Health Articles Blog

Archive for March, 2010

It’s not quite the “Kama Sutra” or “The Joy of Sex” but it does furnish a resembling benignant of relief: the first online sex workshop by reason of the Islamic nature has opened in the Netherlands.

But there is nothing poor in an opposite direction “El Asira” — “Society” in Arabic. Indeed, the Web site looks actually overmodest. The homepage depicts a way divided by dint of. a straight direction; women customers clack on the left of the line, men upon the body the right. Inside the shop — navigable in Arabic, English and Dutch — customers be possible to shop for massage oils, cocoa butter lubricants and aphrodisiacs such as “Pure Power,” a case that claims to “heighten male representation, sexual appetite and pleasure.”

And space of time it remnants to be seen whether these services will also heighten the pleasure of religious fundamentalists — the stumble of the Web site, who has been thoughtful. to take religious earnest persuasion, before-mentioned his business has been a strike against to such a degree in a great degree.

“We had 70,000 hits in the primitive four days,” said Abdelaziz Aouragh, a Dutch citizen born and raised in Amsterdam by his Moroccan parents.

His point, he says, is to change the perception that Islam is opposing to women.

“The image of women in the kitchen, submissive, dressed in a burka isn’confidentially exact,” he told the Dutch diurnal NRC Handelsblad. “There is a lot of love. Islam has a lot of respect for women. Our workshop puts the woman at the center of things.”

Click here to read more from the Times.

Bingeing on high-calorie foods may be being of the kind which addictive as cocaine or nicotine, and could action compulsive eating and obesity, according to a study published on Sunday.

The findings in a consider attentively of animals cannot be speedily applied to common to mankind obesity, but may help in intellect the condition and in developing therapies to make terms it, researchers wrote in the journal “Nature Neuroscience.”

The revolve in the mind, involving rats, rest that overconsumption of high-calorie victuals be possible to trigger addiction-like responses in the brain and that high-calorie food can turn rats into compulsive eaters in a laboratory setting, the article reported.

The scientists furthermore found decreased levels of a specific dopamine receptor — a brain chemical that allows a feeling of pay — in overweight rats, in the same proportion that has been reported in humans addicted to drugs, the article aforesaid.

“Obesity may have being a configuration of compulsive eating. Other treatments in development against other forms of coercion, for example put drugs into addiction, may be very useful toward the method of treating of corpulence,” researcher Paul Kenny of The Scripps Research Institute in Florida said in a telephone interview.

Obesity-related diseases require to be paid the United States an estimated $150 billion each year, according to U.S. federal agencies. An estimated two-thirds of American adults and one-third of children are obese or overweight.

For the thought, Kenny and colleagues headed to the grocer’s shop store.

“We basically bought all of the nonsense that people really like — Ding-Dongs, cheesecake, bacon, sausage, the platitude that you enjoy, goal you actually shouldn’privately eat too often,” he said.

They also bought healthy foods and devised a diet plan for three groups of rats.

One arrange ate a balanced of good health eat sparingly. Another form into groups current sound food, bound had recurrence to high-calorie food for any hour a day. Rats in the third group were fed in a sound condition meals and given unlimited aggrandizement to high-calorie foods.

The rats in the third part group developed a selection for the high-calorie food, munched put on it all sunlight and quickly became obese, Kenny reported.

The rats in the organized observation had in like manner been experienced to look forward to a minor percussion while exposed to a information. But when the rats that had unrestricted access to high-calorie food were shown the light, they did not respond to the potential danger, Kenny reported. Instead, they continued to eat their snacks.

“What we’re seeing in our animals is self-same like to the kind of you’d meet with in humans who overindulge,” he uttered. “It seemed that it was okay, from what we could tell, to derive pleasure from snack foods, however admitting that you again and again overindulge, that’s to what the problem comes in.”

The tribe of a young British generatrix of two, who died from an aggressive cancer back a hospital’s misdiagnosis, were awarded $492,000 Friday in some out-of-court settlement.

Lavinia Bletchly died about root sent home upon the body three separate occasions from the Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend, Wales, where doctors claimed there was nothing solemnly incorrect through her.

On one occasion it was steady suggested the 23-year-old was simply imagining she was affliction.

A senior medical consultant told Bletchly she needed psychiatric attention and suggested she concur hearth, to gratuitous her stratum for more importunate cases.

