Category: Iowa

Amaryllis Progress and Other Notes

I have a few messages to pass on today. This is the last day of November and the Amaryllis plants are doing so well Sena had to brace the tallest one using a Christmas tree stake and a couple of zip ties. It’s over two feet tall!

I’m not sure what to make of almost a dozen comments on my post “What Happened to Miracle Whip?” Apparently, a lot of people feel the same way I do about the change in taste of the spread. So, maybe it’s not just that my taste buds are old and worn out.

Congratulations to the Iowa Hawkeye Football team last night! They won against Nebraska by a field goal in the last 3 seconds of the game. I had to chuckle over the apparent difficulty the kicker had in answering a reporter’s question, which was basically “How did you do it?” There are just some things you can’t describe in words. There’s even a news story about how thinking doesn’t always have to be tied to language.

Along those lines, there might be no words for what I expect to think of tonight’s 1958 horror film on Svengoolie, “The Crawling Eye.” This movie was called “The Trollenberg Terror” in the United Kingdom version. I can tell you that “Trollenberg” was the name of a fictitious mountain in Switzerland.

I’m not a fan of Jack the Ripper lore, but I like Josh Gates expedition shows, mainly for the tongue in cheek humor. The other night I saw one of them about an author, Sarah Bax Horton, who wrote “One-Armed Jack”). She thought Hyam Hyams was the most likely candidate (of about 200 or so) to be Jack the Ripper, the grisly slasher of Whitechapel back in 1888. He’s a list of previously identified possible suspects. I found a blogger’s 2010 post about him on his site “Saucy Jacky” and it turns out Hyams is one of his top suspects. Hyams was confined to a lunatic asylum in 1890 and maybe it’s coincidental, but the murders of prostitutes stopped after that. I’m not going to speculate about the nature of Hyams’ psychiatric illness.

There’s another Psychiatric Times article about the clozapine REMS (Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies) program. I found a couple of articles on the web about the difficulties helping patients with treatment resistant schizophrenia which I think give a little more texture to the issue:

Farooq S, Choudry A, Cohen D, Naeem F, Ayub M. Barriers to using clozapine in treatment-resistant schizophrenia: systematic review. BJPsych Bull. 2019 Feb;43(1):8-16. doi: 10.1192/bjb.2018.67. Epub 2018 Sep 28. PMID: 30261942; PMCID: PMC6327301.

Haidary HA, Padhy RK. Clozapine. [Updated 2023 Nov 10]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK535399/

The paper on the barrier to using clozapine by Farooq et al is very interesting and the summary of the barriers begins in the section “Barriers to the use of clozapine in TRS (treatment resistant schizophrenia). I think it gives a much-needed perspective on the complexity involved in managing the disorder.

So what do you think about Miracle Whip?

Fluoride in Your Precious Bodily Fluids

Yesterday, Sena and I talked about a recent news article indicating that a federal judge ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to review the allowed level of fluoride in community water supplies. The acceptable level may not be low enough, in the opinion of the advocacy groups who discussed the issue with the judge, according to the author of the article.

A few other news items accented the role of politicians on this issue. This seems to come up every few years. One thing leads to another and I noticed a few other web stories about the divided opinions about fluoride in “your precious bodily fluids.” One of them is a comprehensive review published in 2015 outlining the complicated path of scientific research about this topic. There are passionate advocates on both sides of whether or not to allow fluoride in city water. The title of the paper is, “Debating Water Fluoridation Before Dr. Strangelove” (Carstairs C. Debating Water Fluoridation Before Dr. Strangelove. Am J Public Health. 2015 Aug;105(8):1559-69. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2015.302660. Epub 2015 Jun 11. PMID: 26066938; PMCID: PMC4504307.)

This of course led to our realizing that we’ve never seen the film “Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Bomb,” a satire on the Cold War. We watched the entire movie on the Internet Archive yesterday afternoon. The clip below shows one of the funniest scenes, a dialogue between General Jack Ripper and RAF officer Lionel Mandrake about water and fluoridation.

During my web search on the fluoridation topic, one thing I noticed about the Artificial Intelligence (AI) entry on the web was the first line of its summary of the film’s plot: “In the movie Dr. Strangelove, the character Dr. Cox suggests adding fluoride to drinking water to improve oral health.” Funny, I don’t remember a character named Dr. Cox in the film nor the recommendation about adding fluoride to drinking water to improve oral health. Peter Sellers played 3 characters, none of them named Cox.

