Health Adda

Until the recent Delhi High Court judgment decriminalizing homosexuality, this subject was seldom discussed in public.  Sex between 2 people of the same sex was considered unlawful, immoral and hence remained clandestine. The extensive media coverage of exuberant gays and lesbians hugging and petting each other in the open, after the judgement, has made many wonder if being gay has become the latest “in thing”. Homosexuality poses a hazard to health. In a study of 5406 homosexual men in Canada, Dr Robert Hogg noted that their life expectancy was reduced by 8 to 20 years (http://ije.oxfordjournals.org). Through another recent study, researchers from Center for Disease Control (CDC), USA, reconfirmed that gays die around 10-20 years younger than those who engage in normal sexual practice. “These sobering results of our research should encourage our society to reaxamine what it’s doing with those who engage in homosexuality”, says Dr Paul Cameron, President of the Family Research Institu

In this column last Saturday, we discussed how hospitals, w hich most citizen behold as morbid,  frightful places can be transformed into  pleasant , stress free, clean places, where people take care not only of the sick patients, but provide opportunities for the “healthy” attendants to check the staus of their health as well.  This could be your wish list from your hospital: 1.        The whole hospital environment becomes “health promoting”; for example a patient who comes with a minor skin problem also gets an opportunity to get his BP, blood sugar, weight checked and get gets to know if he is overweight or has a cardiac risk. 2.        While waiting for your doctor, you watch a glow screen or CCTV informing  about the benefits of taking the 3 shots of Hepatitis B vaccine, and are reminded to vaccinate your children and spouse as well. 3.        The hospital is spotlessly clean with no gun toting or paan-chewing goons. None of the hospital staff consumes tobacco, and c

You wouldn’t probably go visiting a hospital on a free evening, or be called a luny if you did. And if an ambulance parks outside a neighbour’s door in the colony, your heart would pound as you wonder whom you might lose soon.  Yes, hospitals are necessary evils you can’t wish way. They often become common bashing topics at parties. And the variety of sub topics that hospitals provide are varied enough to keep a conversation going for ages: attitude of doctors, the way nurses behave, the bedsheets, the long waits for investigations, the gentry, the inconvenience and long queues for payment, the escalating cost of care, how last time a person you knew went to that place and died (never mind if he had a terminal cancer and went there gasping), or if anyone who went in critically ill and came out better did so in spite of the hospital rather than due to it! And add to it the topics of unnnecessary investigations, delay in response, or that or that how cruel it was of the docto

Do you get burning sensation behind your chest bone, or have sour food come into your mouth? Do you wake up at night with “heartburn” or “acidity”, and need to drink water or take antacids for relief? If this happens more than once a week, you are suffering from GERD (Gastro-Esophageal Reflux Disease) one  our modern day maladies. GERD is caused by refluxing of acid that is normally produced by the stomach, into the food pipe or esophagus, due to malfunctioning of the one-way valve located at the stomach-foodpipe junction (GE valve). A recent nation-wide survey from 25 centers, conducted by the Indian Society of Gastroenterology, found that 8.4% of Indians suffer from this disorder. If you are a sufferer, you have 80 million in India for company! GERD is a lifestyle disorder, and hence a phenomenon of our times. Those who are overweight or obese, tend to have loose GE valves and are prone to reflux. Alcohol, nicotine (in tobacco), caffeine (in coffee and tea), fatty food ( pastries, f

Many accused the Delhi Government‘s banning of the ubiquitous plastic bags in shops and hotels since January 2009 as overkill and unmindful of its many benefits.The court however observed that plastics had indeed become a serious  hazard and upheld the decision. Plastic carry bags that are so liberally doled out by grocers and store-keepers are emerging a major killer. They are made of polythene, a product of petroleum and can be seen littered on roadsides, drains and fields while you travel by car or train. They choke landfills and drains and have even caused floods. They block the intestines of cattle and marine animals when they are ingested mistakenly while grazing, and kill around 10, 00,000 each year by painfully strangulating their intestines or by choking. Disposing these bags is not easy; their burning releases toxins that are harmful to environment and us. Burying them causes the landfills to choke as polythene does not breakdown and decompose easily, and when t

When Sunita, a 20 year old engineering student, was brought to my clinic by her father a few years ago, nothing seemed grossly out of place in the nvestigations that she had gone through. Yet  was going right for her. While she had been a topper of her batch in school, she was now struggling to pass the year ending examinations, had developed a repulsion to the college, her books and the hostel, had stopped chatting or going out with friends, and had even started avoiding going home on holidays. She was not sleeping well at night, had lost her appetitie and could not remember the last movie she had seen. My suggestion that she could be depressed met with strong disapproval from her father. He demanded that I certify Sunita to be free of any serious disease, and insisted that she had to work hard and exell in studies to compensate for all he had struggled and invested to get her to become an engineer. I heard that Sunita unable to cope and pull on,  ended her life a year later . She wa

More than a year after its introduction into India as an over the counter (OTC) drug, the Emergency Contraceptive pill seems to have become quite popular. Marketed by atleast 2 pharmaceutical companies, namely Cipla (i-pill) and Mankind (Unwanted-72), awareness about their existence among women who can watch TV has become widespread.  Emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs)—sometimes simply referred to as emergency contraceptives (ECs) or the " morning-after pill "—are drugs that act both to prevent  ovulation  or  fertilization  and possibly post-fertilization  implantation   of a  embryo . Hence they are distinct from  medical abortion  methods that act after implantation.  As its name implies, EC is intended for occasional use, when primary means of contraception  fail. Since EC methods act before implantation, they are medically and legally considered forms of  contraception . ECPs contain the  hormone levonorgestrel, a progestin, alone in a single dose of 1.5 mg (as in i-p