Message Forum

Welcome to the Watterson High School Message Forum.

The message forum is an ongoing dialogue between classmates. There are no items, topics, subtopics, etc.

Forums work when people participate - so don't be bashful! Click the "Post Message" button to add your entry to the forum.


 
go to bottom 
  Post Message
  
    Prior Page
 Page  
Next Page      

02/19/25 07:18 PM #15057    

 

Mark Schweickart

Joe (&Jim) I recently changed to a new primary care physician, and he gave me the same response -- that they no longer do prostate exams for men our age. I shrugged it off, not questioning this, but now that you mention it, Joe, I too would be interested in hearing Dr. Jim's take on this, especially since both my older brother and my father went through extensive (and fortunately, effective) treatments for prostate cancer. (Of course my father has long since passed, but it wasn't from a prostate issue.)


02/19/25 08:09 PM #15058    

 

John Jackson

I stopped doing PSA testing maybe 15 years ago after a Surgeon General’s report that showed that life expectancy for men who had PSA testing was no longer than men who did not.  The explanation was that much prostate cancer advances so slowly that most men (especially older men) die of other causes.  And the men who have a test that finds elevated PSA levels have a lot of mental anguish and may undergo unnecessary surgery. 

I think the guidance since then has shifted slightly in favor of the test, but I’ve kept with my original choice.  So if my comments on this site suddenly stop, you’ll all have a good idea why... 


02/19/25 10:01 PM #15059    

 

James Hamilton, M. D.

Joe, Mark and John,

You are all correct in that the PSA testing has become the gold standard for initial screening for prostate cancer. Abnormally high PSA's - in certain age groups - are then usually followed up with ultrasound, MRI, CT (or other modality) guided biopsies of that gland. Sometimes after a certain age, screening is not recommended due to the fact that most prostate cancers would not grow faster than the life expectancy of the patient and, as with all invasive procedures, the risk outweigh the benefits.

Of course, in the patient I described in my last post, I was performing  a therapeutic procedure for the treatment of a fecal impaction and not a prostate screening exam. 

All that being said, there are other reasons for the performance of a digital rectal exam (DRE) such as palpation to feel for any abnormal rectal masses (many rectal cancers are within the reach of the probing finger) and obtaining stool on the glove which can be tested for the presence of trace amounts of blood ("guiac") or FIT (fecal immunochemical testing) which could be a sign of stomach or bowel pathology to include cancer or other problems.

I had a prostate biopsy many years ago due to an elevated PSA level which was negative for cancer. After that my urologist screened me yearly with both PSA and a DRE. The last urologist I saw two years ago agreed that DRE's were out and PSA's were the standard of care. So, now at my (our) age(s), I let my primary care internist order my PSA's (might be over reacting at this age) but if elevated, I'm not sure I would consent to another biopsy. I do, however, have him do a yearly DRE and new generation hemacult type test  to screen for colon cancer and those other pathologies. 

Jim


02/20/25 03:01 AM #15060    

 

James Hamilton, M. D.

And while we are on the topic...

Of course the more common than cancer prostatic condition is benign prostatic hypertrophy (​​​BPH) which also can be detected by the DRE examination. The symptoms of this condition could also be shared by a prostatic malignancy like a weak stream, difficulty starting the stream, incomplete emptying of the bladder, increased frequency and, if severe enough, urinary retention or infections.

BPH can often be easily diagnosed - and estimated size - by an experienced probing finger or ultrasound. Prostatitis, an inflamed or often infected prostate, gives many prostates a spongy or boggy feeling on exam and may require antibiotic treatment. If the prostate becomes swollen or large enough, acute urinary retention can occur which is a medical emergency requiring the need for drainage, hopefully via catheter, which may be difficult to insert. Urosepis, a bacterial systemic infection, can quickly result from such an obstruction if drainage cannot be established. This happened to my father once on a holiday and a neighbor of mine a few years ago. These septic patients both presented with fever, chills and mental confusion. Both required surgical prostate reduction after hospitalization, drainage and intensive antibiotic therapy. 

