Health Adda

  A good night’s sleep, so essential to rest your body and mind, and restore ‘energy” and vitality, is becoming a casualty for many these days. Last week a 58 year old lady complained that she woke up with a startle in the middle of the night dreaming of “drugs”, something she had never been exposed to all her life. Another reported a nightmare in which he felt someone was “strangulating” him by tightening something around his neck, till he woke up feeling choked! Yet another reported dreaming that he was in an ICU of a hospital with PPE draped figures surrounding his bed while he was being prepared to be hooked to a ventilator. Bad dreams can be disturbing to say the least. One wakes up with a startle or in sweat, feeling disturbed and uneasy, and feeling drained. The mood in the morning is usually uneasy and snappy. Creative thinking has usually gone for a toss…postponed to yet another day when one feels more cheerful and positive.   Several factors could be contribu...

  Stress is undoubtedly rising steeply  in these COVID times, not just due to fear of contracting the virus, getting proper treatment, social stigma that it may bring, or surviving the infection, but now to a  newly added cause:  exhaustion and despair from waiting almost endlessly for it to go away! Yes, it is no small concern. Last week during a video consultation, a young 25-year-old girl broke down and described anxiety, palpitations, sleeplessness, constant fear, exhaustion, and a feeling of deep despair stemming from the endless wait for life to get back on track. She complained further of a constant feeling of impending doom and collapse that was driving her to wonder if life was worth living any longer. Coping behavior seems to vary between individuals, but patience is certainly running out for many who had believed that the wait would be a 2-week affair. And now that the wait has crossed 4 months with no end still in sight, many minds are reaching snapping p...

If your mind space is crowded with too many stressful “negative” occupants such as COVID crisis, border conflicts, shattering economy, uncertainties of future or locusts, just to name a few, and if you are in a mood to explore something new and relaxing, give Birdwatching a try. At the outset, let me confess that being a workaholic all my life and born under the Zodiac sign of Capricorn, I had never found time for such “idle” hobbies”. In fact as stud ents with lives packed with studies, sports, thrills, work and challenges, we had scoffed at Dr Salim Ali, one of the greatest ornithologists, who had made headlines decades ago. It all started 2 years ago when my wife hung a “bird feeder” outside our window and our gardener planted a new creeper in the garden. Two years down, when I found myself locked in at home recently in my own empty nest, I found time to notice and appreciate groups of domestic birds visiting us. And when I Googled “Bird watching health benefits” I was stunned with ...

If difficult stretches of time throw us a challenge and make us think and behave differently, they also often emerge as life’s best TEACHERS. While the tone is of fear, gloom and lament on most lips nowadays, some are using this period as an opportunity to turn things completely around.  Many are going back into reviving their long-lost hobbies. The social media is throbbing with people displaying their musical talents, either rendering solo song s or getting together with other musicians on “tele” platforms to create complex music. In one of the displays, several musicians joined in from different parts of the globe to create a finely tuned “orchestra”! There are others who are reverting back to dancing, cooking, craftsmanship, yoga or fitness. All of them look surprisingly happy in the videos they post, their pursuits proving helpful in lifting their gloom and bringing a smile of accomplishment and joy onto their faces. Few seem to be discovering and enjoying their new avatar in ...

One of the off shoots of the COVID 19 scare and lockdown and that many of my colleagues and I are witnessing is the growing use of TELEMEDICINE. It is not without reason that most good hospitals are now offering tele-medicine services, and many patients are benefiting from it. In fact, I thought it makes perfect sense for a patient of Chronic Hepatitis B who is doing well under my treatment with oral medications for the last 4 years and residing in a remote small town of Uttar Pradesh for example, not to spend time, travel cost and effort to visit me in my clinic to show his reports, have a 10- minute consultation, and get a fresh prescription, all that he may now get on-line by telemedicine using his smart phone. Telemedicine is emerging as the in-thing nowadays across the world where people are reaping the benefit of technology, having a face-to face consultation (without masks!) on video with a doctor after having shared all reports with him in advance. And you can do it fr...

