Chocolate lovers ‘are more depressive’, say experts (BBC News)
Absence of racial, but not gender, stereotyping in Williams syndrome children (Current Biology)
Dying man sells ad space on his urn (myFOXla) Read more
Tag Archives: health news
Too much sitting? Try the adjustable-height desk
SOURCE: GeekDesk Sitting at a desk all day is hard on the body, especially the back. What the body needs is variety and the ability to move. One solution is an adjustable-height desk – one that allows you to alternate throughout the day between sitting and standing. Farhad Manjoo describes his experience with one such… Read more
Climate change: A few signs of legislative hope
Source: U.S. News The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, the House bill sponsored by Rep. Henry Waxman, was passed by the House last June. The Senate bill, called The Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, sponsored by Sen. John Kerry, has been languishing in the Senate since its introduction last September.… Read more
Avoid these OTC drugs
Source: Caribbean Net News I try to resist writing about health advice, since most health news is designed to increase anxiety unnecessarily. But here’s something I found that’s quite sensible and helpful. It’s a post by Dr. Edward Pullen on over-the-counter (OTC) medications at KevinMD. Scarring, stuffy noses, headaches, and sleep aids You might think… Read more
The "lie down and die" model of sleep
Source: Biacustica Do we need less sleep as we age? Experts differ on this question. Some studies find that older people need 1.5 hours less sleep each night than teenagers. Other studies indicate that our need for sleep does not diminish with age. One thing experts do agree on is that many older people have… Read more
Glucosamine/chondroitin no better than placebo, but …
An analysis of 10 studies involving more than 3,800 people has found that glucosamine and chondroitin supplements for joint pain are ineffective either alone or in combination. … The supplements don’t appear harmful, the authors note. But if people begin to feel better while taking them it could be due to the placebo effect or just the natural healing of joints over time. Read more
Gonorrhea bacteria: The next superbug?
After chlamydia, gonorrhea – also known as the “clap” — is the second most common bacterial STD (sexually transmitted disease). It’s easily transmitted. Women have a 60-80 % chance of becoming infected after a single sexual encounter with an infected male partner. Left untreated, the disease not only causes unpleasant symptoms – painful urination, urethral… Read more
Where were the melamine whistle blowers?
Source: The Wall Street Journal When Texas nurse Anne Mitchell accused a doctor of unethical conduct, she had no idea how much trouble was in store. First of all, her complaint was anonymous, and second, she believed she was doing the right thing. When she was accused of harassment and faced a ten-year prison term,… Read more
Whistle blowing: Nurse Anne Mitchell vs. Dr. Arafiles
Source: TriCity Herald It takes courage to blow the whistle on a fellow employee. The workplace is a social community. When we stand up and accuse someone of wrongdoing, we alienate ourselves from that community. The whistle blower, of course, also faces very concrete fears: job and income loss, the threat of retaliatory prosecution, and… Read more
The persistence of melamine
Following the 2008 discovery in China of melamine-laced milk – an event that left six babies dead, 300,000 sickened, and over 50,000 hospitalized — the Chinese government ordered all contaminated products to be burned or buried. The government was not directly involved in the destruction, however. That was left to those who had produced and… Read more
Melamine, cadmium, and Heidi Montag
Source: Reuters Melamine in milk is in the news again. Is this totally inexcusable or what? Products from three Chinese companies were removed from shelves in southern China after they tested positive for melamine. Products included not just milk, but candy that used milk as an ingredient. Two of the companies had been cited in… Read more
FDA video on health fraud: So boring it makes you wonder
Source: Dipity The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a new video on health fraud awareness. A worthy topic. It touches on weight loss products, HIV scams, cures for cancer and diabetes. What’s noteworthy about the video is that it’s SO boring. The inflections of the voiceover are totally inauthentic. It has the pacing of… Read more
Daily Dose: Climate change: How bad can it get; FDR's death; Yawns; Facebook
Source: Sacramento for Democracy Climate change Copenhagen climate summit: Five possible scenarios for our future climate (The Guardian) Concise summary of what we can expect for each increase of one degree Celcius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in global temperature. Here are a few of the health implications. 1C: “Most of the world’s corals will die, including… Read more
Daily Dose: Celebrity health; Livestock antibiotics; Transplants
The body as machine Source: The Daily Mail Inventor spends Christmas with his perfect woman – a £30,000 custom-made fembot (The Daily Mail) “Inventor Le Trung spent Christmas Day with the most important woman in his life – his robot Aiko. … Her touch sensitive body knows the difference between being stroked gently or tickled.… Read more
Daily Dose: Palliative sedation; E. coli in tenderized meat
There’s a long article in Sunday’s New York Times on palliative sedation. I’ve also listed some older stories on the subject and an educational site. Aging, end-of-life, and death Source: The Why Files Hard Choice for a Comfortable Death: Sedation, (The New York Times) “Among those [end-of-life] choices is terminal sedation, a treatment that is… Read more
Health Culture Daily Dose #18
Source: Wunderground When did we start calling the whole day before Christmas “Christmas Eve?” I thought Christmas Eve was the evening before Christmas. But no. Senators voted on health care reform at 1:00 AM on Thursday December 24th. To me, that’s still Wednesday night, but it was widely reported as happening on Christmas Eve. Perhaps… Read more
Dementia, denial, and high school football
Source: NFL Football 360 The National Football League (NFL) commissioned a survey on the incidence of dementia and other memory-related diseases among its retired players. The results that came back showed early-onset dementia occurring “vastly more often” compared to the national population. The NLF dismissed the study as unreliable. The data comes from the 88… Read more
Is football the moral equivalent of dogfighting?
