excellent book, and really well organized. I was flipping through the pages a couple weeks ago and came across sildenafil-ie: Viagra -and found what is, quite possibly, the best illustration of a drug mechanism ever :

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At least once during pharmacology our professor tells us something to the effect of “These drugs aren’t used anymore. They were found to be toxic, or harmful to patients, or had so many side effects that no one ever prescribes them anymore. But you still have to learn them for the Boards.” With all the new drugs coming out, why the *hell* do we have to learn drugs that aren’t even found in pharmacies in the US anymore?

Sorry. Just a little pre-test stress rant from yours truly.

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A new wave of ingestible chemicals are on their way, and while I’m still skeptical, the active ingredient is a common molecule called AMP, found naturally in the human body as an enzyme regulator (as well as other uses of which I’m unaware).

The street name for chemicals is “bitter blockers,” because when ingested with bitter foods, bitter-detecting taste buds are less activated, making us taste less of the bitter in the foods and drinks. The New York Times has a piece on this latest biotechnology, and food and beverage companies seem to be swarming.

According to the Times:

bq(quote). While many people think sugar and salt are added to foods simply to increase flavor, often the additives mask other, less agreeable tastes. Processed foods, like canned soups, sauces and potato chips, have high amounts of salt to mask the bitter tastes that emerge during the extremely hot cooking process. Some soft drinks are filled with sugars to tone down the bitter taste of caffeine.

The product has been received well in the lab, at least, to de-bitter grapefruit juice and coffee; in an even more useful setting, the bitter blockers might be used to make drugs more tolerable to swallow, including HIV cocktails, which are infamous for their intolerable taste.

If the AMP works without side effects, I think these could be a blessing to nutritionists–allowing manufacturers to add less salt, sugar, and fat to products in order to mask unwanted flavors. Until more Americans learn to slow down or eat healthier, hopefully microwave dinners will be a little better for us. But I still tend to agree with Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington:

bq(quote). “If companies use this to market products that are healthier, more power to them. If they used higher-quality ingredients or didn’t cook them to death, they wouldn’t taste bitter in the first place.”

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