It could not be more sardonic that when forcibly confined to our homes and locked into isolation, our earlier hankering for holidays, respite from school and work and time for rest, is turning out to be like Midas’s boon of golden touch! In this unprecedented period of depressive developments, we are experiencing many types of emotions that are broadly included under “stress”. The international expert David Kessler  terms it “Grief” and describes 6 stages which I found helpful to understand my feelings: 1.The 1st stage is DENIAL; like what we felt in early March…..”this is just another scare….happening elsewhere…wont affect us in any way”. 2. It gives way to ANGER: “how can this be happening here? Lockdown on our freedom and movements? Never happened before! The government and enforcement people are victimising us…..we need to raise our voice and fight!” 3. When we run out of options, we start to BARGAIN: “OK.. If we suffer for these 3 weeks, all will be OK ag...

Snoring, the harsh sound that some us make inadvertently while sleeping, is indeed so common that we have all had the annoying experience of sharing a bed, room cabin or coupe with some one who has kept us awake and distressed, while he obliviously slept! The horse sound of snoring occurs when relaxed tissues of the throat and tongue vibrate while air passes past them during breathing. Most snorers live otherwise normal lives and do  not need medical attention. A distant uncle of mine who was the loudest and most notorious snorer amongst relatives, died at the ripe age of 98. And not due to any ailment related to his long track record of snoring! The life-style changes that help reduce snoring, and that spouses should insist for snoring partners are to lose weight (snoring is more common in obese), avoid alcohol in the evenings and to sleep on the side. Snoring is often however associated with a more sinister disorder called Obstructive Sleep Apnea, commonly known...

Up until now, we have been brought up to believe that many of our physical traits such as shape (thinness or chubbiness), height, prone ness for metabolic illnesses, kidney stones or gout were all decided by either our genes that we inherit from our parents, or the environment in which we live and eat! A startling new discovery is now pointing to yet another “third” factor, something that that we could not have imagined five years ago! Let us start with a simple observation. We know that fatness, or obesity, for example, runs in families. It is therefore reasonable to assume that this trait got passed down from overweight parents to one or more children through “genes”. To explain why some sibs had more fat than others we invoked additional environmental factors such as gluttonous consumption of fatty and starchy food and perhaps a sedentary or lazy life style. But when you look around with greater scrutiny you often come across someone who seems a “one-off” in the fa...

While excessive computer use can lead to conditions such as attention deficit disorder, depression anxiety an d proneness to violence, recent research has shown that internet is not all that bad after all! The web may in fact be teaching our brains, subtly rewiring the way we respond, think and behave. The book iBrain Surviving the Technological Alterations of the Modern Mind, by Dr Gary Small, provides new insight through research undertaken at UCLA, and reveals that an hour of internet use every day may boost brain function. We learn to react more swiftly to visual stimuli, improve our ability to sift through large amounts of information, and decide what is important and what isnt”. This training is most evident when we scan our e-mails, quickly deciding and deleting what is spam, while focussing on those that are important. If you never use computers, then start, Professor Small recommends. As we found, even an hour a day can vastly improve yor information processing ...

If some of you are feeling low, suffering from fatigue and having a disturbed sleep cycle these days, you could be suffering from “Winter Blues”. In these foggy wintery times, when the days are not just cold, but dull and dark, you may find yourself feeling more lethargic, gloomy and down overall. A more serious form of this mood change during winters is called SAD or seasonal affective disorder. It is associated with sadness, dullness and negative thoughts that affect normal relationships at home or work. Usually seen in women, SAD sets in every year when the sun starts loosing its brightness to fog and clouds, the day begins to shorten and the temperature dips and remains low. The primary culprit of both the winter blues and SAD is the lower level of natural sunlight we are exposed to in winter. This leads to: 1. Dips in serotonin, a neurotransmitter that regulates mood 2. Disruptions in circadian rhythms (your body’s internal clock), which help control slee...

