Add this easy veggie-turmeric pasta recipe to your summer dinner rotation

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So you’ve heard of Alfredo sauce and tomato sauce. Heck, you’ve probably also dabbled in pesto and white wine-butter sauce for your pasta.

But when was the last time you tried a turmeric sauce?

I don’t claim to be an inventive cook. Typically, I leave the creativity to my husband, who owns a restaurant. But when I came across this caramelized corn and asparagus pasta recipe from The New York Times two years ago, it sounded too good not to try. It’s since become one of my go-to dishes year-round, even if the ingredients are most abundant during the summer.

The turmeric “sauce” in this case is more of a seasoned coating for the noodles, which infuses an awesome balance of savoriness and spiciness to pair with the recipe’s seasonal vegetables. It will also add a pop of bright yellow coloring to your clothes if you’re not careful, so dress accordingly.

This recipe is sure to satisfy vegetarians, and it’s great with the addition of pan-seared shrimp as a protein. At the height of corn season, I’ll use Olathe sweet corn for a touch of homegrown flavor. And a hack for those spending the extra hours of daylight out and about instead of in the kitchen: Keep a bag of frozen corn on hand for another apt substitute.

Caramelized corn and asparagus pasta

Recipe originally published by NYT Cooking

Ingredients

1 pound pasta, typically spaghetti or linguini
3 ears of corn, husked
16 medium stalks asparagus, trimmed and thinly sliced on an angle
3 scallions, trimmed and minced
¼ cup olive oil, plus more for drizzling
¼ teaspoon granulated sugar
2 teaspoons ground turmeric
6 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 cloves of garlic, minced
⅓ white wine or vermouth
1 cup ricotta cheese
1 lemon (optional)

Directions

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil on high heat. Meanwhile, prepare the corn by slicing the corn kernels off the cobs. Add cobs to the pot of water to add a touch of sweetness.

Once the water is boiling, add pasta and cook according to package instructions. The cobs remain in the water with the pasta.

In a large, deep skillet, heat the oil over medium-high. Add corn kernels and sugar, season with salt and pepper, and cook while stirring occasionally until they begin to caramelize. (About 6 minutes.) Stir in the asparagus, scallions and half the turmeric (1 teaspoon). Cook while stirring frequently until just softened and the corn is caramelized. (About 2 to 3 minutes.) Transfer to a bowl.

Once the pasta is just short of al dente, reserve 1 ½ cups of pasta water, and then drain pasta and discard the corn cobs.

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In your large skillet, add the butter, garlic and remaining turmeric and cook over medium heat until the butter melts and starts to foam. (About 3 minutes.) Whisk in white wine to deglaze and cook for 1 to 2 minutes. Then whisk in 1 cup of pasta water.

Add the pasta into the large skillet and toss with tongs over medium heat until thoroughly coated and cooked to your desired texture (1 to 2 minutes). Add pasta water as needed to loosen the sauce.

Remove from heat and stir in half of the corn-asparagus mixture, then season to taste with salt and pepper.

Divide the pasta among the plates. Dollop with ricotta cheese and top with the remaining mixture. Drizzle with olive oil. If using lemon, sprinkle the pasta with lemon zest and serve with a lemon wedge.

Enjoy!

Commentary: Pain doesn’t belong on a scale of zero to 10

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Elisabeth Rosenthal | KFF Health News (TNS)

Over the past two years, a simple but baffling request has preceded most of my encounters with medical professionals: “Rate your pain on a scale of zero to 10.”

I trained as a physician and have asked patients the very same question thousands of times, so I think hard about how to quantify the sum of the sore hips, the prickly thighs, and the numbing, itchy pain near my left shoulder blade. I pause and then, mostly arbitrarily, choose a number. “Three or four?” I venture, knowing the real answer is long, complicated, and not measurable in this one-dimensional way.

Pain is a squirrely thing. It’s sometimes burning, sometimes drilling, sometimes a deep-in-the-muscles clenching ache. Mine can depend on my mood or how much attention I afford it and can recede nearly entirely if I’m engrossed in a film or a task. Pain can also be disabling enough to cancel vacations, or so overwhelming that it leads people to opioid addiction. Even 10+ pain can be bearable when it’s endured for good reason, like giving birth to a child. But what’s the purpose of the pains I have now, the lingering effects of a head injury?

