Medical Theory #1. Diabetics have excess sugar in their blood. They also have problems with infections in their feet and lower legs.

I assume that sugar molecules are denser than the typical blood fluids.

So it seems to be reasonable that excess sugar would tend to pool in a diabetics feet and lower legs. Sitting and inactivity exacerbates this problem.

This sugar has a couple of effects. It damages the cell linings of the blood vessels allowing the sugar to seep into surrounding tissues, which irritate the surrounding tissues.

It also makes the surrounding tissues smell sweet, which attracts bugs and mites.

These also irritate the lower legs and feet, so the person tends to scratch at their lower legs and feet, which cause and prolong any open wounds.

I suggest testing for blood sugar in a diabetic’s ankle, rather than fingertip, to get a reading on how much sugar is pooling in their feet and lower legs.

I would also suggest lying flat on the floor, with their legs resting a foot or two up above them against a wall, for half an hour or so daily, and after exercise, to promote the migration of sugar from their legs and feet to their body core.

Medical Theory #2. It is said that your body replaces all of its cells at an average rate of once every seven years.

Well, some organs get replaced much sooner – the cell linings of your intestines tend to get replaced every 4 or 5 days. Your blood cells get replaced every couple of months.

Some cells take years and decades to be replaced – the cells in your eyes or your bones, for instance. And some cells never get replaced – neurons in your brain for instance.

But what is true, is that there is a “pull out old cells and replace them” function going on in your body all the time. This is a separate process from the immunity and disease fighting response systems that fight infections, illness and bad food, and a separate process from the processing of food and homeostasis of supplying nutrients to the body’s cells and carrying off waste products. This replacement of old cells goes on continuously and parallel with, and separate from those other processes.

I imagine it to be something like a work crew of minions from the “Despicable Me” movie, off working by themselves all the time.

They replace a body’s cells in three different modes: 1. As Designed, or 2. As Built, or 3. As Repaired.

I work in IT systems, and we keep track of the description of the components of an IT system in a similar way. The IT systems are so complex these days, and have so many interconnected components, that the record keeping to keep track of how everything interconnects is immense, and the design and testing of each component is complex. So any large system and the accompanying software is designed minutely on paper before any system is constructed.

This is the system As Designed.

Often, however, between the time the system is designed and components purchased and installed, new components will be available on the market, with new capabilities and better security, or the designed components will become unavailable and a different component will be substituted and the resulting system will be built with different components than specified in the design.

This is the system As Built.

Then occasionally bad stuff happens, and the system fails and in the ensuing battle to repair the system and get it functioning again, auxiliary cables will be strung across the floor to obsolete parts and multiple power sources, and several spare components rescued from the warehouse scrap pile will be cobbled together to serve as an emergency replacement for a new component that failed, and once the system is back up and running, it will take months or years for a new system to be redesigned and purchased and installed so the IT systems engineers live with the repairs.

This is the system As Repaired.

The body’s repair and replace function operates similarly.

Because much of the repair and replace process is a response to current conditions, growing muscles due to exercise, or increasing lung capacity or trying to overcome weak blood flow or some such, much of the replacement process just follows along with replacing the cells As Repaired, a simple pull out the old stuff and put in an identical replacement cell.

But occasionally, I think the work crew boss that day looks at the original design, and replaces the old cells with “As Designed” cells. I think that may be why some cancers go into spontaneous remission. Or why scars sometimes disappear. I had a couple of 3 inch long scars on my leg from a childhood accident. I had them for 30 years. One day I looked down, and they were gone. Poof. The work crew replaced them with cells “As Designed.”

It would be awesome if we could somehow communicate with the work crew boss to tell them to replace cells differently depending on what needs to be done. A congenital hole-in-the-heart? Replace the cells “As Designed.” Cancer? Replace the cells “As Designed,” and NOT “As Repaired.”

Medical Theory #3. What Sleep is all about.

The latest theory about sleep is that for some reason your brain needs to rehash the stuff that occurred during the day and transfer it to long term memory, and it does so while you sleep. I think that is bunk.

I think that what is actually happening, is that people (including me) forget that the primary purpose of a brain is NOT thinking. It is a chemical factory and fabricates billions of different chemical signals that regulate and communicate with the cells in your body to maintain and protect it.

“Thinking” is just the most obvious and visible process of the brain.

I think that during sleep, the brain’s chemical factory is getting flushed out and restocked. Dreams and sleep aren’t about thinking at all, but are a chemical flushing, resetting, and restocking process.