Young at heart

As part of my visit to the nutritionist today they put me through a Meridian test. It has that name because that's the corporate logo on the machine. It has a sensor that clips onto the finger. Once the technician pushes the start button it thinks for a minute and then prints a page. That little sensor with the compute power behind it can check the pulse rate (the easy stuff) as well as check for fluttering, the speed of heart valve openings, and a pressure waveform. The technician compares the heartbeat and pressure chart against various samples and can tell hardness of arteries in general and plaque buildup in each of large arteries, small arteries, and capillaries.

Put all that together and the tech produces a letter grade for the heart and from my actual age and grade she gets a biological age of the heart.

Bicycling has been very good to me. My grade is B and heart age is a couple decades younger than my actual age.

It was a busy day. I dashed from the nutritionist to lunch with my friend and debate partner. From there it was off to see a traditional medical person about the soreness in my neck. I had an hour free so went to the nearby Henry Ford Fair Lane estate and took an hour to walk through the Great Meadow and around the pond. Then on to the Ruth Ellis Center for my usual work in the kitchen.

Back to that neck specialist. I've had soreness in the neck for many years. Sometimes that includes pain in the shoulder. The shoulder pain was treated somewhat successfully this summer, but it was hard to convince my primary care doctor that both neck and shoulder should be treated together. It was only after I saw a shoulder specialist that I got a referral to a neck specialist.

The diagnosis of today's visit is my neck muscles are weak, though today's x-rays might show more. I should be able to lie flat on my back and with neck muscles alone hold my head up off the floor for a minute. I could do maybe five seconds. So he gave me a bunch of exercises and prescribed another round of physical therapy, this time for the neck instead of the shoulder.