So, it is not for cancer detection alone (like a prostatic module) that a DRE exam is worthwhile. I still want my prostate physically examined. Just like my heart and my lungs by a stethoscope and not just by an EKG and a pulse oximeter. 

Yeah, I am "old school" on the topic of a doctor actually touching the patient. 

Jim


02/20/25 11:12 AM #15061    

Timothy Lavelle

Nice to see the forum conversation has gone from figurative to literal on the rectum discussion. 

Maybe we can go from blockhead to blocked head?

Or not.

Here's one: Do you think a person's negative expriences in life can strongly affect their outlook in later years. "Talk amongst yourselves".

 


02/20/25 02:25 PM #15062    

 

Michael McLeod

My childhood doctor-related memories have a particularly sentimental feel to them given that our gp was our gp.

That is to say our grandpa, Ernest Victor Reutinger, was a general practioner whose squarish shingled office had been added onto his two story red-brick home on East Main Street with a big front porch that offered a view of a movie theater across the street. The backyard of the home ran alongside the school, church, and playground area of a Catholic parish; I want to say St. Ann's but don't hold me to it.

I am pretty sure I have spoken of this before so skip it if so and excuse the morbidity but it is, weirdly enough, a memory I cherish because of the practicality my mother and my grandfather had about them when it came to the subject. That is as close as I can come to conveying this as not a creepy story but a pragmatic, German-influenced point of pride that illustrates the attitude my mother inherited about confronting the reality of mortality and conveyed it to us, gently and pragmatically, as we grew up. Hence my characterization of this memory as being a sentimental one, admittidly  in a quirky kind of way.

E.V. Reutinger had a small, black, zippered, oblong faux-leather bag that I think held his hypoderic needles and some such in it that was passed down to me and I still have it. I also recall that as kids we got a stray stethescope to play around with now and then. Lent a professional air to our lets-play-doctor scenarios as kids.

The old school post-victorian living room of grandpa Reutinger's home had a big varnished door on one wall at the front of the house on which an ornate knocker that consisted of an owl on its perch had been attached. The door led straight into my grandfather's examining room and office, the knocker on the door that led to it is now on my bedroom door.

My memory is hazy and I can't say whether we got all our shots and checkups as kids from our gpa but he definitely pitched in and prescribed on occasion. I slso have an old stethescope of his which I wish I had kept as a keepsake.

I do remember hearing my mother speak of a time when as a young woman she was in the home and her father came out and asked here and perhaps a sibling of hers come into his office. He wanted to show her a man who had come in ill and had expired. He wanted them to see what a dead person looked like.

My mother and her sister were not traumatized, least that's how the story was relayed to me.

It was alway told in the spirit of their father wanting to demystify death, present it as a practical, day to day aspect of our lives as perishable beings.  And my mother, at least, took it in that way, and used the story to convey a respect for death, but not a fear of it. That's as close as I can come to explaining it and I hope I didn't creep anybody out too much along the way. 

 


02/20/25 03:26 PM #15063    

Timothy Lavelle

I'll step back in for one econd to say that I don't think that story is creepy at all but a reflection of the times. If a Grandpa did the exact same thing today, imagine the various opinions of what an unfeeling jerk some people would say he was.

Before every child became a fragile little jewel that each parent had to treat as the last great hope of all mankind...in other words "back in our day"... we got to play and roam around without Mothers worrying about whether our birthday party was as grand as the Jones had for their kid. We didn't have near so much and Boy! Did we have ot great.

Good recollection Mike. Your memory is strong today I think. Party on. 

Anyone else?


02/20/25 07:02 PM #15064    

 

John Jackson

Thanks, Jim for the male health discussion.  Just goes to show how everything these days is going digital - even rectal exams...


02/20/25 10:35 PM #15065    

 

John Jackson

Good news for terrorists, fentanyl smugglers, human traffickers and child pornographers - now that Kash Patel has been approved as FBI director by a 51-49 Senate vote, the FBI will turn its full attention to prosecuting Trump’s political “enemies” (you know, lowlifes like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Dr. Fauci, and Nancy Pelosi).  

Watch the video below and tell me why it should not have been disqualifying (aside from the fact that Patel has minimal law enforcement experience and zero experience managing an organization the size of the FBI) - yet another Trump DEI hire.

