The mystery of ketoprofen

I don’t often use medications, but there is one — now hard to get — that is like a miracle for me. It’s ketoprofen, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) which I assume, given the -profen suffix, is a relative of medications such as ibuprofen.

Back in the 1990s, ketoprofen was available without a prescription. It was sold over the counter as Orudis KT. In my working days, I often had tension headaches. Aspirin, acetominophen, and ibuprofen would barely touch my headaches. One day I saw a TV commercial for Orudis KT, advertising it as a miracle headache remedy. I went out and bought some.

One Orudis KT tablet was a tiny 12.5 milligrams. For comparison, one aspirin is 325mg, one acetominophen tablet is 500mg, and one ibuprofen tablet, such as Aleve, is 220mg. I could take one Orudis KT tablet for a worst-case headache, and 30 minutes later I’d forget I ever had a headache. There were never any side effects. I called them my “little green pills,” and people I worked with would often come to me to beg for one if they had a headache. How could a tiny 12.5 milligrams of something be so effective?

Then in 2005 Orudis KT was taken off the over-the-counter market and was available only by prescription. Clearly I was not the only person who found it remarkably effective. Some of the last remaining bottles of it sold for very high prices on eBay — $30, $40, $50 and more. After that I couldn’t get Orudis KT anymore.

A few years ago a friend in California gave me some ketoprofen that his doctor had prescribed after surgery. Each capsule was a ridiculous 200mg, more ketoprofen than I would ever dare — or need — to take. A few capsules lasted me several years. I’d open the capsule and take out just enough of the powder to come to 12.5 milligrams. Then that ran out.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked my doctor if he’d prescribe some ketoprofen, just so I’d have it for minor aches and pains. I told him how effective it was in small doses and said, “Surely I’d be better off with 12.5 milligrams of ketroprofen rather than 220 milligrams of ibuprofen?” He agreed. He also said that he didn’t know why the drug company took it off the over-the-counter market, but his guess was that it was a way of making more money from it. “Most people don’t know about ketoprofen,” my doctor said. I believe ketoprofen is much better known in Europe and Canada than in the U.S.

When I took the prescription to the drug store, they didn’t have ketoprofen. The pharmacist said they had not stocked it for years and that it was available only in bulk in far larger quantities than the pharmacy would ever be able to sell. The pharmacist referred me to a “compounding pharmacy,” a specialized sort of pharmacy that mixes drugs and doses to order, particularly drugs that are not common. I got my ketoprofen!

From Googling I’ve learned that ketoprofen is very much used as a veterinary drug, particularly in cattle. It is very effective for fever and respiratory diseases in cattle, as well as for mastitis. This has been a problem in a few countries in Asia, including India and Bangladesh. There are about ten NSAID drugs which, when given to cattle, and if one of the cattle dies out in the open from whatever it’s being treated for, and if a vulture then eats it, the vulture’s kidneys may be fatally damaged. Apparently it’s only Asian vultures that are susceptible. Ketoprofen is actually used as a veterinary drug with chickens, ducks, and quail, as well as pet birds such as parakeets. As far as I know, no species of animal in the U.S. or Europe is harmed by ketoprofen.

Envying the U.K.


Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

It felt a little like Christmas morning to wake up today to the news that Britain’s Labour Party has swept the Conservative Party out of power, reducing the number of Tory seats in Parliament to its lowest number ever. At last, the ghost of Margaret Thatcher has been exorcized. Though there have been two Labour governments in the U.K. since Thatcher, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Thatcher’s neoliberalism has been the governing philosophy since 1979.

Here in the U.S., President Biden has done much to lay neoliberalism to rest, though our foolish political media, interested only in political conflict rather than government, have had very little to say about it. Biden’s accomplishments are particularly notable in light of a Congress nearly paralyzed by a right wing desperate to take the U.S. back to the days of the Confederacy.

Though most of the political work of reversing neoliberalism and Thatcherism remains to be done, the intellectual work is solid. I am reading Joseph Stiglitz’s new book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, and will write about it later. Stiglitz drives a stake into the zombie heart of neoliberal dogma. It’s a book that I hope policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic are reading. Now is a good time to become familiar with the thinking (and proposals) of progressive economists, the better to judge what Britain’s Labour Party does now that they have pretty much unchallengeable power, with 412 seats in Parliament compared with the Conservative Party’s ever-so-humiliating 112.

In Scotland, the Scottish National Party lost 38 seats and retains only nine seats in the British Parliament. And in France, it’s looking like the French are going to have to learn about right-wing governments the hard way, like the United Kingdom did. And here in the U.S., we are now in a state of complete chaos and unpredictability until the Democratic Party decides what to do about President Biden. At least in Britain people can sleep easier now.