I guess you can’t believe everything AI says, can you? That’s called “hallucinating” when it comes to debating the trustworthiness of AI. I’m not sure what you call it when politicians say things you can’t immediately check the veracity of.

Anyway, one Iowa expert who regularly gets tapped by reporters about it is Dr. Steven Levy, a professor of preventive and community dentistry at the University of Iowa. He’s the leader of the Iowa Fluoride Study, which has been going on over the last several years. In short, Dr. Levy says fluoride in water supplies is safe and effective for preventing tooth decay in as long as the level is adjusted within safe margins.

On the other hand, others say fluoride can be hazardous and could cause neurodevelopmental disorders.

I learned that, even in Iowa there’s disagreement about the health merits vs risks of fluoridated water. Decisions about whether or not city water supplies are fluoridated are generally left to the local communities. Hawaii is the only state in the union which mandates a statewide ban on fluoride. About 90 per cent of Iowa’s cities fluoridate the water. Tama, Iowa stopped fluoridating the water in 2021. Then after a brief period of public education about it, Tama restarted fluoridating its water only six months later.

We use a fluoridated dentifrice and oral rinse every day. We drink fluoridated water, which we offer to the extraterrestrials who occasionally abduct us, but they politely decline because of concern about their precious bodily fluids.

Dirty Deepfakes

I saw an article about the unreliable ability of humans to detect digital deepfakes in audio and video productions (Mai KT, Bray S, Davies T, Griffin LD. Warning: Humans cannot reliably detect speech deepfakes. PLoS One. 2023 Aug 2;18(8):e0285333. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0285333. PMID: 37531336; PMCID: PMC10395974.).

I was a little surprised. I thought I was pretty good at detecting the weird cadence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) speech patterns, which I think I can distinguish pretty well. Maybe not.

And there are some experts who are concerned about AI’s ability to mimic written and spoken grammar—but it continues to make stuff up (called “hallucinations”). In fact, some research shows that AI can display great language skills but can’t form a true model of the world.

And the publisher of the book (“Psychosomatic Medicine: An Introduction to Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry”) that I and my co-editor, Dr. Robert G. Robinson, MD wrote 14 years ago is still sending me requests to sign a contract addendum that would allow the text to be used by AI organizations. I think I’m the only who gets the messages because they’re always sent to me and Bob—as though Bob lives with me or something.

Sometimes my publisher’s messages sound like they’re written by AI. Maybe I’m just paranoid.

Anyway, this reminds me of a blog post I wrote in 2011, “Going from Plan to Dirt,” which I re-posted last year under the title “Another Blast from the Past.” Currently, this post is slightly different although it still applies. I don’t think AI can distinguish plan from dirt and sometimes makes up dirt, simply put.

And if humans can’t distinguish the productions by AI from those of humans, where does that leave us?

Little Autumn Promenade

Yesterday, we took a stroll on the Terry Trueblood trail. It was a little breezy and warm for late October.

The fall colors were gorgeous and there was a lot going on. We saw a woman with her toddler flying a butterfly kite. It sailed on the wind beautifully. We saw the quilted hearts hanging from the trees. They’re very cheering. In the wind they looked like they were waving at you.

The woolly bear banded caterpillars were out. I don’t think you can really tell how hard the winter is going to be by looking at the color bands. But it’s fun to talk about.

And then we thought we saw ladybugs. But they could have been Asian lady beetles. It’s hard to tell them apart. The latter often don’t have spots at all. We noticed that they seem to sort of push up their hinders until they’re almost upside down and they may shove each other around.

There’s a pretty vigorous debate on the web about whether the Asian lady beetles are the bad guys and the ladybugs are the good guys. We know they can crawl all over you.

The oddball thing was that we found a baby booty hanging on one of the sign posts. It had an image of a ladybug on it. Or was it an Asian lady beetle?

When you’re in the autumn of your life, it might be time to stop asking too many questions.

University of Iowa Psychiatrists Publish Huntington Disease Study Results

I ran across a fascinating story about a study on Huntington’s disease published by members of the University of Iowa Health Care. The study examined how the Huntington’s disease gene might enhance brain development and function early in life prior to the onset of the devastating disease. It was published in The Annals of Neurology:

I also found an abstract for a paper about Woody Guthrie, a famous American musician and activist who was very creative in his early life, but sadly succumbed to the ravages of Huntington’s disease when he was 55 years old. I couldn’t access the full article without paying for it but the abstract was intriguing because I wondered whether the author suspected something similar to the premise of the study:

