Sorry if I'm a little behind answering email.  I've been busy helping my wife with our first
child, she's 4 days old now.
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>From:    "Aaron D. Wieland" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: H/G Biostats
>
>I consider a fasting blood sugar of 70 mg% to be somewhat low
70 might seem a little low, but as long as the person feels okay, this is not a problem.  I
believe at 50-60 a person starts feeling pretty bad, like sweating, disorientation, etc.  My
mother is diabetic, and she reports this.  If her glucose was 70 she would be ecstatic.

I had a roommate once that went into a diabetic coma.  When the ambulance came, they measured
his glucose, it was 18.  Pretty close to death.  Over the course of the next several months he
had similar, albeit not as severe episodes.  I got a pretty good idea of how glucose level
affects people, from a layman's observation standpoint.

My mother just left my house today after a visit.  I used her glucose monitor to test myself.
It varied, but after multiple measurements my glucose was between 71 and 84, after at least
several hours of fasting.  At 71 (in the afternoon, before dinner, but only ~2-3hrs after a
snack) my only symptom might have been hunger.  Otherwise I felt fine.  BTW - I have no glucose
metabolism problems such as diabetes or hypoglycemia, as far as I know.

Similarly, the blood pressure and WBC measurements look low
>to me (one lab considers a WBC < 4500 abnormal -- my WBC is exactly 4500).
BP is somewhat like blood glucose, in the sense that "the lower the better", as long as the
person feels okay otherwise.  This is according to my wife's doctor.  My wife often has low
blood pressure (like the Bioshperians).  A sign of too low BP might be getting dizzy when you
stand up to fast after lying down, according to the doctor.  Otherwise, no problem.

My WBC was 4,100/ul last time I had a blood chemistry check.  I went over the results of this
test with a doctor.  I pointed out the value, he just shrugged it off and said, "That's just
fine".  Then he said something about very, very low values being bad, but not values on the
lower end.  The medical society is apparently accepting lower values as healthy, according to
the jist of my conversation with him.  The same is also true of cholesterol (total).  The old
cutoff for "high" cholesterol was 200, now the doctors at my local center are tending towards
180 as an upper limit for healthy.  (I know the arguements saying "big deal" about this, but I
thought I would compare it with the established values of normal for WBC, as a changing trend in
medicine).  The "good" range on the test does indicate 4,500-11,000 as normal.

>Thank you for the summary, James.
My pleasure.


James Crocker
====================================
"Violence is the last refuge of the
 incompetent." - Salvor Hardin
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