Health & Medicine

What makes this World AIDS Day different from all others?

By Kenneth Mayer
Last year, on World AIDS Day, U.S. President Barack Obama set ambitious goals to reach more people with treatment and fundamental prevention. Echoing U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s call for an “AIDS-free generation,” he envisioned a tipping point in a 30-year battle to subdue the world’s costliest epidemic. This World AIDS Day, the administration’s release of a global AIDS roadmap takes the vision into practice.

The truth about anaesthesia

What do anaesthetists do? How does anaesthesia work? What are the risks? Anaesthesia is a mysterious and sometimes threatening process. We spoke to anaesthetist and author Aidan O’Donnell, who addresses some of the common myths and thoughts surrounding anaesthesia.

‘Zombie drugs’

By Dr Rosie Harding & Dr Elizabeth Peel
According to official statistics, a significant minority of people living with dementia are prescribed antipsychotic drugs. The 2012 National Dementia and Antipsychotic Prescribing Audit suggests that there has been a fall in the prescription of these medications. However, less than half of GP practices in England participated and thousands of people with dementia are still prescribed antipsychotic drugs each year. What many perhaps don’t know is that only one antipsychotic (Risperidone) has actually been licensed for use in elderly people with dementia.

Spitting blood: the absence and presence of tuberculosis

By Helen Bynum

Flying back from Boston recently I was delighted to be able to watch the 2008 film version of Frost and Nixon. I had greatly enjoyed the play in London and heard the film was also very good. So I plugged in the headphones and settled back.Before too long ex-president Richard Nixon is telling would-be interviewer David Frost how he bonded with his Russian counterpart Nikita Khrushchev over their shared sadnesses: Nixon had lost two brothers to tuberculosis.

Drugs in the Internet era

By Les Iversen
When Drugs: A Very Short Introduction was published in 2001, drugs were relatively hard to obtain. Recreational users could buy illegal drugs from back-street dealers, while prescription medicines required a trip to the doctor to obtain a script. The Internet has changed all that. Nowadays in Western Europe and in North America there are dozens of website dealers offering novel psychoactive drugs (“legal highs”) and prescription medicines at modest prices. The market for designer drugs has grown hugely.

Health information that travels with you

By Megan Crawley, MPH
Imagine you’re a doctor, taking the subway to work. You suddenly remember that your first patient of the day is preparing for a trip overseas. You want to prepare for this pre-travel consultation, but all your reference books are at the office and you won’t have time once you get there.

Parents: does size matter?

By Linsay Gray
What can the height of a person tell us about them and their children? Although determined to an extent by genes, the height of a fully grown man or woman can be considered as a “marker” of the circumstances they experienced early in life. These childhood circumstances include illness, living conditions, diet, and maybe even stress. Such early life circumstances have been shown to be linked to health risks later in life…

Fit firefighters

By Dr Fehmidah Munir, Dr Stacy Clemes, Dr Jonathan Houdmont, and Dr Ray Randall
Firefighters are expected to maintain high levels of physical fitness in order to safely perform their required duties. However, many firefighters struggle to maintain fitness levels and have problems with being overweight or obese. Obesity can have a significant impact on health, including an increased risk of cardiovascular heart disease, which is a leading cause of fatalities among firefighters. Obesity also negatively impacts on work productivity and there is concern that obesity may endanger firefighters’ abilities to protect the safety and well-being of the public they are serving as well as their own safety, health and well-being.

Friend, foe, or frontal lobe?

By Don Stuss and Bob Knight
In a scene from the movie The Shadow, the evil villain Khan, the last descendant of Genghis Khan, is defeated by the Shadow who hurls a mirror shard deep into his right frontal lobe. Khan does not die, but awakens in an asylum, confused as to how he got there and discovering that his powers no longer work. The doctors saved his life by removing the part of his brain that harbored his psychic abilities — his frontal lobes.

Watch your cancer language

By Patricia Prijatel
People who have lived through cancer just want to get on with their lives—head into the future like everybody else, free of cancer, free of its memory. That’s why the labels others affix to us can make us especially testy. Take, for example, the label survivor.

The future of an illusion

By Andrew Scull
Fights over how to define and diagnose mental illness are scarcely a novel feature of the psychiatric landscape, but their most recent manifestation has some unusual features. For more than a decade now, the American Psychiatric Association has been preparing a new edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the fifth (or by some counts the seventh) edition of that extraordinary tome, each incarnation weightier than the last. Over the past two years, however, major attacks have been launched on the enterprise, replete with allegations that the new edition shows signs of being built on hasty and unscientific foundations

The consequences of alcohol and pregnancy recommendations

By Sarah CM Roberts and Lyndsay Ammon Avalos
What should be the public health messaging on drinking during pregnancy?  The answer isn’t clear-cut. We do know that there is strong evidence that high levels of alcohol consumption during pregnancy harm the developing fetus. However, we don’t know conclusively what the impact is of lower level alcohol consumption. That is, we don’t know if there is a truly safe level of alcohol use, nor do we know if the line between safe and unsafe alcohol consumption is the same for all pregnant women.

Achievement, depression, and politicians

By Clark Lawlor

‘For two or three years the light faded from the picture. I did my work. I sat in the House of Commons, but black depression settled on me.’
Starter for ten: who said this? (Apologies if you haven’t watched University Challenge). It was Winston Churchill, arguably the greatest British prime minister and certainly one who played a crucial role in guiding his nation through the Second World War.

The triple-negative diet to fight breast cancer

In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we’ve pulled the following excerpt from Surviving Triple-Negative Breast Cancer: Hope, Treatment, and Recovery by Patricia Prijatel. She provides a quick guide on how to eat healthy in order to better fight the disease.

Fighting Triple-Negative Breast Cancer

According to Breastcancer.org, about one in eight U.S. women will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime. It is a complicated disease that takes different forms — one of the most confounding being Triple-Negative Breast Cancer. Patricia Prijatel, a nationally published magazine writer and an award-winning teacher, was diagnosed with Triple-Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC) in 2006.

What is the position of HIV & AIDS in North Africa & the Middle East?

The biennial International AIDS Conference was held in Washington D.C. in July of 2012. This was the first time that the conference had been on US soil for 20 years. The International AIDS Society  had previously decided that while legislation prevented HIV positive people from travelling to the States, the conference would not be held there. However, these laws were repealed by the Obama administration in 2010. The meeting was huge: 25000 people. Speaking at the conference, I identified three key issues…