The Anonymous Widower

The Cure For White Coat Hypertension

At one of my previous GP practices the two excellent nurses had banned my GP from taking blood pressure as she always raised the patient’s blood pressure, by the way she took the pressure.

This page on a blog at the London Cadiovascular Clinic is entitled White Coat Hypertension, gives this definition.

White coat syndrome, also known as white coat hypertension is a phenomenon in which your blood pressure is artificially raised due to the stress of being in a clinic, hospital, or even just taking your own blood pressure. This usually happens due to the stress and anxiety associated with having medical investigations done. Your reading will be higher than it would be if you measured it at home.

A week ago, I had a message from my GP practice to come in and measure my blood pressure in their machine in the waiting room.

So I went in and took my blood pressure about an hour ago.

I just put my hand in the hole at the front, shook hands with the machine, pressed the green button on top and it inflated a glove around my hand and lower arm to take the pressure.

Ears Are A Black Body

When I worked for ICI in Runcorn in 1968, one of my colleagues; John Baxendale developed or acquired one of the first remote infra-red thermometers.

ICI needed one for taking the temperature of hot vessels , pipes and reactors on chemical plants and in laboratories. John’s thermometer solved the problem, by measuring the black body radiation of the object.

John found that to calibrate his instrument he could point it at a colleague’s ear. As the ears emit black body radiation, the device should have read 36.9°C, as it generally did.

These so-called tympanic thermometers are now in regular use and cost about twenty pounds.

John is one of those people that has stuck in my mind from all those years in the past. He was a surfer and probably the only one, I’ve ever met in my life. I remember some weekends, he used to take his Morris Minor Traveller all the way to the North of Scotland to go surfing. Visiting that area has been on my bucket list for years. The closest I got, was to fly in my Cessna 340A to the Orkneys.

January 26, 2024 Posted by | Health | , , , , | Leave a comment

How To Protect Your Property

I received this in an e-mail.

Several lives ago, one bloke kept having his car broken into, when parked in the University car park.  Solution: put a few nuclear tri-foils over it (our University had a nuclear school).  End of problem.  Can’t think why.

You can get stickers here.

May 9, 2011 Posted by | World | | Leave a comment