The Definition Of A Good Day And Occam’s Razor

Hi folks,

Dave Deming heads off to deliver a tree for Johnny from Johnny's Gone Fishing. From: http://goo.gl/G4l9T

Well, I had a good day today. Two people said that they had started working out because I had inspired them. Something to do with my running and biking and swimming and going to the gym all the time, I guess. But that was nice. The other ‘good thing’ happened at the store we are re-opening, Johnny’s Gone Fishing. We have been giving away complimentary bagels (apologies to Gary Taubes), coffee, and hot chocolate to bring back the old clients. This Saturday a young man with three cute kids told me in passing about his sore heel that was messing up his running. Fair chance that he has a case of plantar fasciitis in its early stages. I talked about the condition, based on my own experience of this most frustrating of all running problems, and gave him a roller lesson on the spot and emphasized the importance of a correct diagnosis.

My two business partners, Jan (left) and Erica (right) who decided to work out more based on my inspiration. Ellen (center) makes great pound cakes.

I was 99% sure of plantar fasciitis, which a couple of other friends have fixed based on my roller advice. It feels good to make a positive difference in people’s lives. However, was my diagnosis correct?  This brings me once again to that old razor of Occam or Ockham, which is defined in Wikipedia as follows:

“Occam’s razor, also known as Ockham’s razor, and sometimes expressed in Latin as lex parsimoniae (the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness), is a principle that generally recommends from among competing hypotheses selecting the one that makes the fewest new assumptions.”

My training as a veterinary pathologist was directed towards working out mechanisms of disease. If there were many concurrent lesions (upset tissues) in the affected animal, I was trained to search for a common cause that could account for all of them. The sore heel was easy enough. I might be wrong, and that remains to be seen. My real interest today lies in my own case of concurrent abdominal aortic aneurysm, severe hyperlipidemia, and an inability to handle barefoot running due to tendonitis in my feet that I just could not eliminate. I suspect that there is a common molecular mechanism that links these three. Anyone out there know what it is? Probably related to elastic tissue repair, I suspect.

So, in spite of what Dirty Harry had to say about ‘knowing your limitations,’ I think that the real trick is to know your complete phenotype, positive and negative, and work with both of them to your advantage.

-k @FitOldDog