->  DD> My croaker tends to throw pills at everything. 
-> 
-> Marvelous moniker....

Glen Cook wrote a series of books where one of the main characters was
named Croaker.  He was a doctor, of course.

As for the drug companies, to be fair they do a little more than just
distill old home remedies into patentable formulas, or so they claim.  The
high-dollar drugs are the ones that are created from scratch after 20 years
of research, or so they claim.  And the different prices in different
countries come about due to countries with socialized or regulated medicine
which pass laws limiting the resale price of drugs of certain types
regardless of the cost of research, materials, and manufacture.  They have
to charge more in other countries to make up the difference.  Again, so
they claim.

-> Most of the diabetes educators/nutritionists I've run acrosss are ALL
-> overweight....so I look at them with the "Ah, do as I say, not
as I do."
-> jaundice.

Each and every instructor at a diabetes class or seminar I've been to has
been overweight and admitted to worse sugar levels than me.  Oh, but
they've got all the answers.

On the other hand, the three nutritionists who work at the hospital I work
for are skinny as a rail and maybe, just maybe, all three of them together
weigh as much as I do.  Yet every single time I've dropped by their office,
they've been pigging out on cake or pie or pizza or something like that. 
At least one of their desks will always have an open bag of chips or candy
or chocolate bars.  I questioned them about this once and the answer is
that I just happened to come by on a day when they were celebrating
something or another.  Every single time.

On an unrelated note, I told my doctor a couple of weeks ago that my new
goal in life was to outlive him.  He thinks I'm kidding.

I'm going to see the doc every three months now, and I'm proud as punch
that it's no longer monthly.  About three weeks before my last appointment,
I realized that I was about to run out of my Vytorin for cholestoral, so I
called up my pharmacy for a refill.  After about a week, I realized they
hadn't called me back so I called to see if the prescription had been
filled.  It seemed I was out of refills on that med and needed to call my
doctor.  I called the office staff and, according to them, the doc said not
to refill the Vytorin as I'd be seeing him in a couple of weeks and he'd
probably be adjusting my meds based on my bloodwork.

So, after the phlebotomist worked on me for a while, the doctor came in and
poked around a bit, discussed my lab results from the previous visit, again
declined to refill any prescriptions due to likely upcoming changes, and
gave me some new numbers to shoot for.  I called him on the new numbers and
told him I could produce better results if he'd quit moving the target.  He
denied this and we actually had to dig through the chart to prove that my
current numbers (sugar, cholestoral, blood pressure, weight) were very
close to the goals he'd given me years ago when I first started seeing him. 
He finally admitted that the AMA had come out with some new recommendations
in the intervening time and that, even with this, I had still shown
remarkable improvement and was very close to where I needed to be.  I
should consider this more of a fine tuning or tweaking than anything else. 
After all, I needed to have goals to strive toward.

That's when I told him that my new goal was to outlive him.

Over the next two weeks, I called or dropped by the office every day or
three to see if my test results have come back.  The tests haven't come
back yet because the lab was closed over the holidays, the doctor is out of
town this week and hasn't reviewed the results, the one particular person I
need to talk to is in with another patient right now, we tried to call but
nobody answered and now we can't find the chart.  I'm sure you've heard all
the excuses.  The crazy thing is that the doctor's office is in one of the
medical plazas on the campus of the hospital I work for and I spend 40
hours a week within a few hundred yards of said office.

Anyway, after two WEEKS, I got a letter in the mail dated two DAYS after my
office visit telling me that my cholestoral levels pegged the meters and
asking if I've been taking my Vytorin regularly.

Sigh.
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