Category: The Body Electric

Cell phones

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

At what point will people get it? I’ve said it before: Get a headset and use it. If you have a kid, it’s especially important that they not spend hours with a cell phone pressed to their growing brains:

LONDON — An international panel of experts says cellphones are possibly carcinogenic to humans after reviewing details from dozens of published studies on the matter.

The statement was issued in Lyon, France, Tuesday by the International Agency for Research on Cancer — the cancer agency of the World Health Organization. The assessment by the cancer panel now goes to WHO and national health agencies for possible guidance on cellphone use.

Last year, results of a large study found no clear link between cellphones and cancer.

But some advocacy groups contend the study raised serious concerns because it showed a hint of a possible link between very heavy phone use and a rare but often deadly form of brain tumor. However, the numbers in that subgroup weren’t sufficient to make the case.

Quote of the day

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

I’ve found that the more depressed I am, the more accurate I am. You?

While healthy people expect the future to be slightly better than it ends up being, people with severe depression tend to be pessimistically biased: they expect things to be worse than they end up being. People with mild depression are relatively accurate when predicting future events. They see the world as it is. In other words, in the absence of a neural mechanism that generates unrealistic optimism, it is possible all humans would be mildly depressed.

Home birth increasing

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

They miss the obvious here: Some women are giving birth at home because they don’t have health insurance and can’t afford to pay cash up front for a delivery. That was true back in the 1970s, when I apprenticed as a lay midwife, and it’s even more true now.

There’s no question that home delivery is much cheaper, and in low-risk births, just as safe when you have a qualified midwife. (For one thing, you don’t pick up those antibiotic-resistant superbugs in your own home.) The medical restraints of hospital births can trigger a cascade of complications and interventions that might account for the U.S.’s disgraceful 32 percent C-section rate. The standard line is that American doctors are jumping the gun to avoid legal liabilities, but I think there’s more to it than that: C-sections have become so commonly used that most medical students don’t ever learn non-surgical alternatives to managing a complication, and thus don’t know any other way to treat them.

The argument against home birth is the risk. But why are our infant and mortality rates so bad? We have the worst statistics in the developed world. You can’t blame that on home delivery.

The other factor in choosing home delivery is that the quality of prenatal care is usually much higher, since midwives are famously reluctant to chance a high-risk home delivery.

Consider the typical profit-driven OB-GYN “assembly line” visit of 20 minutes or so. My visit with my lay midwife was more likely to last a couple of hours, including detailed questions about my protein intake, any unusual symptoms that might indicate nutritional deficiencies, blood pressure sitting and standing, and internal and external examinations. Midwives also recommend positions to encourage a breech baby to flip. (My midwife diagnosed twins in the last trimester that the woman’s OB-GYN had missed. Just sayin’!)

So instead of moaning and wringing their hands as they’ve been doing for decades now, it might make more sense for ACOG to offer more affordable – and safe – alternatives to women. In England, it used to be that a low-risk woman in labor was provided with a midwife or doctor to attend her (the UK has since moved toward the American model of technology-controlled birth) with an ambulance on call outside her home.

Oh, and by the way? Any kind of universal health care should include supported home birth as an option, because it helps control costs. Hospital-based maternity services are a very lucrative revenue stream.

ATLANTA – Home births rose 20 percent over four years, government figures show, reflecting what experts say is a small subculture among white women toward natural birth.

Fewer than 1 percent of U.S. births occur at home. But the proportion is clearly going up, study by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. The new figures are for 2004 to 2008. Home births had been declining from 1990 to 2004.

The increase was driven by white women — 1 in 98 had their babies at home in 2008, the most recent year for which the statistics were available.

[…] The increase is notable because doctors groups have been increasingly vocal about opposing home births, The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has for years warned against home births, arguing they can be unsafe, especially if the mother has high-risk medical conditions, if the attendant is inadequately trained or if there’s no quick way to get mother and child to a hospital if something goes awry.

Doctor participation in home births declined by 38 percent from 2004 to 2008. The percentage of home births attended by certified midwives and nurse-midwives grew, meanwhile.

Chantix

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Oh, look – 150 completed suicides from Chantix users “improperly” reported to the FDA!

I’ll say this again: If your doctor prescribes a new drug (and really, whenever possible, you should ask for a drug that’s at least 10 years old), go online and find the bulletin boards where users report the side effects they experience. Those communities were reporting problems with Chantix long before the medical community figured it out.

It’s important, however, that you read all the comments. When you read the rest, you often find the side effects go away in a few weeks, or that a drug interaction was responsible. Some people (like me!) have strong reactions to just about any drug, and you have to use common sense.

The kinds of stories coming out about Chantix were unusual and scary. Someone should have noticed sooner.

Bedbugs

~ susie

Oh dear. This isn’t good:

Anyone who has ever had a bedbug infestation knows full well what a nuisance the pests can be. Unlike ticks and mosquitoes, however, bedbugs, which feed on human blood, are not known to spread disease and are generally not viewed as a major public health threat.

But a peer-reviewed study published online Wednesday in a journal of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests the pests could play a role in disease transmission. In a tiny sample of bedbugs, collected from a small number of residents living in crowded conditions in a poor neighborhood in Canada, researchers found the drug-resistant bacterium known as MRSA.

Rebuilding year, cont’d.

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

One of the newest members of Team Susie is my physiatrist, who did some acupuncture yesterday in my shoulder and back, and gave me prolotherapy injections in my ankle.

I first heard of prolotherapy a year ago, when someone told me I should look into it for my ankle. I did, and located a couple of doctors in the NJ suburbs who did it. As soon as I found out the price tag ($500 and up per treatment), I put it right out of my mind.

Fortunately, my physiatrist (yes, he’s a real doctor – he even teaches at a medical school) doesn’t charge any extra for the injection. Think about that: He doesn’t charge any extra for the injection, even though he could make five times the money if he wanted.

Anyway, he said the pain is where the ligaments attach to my ankle bone, and explained the prolotherapy will produce inflammation (and maybe pain as bad as the original sprain) which will lay down a new layer of collagen that should tighten up the ligaments and make my ankle less floppy (it rolls to one side).

I talk about this stuff in detail in hopes that someone else can use the information. God knows, I had to dig for it and I’d like to save other people the trouble.

The pain isn’t too bad so far. We’ll see how it goes.