Night of the living dead

[mdlbear]

I did not have a good night last night: straps, wires, and tubes are not conducive to sleep. Last night was my night for the sleep apnea test; they give you a gadget to wear that straps on and includes two strain-gauge bands, a tube going up to your nose, and an oxymetry sensor that clips onto a finger. They really prefer 5 hours worth of sensing; they'll be lucky if they got four. I think I finally got to sleep around 2:30, after taking a flexeril at 2:00. After trying the couch -- the flower_cat was wakeful for different reasons.

Tried adding niacin and B12 supplements to my daily pill salad. The recent tests for those were in the normal range, but I figure it's worth seeing whether they help the neuropathy and triglycerides anyway. I'd forgotten about the facial flushing effect from niacin -- impressive.

Comments

[hvideo.livejournal.com]

Regarding Niacin - the snapshot from Wikipedia mentions that there is some doubt as to whether the "flush-free" form (inositol hexanicinate) actually helps with health issues like Cholesterol levels. The latest studies I've seen indicate that it doesn't. What is CAN do, however, is help your body get used to niacin.

I first tried the standard nicotinic acid form of niacin and got flushing. I also got flushing with the sustained release form of nicotinic acid. So I went to the flush-free inositol hexaniacinate form for a while. When I read the medical studies showing that it wasn't effective, I switched back to the nicotinic acid and found that the flushing was much less than it had been the first time around.

(Of course, even that may not be desirable. One of the papers suggested that the flushing action itself may be part of the reason that niacin works -that the widening of the capillaries and increased blood flow helps the good cholesterol remove the bad cholesterol deposits. But that was speculation, not proof.)