Health

I am walking with a cane (like the one picutred at right) and can drive now. On Wednesday morning, the day before Thanksgiving, I'll be walking out my front door, down the porch steps, down the walkway to my car which is temporarily, for convenience sake, parked at the end of it. I'll drive the six-eight miles down the local “highway” to Kerrville, take the cut-off road to the southeast section of town where the hospital and my surgeon's office is (and the post office where I have some mail waiting) for my first out-patient appointment with him. I will get out of my car and walk into his office, unassisted. How exciting is that!

In 1898-99 German chemist Felix Hoffmann came across a recipe for a salicylic acid compound made by "French" chemist Charles Frederic Gerhardt (a German name).

Though the salicin from Willow Bark was known to relieve pain and reduce fever since it was isolated in the 1820's, it also upset the stomach. A few decades later, Gerhardt found that combining acetyl chloride with the salicylic acid made it less irritating. But he also decided it was too complex to make and dropped the idea.

Some years later, Hoffmann tested the recipe himself and found it worked. Already an employee of Bayer, he convinced the company to make the drug and name it Aspirin - from acetyl chloide and spiraea ulmaria, the plant salicylic acid comes from. First appearing as a powder, Bayer didn't release it in tablet form until 1915. [Image at right: bottle of Aspirin powder from 1899, from Bayer archives]

But after World War I Bayer was forced to give up the trademark as part of German war reparations! At the Treaty of Versailles, the trademark for Aspirin and for Heroin were given to France, Britain, Russia and the United States. 

That is how aspirin became a cheap drug and a generic name ... just to keep a German company from making millions off it.

Carolyn Yeager's full ancestry composition and haplogroup information from the 23andMe DNA testing and research company is located on this page.

I would think the high level in Canada is due to the large indigenous Amerindian population, but I don't have any data. The Islamic countries consume the least alcohol. Enlarge

Taken from Orthodoxy Today. By Mark Ellis, June 24, 2013

Eight major studies of identical twins in Australia, the U.S., and Scandinavia during the last two decades all arrive at the same conclusion: gays were not born that way.

“At best genetics is a minor factor,” says Dr. Neil Whitehead, PhD. Whitehead worked for the New Zealand government as a scientific researcher for 24 years, then spent four years working for the United Nations and International Atomic Energy Agency.

Identical twins have the same genes or DNA. They are nurtured in equal prenatal conditions. If homosexuality is caused by genetics or prenatal conditions and one twin is gay, the co-twin should also be gay.

But the studies reveal something else, says Dr. Whitehead. “If an identical twin has same-sex attraction the chances the co-twin has it are only about 11% for men and 14% for women.”

“No-one is born gay. The predominant things that create homosexuality in one identical twin and not in the other have to be post-birth factors.”