C.J. Sansom’s Shardrake novels

Novels don’t have to be masterpieces to be worthwhile, especially if, like me, you read for escape and thus prefer novels that are set in another time and another place rather than the here and now. C.J. Sansom (who died in April), was very popular, as he deserves to be.

Sansom’s Shardrake character is a solicitor in London during the time of Henry VIII. Shardrake is a hunchback, accustomed to being stared at and made fun of, though he is a gentleman. Sansom’s plots are mysteries, and they tend to be a little wooly and complicated, as they need to be if a novel goes on for more than 600 pages. But what I like best about the Shardrake novels (I have read five of them and will read the other two) is Sansom’s evocation of Tudor England. We travel all over London on foot, on horseback, and in boats on the Thames. Sovereign takes us to Yorkshire, by horse on the way up from London and by ship on the way back. Heartstone takes us to Portsmouth in July of 1545, a date you’ll be familiar with if you know what happened to Henry’s beloved ship the Mary Rose.

Sansom reminds me a bit of Winston Graham, though Sansom is not nearly as good a writer as Graham. Like Graham’s Poldark character, Shardrake is a man ahead of his time who loves justice rather than power. That is a danger. Sansom makes it quite clear how dangerous the Tudor period was, not only for those close to the court who lost their heads, but also for the ordinary people who got crossways with a divided church that was just as cruel and dangerous as Henry. Historians give estimates that vary widely, but it seems that 57,000 to 72,000 people were executed while Henry VIII was king. Sansom’s Henry VIII is a repulsive character. Other characters such as Thomas Cromwell are more complex.

At the risk of making everything political, Sansom reminds us (as does Winston Graham) how hard it can be to be ahead of the times one lives in. We are joined to such people in the past by a kind of invisible thread. We identify with them. There can be no real compensation for those who lived through the many horrors of history. Historical novels serve an important purpose by helping us to never forget.

Good government gets little attention


Pete Buttigieg

Pete Buttigieg, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, was in the backwater city of Winston-Salem yesterday for the groundbreaking on a small project backed by the Department of Transportation — a $4.8 million pathway for bicycles and pedestrians that will link downtown with the city’s medical center. That’s small potatoes as transportation projects go. But Buttigieg is a hard-working guy.

In the turmoil that has arisen over President Biden’s debate performance last week, Buttigieg is one of the people mentioned as Biden’s replacement. Buttigieg is a wonk, a highly effective secretary of transportation, a veteran who served in Afghanistan, and a Rhodes scholar. I was happy to stand out in the July sun to see him in action.

Earlier in the day, both Buttigieg and Governor Cooper were in Raleigh for the start of a bigger project. That’s a railway project that will connect Raleigh to Richmond and then onward to Washington and beyond.

According to the Raleigh News & Observer, while in Raleigh Buttigieg dinged Trump without naming him: “Every one of those projects — and the 57,000 others that are funded, and counting, through President Biden’s infrastructure package — is really about one simple purpose, which is to make everyday life easier for the American people. … I would be remiss if I didn’t note that this is in contrast to what we’ve seen before, a prior administration that declared ‘Infrastructure Week’ every year without any results until it became a punch line, a byword for all talk and no action.”

Events like this force the local media to turn out whether they want to or not. The backwater media would much rather be writing about chicken sandwiches, petty real estate deals, and third-tier chefs in crummy and overpriced local eateries that won’t last a year.


Roy Cooper, governor of North Carolina

An Omega-3 sustainability quandary

I recently came across an Omega-3 factoid — that mackerel contains almost twice as much Omega-3 as sardines. The truth is, I don’t really like either of them but see them as medicine. With mackerel, probably the richest source of Omega-3, there is a sustainability question.

There are many types of mackerel, caught in many different places. The smaller the mackerel, the lower it is in the food chain, making it less likely to contain contaminants. King Oscar says that its skinless and boneless mackerel is caught in the North Atlantic between Norway and the Faroe Islands. That sounds like a place with pretty clean water. But, according to the Marine Conservation Society, overfishing has caused a decline in the populations of North Atlantic mackerel.

Walnuts are an excellent source of Omega-3, and I already eat a lot of them. Another way to boost one’s intake of Omega-3 from walnuts is to use a toasted walnut oil as a seasoning. La Tourangelle’s roasted walnut oil isn’t all that expensive, as premium oils go, and a tablespoon of it contains 1.4 grams of Omega-3. It’s made from California walnuts. It’s very good in homemade dressings. You can get it from Amazon.