The concept of reducing these shades of pain to a single number dates to the 1970s. But the zero-to-10 scale is ubiquitous today because of what was called a “pain revolution” in the ’90s, when intense new attention to addressing pain — primarily with opioids — was framed as progress. Doctors today have a fuller understanding of treating pain, as well as the terrible consequences of prescribing opioids so readily. What they are learning only now is how to better measure pain and treat its many forms.

About 30 years ago, physicians who championed the use of opioids gave robust new life to what had been a niche specialty: pain management. They started pushing the idea that pain should be measured at every appointment as a “fifth vital sign.” The American Pain Society went as far as copyrighting the phrase. But unlike the other vital signs — blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, and breathing rate — pain had no objective scale. How to measure the unmeasurable? The society encouraged doctors and nurses to use the zero-to-10 rating system. Around that time, the FDA approved OxyContin, a slow-release opioid painkiller made by Purdue Pharma. The drugmaker itself encouraged doctors to routinely record and treat pain, and aggressively marketed opioids as an obvious solution.

To be fair, in an era when pain was too often ignored or undertreated, the zero-to-10 rating system could be regarded as an advance. Morphine pumps were not available for those cancer patients I saw in the ’80s, even those in agonizing pain from cancer in their bones; doctors regarded pain as an inevitable part of disease. In the emergency room where I practiced in the early ’90s, prescribing even a few opioid pills was a hassle: It required asking the head nurse to unlock a special prescription pad and making a copy for the state agency that tracked prescribing patterns. Regulators (rightly) worried that handing out narcotics would lead to addiction. As a result, some patients in need of relief likely went without.

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After pain doctors and opioid manufacturers campaigned for broader use of opioids — claiming that newer forms were not addictive, or much less so than previous incarnations — prescribing the drugs became far easier and were promoted for all kinds of pain, whether from knee arthritis or back problems. As a young doctor joining the “pain revolution,” I probably asked patients thousands of times to rate their pain on a scale of zero to 10 and wrote many scripts each week for pain medication, as monitoring “the fifth vital sign” quickly became routine in the medical system. In time, a zero-to-10 pain measurement became a necessary box to fill in electronic medical records. The Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations made regularly assessing pain a prerequisite for medical centers receiving federal health care dollars. Medical groups added treatment of pain to their list of patient rights, and satisfaction with pain treatment became a component of post-visit patient surveys. (A poor showing could mean lower reimbursement from some insurers.)

But this approach to pain management had clear drawbacks. Studies accumulated showing that measuring patients’ pain didn’t result in better pain control. Doctors showed little interest in or didn’t know how to respond to the recorded answer. And patients’ satisfaction with their doctors’ discussion of pain didn’t necessarily mean they got adequate treatment. At the same time, the drugs were fueling the growing opioid epidemic. Research showed that an estimated 3% to 19% of people who received a prescription for pain medication from a doctor developed an addiction.

Doctors who wanted to treat pain had few other options, though. “We had a good sense that these drugs weren’t the only way to manage pain,” Linda Porter, director of the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Pain Policy and Planning, told me. “But we didn’t have a good understanding of the complexity or alternatives.” The enthusiasm for narcotics left many varietals of pain underexplored and undertreated for years. Only in 2018, a year when nearly 50,000 Americans died of an overdose, did Congress start funding a program — the Early Phase Pain Investigation Clinical Network, or EPPIC-Net — designed to explore types of pain and find better solutions. The network connects specialists at 12 academic specialized clinical centers and is meant to jump-start new research in the field and find bespoke solutions for different kinds of pain.

A zero-to-10 scale may make sense in certain situations, such as when a nurse uses it to adjust a medication dose for a patient hospitalized after surgery or an accident. And researchers and pain specialists have tried to create better rating tools — dozens, in fact, none of which was adequate to capture pain’s complexity, a European panel of experts concluded. The Veterans Health Administration, for instance, created one that had supplemental questions and visual prompts: A rating of 5 correlated with a frown and a pain level that “interrupts some activities.” The survey took much longer to administer and produced results that were no better than the zero-to-10 system. By the 2010s, many medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Family Physicians, were rejecting not just the zero-to-10 scale but the entire notion that pain could be meaningfully self-reported numerically by a patient.

In the years that opioids had dominated pain remedies, a few drugs — such as gabapentin and pregabalin for neuropathy, and lidocaine patches and creams for musculoskeletal aches — had become available. “There was a growing awareness of the incredible complexity of pain — that you would have to find the right drugs for the right patients,” Rebecca Hommer, EPPIC-Net’s interim director, told me. Researchers are now looking for biomarkers associated with different kinds of pain so that drug studies can use more objective measures to assess the medications’ effect. A better understanding of the neural pathways and neurotransmitters that create different types of pain could also help researchers design drugs to interrupt and tame them.