 




02/20/25 11:08 PM #15066    

 

David Mitchell

FUNNY hearing this talk of Medical Doctors back in the dawn of civilization. I myself grew up in the home of one. It was a cold day in hell when we were given an asperin. But I recall a time when the scourge of Polio was threatening to destroy that very civilization.  

So this same man with whom I lived showed up at Our Lady of Peace school volunteeering to give each child his or her "vacination", or "shots" as we called them. However you referred to it, it involved the painful pricking of the skin with a sharp needle - something I feared, and hated. This Doctor would always start with my class and would begin with the announcement that "David will go first and show you all how easy and painless it will be."

I had no choice but to go first and to show no reaction of fear or pain. I hated this moment, but this was my dad and I had no choice but to be an example to the class and receive my shot without a hint of fear or discomfort on my face - a lie!

God help me!

But it could have been worse. My uncle John Mitchell was also a "physician". And later, my father-in-law (Tom Hughes) and his 4 brothers - and his oldest son were all physicains. 

But by the grace of God, My cousin Jim (Watterson '63) and I managed to escape this dreaded fate.

But there was a side benefit which made up for all the pain and suffering. As the head of the Allergy Department (for nearly 45 years) at the "Med School" of some little college down along the Olentangy River, he was able to offer me free season tickets to every single event of my choosing, whether it be in an old outdoor "Horseshoe", a basketball Arena named for a man with a "Saint's" name, or a "field house" with a French name. I think I missed one home game in that old "Horseshoe" from 5th grade through High School. I was sick in bed and that game ended in a zero to zero tie with Indiana in an ice storm.

I think I came out ahead in the deal.

 

 


02/20/25 11:13 PM #15067    

 

James Hamilton, M. D.

John,

Glad you liked the male health post.

However, it is not doctors who are catching up to the "digital age". Our profession was using digital techniques☝️ on patients when your engineering predecessors were working with an abacus.

Jim

 


02/20/25 11:25 PM #15068    

 

David Mitchell

John,

I assume that the chain saw is the same one that "co-president" Elon was using as he weilded a "chainsaw for bureaucracy" on stage in front of a live audience at the CPAC convention. It would be  a clear case of governement waste to purchase two of them.  


02/21/25 10:33 AM #15069    

 

Mary Margaret Clark (Schultheis)

Shall we just stop with the "co-president" nonsense?  Forgive my "copy/paste".

 STEPHEN MILLER, WHITE HOUSE DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF: It is true that many of the people in this room, for four years, failed to cover the fact that Joe Biden was mentally incompetent and was not running the country. It is also true that many people in this room, who have used this talking point that Elon is not elected, fail to understand how government works. So I'm glad for the opportunity for a brief civics lesson.

A president is elected by the whole American people. He's the only official in the entire government that is elected by the entire nation, right? Judges are appointed.

Members of Congress are elected at the district or state level. Just one man. And the Constitution, Article 2, has a clause known as the Vesting Clause.

And it says the executive power shall be vested in a president. Singular. The whole will of democracy is imbued into the elected president.

That president then appoints staff to then impose that democratic will onto the government. The threat to democracy, indeed the existential threat to democracy, is the unelected bureaucracy of lifetime tenured civil servants who believe they answer to no one, who believe they can do whatever they want without consequence, who believe they can set their own agenda no matter what Americans vote for. So Americans vote for radical FBI reform, and FBI agents say they don't want to change.

Or Americans vote for radical reform under energy policies, but EPA bureaucrats say they don't want to change. Or Americans vote to end DEI, racist DEI policies, and lawyers the Department of Justice say they don't want to change. What President Trump is doing is he is removing federal bureaucrats who are defying democracy by failing to implement his lawful orders, which are the will of the whole American people.


02/21/25 10:38 AM #15070    

 

John Jackson

Jim, I've given up my abacus but I'm still highly dependent on my slide rule.


