Health Adda

One of the big mistakes that we as parents and teachers often make, and that could stifle the mental development of our children, is to treat them as just small adults! In fact, it is this attitude of grown-ups that could be leading our next generation to become stereotyped conformists rather than original thinkers and innovators. And if we intend to drive home health messages and inculcate healthy habits we need to tailor our efforts to their cognitive potential. That children indeed think and discover the world differently was first noticed by a Swiss scientist Jean Piaget in the early 20th century. He studied his own three children grow and was intrigued by how they behaved, played games and learnt at different ages. With further observations and experiments, he propounded the theory of ‘cognitive development’, placed great importance on the education of children and is hailed even today, 30 years after his death, as a pioneer of the constructive theory of knowing.  He...

The familiar white coat worn by physicians as their distinctive dress for over 100 years, has started generating  murmurs  of controversy. It is not uncommon to find the blood pressure to be higher when measured by a white-coat-wearing-doctor in the hospital or clinic than the readings obtained at home by relatives.  This is due to the anxiety that the white coat and the hospital setting evokes 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. The white coat scares children too.  Kids often express their dislike for this dress by crying and screaming and by denying access to their bellies or chest for examination by paediatricians in this attire. Many pediatricians across the world have folded up their white coats and taken to informal colourful dressing to...

Doctors may not be the brainiest in society; yet the fascinating ways in which they think and make decisions has been the subject of interesting research. A book by Dr Jerome Groopman that deals with the subject has hit the best-seller list. There are some parts of the brain that a doctor uses preferentially over others, memory being perhaps one of the most important to start with.  It begins from the time a youngster thinks of taking the entrance exam to medical school – he is required to read, retain and reproduce a large number of factual information and names of body parts and functions. Unlike the engineering, management, or law students, medical aspirants are hardly required to use mathematical problem solving, creative thinking, logic or thinking out of the box.  But ask them names and profiles of thousands of organs, tissues, cells and drugs, and they will have it on their fingertips! In the next phase as they progress to clinical work, doctors learn to rec...

Recurrent attacks of severe abdominal pain, renal stones, abnormal moods, and an attack of pancreatitis could well be due to an excess consumption of vitamin D. Dr Ambrish Mittal, a Delhi based endocrinologist, says he sees several patients with abnormally high blood calcium levels due to hyper-vitaminosis D, many of whom develop serious consequences such as swelling of the pancreas. Dr Vjay Kher, chief of nephrology at Medanta Hospital agrees that there is a lurking epidemic of vitamin D overdose resulting in high levels of blood calcium, that choking kidneys and causing renal failure. Vitamins are catalysts that in very small doses, regulate actions of several enzymes and make our body function smoothly. The discovery of this group of substances 100 years ago was indeed a major leap in medicine. Dr George Wald was awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering Vitamin A and proving its indispensable role in nurturing the rods in the retina that allow us to perceive light, and he...

When the middle class Indian falls seriously ill today, he is caught between the devil of an exorbitant 5-star private hospital that could drain all his resources, and the deep sea of the swarming government hospital where he needs to be fit enough to stand for hours in long queues to reach the doctor or the scanning machine, sometimes to be told then to come another day! Let me start with the high-cost hospitals first. Have you ever wondered why they feature swimming pools, spas and shopping arcades selling Elizabeth Arden or Gussy? Do you think a “middle-class Indian” son who comes to see his mother suffering from terminal cancer, would   have a swim in the pool and shop for handbags after visiting hours? The message runs deep. It is a subtle way to tell those with shallow pockets “ Stay away. This place is not for you”. That “middle-class Indians” rush in to these mansions where angels would fear to tread indicates either their naivety or a deep desperation to pro...

A major health problem, appearing suddenly out of the blue, can squeeze the family’s resources to the last drop and land you in a debt trap, as I learnt from Rahul’s case recently. Twenty- year old healthy Rahul, who hails from a village near Agra, was perfectly well till the day before, playing cricket with his friends. That morning a gnawing pain started in the upper abdomen that increased in severity to a deep boring one and started radiating to his back. He threw up a few times, started sweating and became breathless. His father, Om Prakash, came back from the private sugar mill where he worked as a supervisor, and carried him in a borrowed 3 wheeler to the nearest local doctor. Sensing something serious, the doctor referred him to a nearby hospital. Having diagnosed Acute Pancreatitis, a condition that could turn potentially fatal, they referred him to a specialized centre. His condition continued to worsen, and Om Prakash could not bear to his only son of 6 children, fi...

If you have piles, and ever get the feeling “Why did this have to occur to me?”, all you need to do is broach this topic in your next party and duck for shelter from the deluge of experience, anecdotes and advice that will follow.  I know that there are better things to talk about in a party than the swelling in your rear end. But parties are hardly everuniformly exciting, and you could pop this unusual topic if your attempts with sports, politics, economy and weather have drawn blank pauses from a grumpy next-seater. The first feeling you are bound to enjoy is the overwhelming reassurance that you are not alone.  Most would own up. In fact as the conversation and the circle get larger, you could give those who don’t have them or don’t know if they do, a bit of inferiority complex! A survey showed that one of every 2 adults have piles and the frequency gets higher as we grow up; many go through their entire lives not knowing if they had it at all while most get...