The buck-you-up cup that gets us going in the morning has indeed survived intense scientific scrutiny for 20 years regarding its health safety, and has emerged largely unscathed with, in fact, some benefits to claim instead. A recent study showed that moderate coffee drinkers were less likely to develop liver cirrhosis, degenerative brain disorders, and heart disease. Scientists, still groping for a cause of the enigmatic Alzheimer’s disease, a degenerative condition of the brain that wipes off its victim’s memory and higher mental functions, were surprised to find that those who drank 3-5 cups of the brew a day had a lower chance of having the disease. A similar “protection” was also seen from another degenerative condition of the nerves and brain, called Parkinson ’s disease. Coffee, a drink made from brewing beans of the coffeacute plant, contains several chemical compounds that affect the human system. Apart from caffeine, the main constituent that pro...

Our health depends on four factors: genes. food, lifestyle and stress. As there is not much that can be done about your genetic make up it is the FOOD we consume that deserves our greatest attention. Our relation with food is paradoxical: essential for survival (cliché), but also emerging as the biggest killer of our times, pushing us towards diabetes, hypertension, fatty liver disease, heart disease, stroke and cancers that account for 70% of India’s u rban ailments and deaths. Scientists have listed these 4 foods as the main health hazards of our time: 1. Sugar This ubiquitous simple looking white shiny crystal found in every home in abundance that was our commonest calorie support during physical work is emerging as the modern age “poison ” in these sedentary times, dethroned fats to assume numero uno position. Its consumption goes far beyond our calorie needs and by continuously stimulating the pancreatic Beta cells to produce more and more insulin, ti...

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, called ‘happiness’ that could hold the key to our wellness. Happiness is quite like the hippo in the zoo. When you see it you can easily recognize 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 or what they are! Funny as it might sound, the arrival of “happiness” as a medical factor affecting our lives probably started when a group of German pragmatists tried to beat the Americans at their habit of measuring every aspect...

Let us recapitulate a few essential points about the role, aims, targets and methods of exercise that should keep you fit and well. In case you have missed the previous columns, here are the key points: Exercise comes next only to food as an essential component for ensuring good health and longevity. It tones up the heart, lungs, muscles and joints. People who exercise regularly have healthier hearts and tend to live longer. People with diabetes, obesity and fatty liver can do very well with exercise. Aerobic exercise improves insulin sensitivity, brings down blood sugar levels, help burn extra fat and prevents clogging of arteries of the heart with cholesterol The type of exercise that is good for the heart is called cardio-vascular or aerobic exercise. It involves movement such as brisk walks, jogging, cycling, swimming, treadmill or playing outdoor games. A good point is to calculate your Body Mass Index (BMI). It should be between 20 -23 for Indians. If it is more than ...

Our series on exercise and wellness would be incomplete without a column on Yoga. At the outset I must confess that I am not an expert on yoga and will offer my sceptic observations as a medical scientist. Of the numerous reports in the literature on the effects of Yoga on various aspects of health such as insulin resistance, heart and fatty liver, very few stand up to scientific scrutiny as the trials have not been designed in line with modern medical requirements.  When asked to review this topic for an international conference a few years back, I could find only 25 eligible studies of which just 4 were randomized controlled ones (considered to be scientifically well designed), 6 were non-randomized controlled trials (these studies are subject to bias in evaluating outcome), and 15 were uncontrolled studies (likely to be biased by the person conducting it as there are no controls). Having explained the limitations and lacunae let me turn to the positive side: what...

Having been convinced that exercise is necessary for well-being and that an appropriate amount of daily dose of aerobics is the requirement, we need to move to the very important issue of choosing the right one that suits your requirements and constraints. Here are a few tips: Brisk walks: This is the form most frequently prescribed by doctors. What you need to assess is where can you take your walk, and how safe is it for you? If you are in a gated campus or near a park or the botanical garden, you are lucky. If you wander on the streets especially in the early pre-dawn hours. You could be in for trouble. Enthusiastic walkers being knocked down by rogue drivers or attacked by criminals is increasingly becoming common. Hence safety should be a pre-condition. Also, the vagaries of weather, during monsoons, foggy winters and desiccating summers should not cause long interruptions. Going to the Gym. I think it is a good method for 3 reasons: the weather cannot play spoil- sport; ...