http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/ 15 en-us Copyright 2008 Fri, 04 Jul 2008 07:00:00 -0400 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.36 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 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 the other leg ... ever hear of this?" I hadn't. But I promised to look into it. It's just the kind of issue that exists in that intriguing interface between mainstream medicine and alternative practices -- where prejudices on both sides often get in the way of good thinking. I started by checking the index of one of my favorite health books, Timothy McCall's Yoga as Medicine. McCall, an M.D., is the medical editor of Yoga Journal magazine, and his book makes an excellent case for yoga's capacity to help keep people healthy. Alas, the book doesn't cover bunions. So http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/07/yoga_as_bunion_buster_for_frid.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/07/yoga_as_bunion_buster_for_frid.html General Health Fri, 04 Jul 2008 07:00:00 -0400 For hundreds of years, people have consumed hallucinogenic mushrooms, saying the experience is deeply spiritual, expands their minds and profoundly alters their perspective about life. Heady claims, to say the least. But there's new scientific evidence backing them up. Roland Griffiths, a psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins, led a team of researchers who conducted a careful study in which they gave 36 volunteers psylocybin, the hallucinogenic substance in "magic mushrooms." Two months after participating in the research in 2006, two-thirds of the subjects described the experience as mystical. In fact, one third said it was the single most spiritually significant event of their lives, and another third put it in the top five. Now, in their first follow-up aimed at determining whether those feelings were fleeting or long-lived, Griffiths and his colleagues report in the Journal of Psychopharmacology that after 14 months the same proportion of the subjects continued to say http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/07/magic_mushrooms.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/07/magic_mushrooms.html Alcohol and Drugs Thu, 03 Jul 2008 07:00:00 -0400 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 years younger than I am in real life. I maintain a healthy skepticism about online health advice; there's an awful lot of misinformation out there. I'm also wary of "services" that turn out to be gimmicks, especially when I end up being steered toward buying something. So I didn't exactly go to RealAge with the most open of minds. But I was pleasantly surprised. RealAge, which has been around since 1999 (don't know how I missed it all these years), actually provides some helpful information. Here's how it works: On the site, you spend a few minutes (it took me http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/07/my_real_age_41_for_july_2.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/07/my_real_age_41_for_july_2.html General Health Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:00:00 -0400 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 injuries can occur in the most peculiar ways. I have no idea what really happened when 52-year-old Makrida Patterson put on her Victoria's Secret thong last May. Patterson has filed suit against the intimate apparel vendor for selling a defective product: She says a heart-shaped metallic bangle that was part of her underwear flew off and hit her in the eye, cutting the cornea. Apparently she missed some work and required treatment with topical steroids. I will of course leave it to the court to judge the merits of her case. But while lots of commentators are writing the whole http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/07/victorias_eyeopening_secret.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/07/victorias_eyeopening_secret.html General Health Tue, 01 Jul 2008 07:00:00 -0400 A whopping 650,000 young adults under age 21 say a grownup -- in some cases a parent -- has supplied them with alcohol, according to a report released Thursday by the U.S Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). This, despite the fact that the federal government virtually outlawed under-21 drinking in 1984, when Congress decided to withhold highway funds from states that didn't make 21 the legal age limit. The survey, which asked 158,000 people ages 12 to 20 detailed questions about the behaviors and social situations surrounding underage drinking, turned up some other unsettling data. Here are some key findings: - More than half of all people aged 12 to 20 had engaged in underage drinking in their lifetime, ranging from 11.0 percent of 12 year olds to 85.5 percent of 20 year olds. - An average of 3.5 million people aged 12 to 20 each year http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/underage_drinkers_get_booze_fr.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/underage_drinkers_get_booze_fr.html Family Health Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:00:00 -0400 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 this news item, which at first made me roll my eyes: a cardiologist at the University of North Carolina's Chapel Hill School of Medicine has come up with a list of "Seven Dirty Words About Heart Disease," a play, of course, on Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV." (Sorry I'm not providing a link here, but you can't say those seven words in The Checkup, either.) Once I stopped rolling my eyes and actually read the list, though, it struck me as a pretty handy roundup of the key elements affecting heart health. Cam Patterson, chief of http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/heart_health_with_apologies_to.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/heart_health_with_apologies_to.html General Health Fri, 27 Jun 2008 07:00:00 -0400 Tiny transmitters being embedded in everything from ID cards to the family dog may pose an unexpected danger: They can interfere with life-saving medical devices, according to a new study. Known as radio frequency identification devices (RFID), these little gadgets permit windshield passes to pay tolls for moving cars, security clips on merchandise to catch shoplifters at the mall, frantic pet owners to find lost spaniels with microchips implanted under the animals' skin, and more. Hospitals are also increasingly using them to track surgical sponges and other medical equipment and supplies. To test whether the signals these ubiquitous devices emit pose a danger, Erik Jan van Lieshout of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and colleagues devised an experiment in a vacant room in the intensive care unit at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam. The researchers exposed 41 medical devices, including external pacemakers, mechanical ventilators, dialysis machines and http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/microchip_dangers.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/microchip_dangers.html Medical Technology Thu, 26 Jun 2008 07:00:00 -0400 When I read about the 10-year-old South Carolina boy who died earlier this month from something called "dry drowning" hours after swimming -- and then walking home from the pool -- alarms went off in my head. We have a pool in our yard, and while I'm always on alert for regular old drowning, I had never heard of such a thing as the "dry" version. Turns out there's good reason for that. Though the term "dry drowning" has long been used to describe just what it sounds like -- drowning away from water -- its use is no longer condoned by drowning experts. One of those experts, pediatrician Deborah Mulligan of Coral Springs, Florida, says the term went out of medical vogue at the 2002 World Congress on Drowning. "It's very confusing to the layperson to hear that term," Mulligan says. "They wonder 'What does it mean?' It gets http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/danger_dry_drowning_for_july_1.