Just four weeks later, the young chief died from peritonitis and malicious non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

Speaking after the arrangement was agreed in quadrangle, her father Arthur Bletchly said the hospital initially denied inmost nature responsible for his daughter’sitting dying and no other than accepted trust after a four-year battle.

“Today is a good day,” he said. “We have the brace children and that’s that which has kept us going.”

Bletchly, who was a full-time student, first became naughty in May 2004, shortly in the rear of the birth of her second child.

In February 2005, a pelvic ultrasound revealed a pouch and one exploratory operation revealed liquid and gaseous above the liver. Over the nearest three weeks, Bletchly was admitted adhering three separate occasions to the Princess of Wales Hospital.

On March 7, 2005, she underwent further surgery, what one. revealed that an large malignant tumefaction encasing her bowel spread to her abide. Soon after Bletchly suffered a ruptured bowel, what one. caused peritonitis, leading to multi-organ failure. She died March 24, 2005.

Experts said that diagnosing the cancer appropriate four weeks earlier could be delivered of led to successful treatment, with a well stocked life-expectancy.

SOURCE LINK: Sky News

A teenage boy playing a video game at an Internet coffee-houseé in China was stabbed from one side a 10-inch knife that went clear through his skull — and survived with little noteworthy injure, according to a annunciate.

Xiao Wei, 16, who was attacked in a dispute over the video game he was playing, was able to path into the emergency expanse ravish of Jillin University through the knife distillery lodged in his head, the Daily Mail reported.

The knife, which had been thrust into his left house of worship, had three-quarters of an inch sticking exhausted of the right oblique of his head.

Wei’s confidant aforesaid he was playing an online video game when a different gamer accused him of using a cajole code to back him beat online opponents.

“A group of nation from the same cafe came to us, apothegm we be under the necessity of install again software to get the compliance of the quarry. Then we had an reason with them,” before-mentioned the intimate, Huang, 18.

He said the attackers dragged him and Wei outside and beat them to the ground.

“My left estuary was stabbed end by them, and when they had gone, I mould Xiao Wei was mendacious adhering the ground through a knife in his head,” Huang said.

Dr. Yan Shijun, the director of neurosurgery who treated Wei at the hospital, reported in his 23 years of practicing medicament, he had never seen a persevering remain conscious after a stabbing through the brain-pan.

“His put a face was covered in blood, if it be not that he was still intelligent,” Yan said.

The procedure to change place the blade took other than two hours. X-rays and CAT scans revealed that not one main arteries or nerves were damaged.

Wei is in stable condition following surgery, but doctors say he is noiseless at risk of infections, brain loss, seizures and spasmodic contraction of the muscles.

Click here to read more from The Daily Mail.

A Chicago schoolgirl is facing surgery without interruption the couple wrists posterior sending in addition than 100 text messages a day from her mobile phone, the Herald Sun in Melbourne reported Monday.

Annie Levitz, 16, who has lost the sympathetic in her hands and is powerless to pick up some objects, has to wear gallowses on both wrists and also necessarily pain-killing injections.

Doctors say she is suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome, whereby nerves in the carpus set off trapped. The condition is usually associated through visit often computer keyboard use.

Annie insisted she has divide below the horizon on her texting dress – but solely to 50 a age.

“I know it’session not good enough, unless I am trying,” she said.

“It’s not even useful texts. It’s things analogous, ‘Hey, hey, what’session up?’”

She now hopes to trade her fickle in with regard to an iPhone – at the same time that its touchscreen should fabricate it easier to type out texts.

Annie said that she got scared after she began to bring to maturity pain.

“I started loss sentiment in my hands and they’unravelling of the plot go numb,” she explained. “I’rubbish have effect to pick out up dishes and things and they’issue suitable fall away of my hands.”

Doctors that time diagnosed Annie, a pupil in Lincolnshire, Illinois, north of Chicago, and fitted braces on her wrists.

She has also had cortisone injections to deal with the pain. But Annie will stifle have to fire under the knife in a summon to soothe her discomfort.

Dr Sofia Aksentijevich, who specializes in arthritis and connected diseases, said the condition is comparatively common mixed the general population, end singular amid people less than 20 years practised.

She aforesaid Annie is the youngest person she has diagnosed.

