Health Adda

Heart attacks are common above 40, often coming at odd times, without warning, and are the commonest killer of our modern times. The best chances of reducing the severity of an acute attack and improving the chances of survival are by chewing aspirin at the very start and reaching a hospital within 2 hours. A doctor colleague of mine, Dr Anil Behl, has started a unique form of social service, of putting 4 aspirin tablets in a plastic pouch and keeping it available at all times with the security check-post of his housing colony. He has backed up this simple act by informing all residents of his colony by email and posters, that should anyone have early symptom of heart attack, they should immediately procure the pills from the security room and chew them while waiting for further help to arrive. During a heart attack, blood clot forms in the arteries of the heart blocking the flow of oxygen-rich blood to heart muscles. Clot formation begins with clumping of small blood particles ca...

The paradox that scientists are trying to come to terms with is that our “healthy” human body is loaded with germs, and that these germs might be conferring positive health to our bodies. To be specific, we carry over a trillion (1014) bacteria in our guts. And they belong to as many as 400 different species. If we could scoop them all out and place them on a weighing scale they would weigh as much as 1.5 to 3 Kg, even more than the clothes we wear! The presence of this huge bustling wild-life sanctuary of little animals or microbial garden in our guts has puzzled scientists for decades. There was a time when “germs” were those terrible little things that caused nasty infections and often took lives. In fact, when some of these germs migrate from the gut to “abnormal” places such as the urinary tract, they produce illnesses such as urine infections. The logical approach that scientists therefore took in the last two centuries was to rid the body of all germs, in an attempt to “...

The regular depiction in TV serials of a doctor arriving home almost instantaneously when summoned on telephone to attend to an emergency, could not be farther from reality. Most good doctors do not attend home calls, and the chances of getting one in the middle of the night when you are down with an attack of incessant vomiting or an allergy could be well neigh impossible. It makes perfect sense to keep some medicines at home or carry on travel. Here are some tips on how to make your own emergency medicine kit: 1. Keep medicines that you are familiar with, and preferably, have taken before, so that it is not a first timer during an emergency and that too in a new place.  If you take a new antibiotic while on travel, and come down with hives, things can get rather complicated. 2. If you are not good with tongue twisting drug names, put them in labelled envelopes according to indications. For example, you could have paracetamol tablets in an envelope labelled “Fever, Body p...

I had honestly not heard of ZIKA virus till recently, when this hitherto unheard virus shot into international fame for allegedly damaging the brains of babies growing in their mother’s wombs, and having them being born in vegetative states with mental retardation.  It is true, that ZIKA, which spreads through mosquito bites, does not seem to be dangerously fatal to the humans it stings, but the suspected havoc it causes to expecting mothers, who go on to deliver deformed mentally retarded babies, and the effect of this trauma on their families is often perceived by many to be worse than death. Although ZIKA virus epidemic is raging in distant countries like Brazil, Mexico, Africa and other South American nations, it would be silly to adopt an “ Abhi Dilli Door Hai” stance. The same strain of mosquito that spreads ZIKA, called Aedes aegypti, is rampant in most ‘nukkars’ and ‘galis’ of India. At the moment it is fervently engaged in spreading other viruses such as Dengue and...