Set point?

I won’t doubt modern medicine again! Personal experience is the only teacher.

Last week, after stupidly DIY diagnosing the problem as psoriasis, I finally got in to see the real human doctor. (A rare GOOD doctor who listens and understands the whole patient, so he’s worth waiting for.) He knew immediately it isn’t psoriasis because he has the condition himself, showed me his elbow for comparison. After a few days of checking and conferring he decided it’s an allergic reaction against Lisinopril, which I’ve been taking since 2010. He told me to stop the Lisinopril without a substitute for now, prescribed steroid pills for the swelling and steroid cream for the skin.

After 3 days the cream has cleared up nearly all of the skin on arms and legs. From crusty sores back to normal wrinkly old codger skin. Magical! I’m a believer. Modern medicine works.

The pills (“prednisone burst”) are slower, acting first on innards to open up the gut. So far not much response from the swelly feet, but I trust it will get there.

Here’s an oddity worth thinking about. This morning I took taxi to the store to avoid the usual one-mile walk. The trip still involved a half hour in shoes and 15 minutes of walking around the store. Stuffing the fat feet into shoes wasn’t easy. Immediately after removing shoes, the feet were fully skinny for a minute, then refilled to the same volume.

Mechanically this doesn’t make sense. If they CAN be skinny, why not stay that way? When you squeeze the contents out of a toothpaste tube it doesn’t refill with toothpaste!

Same thing happened last week when the hands were fat. I could deflate them with cold water and massage, but they soon refilled to the same volume until they finally decided to resume normalcy.

Swelling must involve a homeostatic ‘set point’ like overall fatness. The feet know how big they want to be, and won’t deflate until the set point is lowered.