Health Adda

The family doctor is fortunately being resurrected again. Yes, he was almost dead the last few decades when the public’s obsession with specialties and specialists drove them to high-end tertiary care centers. What they often missed was good holistic care! The family doctor’s role is the most challenging. He has to answer why the newly born cries after feeds, why the school going child is losing his appetite ( or at least that is what mom thinks), why the lady of the house gets the splitting attacks of migraine, how to measure and control the gentleman’s BP especially when there is tension at office, why granddad takes so long to pass urine, and how to manage the vomiting and diarrhea of the cousins who are visiting! In other words, he has to be the proverbial jack and dabble with all aspects of health from birth to death. Being a scarce commodity, a good family doctor can be difficult to find. His qualifications should include a “proper degree” and easy accessibility. He

The regular depiction in TV serials of a doctor arriving home immediately when summoned on telephone to attend to an emergency, could not be farther from reality. Most doctors do not attend home calls, and the chances of getting one in the  of the night when you are down with an attack of incessant vomiting or an allergy could be almost impossible. It makes sense therefore, to keep some medicines at home or carry on travel. Here are some tips on how to make your own emergency medicine kit: 1.        Keep medicines that you are familiar with, and preferrably, have taken before, so that it is not a first timer during an emergency and that too in a new place. 2.        If you are not good with tongue twisting drug names, put them in labelled envelopes according to indications. For example, you could have paracetamol tablets in an evelope labelled “Fever, Body pains”, or loperamide in one labelled “Loose motions” 3.        Keep them in your hand baggage, in a separate pouch or flap. I rec

Recent research is turning the relationship of health and happiness on its head; healthy people are ofcourse happier, but more startling is the observation that people who are happy and satisfied with their lives might be healthier.  Moreover, the benefit comes with a quick turn around time, with greater happiness boosting health in as little as 3 years. Around 10,000 Australian adults were posed 2 questions in a study in 2001: “During the past 4 weeks, have you been a happy person?” to assess happiness, and “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life?” to determine satisfaction. The answers were correlated with physical health parameters in 2001 and 3 years later in 2004. “We found strong evidence that both happiness and satisfaction have an impact on our indicators of health”, says Dr Siahpush, from the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, USA. They were associated with excellent or very good physical health, absence of long-term limiting illnesses, and hig

Physicians and researchers are now paying increasing attention to prayer and its powers in healing, relegating the concept that our body and its ailments are not influenced by our minds, to history. Science is reluctantly coming to terms with observations that patients in intensive care units who were prayed for did significantly better in terms of recovery and survival than those who were not prayed for. Neurosurgeons of LSU Health Sciences Center, Louisiana, USA, evaluated the effect of prayers on the recovery of unconscious patients admitted with traumatic brain injury. They compared 13 patients who received prayers with another 13 with equal severity of injury who did not receive prayers. The analysis showed the group who received prayers did better in terms of survival, and recovery from coma.  Doctors are finally waking up. Two decades ago most medics would have discarded a patient’s or his relative’s spiritual aspirations as humbug. In a recent study from Massachussets, USA, Dr

Celebrities, through their own life examples, often help create awareness on health issues more effectively than can be achieved by  other means. And it is the media that plays the vital role of taking this information to the society. Take coronary disease for example. When Dr Manmohan Singh underwent his second cornary bypass surgery last year at the discussion in party circles often revolved around topics such as success of re-do surgeries and the effectiveness of angioplasty. When Bill Clinton underwent a similar surgery a few years ago, people came to know from his case example that saturated transfats in fast foods (he was passionately fond of burgers) tend to clog the arteries that carry blood to the heart muscles, and prevention needs to start in teens rather than in 40s. Mr Sharad Pawar’s cheek cancer story was very telling; he was an avid Gutka chewer and what is now too well known is that this habit confers a great risk of oral cancer. In fact, India, where men chew tobaccol

During the ongoing Road Safety week, it is sobering to know what statistics have to say about our driving skills, behaviour on roads and the risks we pose to ourselves. While only 1% of global cars are on Indian roads, we account for 6% of the global road traffic accidents (RTA). In fact,  India holds the dubious distinction of registering the highest number of road accidents in the world.  According to experts at the National Transportation Planning and Research Centre (NTPRC) the number of accidents for 1000 vehicles in India is as high as 35 while the figure ranges from 4 to 10 in developed countries . Road fatalities have assumed epidemic proportions and are predicted to become the 5 th  highest killer in the world by 2030. An accident occurs every 7 minutes and a t least  13 people die every hour in road accidents  in the country, the latest report of the National Crime Records Bureau reveals. In 2007,  1.14 lakh people in India  lost their lives in road mishaps — that’s signific