02/21/25 10:55 AM #15071    

 

John Jackson

MM, so much for the Trump mandate. Below is a Gallup chart showing initial approval ratings (immediately after inauguration) for recent Presidents.  The only initial approval rate lower than Trump's rate in late January 2025 (47%) was his rate after his first inauguration (45%):


And it's gotten much worse now that we're a month into the Trump reign - in the last two days four polls (WA Post-Ipsos, CNN, Reuters and Quinnipiac) came out and on average Trump has an unfavorability rating 6 points higher than his favorability.  And Musk is underwater  by double digits. 

Trump's handling of the economy (his previous strength) is underwater 4%.

On most individual issues (like eliminating USAID, firing government workers, Gaza and Ukraine) he’s underwater by 10-20 points.  He’s down 60 points  (80% unfavorable, 20% favorable) on pardoning Jan. 6 rioters.

The only issue where he’s up slightly (at least in the WAPO poll I saw in detail) is the immigration issue but there’s a lot of grey – everyone wants to deport criminals but it gets dicier if you’re talking about all illegal immigrants.  And large majorities favor letting Dreamers stay.

Buyer’s remorse is settling in.


02/21/25 10:58 AM #15072    

 

Mary Margaret Clark (Schultheis)

I cannot remain silent about the justified need to prosecute Dr. "I am the science" Fauci.........he deserves to be arrested for his crimes against humanity. See the copied & pasted article from two years ago. 

The New Anti-Fauci Legislation

This week Senator Rand Paul and Congressman Chip Roy introduced long-overdue legislation to rein in and reform an out-of-control and counterproductive public health establishment. The bill, entitled the NIH Reform Act would replace the Anthony Fauci-led National Institute of Allergic Diseases (NIAD) with three separate agencies: One to deal with allergic diseases, a second with infectious diseases, and a third to deal with immunologic diseases. Directors of each of these institutes would be subject to Senate confirmation and would serve no more than two five-year terms. No longer would any one person like Fauci be given such overreaching authority (“dictator-in-chief”) for decades. Senator Paul explains, “This will create accountability and oversight into a taxpayer-funded position that has largely abused its power and has been responsible for many failures and misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Congressman Roy expanded on the need for this legislation.

From the earliest days of the pandemic, unaccountable public health bureaucracies proved themselves far more adept at ruining lives than saving them. Never again should a single individual, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, wield unchecked power and influence over the lives of the American people. 

 

The legislation is co-sponsored by senators Mike Lee, Marsha Blackburn, Mike Braun, and Josh Hawley.

The Paul-Roy criticisms of Fauci are well-warranted and documented. Fauci lied and suppressed views of respected professionals with whom he disagreed. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook were pressured hard to silence dissenters, creating the impression than the scientific community was fully in agreement with Fauci’s policies. The threats included anti-trust suits and ”increased liability for user-posted content.”

If scientists went along, they got along with fat grants from Fauci. 

 The content suppressed included things like these:

...accurate reports of "breakthrough infections" among people vaccinated against COVID-19, accounts of "true vaccine side effects," objections to vaccine mandates, criticism of politicians, and citations of peer-reviewed research on naturally acquired immunity. 

Fauci, in fact, colluded to smear the better credentialed than he professors who called for an end to the lockdowns.

So extreme was the manipulation of the news that a federal court has indicated that they may well have constituted violations of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and debate. 

Among those whose views were muzzled to protect Fauci’s role as “dictator-in-chief were signers of the Great Barrington Declaration: Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, who had argued against the lockdowns. They said there was no reason for low-risk people to be kept from going to bars and restaurants, offices, sporting and entertainment events. The declaration said it was sufficient to provide focused protection of the vulnerable older population. It also suggested that increased infection of those at lower risks would build herd immunity, which rather put paid to the ludicrous masking, social distancing, school closings and tracing policies Fauci commanded. (Who in their right minds could justify the expensive tracing protocols in urban areas; permitting shopping in big box stores but not in neighborhood bodegas?)

Bhattacharya is right -- open discussion would have been a better path. (So would other policies, as Sweden’s experience demonstrates.)

In a recent tweet Bhattacharya supported the proposed legislation. “We need to reform both public health so that it is not susceptible to hijack by panic mongers who have little regard for the civil liberties or the wellbeing of the kids and the poor when the superbug hits.”