Any treatments that come out of this research are unlikely to be blockbusters like opioids; by design, they will be useful to fewer people. That also makes them less appealing prospects to drug companies. So EPPIC-Net is helping small drug companies, academics, and even individual doctors design and conduct early-stage trials to test the safety and efficacy of promising pain-taming molecules. That information will be handed over to drug manufacturers for late-stage trials, all with the aim of getting new drugs approved by the FDA more quickly.

The first EPPIC-Net trials are just getting underway. Finding better treatments will be no easy task, because the nervous system is a largely unexplored universe of molecules, cells, and electronic connections that interact in countless ways. The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to scientists who discovered the mechanisms that allow us to feel the most basic sensations: cold and hot. In comparison, pain is a hydra. A simple number might feel definitive. But it’s not helping anyone make the pain go away.

(KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs of KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.)

©2024 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Do you have COVID? Here’s how long the CDC recommends you stay home

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Michelle Marchante | (TNS) Miami Herald

MIAMI — COVID is going around again this summer, with infections rising across Florida and the country.

The good news is that the most common variants circulating in the country — KP.3, KP.2, and LB.1 — cause similar symptoms to previous COVID strains, such as cough, fever and fatigue. And many people can recover at home.

The bad news: These variants have a mutation that make them more contagious.

So, how long should you quarantine at home if you’re sick with COVID? And should you wear a mask again?

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations have changed throughout the pandemic. Now, the federal public health agency’s guidance focuses more on symptoms.

Here’s what the CDC’s current guidance says:

What are the quarantine guidelines for COVID?

If you test positive for COVID and have symptoms: Stay home and away from others until symptoms get better overall and you no longer have fever (without the help of fever-reducing medication) for at least 24 hours.

“Depending on the length of symptoms, this period could be shorter, the same, or longer than the previous guidance for COVID-19,” the CDC states.

Once the “stay home period” is over, the CDC recommends taking additional precautions, such as wearing a mask and avoiding crowded areas for the next five days as you might still be contagious. Make sure to wash your hands frequently, too.

What if your COVID cough just isn’t going away?

Don’t worry. While some symptoms, such as fever, are common during periods when someone is infectious, other symptoms, like a lingering cough, might stick around for a while, even though you’re not infectious anymore, the CDC says.

If you test positive for COVID and don’t have symptoms: Take precautions for the next five days to reduce the risk of spreading the disease to others as you might still be contagious. Precautions can include wearing a mask, social distancing, washing your hands frequently and cleaning high-touch surfaces such as doorknobs.

Why did the CDC COVID guidance change?

The CDC’s previous COVID guidance recommended isolating for at least five days and then taking extra precautions. In March, the CDC updated its guidance to make it more symptom-focus, similar to other respiratory illnesses.

The CDC said it did this for various reasons, including because the country’s COVID situation had improved with fewer COVID-related hospitalizations and deaths and also because “we have more tools than ever to combat flu, COVID, and RSV.”

“We considered multiple options for adjusting isolation guidance at different lengths of time. In addition to fewer people getting seriously ill from COVID-19 and having better tools to fight serious illness, CDC considered other factors such as the personal and societal costs of extended isolation,” the agency said. “We also considered the timing of when people are most likely to spread the virus (a few days before and after symptoms appear). The updated guidance is easy to understand, practical and evidence-based, as well as more aligned with long-standing recommendations for other respiratory illnesses.”

_____

©2024 Miami Herald. Visit at miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Judge throws out Rudy Giuliani’s bankruptcy case, says he flouted process with lack of transparency

posted in: Politics | 0

By MICHAEL R. SISAK

NEW YORK (AP) — A judge threw out Rudy Giuliani ’s bankruptcy case on Friday, finding that the former New York City mayor had flouted process with a lack of transparency.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane formalized the decision after saying he was leaning toward doing so on Wednesday. Lawyers for Giuliani and his two biggest creditors — two former election workers he was found to have defamed — had agreed that dismissing the case was the best way forward.

The dismissal ends Giuliani’s pursuit of bankruptcy protection but doesn’t absolve him of his debts. His creditors can now pursue other legal remedies to recoup at least some of the money they’re owed, such as getting a court order to seize his apartments and other assets.

Dismissing the case will also allow the ex-mayor to pursue an appeal in the defamation case, which arose from his efforts to overturn Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.