Health Adda

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 ...