Health Adda

If you are wondering how to get over that state of sluggishness, plumpness, high blood sugar and pressure, and want to get your body’s metabolism into good gear, you may consider trying Intermittent Fasting as your New Year resolution. Abstaining from food for 16 to 18 hours a day helps restore your disordered metabolism, and aid you live longer, reveals a study published recently in a prestigious medical journal (New England Journal of Medicine, Dec 26, 2019). The findings validate what has till now been considered an eating fad appearing in the social media, and might encourage many of the 500 million Indians suffering from diabetes, hypertension or obesity to transform their fat-stuffed sloppy bodies into robust sprightly energetic ones. What is Intermittent Fasting (IF)? IF requires you to abstain from food for 16 to 18 hours a day, and eat only during the slim window period of 6 to 8 hours. This is referred to as the 16:8 diet regimes. Another form is...

The quick witted and dashing trade union leader George Fernandes, who went on to become the defence minister of India and is remembered for his fabled flight in a Mig fighter aircraft, could not recognise his own relatives and recall his own name in the last decade of his life. The “cowboy” American president Ronanld Reagan, the tough no-nonsense British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and the Hollywood heartthrob Charlton Heston are also  among the 26 million suffers worldwide who were afflicted by Alzheimer’s Disease, that robbed them of their mental functions and reduced them to blank vegetative state till death. A lzheimer’s Disease (AD) is on the rise and is being increasingly recognised. The mother of a senior executive in Lucknow, who suffered from this disease and had became comatose was, in a rare show of devotion, kept alive for 5 long years with life support at home. And some healthy relatives have cobbled together a group to learn and share from ...

I think there are two reasons why Indians are poor achievers. While one is laziness, the other, paradoxically, is just the opposite, that is OVERWORK. Long working hours are common worldwide. Indians, Koreans and Chinese, especially those in medical profession and the IT industry, are famed for their for ability to put in endlessly long hours. It is often said that young Indian doctors hardly sleep during their residency days. My IT friends t ell me that many employees work 18 hours a day and at odd hours in their organisations. Much as parents, teachers and employers would hate to hear it, there is indeed growing evidence that overwork is associated with significant health problems as well as poorer outcomes. Long working hours have been found to be associated with cardiovascular and immunologic reactions, reduced sleep duration, unhealthy lifestyle and adverse health outcomes, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, subjective health complaints, fatigue, and depr...

Patients planning to undergo major complicated procedures such as heart surgery, organ transplantation or joint replacement are often anxious to know about the success rates and risks, before making up their minds or choosing the doctor. Conventionally it has been the word of mouth. “We heard Mr Sharma, our neighbour’s friend, came home well after a heart surgery in X hospital by Y surgeon. He must therefore be good” is the usual formula . Another method has been to assess a doctor’s competence by seeing the crowd outside his chamber. This assumes that the doctor is popular, but could also mean that he is not well organised in managing his clinic crowd! In these days of computers and internet, the commonest thing smart people do is search the net. This approach however has its own set of problems. We are led to believe that more hits on Google are more likely to be valuable. It is therefore hardly surprising that corporate hospitals and private doctors have an overwh...

If you are one of those who resort to Google for your health problems, you are not the only one. Almost anyone who has access to the Internet does it nowadays, either to find out what their symptoms suggest, discover remedies and side effects, learn about “illnesses”, hunt for the right doctor or hospital, and sometimes to track if the treatment is going right. Many doctors are still outraged by the cheekiness of patients trying to cross-check or “spy” on their “wisdom” reflecting a bygone attitude of “paternalistic” medicine. I consider “Google” a useful repository of information, and the inevitable new factor in patient-doctor relationship, and am OK with it, as long as, ….and that is important, as long as my patients Google it right! 1. Look carefully at the source of information. What shows up immediately as soon as you type the search words and click the return button are usually advertisements and “promotional” sites. 2. Most reliable ones would hav...

If my readers wonder why I should be obsessing about “Happiness”, I admit that some deep thinking and few rounds of discussion over the last week have given me the feeling that most of us are probably glossing over this very important subject in life. Health freaks will be happy to know that well conducted scientific studies have demonstrated that “happiness” brings with it significant health dividends. For starters: happy people seem to  live longer lives, by as much as up to 10 years. Further, the frequency of hypertension, diabetes and heart diseases is less. There seems to be considerable confusion on what constitutes “Happiness”. It is a longish-term state of mind and attitude, and should NOT to be confused with pleasure. If one is fond of say chocolates, he or she will be pleased and thrilled to have a few. But if the supply is endless and abundant one gets tired of it, and perhaps at some stage even loathes it. Pleasure therefore gives gratification, say with fo...

During review of an un-anticipated death of a 45-year old man in our hospital in 2015 I had come across the term SUDEP. This was the story of a businessman who had had epilepsy for several years and been on irregular treatment with his anti-epileptic medications, resulting in recent epileptic fit s. His seizures had been controlled in the emergency, but had been advised precautionary admission for a day.  He was last seen smiling and chatting with his wife, somewhat resentful about having to spend a day in hospital. A few hours later, while under close monitoring, his heart suddenly stopped and despite resuscitation, he died. A similar story unfolded last month when a 19-year old boy had a similar unexpected outcome. His epilepsy had appeared to be under good control with all tests such as EEG and video monitoring showing negative results. And then, when he suddenly had a seizure and cardiac arrest, he could not be revived. SUDEP is the acronym for Sudden Unexpected D...