Eventually I’ll use all of the six cans of King Oscar mackerel that I bought. Other than that, I think I’ll stick with walnuts and walnut oil.


⬆︎ Pasta salad with walnuts, celery, onion, cherry tomatoes, chopped dried figs, and raisins, with a dressing of roasted walnut oil, honey, and a dash of vinegar.


⬆︎ The mackerel looks kind of gross, doesn’t it? The pesto (with lots of garlic) helps mask the (to me) unpleasant taste of the mackerel.

What in the name of Zeuss just happened?

There is much that could be said about whatever form of madness it was that happened during last night’s Biden-Trump debate. But the thing that matters most is that the media have made up their hive mind. What Trump is, what Trump has done, and what Trump intends to do no longer matters. The media, in ecstasy from the smell of blood, have found their victim, and it is Biden.

I wrote this to a friend this morning:

“I did not watch the debate last night. I am horrified at what I am reading this morning, a media ghoul feast like I’ve never seen before. The media being what it is, and the American people being what they are, I can’t imagine how Biden and the DNC can reverse this kind of press (and it must be nine times worse in the TV media). The media will do the Republican party’s work for them from here on, and Russia here we come. Everything other than Biden’s age will be drowned out; Trump’s age and what he is and what he has done doesn’t even matter anymore. We’re now in a manic psychic-epidemic mode, led and fed by a hyperventilating media, doing to Biden, and to history, what we did to Jimmy Carter, revising him into a failure. Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate for president would be a guaranteed way to lose. Nobody likes her, including me; she was a mistake in 2020. The only person who has the political ability to do what would need to be done in a mere four months is Gavin Newsome. Lots of people must have stayed up all night in Washington gaming out a plan, or at least I hope they did. Biden did great during the state of the union speech three months ago, while Trump has been rambling about sharks and not remembering people he has known for years. I don’t understand this. But it was clearly the miracle straight from hell that Republicans needed to sell Hitler to the American people. The media will be fine with it, because doomscrolling will bring back the 2016-2020 glory years. God save us.

“I feel like the world just got turned upside down. Yesterday I did something I hadn’t done in ages. I stopped at a greasy spoon and had a (terrible) breakfast. There was a group of old farmer guys talking. In the previous two election years, they’d have been angry, repeating Fox News talking points. Yesterday there wasn’t a bit of that. They were laughing, having a good time, and not a bit of anger, talking about cows, broomstraw, and how people used to know their neighbors. I was pulled toward the conclusion that Republicans simply have not been able to stir up enough rage and provide enough fear-inducing talking points to get the deplorables to bother to vote in November. Now I’m afraid that has all changed.”

There are sane voices (including Biden’s). But sane voices will be drowned out in the media stampede. This is from Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter this morning:

“It went on and on, and that was the point. This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.

“It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has.”

Who knows at this point how the Democratic Party will respond. Democrats versus a depraved Republican Party is one thing. But Democrats versus a depraved Republican Party and a depraved and savage media is another.

Update:

A few media watchers get it right, but pretty much no one pays attention to them. Dan Froomkin at Press Watch: “CNN fails the nation.”

Illusions Perdues

How often do we get lavish period pieces based on a novel by Honoré de Balzac? I came across this on Amazon Prime Video. According to the Wikipedia article, the film (2021) lost money, though its rating on Rotten Tomatoes is 93/93. It’s a long film — two and a half hours.

According to the Wikipedia article, Balzac’s first novel (1829) imitated the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott. Illusions Perdues (Lost Illusions), however, which was published in serial form between 1837 and 1843, was nothing at all like Walter Scott. Nor was Paris anything like Scotland. The only Balzac I’ve ever read was Le Père Goriot. I’ve ordered a copy of Illusions Perdues and will see if I have any French circuits left.

A very thoughtful piece of piano music is heard several times during this film — Franz Schubert’s Impromptu No. 3 in G♭ major, opus 90. After you hear excerpts in the film, you’ll want to hear the whole piece. The finest performance of this piece I’ve found on YouTube is by Khatia Buniatishvilli:

For extra credit, and to compare performances, here it is played by Alfred Brendel (a recording of which is used in the film). Brendel, by the way, is 93 years old and is still with us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7rP-9QXEtY

A baby rabbit, and baby figs

I see the baby rabbit every day. It likes to hang out near the front steps and eat clover. Each year the fig crop gets better and better. I have to fight the squirrels for the apples, but it’s the birds that I have to fight for the figs. I have three Rose of Sharon trees. Each is a different color and blooms at a different time. This one grows at the edge of the woods in the backyard and seems to like it there.


Click here for high-resolution version