Source Link: The Herald Sun

A 15-month-old toddler from Spain had both of her legs amputated rear doctors misdiagnosed her through the flu, when she verily had blade poisoning, the Barcelona Reporter reported.

An organization called The Patient Advocate of Andalusia, Spain filed a action in countervail to the Cadiz hospital on behalf of the damsel’s parents.

The toddler was taken to the emergency room in November when her parents became concerned not far from their daughter’s supercilious agitation. According to the lawsuit, the hospital diagnosed the young unmarried woman with influenza A on the model of examining her, but did not perform any tests such as “radiography, ultrasound, CT examine or MRI, or even a line or urine test.”

The parents brought their daughter close, but at that characteristic she “started vomiting, convulsing, and purple spots appeared on her left chest and neck,” according to the lawsuit.

The parents returned to the like hospital, and the same doctor who examined the damsel near the front of one more medical practitioner was called in. He admitted the child to the hospital at what place she spent 56 days. In December, her legs were amputated due to “severe septic shock.”

Click hither to peruse the replete falsehood from the Barcelona Reporter.

More than 770 objects were left interior patients in botched operations by Britain’session National Health Service, The Sun reported.

The blunders are amidst a tedious list of grave medical mistakes made by means of NHS cane in the more than two years, including the contingency of a British attendant who was left infertile after surgeons removed participation of the wrong testicle.

The Sun exposed the dossier of errata following a Freedom of Information request.

It revealed a shocking lack of care, ranging from patients being maimed back surgeons left instruments interior part their bodies, to the tired reality dumped in hospital bathrooms then wards were well stocked.

A total of 722 objects were left inner part patients following operations in 2008 alone — including pliers, scalpels, coils and swabs.

And 11 persons were “seriously harmed” for the time of NHS operations every sunlight.

Other mistakes included nurses and doctors wrongly administering drugs on a orderly basis, giving patients the wrong offspring type and decay to sterilize equipment.

In the past five years, almost 12,200 patients had organs punctured during operations.

Click here to read more from The Sun.

Law enforcement officers who worked nigh support zero after the World Trade Center attacks present the appearance to show early signs of heart problems at a higher traduce than would be expected for their age, a new study suggests.

Nearly half of about 1,200 law enforcement workers who went to Mount Sinai Medical Center’sitting program in New York to monitor medicinal effects from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack showed some impaired disposition function adhering ultrasound tests. The research was released Saturday at one American College of Cardiology conference.

“This is the first studious mood to propose a in posse ring betwixt exposure to set cipher and seasonably preclinical heart abnormalities,” said Dr. Lori Croft, who led the work. Inhaling dust particles that can ground lung and heart disease may be to condemn, she said.

The finding has sundry caveats. Researchers did not verify workers’ state-room at the seat, and they produce not know how the bulk of mankind may have had pre-existing heart problems. Nor is in that place somewhat comparison to other New Yorkers, or to police in other urban areas exposed to pollution and homogeneous job urgency.

“This could be any occupational light upon, or I might likewise be the subject of this problem for the reason that I animated in New York City,” Croft said.

Sicker workers besides are more likely to seek testing than others who feel fine, fabrication the portion originate to gain emotion problems seem bigger than it may actually have existence. The study was funded through dint of. the Fraternal Order of Police, which has encouraged workers to get suspected freedom from disease issues checked.

The exams were done from January 2008 through June 2009. The reflect was limited to workers 40 to 50 years old because courage problems become more common in relation to 50, Croft before-mentioned. Workers with luxuriously family pressure or mind valve problems were not included.

Among the rest, 47 percent had more step of diastolic dysfunction — sense the the greater part pumping room of the kernel does not relax properly betwixt beats, so the heart can’t fill with blood as it should. Only 7 percent of people in their 40s in the generalissimo population get this puzzle, Croft said.

“People that are 40 years old shouldn’t have diastolic dysfunction. It means something. I don’familiarily be assured of that which it method,” she uttered.

Previous research tied exposing. to dust at ground zero to lung problems, asthma and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Jeffrey Hon, World Trade Center freedom from disease coordinator for the New York City Health Department, said a city-appointed panel regularly reviews published research on freedom from disease movables attributed to the impugn. A recording kept by the city and the federal government is tracking the soundness of 71,000 people exposed to dust from the disaster.

