Archive: General Health
New Cancer Culprit: Incense?
Snuff the incense, dude. It might give you, like, cancer. A study to appear in the October 1 issue of the journal Cancer looked at the incidence of respiratory-tract cancers among 61,320 Chinese residents of Singapore, where incense-burning is a big part of daily life. Those who used the most...
By Jennifer Huget | August 29, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (2)
Study Pokes Holes in Nut Ban
In medicine as in politics, sometimes an idea gets repeated so often it takes on the aura of fact. So it's been with the advice offered for more than 50 years to people diagnosed with diverticulosis, the development of pockets in the lining of the colon, or its relative, diverticulitis,...
By Jennifer Huget | August 27, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (1)
Flu Stories
How worried are you about a pandemic flu? Scientists consider the threat of a world-wide influenza epidemic to be a matter of "when," not "if." A deadly strain of avian flu is thought to be the most likely culprit as it continues to pop up in undeveloped countries around the...
By Jennifer Huget | August 26, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (5)
The Ear Infection/Fat Connection
Yesterday The Checkup looked at research suggesting that MSG can make you fat. Today's culprit? Ear infections. On rare occasion, science moves forward in big, decisive steps. But more often it's a piling up of small, even obscure-seeming discoveries that may help us better understand how our bodies work --...
By Jennifer Huget | August 22, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (3)
Kidney Stones? Lay Off the Iced Tea
Bad news for iced-tea lovers who also happen to be kidney-stone prone. The refreshing beverage, which I favor because it's tasty even without sweetener, contains high concentrations of oxalate. Turns out oxalate's a key culprit in creating kidney stones. And if you've ever passed one of those, you know it's...
By Jennifer Huget | August 15, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (19)
ER Docs Warn: Don't Text While Rollerblading
As is reported in today's Health section, the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) has issued a warning about the dangers of text-messaging (communicating by writing and receiving messages composed on cellphone keypads) while engaged in other activities, from driving or crossing the street to Rollerblading or cooking. While nobody's...
By Jennifer Huget | August 5, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
Spitz, Jenner Share Health Histories on TV. (P.S.: They're Still Kind of Cute.)
Mark Spitz (Reuters/Mario Anzuoni) The mere thought of Mark Spitz sends me right back to 7th grade, when I cut pictures of the great Olympic swimmer out of The Washington Post and glued them to the brown-paper-bag cover of my geography book. I hung in my bedroom a life-size...
By Jennifer Huget | August 1, 2008; 12:00 AM ET | Comments (1)
Oops! Be Gone, Tattoo.
More women are getting tattoos these days, but more are also apparently coming to the conclusion that their decision to get their boyfriend's name, a rose or some other image inked into their skin was a mistake. A new survey finds that women are more likely than men to get...
By Rob Stein | July 24, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
Simple Steps for Post-50 Health
Every day, the news is full of advice, much of it contradictory, about how to stay healthy as you age. It's hard to keep track of all that information, and it's even harder to sort the solid advice from the less-solid stuff gleaned from the latest study du jour. Here's...
By Jennifer Huget | July 22, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (3)
Optimism May Help Heart Health
I'm wary of the notion that a positive mental attitude can help people survive medical crises, mostly because I've known some incredibly upbeat people who have died of cancer. A good outlook and cheerful demeanor can't hurt, I suppose, but the pressure on sick people to maintain those attitudes seems...
By Jennifer Huget | July 16, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
Yoga as Bunion Buster?
A friend, knowing that I teach yoga and write about health, e-mailed me the other day with this question: "Somebody told me that there is a yoga exercise that will actually reverse the progress of a bunion. You put the affected foot up against a slant board and stretch out...
By Jennifer Huget | July 4, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (3)
My Real Age? 41.7!
These days I appreciate anything that makes me feel younger. (Yes, that was me in CVS recently, shopping for hair dye to cover my grey.) So I really got a boost when I found out that the folks at RealAge.com think I'm a mere 41.7 years old -- about six...
By Jennifer Huget | July 2, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
Victoria's Eye-Popping Secret
The American Academy of Ophthalmology is launching an EyeSmart campaign today to raise public awareness about eye injuries and teach people how to avoid them. Interesting tidbit: Contrary to popular belief, most eye injuries occur at home, not in the workplace or at high-risk places like construction sites. And those...
By Jennifer Huget | July 1, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (1)
Heart Health, With Apologies to George Carlin
I was wondering why political commentator Tim Russert's death from a heart attack spurred so much media chatter about cardiovascular health while comedian George Carlin's heart-failure death soon after did not. Maybe everybody already had said everything they had to say on the subject, I figured. Then I came across...
By Jennifer Huget | June 27, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (6)
YouTube Put to Good Use
In my household, YouTube is mainly a means of catching up with the latest pre-adolescent hilarities and marveling at really cool musical feats. But a group of neuroscientists affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco has harnessed the ubiquitous power of the popular online video-sharing site to spread information...
By Jennifer Huget | June 18, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
On Living Longer
Every year when the federal government releases its new life-expectancy data, I like to take a minute to think about what all those numbers really mean. As was widely reported yesterday, overall life expectancy rose in 2006 to a record high of 78.1 years. That means that a baby born...
By Jennifer Huget | June 13, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
How Will You Die?
What do you worry is going to kill you? Breast cancer? A heart attack? A car crash? We get bombarded with all sorts of things to fret about: One day something in our water bottles may cause cancer. The next day the stress from our jobs is going to give...
By Rob Stein | June 12, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
Antibiotics Before You Brush?
So I was looking for a good health story to blog about when I came across a report from the Reuters news service -- on which I often rely and which I always have trusted -- that seemed to suggest that a new study showed toothbrushing releases potentially dangerous bacteria...
By Jennifer Huget | June 11, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
Man, Is It Ever Hot!
I was at an outdoor event for much of the weekend, and, boy, was it beastly out there. My family and I drank liters and liters of bottled water, and we took frequent refuge in the shady interior of our 1978 VW bus. But still there were moments when I...
By Jennifer Huget | June 10, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