Ringman JM. The Huntington disease of woody guthrie: another man done gone. Cogn Behav Neurol. 2007 Dec;20(4):238-43. doi: 10.1097/WNN.0b013e31815cfee4. PMID: 18091075. Abstract: Woody Guthrie was an American songwriter, musician, writer, and political activist who died with Huntington disease (HD) in 1967 at age 55. His relatively brief creative life was incredibly productive with countless songs and a tremendous volume of letters to his name. His personal life was similarly driven with Woody having had 3 wives and at least 9 children and an insatiable appetite for traveling the United States. In this essay, I explore Guthrie’s art in relation to the development of the overt behavioral changes and chorea that characterized his illness. Woody’s most productive time artistically was in the 5 years immediately preceding the onset of overt symptoms of HD. I hypothesize that subclinical HD may have been an important driving force behind Woody Guthrie’s creativity.

If anybody knows, please comment.

Woody Guthrie was certainly an important figure in the American history of activism as well as music.

Usually, I would share the music of some of the artists I mention on this blog. On the other hand, one of the co-authors of the University of Iowa paper mentioned above is Doug Langbehn, my former colleague, who’s an accomplished musician and statistician. So instead, I thought I’d share the talent of Doug and his band.

Thoughts on The Big Mo Podcast 033: “A Balance of Old and New”

This is just a short piece on the Big Mo Podcast last Friday night and his comments about one of the songs he played that night. It made the list of 5 songs he and Producer Noah discussed a couple days later.

Big Mo’s had great comments about all the songs, but I took special notice of those about one of them. It was James Carr’s big hit in 1966, “Dark End of the Street.”

The most important thing about it is that I remember listening to it when I was just a kid. I was too young to understand the meaning of it. But his voice grabbed me. That’s really the only thing I can say about it. His performance still has the power to raise the hair on the back of my neck, even though I can’t identify with the lyrics or connect the theme to any life experience I’ve had. I suspect many people feel the same way.

The other reason I connect with the song other than Carr’s voice is his life story. He was said to have suffered from a psychiatric illness, the nature of which seems like it was never clearly identified. I’ve read a few web articles and terms like “bipolar disorder,” “depression,” and other similar references come up. His psychiatric diagnosis is the least important thing.

Carr’s life story is hard to read, despite what little there is of it to read about. It’s painful. The version on the Black Past website encapsulates what you find in several other articles: Tulino, D. (2018, February 21). James E. Carr (1942-2001). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/carr-james-e-1942-2001/.

But to get the real point about James Carr, all you have to do is listen to that one song, “Dark End of the Street.”

Reading My Old Book in a New Light

Sena bought me a wonderful new lamp to read by and it improves on the ceiling fan light I wrote about the other day (And Then a Light Bulb Went Off).”

The new lamp even has a nifty remote control with which you can choose the ambient feel. There are several selections, one of which is called “breastfeed mode,” a new one on me. There’s a light for that?

The lamp arrived at about the same time I got a notice from my publisher for my one and only book, “Psychosomatic Medicine: An Introduction to Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry,” that people are still buying—after 14 years! My co-editor was my former psychiatry department chair, Dr. Robert G. Robinson. As far as I know, Bob has dropped off the face of the earth. I hope he’s well.

Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry is probably about the same as I left it when I retired 4 years ago. I walked all over the hospital trying to help my colleagues in medicine provide the best possible care for their patients. I put in several miles and stair steps a day. I saw myself as a fireman of sorts, putting out fires all over the hospital. I got a gift of a toy fire engine from a psychiatrist blogger in New York a long time ago.

Now I walk several miles on the Clear Creek Trail, like I did yesterday and the day before that. I have shin splints today, which tells me something—probably overdid it.

So, I’m taking a break from walking and reading an old book in a new light.

Because I Wanted a Hurts Donut…

I got an urge for a Hurts Donut so I walked on the Clear Creek Trail to Coralville get to the little hole in the wall shop. You can easily walk to several places in Coralville on the trail. Actually, I wanted to also check out the Coralville Public Library and see S.T. Morrison Park. I’ve never been to that park so it was a novelty all by itself.

It took about 45 minutes to walk to that part of town. It’s great exercise and beats the traffic. You have to walk under some railroad tracks and there’s a sign warning you not to stand in the culvert below while the train is passing over the top. I can see why.

There are funny signs in the rustic Hurts Donut shop. You can see the corny “Wanna hurts donut?” jokes on the walls. There’s another sign saying “School is important but donuts are importanter,” which reminds me of my coffee mug which says sort of the same thing about cribbage: “Education is important but cribbage is importanter.”

