Health Adda

Have you noticed that medical prescriptions hardly ever consist of a single drug but most often comprise a long list of them, even when the symptom that took you to the doctor was just a single one? It is due to a recently recognized phenomenon called Prescription Cascade. As most drugs have side effects, what the doctor tries to do is to add balancing drugs that would counter them should they occur. The most common example of this phenomenon is to co prescribe drugs that lower the stomach’s acidity when prescribing pain killers. Most pain killers such as aspirin, ibuprofen, diclofenac, indomethacin or naproxen are plagued by the side effect of causing gastric injury, called gastritis or gastric erosions. Indeed long term use of these agents are associated with the development of ulcers in the stomach or duodenum, that apart from causing stomach ache, can sometimes bleed or perforate  posing a threat to life. Doctors, therefore, often find it more covenient, and perhaps safer to ad...

One of the cruelest acts that we as parents, teachers or colleagues might be inadvertently indulging in is failing to recognize dyslexia, and labelling it as mental weakness. Dyslexics, comprising 5% of the population, can be spotted from  pre-school age. Typically, these kids have bright intelligent eyes, seem to follow what you tell them, react intelligently to situations, are emotionally normal, but seem to get into problems when asked to read or write. They may sit with the book open for long hours without progressing down the page, write poorly with lots of spelling mistakes, confuse “b” with “d” (mirror images) and hence get poor marks in the way tests are “normally” conducted. They are certainly not mentally weak. In fact studies show that some of the brightest and most successful have had the trait. Albert Einstein the great scientist, John Lennon of Beatles fame, Richard Branson the owner of Virgin Airlines, Tom Cruise the Hollywood star, Thomas Edison who gave us the elec...

Are you getting enough of good music to benefit your body and mind? Research has shown that music has a profound effect on your body and psyche. In fact, there is a growing field of health care known as music therapy, which uses mu sic to heal. Those who practice music therapy are finding benefit in using music to help cancer patients, children with ADD (attention deficit disorder), and even hospitals are beginning to use music to manage pain, fight depression, calm patients and ease muscle tension,   Airlines and hotel industries were quick to spot the benefit of soft soothing music on customers and started using it in flights and hotel lobbies. Their customers started feeling cheerful and stress-free with patient satisfaction surveys and business turnover showing mprovement.   Studies have shown that patients waiting for endoscopic or surgical procedures are less stressed and have fewer complications if soothed and prepared with soft music. Further, surgeons un...

My well-wishers and grateful ex-patients wonder why I fail to turn up at their parties despite their pleasand insistent invitations. While my wife usually gets fed up with the adulation and importance I usually get from satisfied patients or their relatives at parties, some sour ones are educative enough. I once found myself squeezed between two defence officers at a party at the MB Club. They seemed jovial, friendly and in “high spirits” and had many interesting stories to  tell. Their demeanour however changed  once they learnt that I was a doctor at the SGPGI. The conversation then turned to how terrible places hospitals were, how uncaring the staffs were and how one of them had lost a relative at SGPGI after a heart surgery due to, what they perceived, neglect.  My feeble protests that I belonged to a different speciality , that patients sometimes do die after heart surgeries in spite of the best treatment, just as jawans do in a war despite all armours, ...

While the news may be bad, the manner in which it is delivered can make it either traumatic or bearable, says Dr Elly Hann, an expert on end-of-life care programme.  And what is interesting is that the technique applies not just to patients detected to have cancers, but to any bad news like loss of a job, failure in an examination, or a failed relationship, It is being increasingly realized that bad news, no matter how bad, needs to be told rather than concealed, as getting to know it helps the patient or victim to cope better and set realistic goals. Recent research contradicts traditional belief that it takes away hope plunging people in irretrievable despair. That is of course if the news is communicated properly. The currently accepted technique of delivering bad news that we might all find universally useful in our own lives, has 6 steps. Step1: Getting started. A little thoughtful preparation needs to go into ascertaining and reconfirming the unpleasant facts be...

The 85 year old British scientist, Professor Robert Edwards, who helped create the first test tube baby and thus transformed the lives of millions of couples plagued by infertility, was finally awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine, 2010. The person happiest to hear the news was Louise Brown, now 32, who on July 25, 1978, became the first ever child born through in-vitro fertilization (IVF), to her mother Lesley, who was seeking tretament for infertility. Professor Edwards along with his research partner Dr PatrickSteptoe,  had been resarching on taking eggs out of a woman’s body after stimulating the ovary, and fertilizing it with sperms from a donor, in a petri dsh, allowing it to multiply a few times, and then putting it back into the womb of the woman. Their first success came with Lesley Brown who gave birth to Louise by natural delivery. Dr Steptoe, with whom Dr Edwards had started his infertility research and clinic in Cambridge, died in 1988. As the Nobel Prize...

A new medication, varenicline, promises to help smokers who are keen on quitting the habit, to do so with ease and comfort. Quitting smoking can be hard for smokers as nicotine, the substance in tobacco that gets you hooked, is one of the most addictive substances known to man.  Stopping suddenly is sometimes associated with intense craving, mood swings, abnormal behaviour and depression making smokers continue with their habit indefinitely till a major hea lth event like heart attack or cancer shakes them out of it. The addictive effect of smoking is due to nicotine that gets attached to a site in the brain called alpha-4-B-2 receptor and triggers neurochemical pathways that provide the sense of pleasure that go with it. Varenicline works by geting attached to the same site in the brain, thereby blocking nicotine from getting to it. Why Varencline particularly seems to work is because apart from blocking nicotine, it exerts a mild stimulatory effect of its own, just ...