Naturopathic Maine

Short answer: Neuroendocrine Tumors and cancers (NET) are an extremely rare orphan disease. Longer answer: It sucks to get an orphan disease that few doctors have ever seen. NET is less than 2% of overall cancers. It affects fewer than 200,000 people in the U.S. So it's a zebra, not a horse. (For those unfamiliar with medical euphemisms, if you look out in a farm field you expect to see a horse, not a zebra. Young doctors are famous for trying to say patients might have a rare zebra disease. The overwhelming majority of patients don't, they have much more common horse diseases.) In recognition of this fact, the neuroendocrine community uses the zebra to increase awareness about the disease. The symptoms of Neuroendocrine problems can show up anywhere in the body, most often in the gut. They are nonspecific enough they can be mistaken for many, many other things. It sucks even more to get the even rarer aggressive, systemic form of an orphan disease. Rainè Riggs had the mos...

We get these disturbing posts on our phones these days. I think of them as "horror clickbait," stories that are so disturbing we have to read more. I can't do anything about many of the stories, but I can help a little with the ones to do with our health. The clickbait story was that processed food will shorten your life . By how much? Oh, about 14%. That sounds terrible until you take a step back and do a little math. 14% of a human life... that's...round to 70 years, round down to 10%... and you have at least seven years of your life lost to processed food. That's pretty dramatic. For comparison, smoking like a chimney your whole life will drop your expected span by about ten years . Are we really saying eating processed food is as bad as chain smoking? Then I went looking for the study. It's not a great format. A survey of English eaters . And a fairly arbitrary splitting up of food into minimally processed, processed, and ultra-processed food. By arbi...