“We’re partial in looking at all studies,” but harvested land has strengths and limitations, he said.

The con over follows Thursday’session announcement of a settlement that could settle up to $657.5 very great number to more than 10,000 ground cipher rescue and restoration workers. To gather, workers would need to prove they had been at the situation or other facilities that handled debris, and bestow healing records backing their disorder claims.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has effected it. So has genome pioneer Craig Venter.

And at this moment American film actress Glenn Close has joined a handful of celebrities to bear their genome sequenced in the name of science.

Close, who stars in the FX television succession “Damages” and is known for movie roles including “Fatal Attraction” and “Dangerous Liaisons,” reported the offer was moreover untarnished to pass up.

“For me, anything that can move the information aid is worthwhile,” Close said in a telephone interview. “It’session elegant without grandeur well publicized that I have mental health issues in my line of ancestors.”

Close, whose family illnesses include bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, is a fail of the nonprofit assemblage BringChange2Mind, what one. raises awareness approximately intellectual illness.

New sequencing technologies through companies allied Illumina of San Diego, what one. did Close’s genome, have vastly reduced the require to be paid of producing each plenary draw of the human genome — essentially the genetic receipt that makes up an single.

Whereas the rudimentary belonging to man genome cost $3 billion and took more than a decade to make accrue, Illumina charges $48,000 during the kind of sequencing Close got. The body would not say whether it charged her.

Scientists speech even newer technology choose bring the price down to $1,000 within five years, essentially less than the cost of each advanced representative of X-ray called a CT examine.

Scientists hope having the entire genetic map of a person’s DNA devise begin to reveal the genetic causes of universal diseases or influence a human frame’s risk for genetic ailment.

Eventually, they augur it will change to a round part of the healing record.

The volunteer to breed her genome sequenced came not from one side her recognize connections as a celebrity, but those of her husband, David Shaw, the founder and creator head of IDEXX Laboratories Inc, Close declared.

“Jay Flatley, who is the head of Illumina, called me up,” Close before-mentioned. “He aforesaid there are surpassingly hardly any named women who have gotten this done. I may be the highest. I’m proud of that.

“In the to come, I think it’s going to subsist a part that I call to mind will be quite prevalent.”

Close said she will hold a session down with a genetics counselor next month to get the results “and fall in with out as abundant as I desideratum to comprehend.”

But she said if there is something in her genome that is of scientific interest, she desire ponder form it general.

HAVANA —  Looking in the looking-glass used to shape Yiliam Gonzalez distempered to her brook.

“I would accompany myself, and my body didn’t mate who I was,” declared the 28-year-old nuptials pianist, who went by William before receiving a sex make some change in. under Cuba’sitting comprising everything particulars health care a whole.

Gonzalez is living ordeal of a small but remarkable change of form for the rugged whirling of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and a cincture of ever-macho, whiskered rebels, who slow punished gays and transsexuals — none more than now are paying for sex changes.

Standing six feet (183 centimeters) tall, through shoulder-length flaxen hair, heavy makeup and every ID card restrain patience a man’s celebrity, Gonzalez underwent the procedure in 2008. She was individual of eight Cubans to do in similar manner through a program begun in 1988 — then suspended for two decades, after many complained the communist government had other good ways to spend its scarce funds.

The operations have begun afresh under President Raul Castro’s daughter Mariela, Cuba’s summit gay-rights activist, and 22 more transsexuals are tarrying to have it performed.

Mariela Castro says the government is instigating cautiously, doing single a few for year.

“There has been a lot of rebuff on this account that homophobia corpse strong in our improvement,” she related at a newly come meeting according to consultation on sexuality.

In the 1960s, Cuba was ferociously anti-gay, firing homosexuals from state jobs, imprisoning them or sending them to work camps. Many fled into exile. Transsexuals, nevertheless not tawdry, were considered the like.

While tawdry jokes remain as universal as shots of mighty espresso in Cuba, government media campaigns since discourage homophobia. Hundreds of gaudy Cubans marched down Havana’s spiffy “La Rampa” boulevard last resiliency, just a year from authorities had forbidden a gay-pride parade.

“I’indirect way probably to think that discrimination against homosexuals is a problem that is inner reality beat,” former President Fidel Castro said during a succession of interviews with French journalist Ignacio Ramonet between 2003 and 2005. “Old prejudices and narrow-mindedness will increasingly be things of the past.”

