Health Adda

Plastic carry bags that are so liberally doled out by grocers and store-keepers are emerging a major health hazard and killer. They are made of polythene, a product of petroleum and can be seen littered on roadsides, drains and fields while you travel by car or train. They choke landfills and drains and have even caused floods. They block the intestines of cattle and marine animals when they are ingested mistakenly while grazing, and kill around 10, 00,000 each year by painfully strangulating their intestines or by choking. Disposing these bags is not easy; their burning releases toxins that are harmful to environment and us. Burying them causes the landfills to choke as polythene does not breakdown and decompose easily, and when they do, release toxins into the soil that find their way into the food chain. Sometimes plastic bag litter can cause more problems. According to Nobel Peace Prize winner, Professor Wangari Mathaai, discarded bags fill up with rainwater and become perfe...

The secret to happiness may have to do with relatives and friends rather than money and fame, reports a recent scientific study. The findings of a 75 years long study undertaken by Harvard University researchers to find out what makes people happy and healthy as they go through their lives, was presented by Dr Robert Waldinger, the fourth director of the long research project, in his crisp 12 minute TED talk “What makes a good Life. Lessons from the longest study on Happiness”, recently (http://ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_what_makes_a_good_life_lessons_from_the_longest_study_on_happiness). This unique study, the longest ever undertaken to study happiness, tracked the lives of hundreds of young people, rich and poor, starting from their teenage to their nineties.  On expected lines, most youngsters, at the time of initial interview in 1930 when the study started, had mentioned money as the most important thing they thought they needed to make them happy. Some had sa...

One could wonder why in diabetes, a condition in which the blood sugar concentration in the blood goes up, need we worry about the liver? Or for that matter, even take the blood sugar reports seriously at all. Doctors have begun to realize that the elevated blood sugar value is only the tip of the iceberg. Patients with type 2 diabetes, the common form of the disease that occurs in adulthood, often go on to develop problems with several other organs of the body, such as kidneys, brain, blood vessels, heart, feet and the liver. At the root of the problem in Type 2 Diabetes, is the observation that contrary to intuitive logic, the blood levels of insulin in this condition is increased! Insulin resistance (IR) as its is called brings with it several changes in the body such as thickening of the basement membrane, the floor on which cells of all organs of the body are lined up and pushes up fatty acids in blood circulation, that then gets deposited in the liver and blood vessel...

One recent morning while I was gloating about our country’s claim to be seated among the developed powerful nations of the world, my car stopped at a traffic signal and a dirty starving man begged me for some money to eat a meal. While parting with a tenner, I asked him what made him beg. He said he had been a small farmer in UP, but had lost his land, home, money and living, trying to provide treatment to his son who had been stricken with cancer for two years. Treatments have improved and many diseases are now curable, but they have come at huge costs that continue to spiral. And when a loved one falls prey to disease, emotions compel us to go to the last post to save his or her life. Administrators view healthcare sector as a graveyard for government investments. A government hospital does not fetch money on a regular basis, unlike manufacturing industries, housing, liquor or tobacco businesses. And the political benefits of cutting red ribbons of hospitals before elections ...

Strange as it may sound, doctors have an obsession for food items when describing body parts, organs or even human excrements. It often starts with the relatively innocuous description of kidneys as bean-shaped organs and the human brain as walnut shaped, that most students of biology are familiar with. But they soon go on to use “café-au-lait” marks, salmon patches, and cherry red spots to describe different types of skin lesions that tell tales of diseases from a brown nevus or angioma or bleeding spots. And when doctors, who by the way derive their professional origin from butchers, delve inside the human body while cutting up corpses during autopsy, they resort to food items to describe what they see. If the liver shows alternating red and white stripes as in early cirrhosis the description goes as “nut meg liver”. If the intestine shows a central narrowing due to a cancerous tumour, an “apple core lesion” seems to depict it best. Familiar fruits are most commonly use...

A hugely positive note with which 2015 is signing off on the medical front is the revolutionary treatment of Hepatitis C that is set to transform the lives of 12 million Indians and several fold more across the world. Around 1-2% of Indians harbour this chronic viral liver infection, most of them unknowingly and many coming to know of it when they have already developed liver cirrhosis or liver cancer. Treatment over the last 3 decades has been either unusually difficult, with weekly injections of interferon, or impossible (due to weakness or low platelets precluding this form of therapy). Three oral “miracle” drugs have burst into the world’s therapeutic arena, and what could not have been better is that this treatment is now available in India at less than 1% of the international price! Sofosbuvir is the prime new anti-viral medicine for treating Hepatitis C that was discovered and launched in USA and Europe by Gilead company at the prohibitive cost of US$ 1000 (Rs 6...