Health Adda

Heart attacks are common above 40, often coming at odd times, without warning, and are the commonest killer of our modern times. The best chances of reducing the severity of an acute attack and improving the chances of survival are by chewing aspirin at the very start and reaching a hospital within 2 hours. A doctor colleague of mine, Dr Anil Behl, has started a unique form of social service, of putting 4 aspirin tablets in a plastic pouch and keeping it available at all times with the security check-post of his housing colony. He has backed up this simple act by informing all residents of his colony by email and posters, that should anyone have early symptom of heart attack, they should immediately procure the pills from the security room and chew them while waiting for further help to arrive. During a heart attack, blood clot forms in the arteries of the heart blocking the flow of oxygen-rich blood to heart muscles. Clot formation begins with clumping of small blood particles ca...

The paradox that scientists are trying to come to terms with is that our “healthy” human body is loaded with germs, and that these germs might be conferring positive health to our bodies. To be specific, we carry over a trillion (1014) bacteria in our guts. And they belong to as many as 400 different species. If we could scoop them all out and place them on a weighing scale they would weigh as much as 1.5 to 3 Kg, even more than the clothes we wear! The presence of this huge bustling wild-life sanctuary of little animals or microbial garden in our guts has puzzled scientists for decades. There was a time when “germs” were those terrible little things that caused nasty infections and often took lives. In fact, when some of these germs migrate from the gut to “abnormal” places such as the urinary tract, they produce illnesses such as urine infections. The logical approach that scientists therefore took in the last two centuries was to rid the body of all germs, in an attempt to “...

The regular depiction in TV serials of a doctor arriving home almost instantaneously when summoned on telephone to attend to an emergency, could not be farther from reality. Most good doctors do not attend home calls, and the chances of getting one in the middle of the night when you are down with an attack of incessant vomiting or an allergy could be well neigh impossible. It makes perfect sense to keep some medicines at home or carry on travel. Here are some tips on how to make your own emergency medicine kit: 1. Keep medicines that you are familiar with, and preferably, have taken before, so that it is not a first timer during an emergency and that too in a new place.  If you take a new antibiotic while on travel, and come down with hives, things can get rather complicated. 2. If you are not good with tongue twisting drug names, put them in labelled envelopes according to indications. For example, you could have paracetamol tablets in an envelope labelled “Fever, Body p...

I had honestly not heard of ZIKA virus till recently, when this hitherto unheard virus shot into international fame for allegedly damaging the brains of babies growing in their mother’s wombs, and having them being born in vegetative states with mental retardation.  It is true, that ZIKA, which spreads through mosquito bites, does not seem to be dangerously fatal to the humans it stings, but the suspected havoc it causes to expecting mothers, who go on to deliver deformed mentally retarded babies, and the effect of this trauma on their families is often perceived by many to be worse than death. Although ZIKA virus epidemic is raging in distant countries like Brazil, Mexico, Africa and other South American nations, it would be silly to adopt an “ Abhi Dilli Door Hai” stance. The same strain of mosquito that spreads ZIKA, called Aedes aegypti, is rampant in most ‘nukkars’ and ‘galis’ of India. At the moment it is fervently engaged in spreading other viruses such as Dengue and...

Plastic carry bags that are so liberally doled out by grocers and store-keepers are emerging a major health hazard and killer. They are made of polythene, a product of petroleum and can be seen littered on roadsides, drains and fields while you travel by car or train. They choke landfills and drains and have even caused floods. They block the intestines of cattle and marine animals when they are ingested mistakenly while grazing, and kill around 10, 00,000 each year by painfully strangulating their intestines or by choking. Disposing these bags is not easy; their burning releases toxins that are harmful to environment and us. Burying them causes the landfills to choke as polythene does not breakdown and decompose easily, and when they do, release toxins into the soil that find their way into the food chain. Sometimes plastic bag litter can cause more problems. According to Nobel Peace Prize winner, Professor Wangari Mathaai, discarded bags fill up with rainwater and become perfe...

The secret to happiness may have to do with relatives and friends rather than money and fame, reports a recent scientific study. The findings of a 75 years long study undertaken by Harvard University researchers to find out what makes people happy and healthy as they go through their lives, was presented by Dr Robert Waldinger, the fourth director of the long research project, in his crisp 12 minute TED talk “What makes a good Life. Lessons from the longest study on Happiness”, recently (http://ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_what_makes_a_good_life_lessons_from_the_longest_study_on_happiness). This unique study, the longest ever undertaken to study happiness, tracked the lives of hundreds of young people, rich and poor, starting from their teenage to their nineties.  On expected lines, most youngsters, at the time of initial interview in 1930 when the study started, had mentioned money as the most important thing they thought they needed to make them happy. Some had sa...

One could wonder why in diabetes, a condition in which the blood sugar concentration in the blood goes up, need we worry about the liver? Or for that matter, even take the blood sugar reports seriously at all. Doctors have begun to realize that the elevated blood sugar value is only the tip of the iceberg. Patients with type 2 diabetes, the common form of the disease that occurs in adulthood, often go on to develop problems with several other organs of the body, such as kidneys, brain, blood vessels, heart, feet and the liver. At the root of the problem in Type 2 Diabetes, is the observation that contrary to intuitive logic, the blood levels of insulin in this condition is increased! Insulin resistance (IR) as its is called brings with it several changes in the body such as thickening of the basement membrane, the floor on which cells of all organs of the body are lined up and pushes up fatty acids in blood circulation, that then gets deposited in the liver and blood vessel...