Health Adda

While we may debate whether examinations in our schools and colleges can ever be defanged of their fear factor, there seems to be growing concern that in the present form they induce considerable stress to students. Increasing media reports of young lives being snuffed out by suicide, and the manifold larger number of unreported scars and traumas produced by this annual event should evoke serious concern in us. Stress may not always be bad. Without a dash of “positive” stress, we would not be striving to run or climb in life. Without it, I wonder if any of us would have struggled to reach wherever we have. However, with life getting more and more competitive and we getting more and more ambitious, too much is being perceived to be at stake. “Perform or perish” or “do or die” is the attitude that is assuming center stage in the minds of students, claiming the high price of mental and physical health. Negative stress can be recognized reasonably early and easily. It cause...

Hepatitis C, a small RNA virus that causes infection and damage to the liver, had its moment of public recognition when the well-endowed silverscreen celebrity Pamela Anderson of Baywatch fame got diagnosed with it. The way she contracted it wa s equally sensational: she had shared the needle for a skin tattoo with her boyfriend, Tommy Lee, who carried the infection. The gossipy tale went further to her litigating against him for concealed the information, but as often happens there, they finally united by wedlock! Hepatitis C infection is indeed more common than most of us probably know. Of all us who consider ourselves perfectly healthy and volunteer to donate blood, 1% harbour the infection. In other words, approximately 10 million people in India have the infection and do not know it. Hepatitis C virus is a stealthy one that hardly ever produces jaundice, the commonly known symptom of liver disease. It lodges in the liver and nibbles away at its cells over years. Duri...

A cinical problem of young people that is on the rise these days is Eating Disorders. It is a condition which affects an individual’s eating habits, either as a result of their own doing (self-inflicted), or as a bodily reaction to the consumption of food. Eating d isorders can range from mild mental anguish to life-threatening conditions. The two most common varieties of eating disorders that have become well known because of the celebrities afflicted by them are Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa . Anorexia nervosa, whose sufferers include celebrities such as Victoria Beckham, Kate Winslet and Kareena Kapoor, is a condition in which significant weight is lost deliberately driven by a fear of distorted body image . It is a serious disorder that can lead to death.  The girl has a n abnormally low body weight (the suggested guideline ≤ 85% of normal for age and height, or BMI ≤ 17.5), stops having her regular periods, and has an intense fear of gaining weight or ...

While Medical science has significantly increased our life expectancy and made many diseases treatable, it has made our expectations soar to unreasonabe heights and dimished our capacity to accept death due to diseases that defy current treatm ent. Widespread cancer, dementia and advanced chronic diseases of the heart, lungs or liver are some examples that cause significant pain and suffering, progress relentlessly and render even the relatives helpless and frustrated. Palliative Medicine (PM) may sound a paradox in modern times, as “it aims to add life or quality to the remaining days, in terminally ill patients”, says Dr Mhoira Leng, a British doctor presently working in Uganda, and a pioneer in this subspeciality, who was in Lucknow recently. “Providing relief of the   distressing and dehumanising pain to patients with terminal cancer can be one of the greatest boons of medical science that is unfortunately not often adequately utilized”, she added. Experts in PM h...

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. ...

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...