Some of Fauci’s Many Lies and Contradictions

Fauci certainly spent a lot of time in the media spotlight. Unfortunately for his present reputation, many of those performances were videotaped and his many lies and contradictions have been captured.

His most serious lies regard his role in the gain of function research at Wuhan and the origin of Covid-19 to cover up his role in creation of the virus and its spread, though the damage this preening martinet caused to this country is incalculable.

The Political Machinations of Fauci and Much of the Public Health Administration

The Brownstone organization makes a persuasive case that Fauci deliberately imposed a vaccine delay to cost Trump’s re-election. 

We already knew that Fauci, the FDA, CDC, and the pharmaceutical industry went to great lengths to block treatments based on repurposed pharmaceuticals, including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, while putting all hope and money into Covid-19 vaccines. But a new book reveals that Fauci also forced Moderna to delay their clinical trial by three weeks -- which pushed the release of their preliminary results until after the presidential election.  

Moderna was not the only company whose progress Fauci halted:

It does not matter how one feels about Trump or Biden. A massive political win in the week before the election would have convinced enough voters of Trump’s competence and thus pushed Trump’s vote total over the top.

What about Pfizer? They also could have published their preliminary results prior to the election which might have secured Trump’s re-election. According to Loftus, Pfizer “opted out of Operation Warp Speed for fear it would slow the company down.” Pfizer still took $2 billion off of the Trump administration for advance purchase orders. But Scott Gottlieb and Pfizer clearly preferred Biden and so they held their preliminary results until November 9, 2020 -- just 6 days after the election. The Biden administration returned the favor by giving Pfizer a blank check and authorizing shots for additional age groups based on the worst “clinical trial” results anyone has ever seen.

The important thing to understand in all of this is that Fauci, the FDA, NIH, and CDC are political functionaries pretending to be scientists. Pandemics, vaccines, and public health are a way for the machine to direct billions of dollars to their base and reward large donors to the party. These companies and their bureaucratic enablers were happy to take money off of Trump. But they knew that they could get an even better deal from Biden. 

Add this to the efforts by Democratic operatives to void and circumvent election laws, permitting unheard of manipulation of mail-in balloting and other election procedures to Biden’s benefit.

And as you may remember, the lockdowns were used to prevent churchgoing, even people meeting for 10-man minyans to pray, and children cooped up inside NYC apartments from playing outdoors in public parks, while they cheered and encouraged thousands of Black Lives Matters demonstrators, often within blocks of those same parks. They used the mandates to favor the Left as they destroyed the very fabric of American life.

This is not Fauci’s first rodeo. He played the same fearmongering power grab with Zika, a mosquito-borne disease that was claimed to cause microcephaly. In a recently released book, Dr, Randall Bock documents how the Zika outbreak in Brazil was based on poor science never peer reviewed. Analysis showed that the “genome and morphology of Zika are nearly indistinguishable from …dengue, itself long endemic in Brazil. ”Despite millions of prior cases of dengue, there was no evidence of any association with microcephaly.”

Despite the absence of scientific association with the birth defects, Fauci claimed an “explosion” of children born with the defect and expressed confidence that “any questions that Zika causes microcephaly “would soon be removed.” It wasn’t. There was and still remains no evidence of such an association. Bock thinks the failed hypothesis of a connection is being kept on life support because it fills the public health establishment’s “ambitions for social change and control.” Hard to argue with that.


02/21/25 11:03 AM #15073    

 

John Jackson

I'm going to take a break and let the above post speak for itself.


02/21/25 11:55 AM #15074    

 

Mary Margaret Clark (Schultheis)

Thanks John. I stand by everything printed in that article which confirms much of what I wrote back in June, 2024, post #14080.....all of which since been proven to be true. Exactly why Biden preemptively "pardoned" Fauci in order to protect him from having to be tried for his lies and thus revealing the Biden Administration complicity in those lies.


02/21/25 12:03 PM #15075    

 

John Jackson

MM, please don't interpret my lack of response as agreement.


02/21/25 01:24 PM #15076    

 

Mary Margaret Clark (Schultheis)

Oh believe me, John, I certainly did not. I post only to keep the Forum from being dominated by one single point of view. 