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/danger_dry_drowning_for_july_1.html Family Health Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:00:00 -0400 Spiraling fuel costs have made running school buses a budget-busting proposition. So last night the Montgomery County Public School (MCPS) board voted to give Superintendent Jerry D. Weast leeway to increase the distances from school beyond which bus service is provided -- in effect, making more kids walk to school. Right now, elementary-school kids living within a mile of school don't have bus service; for middle-schoolers, it's 1.5 miles, and high school students living 2 miles from school or closer have to get there on their own. There's no telling yet how those guidelines might change, if at all; in any case, no changes are planned for the coming school year. Should kids living farther from school be asked to walk, some parents are sure to squawk. And with good reason, in many cases: as acting MCPS public information officer Chris Cram explains, a lot of safety issues, from sidewalk http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/a_longer_walk_to_school.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/a_longer_walk_to_school.html Family Health Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:00:00 -0400 As much as I -- like everyone else, apparently -- have been saddened by the sudden death of political commentator Tim Russert, I have been moved by the great grace and equanimity with which his only child, 22-year-old Luke Russert, has handled his enormous loss. I lost my own father too early, too, when he was just 64 (six years older than Russert; he, too, died from a heart attack). But I was 31, married, and otherwise well established in life. I wonder what it must be like to lose your dad when you're 22, when you've just finished college and started a career and you're for all intents and purposes a full-fledged adult -- except that you still, in many ways, think of yourself as your parents' kid. There are plenty of counseling services and guidebooks aimed at helping young children cope with the death of a parent. And http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/when_young_adults_grieve.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/when_young_adults_grieve.html Family Health Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:00:00 -0400 Do you know how many hairs you lose in a day? The common wisdom has long held that healthy people shed 100 hairs daily. But Jeffrey Miller, an associate professor of dermatology at Penn State College of Medicine, says that number's essentially pulled out of thin air. "It's a purely mathematical derivation based on assumptions that have never been proven," he says. In his clinical experience, when he's actually counted hairs a patient has lost, the number has usually been much lower than 100. So Miller set out to do what no one, astonishingly, has done before: to develop an objective, practical way to track hair loss. His study appears in the June issue of the Archives of Dermatology, a publication of the American Medical Association. Building on a single-paragraph description of a similar technique in a 1967 text by the eminent dermatologist Albert Kligman, Miller came up with a http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/counting_hairs.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/counting_hairs.html Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:00:00 -0400 Your daily cappuccino may seem like a guilty pleasure. But guess what? This guilty pleasure may actually help you live longer. That's right: Coffee, apparently, is a health food. I know, you're probably thinking: Yeah, right. It seems like everything that's addictive--and pleasurable--is bad for you. Smoking: bad. Drinking: Bad, if you overdo it. Coffee? Good? What gives? Well, previous studies have produced decidedly mixed results about coffee. Some found that java seemed to make people more likely to drop dead from a heart attack, get diabetes or be stricken by cancer. Others found the opposite -- coffee drinkers seemed to live longer. To try to sort out the risk/benefit ratio for America's favorite morning brew, Esther Lopez-Garcia of the Autonoma University in Madrid and her colleagues analyzed detailed data collected at Harvard about 84,21 women who participated in the Nurses' Health Study for 24 years and 41,736 men who http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/is_coffee_a_health_food.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/is_coffee_a_health_food.html Nutrition and Fitness Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:00:00 -0400 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 about a handful of related neurodegenerative diseases. By creating a YouTube channel to share info about the symptoms, prognosis and treatment of such diseases as Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal dementia, Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (CJD), Huntington's disease and Parkinson's disease -- all of which involve the body's misprocessing of proteins -- the team hopes to raise awareness and drive patients into clinical trials in hopes of finding new treatments. Spurred by the experience of their Silicon Valley colleague Michael Homer, a former Apple Computer and Netscape marketing executive who was recently diagnosed with CJD, the scientists hope to use the new YouTube http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/you_tube_u.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/you_tube_u.html General Health Wed, 18 Jun 2008 07:00:00 -0400 Fewer than a quarter of 1,007 California adults who responded to a Harris Interactive poll commissioned by the California HealthCare Foundation visited physician-ratings sites, according to an article in American Medical News, an online publication of the American Medical Association. And only 2 percent of those surveyed changed doctors on the basis of information from sites such as this one or this). The article notes that even as some insurers try to put the ball in patients' hands, telling them to find a physician who meets the insurer's quality guidelines, patients appear to continue to rely more on word-of-mouth references than on ratings they find on the Internet. Which is not to say we consumers aren't surfing the 'Net for health information: In the survey, 80 percent of adults scoured the Internet for health information. It's just that when we surf, we're usually looking for information about a specific disease http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/patients_unmoved_by_internet_d.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/patients_unmoved_by_internet_d.html The Business of Health Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:00:00 -0400 Would your 11-, 12-, or 13-year-old know where in the house to go to keep safe during a bad storm? Does he or she know how to use kitchen appliances safely? Would he or she know to get out of the house immediately if there were a fire? I'd like to be able to answer yes, yes, and yes. But suddenly I'm not so sure. And yet I do sometimes (though not often) let my 11-year-old stay home by himself. A new report from the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health suggests that many parents leave their "tweens" at home alone, at least for a few hours, despite misgivings that the kids aren't sufficiently prepared to keep themselves safe. The poll asked about 1,500 parents how frequently they left their tweens home alone and how confident they were that the kids would follow safety http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/home_alone_for_monday_june_16.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/06/home_alone_for_monday_june_16.html Family Health Mon, 16 Jun 2008 07:00:00 -0400