I think it's the difference in doctors. I have no problem with electronic records. What I do have a problem with is the doctor spending 90% of his time looking at the computer and not at me. No wonder he didn't remember me a few weeks later. Cold. And his computer was large too, and on a stand. I feel he was snooping through 33 years of medical records from my deceased doctor. What I had was a common illness that needed antibiotics. Period. And what he should have done was go through my records, especially medicines I take which I hand delivered a list of them, *before* he saw me. There was absolutely no need to look at the computer while I was there. None. He has no people skills and the computer makes it easy for him. He hardly spoke to me, but when he left the room he immediately started laughing and joking around with his staff. A friend went to him also, same thing. Unfortunately, there aren't that many doctors in my area unless I want to drive 30 minutes to one, and if I'm pretty sick, that's not happening. lol

2nd week and 3rd week update 2nd week, Actinovate, RdeR: helas! Actinovate cant keep the spots away from RdeR leaves. All the leaves that were new when I started this experiment have spots and the spots are growing. 3rd week application of Actinovate: really the Actinovate has not worked at all. The spots on RdeR are back full force. The reprieve that I had seen and thought maybe it was Actinovate working was just new leaves waiting to show spots. Cutting so much of the plant off didn't do any good either. I think RdeR is a very difficult subject to cure spots from. I have found quite a few posts discussing RdeR's spots. Are they BS or are they not? At least they are not your typical BS (the leaves dont yellow or fall off easily) and the spots are very hard to cure. But the plant goes on blooming. (Maybe it was not fair setting the bar so high for Actinovate in the first experiment). Now after the 3rd application, I am going to discontinue Act. I will try a chemical fungicide and see if this fungus can be removed at all. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2nd week, Serenade, CdeB: Serenade still seems to be keeping all spots at bay! The cut down, leafless shrub is showing growth of fresh shoots and clean new leaves. 3rd application of Serenade: I see small spots on one leaf. Maybe Serenade can control spots a fair amount but not totally. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Zephirine D: One application of Actinovate has done nothing to control BS in ZD. BS has spread and growing. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Root drench with Infuse on Rambler after 2 applications 10 days apart, now about 2-1/2 weeks later: BS seems to be settling down. There are not many leaves left to black spot but I see fresh shoots and leaves that look clean, healthy and growing fast. Maybe Infuse worked, maybe the plant just slowly healed itself. Even though I was skeptical at first that Infuse as root drench could work, I think it did. I just read that if a plant has become woody instead of a small soft stemmed shrub, the systemic can take a long time to translocate, up to 6 weeks. I was expecting visible change in two days. An Aside: Before the 2nd application of Infuse to the roots I decided to check the soil to see how the earthworms were and anything else I might notice. I moved away the soil, the earthworms seemed fine. They did not look reduced in number or sickly. Then what I saw took my breath away, again. Knuckled in and under the base of the plant is a large root node from an invasive vine I have been trying to get rid of from my yard. Its the size of a honeydew and its not just passing by. It looks like a parasitic association. It has really pushed itself in and grown. Little red snake like shoots are preparing to come out.....and thick roots have grown like Medusa's hair in all directions. Kind of like plant alien. (This vine is every where in New York. You see layers and layers of it covering tall trees and killing them when on the highways. I found roots of it forming nodes under my Sombreuil and my Styrax tree both of which died. This vine has/had taken over our yard during the past few years of neglect. This spring and summer I and my husband have been pulling off the vine and digging out its roots. Our whole yard seems like it is one giant organism. Not kidding, we have taken out 3 truck loads of vine biomass from our yard so far. Its not just how much vines we took off the surface but how much we have cleaned up under the soil by removing its roots.) Anyway I thought we had cleaned up everything around the rambler but had actually missed quite a bit. With a knife I cut out most of the node, and pulled out roots until they went in too deep. This ensconced node must have terribly weakened the rambler, specially during the growing season, which caused it to get so much BS. Must be. Dont remember it ever getting BS like this or at all. OK! Conclusion: For me Serenade works to controls BS mostly but maybe not 100%, Have to be super diligent and regular. Have to reapply if it rains. Actinovate did not control BS in RdeR or ZD. It still might work in some cases if the infection is not too strong, I think. Have to be diligent. Used Serenade and Actinovate both as foliar spray and root drench so I am not certain if foliar spray alone will be enough, my guess is it would be. These bio-fungicides work but require time, energy and discipline. May not work if the infection is very strong. Infuse as root drench has controlled the enormous BS infection on my rambler which I could not spray.

Added comment: My firm does large scale, high level IT and other types of consulting, among other things, and is UBER security conscious because of very sensitive client information we have. I had occasion a few minutes ago to connect to its intranet, and the information I wanted was sitting behind QUADRUPLE verification. (Name and password, followed by 3 security questions, followed by a different name and password, followed by an access code sent by email or text to a pre-verified address/number). Most of it is only double. I checked to find clear instructions and found that recent Microsoft and Apple Browsers are always supported, some versions of Firefox can have incompatibilities, and nothing else is supported. Any attempted log on with other browsers (like with Chrome) gets bounced. This is unchanged, it's been this way for years. Other than, originally, Apple wasn't supported at all until about 8 years ago and FIrefox was allowed at about the same time. That's why I questioned Jane's comment.

By way of explaining why this caught my attention... Real life parallel example from my household earlier in the week... Walked into a room to hear my husband on speaker phone with his pharmacy. He needed to call in some refill meds as well as new scripts for expired scripts. One of the scripts was for cetirizine--an allergy med. Doc had written a script for it a couple of years ago, taken as needed. DH was running low and wanted to top up his supply. Cetirizine is a common allergy med. OTC. DH was asking the pharmacist to call DH's doc (a PCP) to get a new script. The pharmacist was in process of telling him that it was available OTC and probably cheaper to buy off the shelf rather than as a RX. Also part of the conversation was setting up a pickup time--sometime after 3 pm the following day but no guarantee that it would be available at 3 pm because the pharmacist explained that the pharmacy was really backed up with orders. During this conversation, I walked into another room and pulled a bottle of cetirizine off the shelf in the medicine cabinet...one that I had bought when I was on a solo trip. Sat it on the desk in front of DH while he was still on the phone to the pharmacy. Hospitals here are at near 100% occupancy...pharmacies backed up with orders. AND, DH then informed me that he had divided up his original script of cetirizine into 3 bottles--so he had one next to the bed, one next to the TV and one in his desk. With tablets remaining in all 3 bottles. i.e., he wanted more for his convenience, not because he had exhausted his supply. Along with having forgotten that I had told him (in the past) that I had an OTC bottle in the ground floor powder room medicine cabinet. Yeh, I was a bit exasperated about it all...and I was just a bystander, not a party to. So I can understand where the doc was coming from and can forgive the bit of snark given the current situation in healthcare. DH also has a script for meclizine. Another OTC med. I re-reminded him that we have OTC bottles of meclizine on hand, too. (One that I use, also, albeit seldom.)