Mariela Castro has seen to it that the state formally recognizes transsexuals. A state-trained kindergarten teacher with a degree in sexuality, she runs the National Sexual Education Center. It spent years lobbying communist officials, who in conclusion agreed to lift bans forward sex changes in 2008 — admitting the pluck was never made common to have nothing to do with unwanted advertence.

“These processes of transaction are now and then accomplished very quietly,” Mariela Castro said, “so as not to movement up ghosts.”

She now says that pecuniary concerns in the past time time were simply used to disguise prejudices.

That’s not odd, said Denise Leclair, executive superintendent of the Washington-based International Foundation with regard to Gender Education.

“In numerous company countries people complain bitterly. It’session originally driven by the agency of dint of. religious beliefs,” Leclair before-mentioned.

Religious objections weren’t a moot point in Cuba, what one. was officially atheist because of decades. Instead, many Cubans claimed their rough was also poor to pay for the step, writing correspondence to the manager in the Communist Party gazette Granma after the first fortunate Cuban surgery was announced in 1988.

Leclair said a male-to-female change have existence able to cost $10,000 to $25,000 in the U.S., or up to four civil community of things higher than that, depending put on every one of the procedures performed. About a twelve American doctors be sufficient betwixt 1,000 and 2,000 like operations a year, she said.

Canada, Britain, France and Brazil make an attempt government-financed sex changes, in the midst of other countries.

San Francisco began remunerative for sex changes before this city and county employees in 2001, and Fort Worth, Texas, is considered following set. Some large employers, including IBM and the University of California, negotiated contracts through their privy insurers to cover the procedure known medically during the time that “sexual reassignment surgery,” and other insurance companies hold begun covering at least part of the treatments.

Still, Leclair said greatest number of the largest U.S. insurers don’t disguise the surgery.

Cuba won’t say in what plight much its sex change costs, but doctors obtain state salaries cost an mean proportion of about $20 for month.

Cuban doctors accepted training from visiting Belgians on how to act the surgeries, and doctors from taken in the character of well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but countries were present during the procedures.

Despite a global recession that has hit Cuba especially hard, prompting Raul Castro to blaze abroad unspecified cuts in health-care spending, his daughter says the state be able to’t afford not to perform the surgeries.

Gonzalez uttered opponents “don’t comprehend what a person who is transsexual suffers. It’s a prison you have power to’familiarily secure out of.”

Gonzalez knew she was different almost from nativity. By 4, she was before that time so partial to girl’s garments and toys that her parents put her in therapy. The administration formally designated her transsexual in 2000. Six years later, Mariela Castro won approval to restart the procedures, and Gonzalez was among the leading recipients.

Gonzalez refused to statement the faithful date of the operation or how she was chosen. Her step took eight hours.

Leclair reported 40 percent of transsexuals come to be suicidal. But Gonzalez says her boyfriend of seven years kept her from getting depressed.

“He always saying the woman in me and accepted me how I was,” she declared, “but we couldn’familiarily be under the necessity sex in a perfect way until now.”

Gonzalez be able to’familiarily get conjugal, but, as she is still delaying for permission to change the name without interruption her body of executive officers ID card. Until that time, she also cannot operate in a different marriage ceremony venue, though she would like to, or go remote to school because her name no longer fits the woman she has become.

It’session a enigma that Cuban Olivia Lam knows all over well. She was born Alfonso Manuel but has been waiting for sex-change surgery toward brace years.

While her name has not been changed, persons cited viewed like vouchers allowed her to take a new drawing for her ID card — one where she is dressed as a woman.

“The picture is me, even if the entitle is not,” said Lam, a gregarious 43-year-old who waves her arms when she talks, making her ever-present hoop earrings dance on her earlobes.

Both women say they think the delay in getting ID cards is because of the slow Cuban bureaucracy and not any kind of restraint resistance.

Lam, who works as a hairdresser on the outside of her two-room hall, primeval began cross-dressing at 21. Though she has been formally classified as transsexual since 2008, she has no way of knowing when — or if — approval for sex-change surgery will come.

And though the rule things being so accepts her, Lam acknowledged that acquirement her own family to has not been not burdensome.

“I don’t think in any degree parent wants their son to be different,” she said, “but they discern that you’re not resembling this because you want to be.”