Skip to main content

Tackling Summers

Image
By
The month of May, when the mercury soars to 45OC in the northern plains, can play havoc with your health, energy levels, mood and performance.The hot blast that strikes our face when we venture out in the afternoon these days can dry up our body (dehydration) or cause excess body heating (heat or sun stroke), both of which can be quite serious.

Dehydration is the commoner one, and claims around 2 million lives globally every year, especially from developing regions. Children are more susceptible, and once grossly dehydrated, often find it impossible to regain health.

Symptoms and signs of dehydration include fatigue, headache, low BP, dizziness, fainting, dry mouth and reduced amounts of concentrated urine. It is often precipitated by an attack of vomiting or loose motions, or sometimes, a fast. Drinking large amounts of water (around 6-15 glasses a day) and increasing the intake of salt (through pickles, papads, salted nimbu paani or lassi) are the cornerstones of prevention and treatment.

The hot air also tends to dry up or dessicate the nose and skin. Sunscreens are not of much help here as they protect only from sunlight and are not the antidote for dry hot blasts.Bleeding from the nose is not uncommon; a simple measure is to smear a moisturizer on your nose membranes. Using a moisturizer on the exposed parts of the body, especially the face, and ensuring a good intake of fluids, helps keep the skin in good turgor.

Heat stroke is common during these dry hot spells when the body’s heat regulatory mechanism fails to maintain a balance between heat production and heat loss. When the outside temperature grossly exceeds the body’s (37OC), we are unable to dissipate heat into the atmosphere by sweating, panting or passing urine. Therefore, when the outside temperature is 45OC the body temperature rises causing the person to be pale, hot, irritable, confused or unconscious. Children and elderly are at greatest risk, as are athletes, construction workers, labourers or military recruits.

Heat stroke, as it is called, is a medical emergency and requires moving the person to a cool shaded place, lying him down on the floor or ground, pouring water on the head and body, placing ice cubes under the armpits and moving him to a clinic or hospital.

The reason why schools and institutions close during the peak summer period is to protect children and youngsters from getting heat stroke. Further, milder manifestations of exposure to severe heat causes fatigue, poor concentration, dizziness, cramps and fainting, when students can hardly be expected to perform well in scholastics or sports.

The hot summers therefore provide a unique opportunity to stay indoors, munch on salads and cucumber, drink lots of salted nimboo-pani and mathha, swim in the early mornings or late evenings, and use the major portion of the day to catch up on all the pending reading. 


Keep consoling yourself that whatever goes up must, come down someday, So must the soaring mercury. Till then....

As published in HT City ( Hindustan Times) dated 20th May, 2012.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teaching and Learning – is there a trick?

By
One of the big mistakes that we as parents and teachers often make, and that could stifle the mental development of our children, is to treat them as just small adults! In fact, it is this attitude of grown-ups that could be leading our next generation to become stereotyped conformists rather than original thinkers and innovators. And if we intend to drive home health messages and inculcate healthy habits we need to tailor our efforts to their cognitive potential. That children indeed think and discover the world differently was first noticed by a Swiss scientist Jean Piaget in the early 20th century. He studied his own three children grow and was intrigued by how they behaved, played games and learnt at different ages. With further observations and experiments, he propounded the theory of ‘cognitive development’, placed great importance on the education of children and is hailed even today, 30 years after his death, as a pioneer of the constructive theory of knowing.  He...
1 comment
Read more

The Doctor’s Dress

By
The familiar white coat worn by physicians as their distinctive dress for over 100 years, has started generating  murmurs  of controversy. It is not uncommon to find the blood pressure to be higher when measured by a white-coat-wearing-doctor in the hospital or clinic than the readings obtained at home by relatives.  This is due to the anxiety that the white coat and the hospital setting evokes in patients, and has been termed “White Coat Hypertension”. Mature clinicians often routinely subtract a few points from these measurements when entering records in case charts or calculating the dose of anti-hypertensive medications to be prescribed. The white coat scares children too.  Kids often express their dislike for this dress by crying and screaming and by denying access to their bellies or chest for examination by paediatricians in this attire. Many pediatricians across the world have folded up their white coats and taken to informal colourful dressing to...
2 comments
Read more

Questions from a Doctor’s Life

By
There is hardly any person in Uttar Pradesh who has not heard of Dr D K Chhabra, a senior neurosurgeon, who died recently. Over the decades his expertise, pragmatic advice and popularity had broken the shackles of his narrow surgical field coming to be known as a “brain-specialist”and a genuine adviser for all health problems. I got to know him in 1987 when I joined the upcoming Sanjay Gandhi PG Institute of Medical Sciences (SGPGI) in Lucknow as a young member of the faculty in Gastroenterology. He had moved from his alma mater the KG Medical College where he is still regarded as a legend. An omnipresent bachelor doctor living in the duty room readily available to help anybody anytime.He was tasked to heading and developing Neurosciences at SGPGI. He had an eye for detail and was tasked additionally by the director to set up not just his department, but the whole hospital, the building, equipment and the campus. DKC was a tall and handsome man who spoke little. But when he did inl...
1 comment
Read more