CHOICES

I am working on several projects besides my day job right now. One of them is a fantasy novel and another is a music CD about Adam and Eve and the garden. I write on my novel everyday. I wrote and arranged all the music last year so I basically only work on the music about once a week in the studio.

In my novel I just wrote a scene last night in which a person is offered everything they could possibly want, riches, fame , adulation, power. On the other hand they could choose a canteen of cold water and a sword. The soldier, knowing her own values, chose the canteen and sword.

In the night I awoke (literally) with the realization that was exactly the choice placed before Adam and Eve. This thought has haunted me all day as I have wondered in my mind, in between classes and at slow moments, if I know who I am and what I would choose. Do I make music and write for fame, adulation, riches and power? Or are words and music my canteen and weapon? What is worrying me is, I am not sure I know.

SWEET MEDICINE

In 1976 my wife and I were involved in a head-on collision that left me semi-scalped from my eyebrows to about half-way back on my head. It looked pretty awful but was actually not a serious injury. The doctors sent me home with instructions to apply hydrogen peroxide to the wound several times each day to avoid infection.

Hydrogen peroxide is a compound that has two molecules of hydrogen and two molecules of oxygen. That makes it the same as water, except that it has one extra oxygen. When it is applied to injured human tissue, it is exposed to an enzyme that liberates the extra oxygen, leaving water and a single oxygen floating around. That single oxygen is highly reactive and attaches itself to any bacteria in the wound and damages the bacteria’s cell membrane, killing the bacteria. The oxygen that is released, however, causes the tissue to foam in a dramatic way.

On the first morning after the accident my young children were talking to me about what had happened as I applied the hydrogen peroxide to my forehead. They watched in horror as my entire forehead foamed up with hydrogen peroxide. They were both fascinated and appalled. The fascination proved to be the bigger factor as they insisted on being present for every subsequent application. I became the only Dad they had ever heard of with a foaming head. In fact, they asked if they could bring their neighborhood friends to watch. Sensibly, I did not allow this.

“But what does hydrogen peroxide have to do with honey?” you ask. It turns out that honey has the necessary components to produce miniscule amounts of hydrogen peroxide over an extended period of time. Honey is about 30% glucose. But it also contains glucose oxidase, an enzyme from the stomach of bees that is secreted into honey by the bee. This enzyme, in the presence of oxygen and water, can break glucose down into gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide.

However, this enzyme does not function in honey because the pH of honey is too low. Honey generally has a pH reading somewhere between

3 and 4.5, and glucose oxidase requires a pH of about 6. Also, for glucose oxidase to function requires at least 2300 parts per million (ppm) of sodium to be present. Honey usually has only about 30 ppm. So good clean honey, stored in a proper container, is stable with no reaction occurring.

Human tissues contain an abundance of sodium, and the pH is generally slightly more than 7. If honey is applied to injured human tissue, the pH is slowly raised where the honey comes in contact with the injured skin. The abundance of salt in the body combines to activate the glucose oxidase. This causes the honey to produce minute doses of hydrogen peroxide over an extended period of time, directly to the place where it may be needed to combat possible infection. However, the honey isn’t as fun to watch as the hydrogen peroxide because you miss the foaming part.

Honey is also a supersaturated sugar solution and will not support the growth of bacteria because it pulls the water out of any bacteria present. Honey’s low pH also creates an environment that inhibits most bacteria growth. Finally, some honey has been shown to contain anti-bacterial compounds isolated from the floral nectars. In all, honey can be used as a home remedy for dressing wounds.

As you might guess, honey varies in its medicinal effectiveness, depending on the floral source of the honey and other factors such as water content, glucose content, glucose oxidase content, and other parameters. Some honeys, such as Manuka Honey from New Zealand, have greater medicinal properties than others. This lack of uniformity is one reason why honey isn’t used more aggressively in regular medical treatment.

Well, that, plus the fact that the honey is far less exciting to watch than plain hydrogen peroxide!

HEALTH CARE

I’ve been trying to decide if I am healthy or not. Of course, I’ve been blind since the third grade, but it hasn’t really hampered me a lot. That’s because I wear glasses. Part of the health care industry I suppose. I have high blood pressure, but with the little pills I can still run for over an hour and climb to Hanging Lake. My left thumb aches now when I play the mandolin or guitar too much. But I always considered Ibuprofen the breakfast of champions.

So, if I am coping and working and being productive, am I healthy? I certainly don’t feel sick or diseased. So with all the discussion going on about fixing our health care system, I have been trying to decide if I need it. Just exactly what is the health care system?

So I Googled the definition and found several different ones, but most of them sounded something like this: the condition of being sound in body, mind, or spirit; especially: freedom from physical disease or pain. Having looked this up before, I wasn’t too surprised. The problem with this definition is that it hardly anyone I know qualifies. I mean, is near- sightedness a disease? How about guitar induced inflammation? It hurts.

So if health is defined more or less as the absence of disease, what then is disease? So I looked that up. “Disease is a condition of the living animal or plant body or of one of its parts that impairs normal functioning and is typically manifested by distinguishing signs and symptoms.” In other words, disease is the state of being unhealthy.

I find it odd that a country would spend such a huge amount of money on an industry that cannot be defined accept in terms of itself. No one seems to know what the health care industry is for.

Is it to keep us from dying? That isn’t possible. The earth is a finite resource and cannot support an infinite number of living things of any kind. Is the health care system about preventing disease? That too is impossible. For one thing death comes at the hand of disease and since death comes to all men we cannot prevent disease.

More significantly not all diseases are alike. Infectious diseases are probably a part of biology. From the earliest imagine life form, living things have required a surface to live on. When surface area became crowded the next most logical step was to simply live on top of some other living thing. And living things living on living things is a perfect description of infectious disease. It’s just biology. But there are other kinds of disease such as physiological diseases. These are diseases that are the result of mechanical type malfunctions in machinery, whether due to use or simply being constructed incorrectly by the blind forces of development. In these types of disease cells may go awry, systems may malfunction, parts may not fit, or accidents happen that misalign pieces.

Perhaps the reform we need is to define what the Health Care Industry really is. How can we tell if something is broke if we don’t know what it does? How can we know how to fix something if we don’t know what it does? Or maybe some people really don’t care what it is supposed to do. Maybe there are other reasons to dabble with a third of the nation’s gross national product.