Source: Collegiate Sports Medicine Malcom Gladwell (of Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point fame) has an article in the New Yorker called “Offensive Play.” The subtitle is “How different are dogfighting and football?” In dogfighting, the dogs are injured and suffer permanent damage. It’s becoming clear that the same is true for professional football players.… Read more
Are convertibles hazardous to your hearing?
Source: Los Angeles Times A decibel (abbreviated dB) measures the intensity of a sound. The zero point of the decibel scale is called “near total silence.” As long as we’re living and breathing on the earth, we’re never going to experience absolute, total silence. If you scan the increasing decibel levels of familiar sounds, the… Read more
Keith Olbermann & the Fight against Death
The Nose on Your Face The thing about Keith Olbermann is, I tend to agree with his positions far more than I care for his over-the-top, full-of-himself histrionic shtick. So I approached his “Special Commentary” on health care — one hour of nothing but the largest talking head on TV — with both interest and… Read more
Doctors and the health crisis of global warming
Let’s look at the facts. Global warming inevitably leads to a global health crisis. Health and disease are the province of the medical profession. Shouldn’t doctors be speaking out on the health crisis of global warming? Last month the two leading British medical journals – The Lancet and the British Medical Journal — published an… Read more
Climate crisis. Health crisis. Same difference.
Climate change is a more serious problem than we thought it was just a few years ago. A big rise in global temperature may not happen for another 40 years, but other changes are “imminent,” according to Science magazine. A permanent drought, with Dust Bowl-like conditions, could become the “new climatology” of the American Southwest… Read more
Global warming makes me sick
There’s an unfortunate parallel between the politics of climate change and the politics of US health care reform. They differ in scale — global vs. domestic. But consider this: Who suffers the most from the lack of universal health care in the US? The poor and unemployed. Who will suffer the most from climate change?… Read more
Health Culture Daily Dose #17
Additional stories related to health. Categories include: More articles on Health Care Reform, History of Medicine, Medical Journalism, Medical Technology, Medical News, Pharmaceuticals, Pop Culture, Social Media and the Internet, and The So-Called Obesity “Epidemic.” HEALTH CARE REFORM A ‘Common Sense’ American Health Reform Plan (The New York Times – Uwe Reinhardt) After studying this… Read more
Health Culture Daily Dose #16
Here are some things I’ve come across recently. Categories include: Aging/End of Life/Death, Doctors, Influenza, Genetics, and Health Care Reform. AGING, END OF LIFE, AND DEATH End-of-Life Care: Where Ethics Meet Economics (The New York Times – Uwe Reinhardt) Health spending in the United States has doubled every 10 years during the last four decades.… Read more
Collateral circulation and the cat concerto
Like the appendix , collateral circulation is another part of our anatomy that was more useful to our ancestors. Collateral circulation refers to systems of veins and arteries that allow blood to continue flowing when the main pathway is blocked or damaged. These extra vessels sometimes develop in response to a circulation blockage. But certain… Read more
Still useful after all these years: The gall bladder
The gall bladder is another useful but expendable organ (see recent posts on the appendix and the spleen). Unlike losing your spleen, living without a gall bladder is not detrimental to your health, though it may be inconvenient at times. The gall bladder is located under the liver, on the right side of the body.… Read more
Still useful after all these years: The spleen
Source: danielle2 While some anatomical organs are dismissed as totally unnecessary (see Still useful after all these years: The appendix), others are considered useful but dispensable. Consider the spleen. Located on the left side of the body, under the ribs and behind the stomach, the spleen is about five to six inches long and one… Read more
Still useful after all these years: The appendix
Source: Adventures in Honduras You can live without an appendix, true, but you should no longer think of this “vestigial” organ as a useless part of your anatomy. The appendix is finally getting the respect it deserves. We have ten times as many bacteria in the body as we have cells (and we have 10,000,000,000,000… Read more
How much water do we need?
The idea that drinking eight glasses of water a day is the healthy thing to do has been around since the 1940s. It’s not true, but at this point it’s a widely held myth. On a site called Optimum Health, for example, I found this statement: “The average person needs 8-10 glasses of water daily… Read more