Health Adda

When access to medical consultation is as easy and cheap as is in India, that many patients, especially those with resources, would seek more than one expert’s opinion, is only to be expected. “Second opinion” is the seeking of another medical opinion to verify or validate what the first doctor had diagnosed or advised, and is often quite a valuable step. if an otherwise healthy person who has had no symptoms of disease till yesterday, is suddenly told to have liver cirrhosis due to a viral infection that requires long and expensive treatment, it is imaginable that he and his family may like to verify the test results, explore if there are other management options, weigh the pros and cons, and particularly in our country, see if they can get the treatment at more affordable rates, before they decide to start. The diagnosis of cancer is certainly is another such situation. It often comes as a shock and evokes a sense disbelief and denial in patients with thoughts like “it just can’...

Patients are often still unusually touchy when you broach the topic of stress during discussion of their physical problems, and on may occasions I have had them remind me that they have come to find an “organic” reason. This deeply entrenched concept of “mind body duality” is a legacy of the 17th century French philosopher Rene Descartes according to whom the mind and body were really distinct, unconnected and independent. Modern medicine is however finding it difficult to shrug off evidence that the mind could be impacting our health. Episodes of stress making the blood pressure to shoot up in a hypertensive, blood sugar to go awry in a diabetic, or precipitate an attack of migraine is now being recognised. During my training days in the early eighties when we were being brought up on the belief that physical problems were unrelated to the state of mind, a 50-year old lady was admitted to hospital with an acute episode of dysentery. She was passing 15 to 20 bloody stools every day ...

Traditional medicine has got its biggest stamp of approval from the scientific community up until now, with one of its practitioners finally getting the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2015. Dr. Tu Youyou, the 84 years old lady scientist from China who introduced the anti-malarial properties of extracts of a plant (sweet wormwood) to modern medicine, is the recipient of this year's prestigious prize. Artemisinin, the compound that she extracted and discovered, is currently the most favoured and safest anti-malarial drug used worldwide, and has saved millions of lives from malaria. The story of Dr Tu’s discovery is an interesting one. In 1967, Communist leader Mao Zedong decided there was an urgent national need to find a cure for malaria when it was spread by mosquitoes and killing Chinese soldiers fighting Americans in the jungles of northern Vietnam. A secret research unit was formed to find a cure. Tu Youyou was appointed head of Mission 523 and dispatched to southern China whe...

Today is the day on which many will wake up with groggy eyes and make resolutions for the new-year. That very few of these promises will survive a month or a week or sometimes even a day is another matter. Making them, even if they do not last, is still important as they indicate an insight into what one ought to be doing. The flesh is often weak, but the mind might be clear, and resolutions are a Google-map for reaching the destination. Here is a list of what I would like to do as well as what my advice would be for readers and well wishers, keeping the focus on psycho-social health: 1. Stay cheerful most days in the year. I know it is easier said than done, but I see too many unhappy stressed people who seem to be missing out on living their lives with enjoyment and satisfaction, while time continues to tick away. They are often too busy at work, with not enough time for family or children. They forget that the childhood days of their kids will never ever come back. And regr...

With exams round the corner, time for reading a book from cover-to-cover page-by-page is now over. This is time to stop the endless reading and change gear to strategising on how to improve and polish your performance. Remember that marks are given only on what you have written; the examiner (especially in board examination) has no way of knowing who you are, what you know or how much you have toiled. Your answer paper has to do all the talking! Therefore, it is time to get smart and maximise your marks with the following tips. 1. Stop acquiring further information, and shift your focus to improving your presentation. Remember the “R”s : Read, Retain, Recapitulate, Reproduce, (w)Rite, and Revise. The time for Reading is up. 2. Focus now on “retaining” and “recapitulating”. The best way is to go chapter by chapter, trying to recollect the points and diagrams, mostly with the book closed, taking a peep into it once in a while when you get stuck. 3. Take a mock test. You will find tha...

In their pursuit to understand why some people live healthier and longer lives, and after chasing several measurable parameters such as blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, uric acid and smoking for over half a century, medical scientists are now tumbling upon an esoteric factor that has been conspicuously missing from medical books. It is called ‘happiness’ and could hold the key to our wellness. Happiness is quite like the hippo in the zoo.  When you see it you can easily recognise it, but when someone asks you to describe it, it is not easy. It does not have the distinctive features like an elephant’s trunk or a leopards spots. And yet when you try counting people in office who are happy, or occasions when you have been happy, you know exactly who make up that small dwindling group! Funny as it might sound, arrival of “happiness” as a health parameter started when a group of German pragmatists tried to beat the Americans at their habit of measuring every aspect o...