02/21/25 07:39 PM #15077    

 

James Hamilton, M. D.

John J.

Ahhh... the trusty slide rule!

I still have quite a few of them including my favorite K&E that helped get me through several courses including Emil T. Hoffman's freshman chemistry class back in '66 - '67.

Jim


02/22/25 03:04 PM #15078    

 

John Maxwell

There are times of peril and times of comfort. There are people of peace and love, and in contrast there are people of hate. When the people of love turn into people of hate, then the people of hate win? What do they win? You know, as I watch our founding fathers dream of democracy rapidly and systematically be dismantled before our horrified eyes, I am concerned greatly by the fact that the most leathal weopons are in the hands of creatures who will detonate them just to see what happens.
This is where immense wealth has brought us.
Cruelty is not a stranger to the world. It just hasn't been a product offered by Americans, until now. Of course, anyone can take the bad with good, but sometimes it's impossible to find the good. In most of these cost cutting maneuvers the current administration has embarked on have mostly targeted "political enemies". This list has now grown since the data has been stolen from every computer in America. Its like a giant game of telephone, where the end message is not the original one. Know every word written here is being uploaded into some AI boileroom, discected and columns of data are being interpreted to a main end. This is "Big Brother" on steroids, with no safegards.
Biden was a gentleman, and his wife loves him. On the other philandering hand his wife dispises him. That speaks volumns to me and I use it as a rule of thumb. By the way the rule of thumb has been interpreted as the size of the stick, with a man could beat his wife. Which sounds like, to some of the magats, may adhere. Offensive? You bet. I find there process extremely inappropriate and exclusive. Two tennants on which this country was not founded.
So spare us your regurgitated nazi propaganda. Mary Margaret. It's Bullshit and you above all should recognize it. You support this cruelty. You disappoint me terribly. When did you begin to ignore common sense? Pity.

02/23/25 09:18 AM #15079    

Joseph Gentilini

#15078

John, I agree with your posts!!  joe


02/23/25 10:07 AM #15080    

 

Michael Boulware

Jocko really triggered some thought. I see a lot of similarities to what was happening in Germany before World War Two and what is happening in our country today.

 

Neville Chamberlain thought "appeasement" would stop Nazi aggression. The Ukraine could be our new "Czechoslovakia".

We are banning and burning books.

Hitler disposed of prior leaders and surrounded himself with "yes" men. The media was reconstructed to reflect his point of view.

Jews targeted for hate, considered immigrants.

"Germany first" philosophy along with limiting minorites' rights

Anybody that disagrees with Hitler labeled a Communist. Dissent is squashed.

All of this is really sounding famliar

 


02/23/25 11:08 AM #15081    

 

John Jackson

Mike, I couldn't agree more.  In maybe the most ominous move yet, on Friday night Trump fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and six other top military leaders, including the head of the Navy and #2 at the Air Force.  From a Reuters article:

While the Pentagon's civilian leadership changes from one administration to the next, the uniformed members of the U.S. armed forces are meant to be apolitical, carrying out the policies of Democratic and Republican administrations.

Brown, the second Black officer to become the president's top uniformed military adviser, was serving a four-year term meant to end in September 2027.

Like many Trump picks, the new Chairman Dan Caine’s qualifications are less than stellar.  By law, the Chairman is supposed to be a four star general.  Caine is three-star and not even active duty (he is retired).  From Reuters:

Caine's military career is a far cry from the traditional path to becoming the president's top military adviser. Previous generals and admirals have led a combatant command or a military branch of service.

Trump got a lot of pushback from his generals during his first term, especially Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley who later said Trump was “Fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country”.

It seems pretty obvious to me that Trump is once again filling key jobs with people of questionable competence whose primary loyalty is to him and not to the Constitution.  And Trump needs compliant generals because I have no doubt that he will try to use the Insurrection Act to declare martial law (allowing him to use the military to quell civilian protest) if things (like elections - he's already talking about "Trump in '28") don’t go his way.

Trump almost succeeded, but failed, on Jan. 6 and he's determined not to fail again.  


go to top 
  Post Message
  
    Prior Page
 Page  
Next Page