The Old-Fashioned donuts there are so good, but so bad for you. I had two.

The Coralville Public Library has a beautiful skylight. I haven’t been in a public library for ages and so it was fascinating to see that libraries haven’t changed much.

In fact, after I found one of Dave Barry’s books, “Dave Barry Book of Bad Songs,” (published in 1997; I had a copy but it got lost in a move) I asked one of the librarians about the old rule I learned as a kid. You might remember it too if you’re old enough. When you pick a book off the shelf and go to a reading room to look it over—can you just put it back on the shelf where you found it or do you have to give it the librarian who will reshelve it?

If you guessed that you have to give it to a librarian, you’re right and you’ve probably dated yourself. The librarian joked that some things never change. Sometimes that’s a good thing.

Among the things that never change are the difficult to understand lyrics in some songs. Dave Barry wrote a whole chapter about it in the Book of Bad Songs, “Songs People Get Wrong.” He mentions one of them, which I always got wrong but never told anyone about it because it was embarrassing. It’s a lyric in the song “Blinded by the Light” that Barry said was done by Bruce Springsteen, but which I didn’t hear until Manfred Mann’s Earth Band covered it.

So, here’s my deal with that lyric. I always heard “wrapped up like a douche” instead of “revved up like a deuce.” Barry notes that many people made the same mistake. Funny thing, Barry never mentions what that common mistake is called and it’s a mondegreen (a misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from mishearing the lyrics of a song). Music is important but mondegreens are importanter.

I finally saw Morrison Park and it’s a very restful place. You can contemplate the sculpture which is placed in the center of a pond. Ducks paddle around it. It’s called “Silver Lilly” and it was made by Professor Hu Hung-shu. Art is important.

U.S. News & World Report Ranks Iowa City Hospital in 9 Specialties

The University of Iowa Stead Family Childrens Hospital in Iowa City has ranked in 9 pediatric specialties, including pediatric behavioral health by U.S. News & World Report!

Thoughts on the Big Mo Pod Show “Funkin’ Down the Highway”

This is a post about the Big Mo Pod Show we heard last night on the KCCK FM radio dial 106.9. Incidentally, the KCCK fund drive was enormously successful this year, earning $100,000 in donations, according to Big Mo (aka John Heim) himself.

One item is the cover by Buddy Miles of the song “Tobacco Road.” This rendition was different from performances by other artists. Big Mo liked it and so did I. I did a little web search on it because I couldn’t catch all the lyrics. It was originally done by John D. Loudermilk in 1960. Miles’ version is essentially the same.

What interested me even more about “Tobacco Road” are the associations I have about it with specific literary works. I’ll admit I’ve never read nor seen the film adaptations of Erskine Caldwell’s books, “Tobacco Road” and “God’s Little Acre.” But one of my favorite short stories by James Thurber is “Bateman Comes Home,” which was published in a collection entitled “The Thurber Carnival,” in a hardcover edition in 1945. You’ve got to read it to get a sense of how comical the parody is of the regional dialect used in Caldwell’s novels. In fact, Thurber himself gives the game away about his intent in writing “Bateman Comes Home” by adding a wry comment as a subtitle:

Written after reading several recent novels about the deep south and confusing them a little—as the novelists themselves do—with “Tobacco Road” and “God’s Little Acre.”

He also adds another comment at the end of the short story: “If you keep on long enough it turns into a novel.”

The other thing I noticed about the podcast last night is that one of the songs which was not included in the list, “Joliet Bound,” was performed by an artist I haven’t heard of, the Reverend Shawn Amos, who is no relation to me, of course. But my background as a psychiatrist made me take special notice of details about his family, one of which is that his mother, Shirl-ee Ellis, a singer herself, had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. Sadly, she eventually died by suicide. Shawn Amos is also the youngest son of the Famous Amos chocolate chip cookie founder, Wally Amos (again, no relation), although I’ve gotten a lot of friendly ribbing about that.

The song “Joliet Bound” is about a guy who expresses that he’s wrongly accused of killing a man over a woman and is on his way to Joliet prison in Joliet, Illinois. The Joliet Prison is a tourist destination nowadays and has other distinctions attached to it. It was featured in the 1980 film, the Blues Brothers. There were some famous inmates there, among them John Wayne Gacy, who was once evaluated and diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder by psychiatrists at The University of Iowa in 1968 as described in Dr. Donald Black’s book, “Bad Boys, Bad Men: Confronting Antisocial Personality Disorder (Sociopathy).”

Congratulations KCCK Radio!