Health Adda

The recent death of the young 17 year old Ayazzudin, the son of our ex-cricket skipper Mohd Azharuddin, and his cousin Ajmal, in Hydeabad in a 2-wheeelr accident once again sent that familiar shiver down our spine. These 2 kids were trying to beat their own speed record on their superbike gifted to them by their indulgent well-off parents. These precious lives having been lost, and condolences paid, it is time we faced where we are heading.   Deaths due to road traffic accidents (RTA) in India registered a sharp 6.1% rise between 2006 and 2007. However, road safety experts say the real numbers could be higher since many of these accident cases are not even reported. "There is no estimate of how many injured in road accidents die a few hours or days after the accident," points out Rohit Baluja, member of the UN Road Safety Collaboration and Commission of Global Road Safety representing Asia. RTA is all set to be the 5 th largest killer in society very soon. We Indians are ve...

If you are the one of the “mujhe gussa ata hai” types, watch out! Your proneness to anger might be putting your life to risk. Recent studies show that angry people have a five times greater chance of dying before age 50 than their cool headed counterparts. Anger elevates blood pressure, increases threat of stroke, heart disease, cancer, depression and anxiety disorders. To make matters worse, angry people tend to seek relief from the ill-moods through other health-endangering habits, such as smoking and drinking, or through compulsive behaviour such as workaholism. What seems to be more harmful is the persistent simmering form of anger than the quick short-lasting bursts. The normal experience of overt anger lasts only a few minutes, but the prolonged forms, such as resentment, impatience, irritability and grouchiness can go on for hours and days at a time. They stimulate secretion of stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol, which wreck havoc to health. Anger depresses the imm...

Do you remember what you dreamt last night? Even if you can’t and are under the impression that your sleep was dreamless, you would have actually dreamt more than 2 hours or 25% of the time that you slept. Dreams   are successions of images, ideas, emotions   and  sensations occurring involuntarily in the  mind  during certain stages of  sleep. Good or bad, dreams always take us to some interesting places.  They can range from normal and ordinary to the surreal   and bizarre. Dreams can at times spring a  creative  thought or give a sense of inspiration. Dream imagery is usually absurd and unrealistic and they are generally outside the control of the dreamer. They can vary from frightening, exciting, magical, and melancholic   to adventurous. Dreaming is as old as human history; it finds mention in ancient Mesopotamian, Chinese, Assyrian, Greek and Indian texts. Credit for the first serious attempt to study and understand dreams, ...

Height has its imposing value. Most heroes in “Mills and Boon” books, in whose arms ladies swoon, are tall and have broad shoulders. A good height is therefore something that most of us wish during our growing years, some, quite desperately. Lionel Messi, the most talented soccer player of present times, who is 5’ 7” had a problem with height. His growth stalled during childhood. One can imagine his anguish when a school going Lionel saw fellow Argentinian kids surpass him in height as he remained stunted. He was diagnosed to be deficient in growth hormone, a protein secreted by the pituitary gland located beneath our brain, which regulates height. This deficiency can ofcourse be partly corrected if the hormone is replaced from outside, before the growing bones have frozen. Hormone replacement, as is done with insulin for diabetes or thyroxin tablets for thyroid deficiency, is feasible, but growth hormone therapy was exorbitant at that time, and his family could not afford it. What ca...