Health Adda

Overweight Indians may have some cause to cheer as a recent study on one million Asians surprisingly failed to find an increased risk to life of Indians and Bangladeshis who had increased Body-mass Indiex (BMI). Body Mass Index, a measure of whether a person’s weight is appropriate for his or her height, has become a standard measure across the world, of an individual’s health. You can calculate it by dividing your weight (in Kg) by the square of your height (in metre), or simply by feeding your height and weight and getting it from a calculator available on several websites (try www.gastroindia.net ). Despite the problems of defining what is “normal” in population studies, a BMI range of 20-25 has long been held as the one associated with the least risk of dealth, while progressively higher risk has been observed in overweight ( BMI 25-30)   and obese   (BMI more than 30) individuals, mainly due to   increased frequency of heart disease and cancer. A recent study publ...

Of all India’s paradoxes, the weirdest seems to be the way it provides health care to its people. W hile it offers high-end care to medical tourists as well as Indians who are able to afford the high costs, millions of Indians continue to have limited or no access to basic healthcare. Responding to this challenge and listening to the calling of their profession, a band of dedicated young Indian doctors have started providing medical help to those who need it most, at the cost of their studies, careers and comfort.  Called “Doctors For You (DFY)”, this group shot into fame recently when they were awarded the “best medical team in a crisis zone” award by the prestigious British Medical Journal group for helping victims of the 2008 Bihar floods. When millions were rendered homeless during the Kosi floods in Bihar, DFY deployed 110 of its members to treat villagers for diarrhea, chest infections, snake bites, typhoid and malaria. During the 6 months the group treated around 130,000 pa...

Some heroes do not get to have their pictures splashed in newspapers, but become heroes all the same. As they say, ‘Everyone can become a hero, only the radius may differ’. Take Ramesh for example. He is a 46 year old male nurse in the nephrology department of SGPGIMS. During his youth he did what many of us did in our teens and twenties: hung around with friends around ‘nukkars’ and in front of cubbyhole cigarette shops (there was no gutka then), got coaxed by peers to try that first puff, coughed and choaked but went back to prove our manliness, took to it to gain acceptance of our friends, made it a habit, and finally got hooked and became daily smokers. Ramesh’s addiction took him to become a chain smoker, puffing  40 cigarettes a day, and finding it difficult to do without tobacco for long stretches. His wife, Jorgen’s repeated reminders, pleas and naggings fell on his ears like water on a duck’s back. Then came his two lovely children, Renata and Renee (now 19 and 14) who so...

Compared with several tragedies claiming far more lives, the recent accidental crash of an air-ambulance killing several of its occupants and 3 residents has occupied a disproportionate chunck of media attention and evoked strange emotions from citizen. At the heart of the issue is the human tragedy of a 20 year old young IIT aspirant boy suffering from acute liver failure whose chances of pulling through without a liver transplantation were minimal, and who was being air-lifted to a premiere hospital in Delhi for this heroic and costly treament. What adds to the sense of tragedy is that in a desperate bid to save thier dying son, the family had staked all their fortunes into his treatment (cost of air ambulance Rs 3 lac, cost of liver transplantation at Apollo hospital Rs 21 lac), and sent a young healthy cousin accompanying Rahul in the plane, who died as well, doubling the family’s toll. Was Rahul, in hindsight, destined to die at this young age? He seems to have been unlucky on se...

The familiar white coat worn by physicians as their distinctive dress for over 100 years, has been courting controversies lately. It has been observed that patients who have their blood pressure measured in a clinic or hospital by a white-coat-wearing-doctor have higher readings than they do when measured at home by their relatives.  This is apparently due to the anxiety that the white coat and the hospital setting seem to evoke in patients, and has been termed “White Coat Hypertension”. Mature clinicians often routinely subtract a few points from these measurements when entering records in case charts or calculating the dose of anti-hypertensive medications to be prescribed. Anxiety is also apparent in children who encounter pediatricians wearing the unfriendly white coat.  Kids often express their dislike for this dress by crying and screaming in protest. Casually attired personnel are more often allowed by small children to have access to their bellies or chest f...

Ever wondered how a medico transfers information on 226 human bones, 605 muscles, 800 diseases and 1200 medications, contained in 40 kg of medical books, to his brain and stores it as memory?  It is through a very useful memory-aid technique called Mnemonics. A mnemonic is a catchy verbal phrase, word, poem or song that helps a person remember something. Take for instance the tongue-twisting names of the 8 wrist bones: Pisiform, Triquetral, Lunate, Scaphoid, Trapezium, Trapezoid, Capitate and Hamate . How on earth would a young fresher remember them and in that order had it not been for the mnemonic “P lease T ake L ovely S’onia’ . T o T he C offee H ouse”.  What adds to the fun in the anatomy class is the freedom to improvise and use the name of one’s favourite “S”from the class girls, thereby etching the names of the carpal bones to one’s memory for life. Home-made Indian versions are often more exciting. Medicos across the Hindi speaking belt prefer “ S neh L ata T inde...

If the thought of visiting a hospital makes butterflies flutter in your stomach, you are neither alone nor is the fluttering without cause!  Hospitals are accident prone zones, and often the news or memory of an adverse experience someone has had while in hospital might be the cause for your unconscious anxiety. The World Health Organization estimates that an accident might be occuring in as many as1 in 300 patients admitted to hospital, ranking 10 th among the causes of hospital deaths. It accounts for approximately 30,000 deaths in the USA alone.  Compare this with 1 in a million (1,000,000) , the rate of accidents that occur in the airline industry, presently considered one of the safest. Don’t get me wrong and start imagining that hospitals gobble up a large number of healthy lives of cheerful people going on a holiday. In most instances, these are critically sick people on the proverbial razor’s edge, who often tumble downhill after an intervention that retrospectively ...