Doc's Blog

Please allow me to enlighten you, in case you’re not aware of the great work of Norman Borlaug, the American Nobel Prize-winning plant scientist of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Borlaug was the scientist who developed rice with high vitamin A content to prevent hundreds of thousands of children from going blind in third world countries because of vitamin A deficiency. He also developed seed barley strains that required half of the usual amount of water to grow in semi-arid countries. He taught third world villagers to plant corn in rows for weed control, rather than casting the seed around randomly like you were feeding the birds.

I have had more than enough of Dr. Fauci’s pronouncements. Mind you, I also contracted SARS-CoV-2, or Covid-19, after my wife, Kris, passed away from it. And I have been vaccinated twice with Moderna’s messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine since then.

If you are an old codger (or codgeress) reading this, get vaccinated. If you are young with no predisposing conditions, I wouldn’t get vaccinated or subject healthy children to it.

In the past month, there has been a huge game-changer in Covid vaccines developed without the brand-new mRNA vaccine technologies, which haven’t yet withstood the test of time for people of child-bearing age.

Last month I reported on the history of Woodstock, Ohio’s former community church, its trials, and how the community persisted in trying to restore worship in the church.

Now here’s where the story gets personal for me. First, let me introduce you to Pete, the son of Dale, my semi-retired marketing agent who has marketed the books I have written over the years.

Pete and his sister, Brit, were raised from adolescence to adulthood by Dale, a single parent. Pete graduated from college with a business degree before receiving the call for ministry and becoming a Baptist pastor. He and his wife, Melissa, have three young children.

Brit, who also earned a college degree, plus a master’s degree, holds an administrative position with an Ohio governmental law enforcement support organization and teaches part-time at a local college. She and her husband have a daughter.

Some months, topics for my column come to mind quickly. This month, however, I struggled to land on a topic I thought would entertain and inform you, my readers. Then one morning, in my quiet time, a little voice told me to write about a really good story that has unfolded right in front of me.

I confess: It often requires a good nudge, sometimes a rap up the side of the head, to get my attention. This time it was a rap upside of the head.

Anyway, here’s the story, set in a small village in eastern Champaign County, Ohio – Woodstock. This particular Woodstock has never had a big music festival out in a hilly cow pasture to disturb the peace of its 261 residents, assorted dogs and cats, horses, and the dairy cows that graze in outlying pastures.

More than 6,000 years ago, tribes wandered the prairies of what is now Russia and Ukraine. They settled across Eurasia, the earth’s largest continental land mass, encompassing all of Europe and Asia.

These wandering tribes, the Yamnaya, traveled with heavy ox-drawn wagons and left their genetic fingerprint from Hungary to Mongolia. They’ve been referred to as “eastern cowboys,” as they also traveled on horseback.

You’ve probably seen panic-inducing headlines about climate change. I think the wildest one I have read is: “Code Red for Humanity.”¹ The article it accompanied reported that we can’t turn the clock back to reverse the environmental damage that humankind has caused. We are doomed if we don’t take immediate and drastic action to implement the “green movement.”

Thankfully, most of this Code Red stuff is baloney. Centuries, if not thousands of years, show that as far as our climate and environment are concerned this is the best time ever to be alive.

Every time that a well-researched good news climate analysis is reported, the United Nations moves the goal posts farther back so that the state of the environment still appears discouraging. It isn’t that the environmental science is bad. Rather it’s the shoddy reporting by our friends in the media who nitpick what to report.

Before you flip the page because you don’t have diabetes or you have your blood sugar under control, please stay with me. I have a special story to share with you about astonishing new developments in preventing or controlling diabetes.

Strangely enough, camels are involved.

I’ll spare you the details about the complicated biochemistry involved with diabetes. Even researchers are still discovering the intricacies of how various molecular hormonal reactions influence blood sugar levels.

Falun Gong is a religious movement in China that involves the practice of qigong – a mix of meditation, energy exercises and regulated breathing – combined with the practice of a moral philosophy, with the ultimate goal of achieving spiritual enlightenment. Falun Gong, with an estimated range of seven to 20 million adherents, is a Buddhist-like spiritual group that practices compassion, truthfulness. patience and tolerance.

In one of my trips to China, I observed from my high-rise hotel room local citizens practicing qigong exercises in the village courtyard. According to Chinese authorities, Falun Gong is evil because it demonstrates cult behavior, instills mind control in individuals, spreads heretical ideas and promotes methods for accumulating wealth – all while allegedly endangering Chinese society.

Early in my veterinary career I became board-certified in the specialty of theriogenology. The study of reproduction in domestic animals, theriogenology is roughly the veterinary medicine equivalent of obstetrics and gynecology in human medicine. My new certification added an exciting dimension to our practice and drew clients from a wider geographic area, including Puerto Rico, Mexico, Colombia, Nicaragua, China, Japan, Russia, Mongolia and British Columbia in Canada. At that time, I was just one of over 400 theriogenologists world-wide.

One example of my expanded practice is the breeding soundness exam for male animals – such as bulls, rams, dogs, boars and stallions. This test determines whether a male – in the case of this story, a stallion – has what it takes to stand at stud. Customers of stud farms pay significant fees to have their mares serviced, so they’d like to know that there’s a decent chance they will earn a spindly-legged foal as a return on their investment.

One of my clients, J.D., whom I had known since Judy and I set up practice, was fascinated with horses. He kept four Quarter horse mares at his small farm near Rosewood, Ohio. J.D., then a forty-something yuppie, always owned a shiny new pickup and was meticulous in caring for his horses. He even cleaned their stalls daily – a chore that many of my horse clients reserved for weekends.

My wife, Kris, says I am a jokester. I tell her that laughter is good for my health.

It tones my abs as my stomach muscles expand and contract, similar to working out at the gym. Or, I tell Kris, it’s like when she picks up a 50-lb. bag of horse feed or cattle mineral.

I also suggested that living with a jokester like me could help her enjoy the other benefits of laughing¹:

• Lowers blood pressure and stroke risk
• Reduces stress hormone levels
• Works abs, as I described earlier
• Improves cardiac health. Laughter provides a great cardio workout.
• Boosts T-cells, which are specialized immune system cells that fight off illness
• Triggers the release of endorphins, which are natural painkillers, making you feel good
• Produces a general sense of well-being

Truth be known, Kris was mad at me when I shared this information with her. While she didn’t refer to me as “jokester,” she may have used the word “joke.”