Health & Lifestyle
Health File
Smog And Appendicitis
Already recognized as a risk factor for heart attack, stroke and cancer, air pollution is now also being linked to attacks of appendicitis.
“Appendicitis is one of the most common reasons for North Americans to have surgery,” says gastroenterologist Dr. Gilaad Kaplan of the University of Calgary’s Departments of Medicine and Community Health Sciences.
Appendicitis, an inflammation of the appendix which is found between the small and the large intestine, is a disease that accompanies industrialization, and until now it was blamed on lack of fibre in modern diets. “But that doesn’t explain the drop in rates in the mid- [...]
February 25, 2010, by Sharon Adams
Casualties At Home
Sitting in a dentist’s chair, Susan Binnie asks if she can stay after the dentist is through—just so she can soak up the peace. She lives near St. Albert, northwest of Edmonton with her two daughters, aged nine and 14, and her husband, a veteran who has struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for 15 years. Binnie has discovered if one person in the family has PTSD, the whole family suffers.
And so she takes her peace where she finds it.
Angelle Peacock, a mother of two small boys, lives in Morinville, Alta. She is also coping with post traumatic stress disorder [...]
February 1, 2010, by Sharon Adams
Health File
Practise Safe Text
Modern life has plenty of electronic conveniences meant to make our lives easier, but sometimes they’re a pain in the neck—and elbow and fingers and shoulders.
BlackBerry thumb, cell phone elbow and texting tendinitis are whimsical names for repetitive strain injuries—serious conditions that can linger for years, or a lifetime if ignored and left untreated.
Cell phone overuse can cause cubital tunnel syndrome—numbness, tingling, aching or burning in the forearm and hand. When you bend your arm during long or frequent calls, the elbow’s ulnar nerve is compressed. Leaning on the elbow while talking aggravates the problem by interrupting the [...]
December 28, 2009, by Sharon Adams
Minds At War: Operational Stress Injuries
Sergeant Shawn Clarke knows how far the Canadian Forces has come in handling Operational Stress Injuries. If he’d met himself 10 years ago, as he is today—an Afghanistan war veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder—he’d have said, “‘Suck it up you wimp!’ That’s what I would have said to a guy like me.”
But a decade is enough to make major changes, if not complete a revolution.
Clarke is among a growing number of CF members and veterans recovering from operational stress injuries, OSIs, and like many he is not afraid to challenge people—even those of higher rank—who are insensitive or disrespectful to [...]
December 4, 2009, by Sharon Adams
Health File
Studying Successful Aging
What image do you have of old age? Do you see independent people in their 80s and 90s actively participating in community life? Or a group of increasingly dependent people whose physical and mental abilities decline with every passing year?
What biological processes, life events or social actions lead some to one group and some to the other? It’s a question of keen interest to individuals who want to remain robust as they age, and the public health and social systems girding up to handle the looming bulge of retiring baby boomers.
Over the next 20 years the newly-launched $30-million [...]
October 25, 2009, by Sharon Adams
Health File
Brain Injuries Studied By Military
The Canadian Forces is gathering data on mild traumatic brain injuries suffered on deployment, in part to guide future treatment of troops with persistent symptoms.
Although sports experience shows most people with concussions fully recover in a short time, not enough is known about similar injuries in military settings, particularly those caused by blasts from improvised explosives. Soldiers are “known as wanting to tough it out and not declare symptoms,” says Dr. Bryan Garber, deployment health specialist with the Canadian Forces Health Services Group.
The CF was spurred to gather its own data on mild traumatic brain injury [...]
August 25, 2009, by Sharon Adams
Eight Great Canadian Medical Breakthroughs
Canada has good reason to be proud of our medical mavericks and mavens—they are responsible for breakthroughs that have saved lives and affected the health of hundreds of millions of people around the world.
The list of Canadian medical breakthroughs measures in the hundreds, if not thousands, and includes every field of medical endeavour, from developing drugs and vaccines to designing medical equipment, inventing new surgical and treatment techniques, finding causes of diseases, identifying genes whose defects cause disease, pioneering cell-based therapy—and many, many more.
Despite Canada’s small population, our researchers have made many discoveries, many of them world-changing. Canada gets a [...]
August 4, 2009, by Sharon Adams
Health File
What Did The Doctor Say?
Did the doctor say isolate, or irrigate? And was that two tablets, two times a day? Misunderstanding what a doctor says can be confusing and dangerous—and it happens a lot.
A study on health literacy released by the Canadian Public Health Association last fall revealed more than half of adult Canadians have problems understanding their doctor, and the problems worsen with age.
A 2009 study by Texas A&M University in College Station of patients with osteoarthritis severe enough to warrant knee replacement showed 18 per cent of them were unclear on whether the doctor had recommended surgery. In [...]
May 1, 2009, by Sharon Adams
Health File
Video Games Keep The Mind Sharp
Researchers have long known that constantly challenging the brain through things like learning a new language or taking up a musical instrument helps keep the brain sharper as we age. Now we can add playing video games to that list.
Researchers at the University of Illinois have found the mental workout of a video game requiring strategy improves cognitive skills for everyday life. Adults in their 60s and 70s trained to play the strategy game, Rise of Nations, showed improvement in verbal recall, ability to switch between tasks, working memory and reasoning ability, among other things. [...]
April 30, 2009, by Sharon Adams
Aging Infrastructure, Part 1: The Trouble Underground
The pitter-patter of rain on the rooftop that used to lull Windsor, Ont., homeowner Steve Horoky to sleep now puts him on high alert. Three times since 1996 his basement has flooded with raw sewage following rainstorms. The first flood was blamed on sewer lines that needed cleaning, he says; the second on a breakdown at a pumping station. Number Three was blamed on an unusually heavy rainfall.
Since that initial flood, Horoky’s trust in public utilities has been eroded. Events in Walkerton, Ont., where seven people died from drinking contaminated water in 2000, are “an example of how things can [...]
