Last night I had a fascinating conversation with a pulmonary nurse who works at Duke University. You just have to LOVE the way life will constantly smack you down, over and over. Yes, I was in the home of two scientists, completely engrossed in their conversation with another scientist. Whoa, those are some smart people. I love smart people. Was I just denigrating academic scientists as "lords of all knowledge" on this blog? I'm an ass.

This guy was talking about the work happening right now at Duke to make surgery safer. Apparently we put people into a pseudo form of hibernation during surgery by inducing hypothermia. But doing so causes a cascade of undesirable affects throughout all our internal organs, including our brains. Science is trying hard to understand how bears and squirrels can put themselves into hibernation and come out of it without any of the controversial affects of induced hypothermia. Its speculated just going under general anesthesia too often can precipitate an Alzheimers-like brain degeneration in old age.

Apparently, receiving blood is not good. You really don't want anyone else's blood in your body, if you can possibly avoid it. Using very sophisticated computers to sift through confounders, science has isolated a five year mark of higher mortality for anyone who gets blood--regardless of the reason they needed extra blood in the first place.

Apparently your "guts basically die" in a major surgery. But "don't worry, it all comes back up." And "our bodies have some amazing ways to deal with" the trauma we cause in surgery. "Make no mistake," the man said, "you do not want to have surgery if you can avoid it. Surgery is very dangerous."

We are hoping to learn how to do medicine better. Which is great. At Duke they are working hard toward greater success with bloodless surgeries, a thing I'd never even heard of. And this nurse ended up reiterating that the science of protein, most specifically with regard to inflammation, is at the heart of what we desperately need to understand.

So an enormously credentialed man of science walked into a room last night and in 10 minutes blithely affirmed two of the most important ideas of my adult life, both of which I've been repeatedly castigated (by scientists) for suggesting:

1) We are doing birth wrong. It should almost never be a surgical event. C-sections are not benign.
2) Inflammation is the locus of our confusion. We are probably barking up the wrong nutritional tree with regard to saturated fat and diets.