Health Adda

When a 57 year old well-established doctor suddenly decided to quit his stable government job of 25 years, 8 years ahead of his retirement age, change his career path, move to a new town, buy a swanky car, many were taken by surprise. When a lady of 52 years, decided to leave her career of 15 years as a school-teacher, to dive into her passion of Hindustani classical music, her friends and family were taken aback. When a 40 year-old successful industrialist running a health care industry suddenly deciding to leave his corporate life and take to spirituality and social service, his colleagues were stunned. Many men and women, usually between 35 and 65 years, often show a change of mood, or surprising behaviour, that smack of mid-life crisis. It was described first by Elliot Jacques in 1965, and since then been recognised the world over. The common symptoms and signs include: 1. Change of job, often giving up one that had been going smoothly for years, and taking up a more c...

Pimples are those unwelcome pink little bumps that crop up on the cheeks, chins and foreheads of youngsters often spoiling that otherwise perfect party or sometimes shattering self-esteem and scarring their faces for years. True, they are not dangerous, in the sense, they do not kill or shorten life, but their effects can be pretty nasty and long lasting, on the skin and on their personalities. Also known as acne, spot or comedo, they result from oily secretions getting stuck in skin pores. Inside the pore are sebacious glands that produce sebum. When the outer layers of skin shed (as they do continuously), the dead skin cells left behind may become 'glued' together by the sebum. Their appearance around adolescence suggests that hormones play a role in their development. Around puberty, the skin tends to get thicker and the sebaceous glands go into overdrive producing more sebum that builds up behind the blockage. Sometimes this sebum gets infected with bacteria such as...

With leaders of over 190 countries discussing global climate in Paris this month, unprecedented floods wrecking havoc in Chennai since last week, smog engulfing the Chinese capital Beijing right now, and air quality charts of Delhi showing that the air we are breathing is choking our lungs and hearts, I would have to be quite an ostrich to write about any other health issue this week. The health consequences of the Chennai floods that have killed over 200 people is just the tip; what is of greater concern is the wave of infections especially diarrrhoeal diseases, typhoid, pneumonias, malaria, dengue, skin infections and stress that are to follow. Further the floods have devastated the lives of several million and sent shivers down our spines by reminding us that some freak natural disaster could usurp our lives just as it did to Uttarakhand a couple of years ago. One of the core issues is the amount of green-house gases emitted in to the atmosphere due to the use of fossil fuel...

Among the many issues that grabbed media headlines in the aftermath of the Paris carnage recently, the story of how the French medical emergency services responded to the unexpected challenge holds many lessons for us. Within just TEN minutes of the blasts and shootings, information reached the Emergency Medical Services and its crisis cell called Assistance Publique-Hopitaux de Paris (APHP) got activated. This cell mobilised 100,000 health-care professionals, 22,000 hospital beds and 200 operation theatres across 40 public hospitals in preparedness, all within an hour. A crisis WHITE PLAN that had been worked out and rehearsed for several years was activated, making this the most coordinated medical rescue and support mission in Europe in its history. The tasks of gathering information, networking and coordinating transport was managed by a cell of 15 people. Forty five well-equipped emergency ambulances with doctors, nurses and technicians were pressed into service, each knowi...

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 favored 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...

When I was a child and encountered the first death in the colony of an elderly neighbourhood-uncle, my grandfather taught me an important lesson. The news of Mr Khan’s sudden death ushered in hushed discussions amongst elders, puzzled questions from kids, and a quick large gathering of friends and relatives at the neighbour's home three houses down the lane in our colony. That evening when we were ready in our sports gear and prepared to go down the same road to the play-field, my grandfather dissuaded us with “when neighbours grieve, it is unkind and insensitive to rejoice and play in front of them”. He had not used authority, nor quoted laws and rights, but had left it to us to decide how sensitive neighbours ought to behave. And we had hung up our shoes and sacrificed our pleasure of that day in an act of solidarity! When I became a doctor and earned my first stipend, I had taken a bunch of friends (Ali, Bhaskar, Mohan and Shyam Sunder Kothari) to a restaurant to dine. One...

Scientists seem to have found the underlying defect that explains why some people get addicted, be it to substances (alcohol, tobacco or drugs), sex, the internet, gadgets or shopping, with the discovery that addiction drives up levels of a chemical substance called Dopamine in a part of the brain called the “Pleasure Centre”. In an article published in the journal Nature Neuroscience in June 2014, researchers from USA looked at addiction related role of nerve-to-nerve communication in the brain, and concluded that activity in the neural circuit that provides the feeling of pleasure gets unduly strengthened in addicts, to the extent that it then starts obstructing other circuits dealing with r easoning and self-control. Addiction is therefore proving to be a brain disease of a chronic relapsing nature that cause compulsive seeking of pleasure-providing substances or acts that the addict finds helpless in controlling by will power or logical reasoning. Anyone who has observed an ...