Health News and Scoops

I know you are probably sick of hearing about hypertension, blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease by now, but here’s the deal: there are easy ways you can avoid not only hearing about those conditions on the news, but also hearing about them from your doctor (and your insurance company).  The steps you can take to control your high blood pressure or risk of high blood pressure were outlined in a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.  Following their guidelines for a more heart-healthy lifestyle “could lower women’s risk of high blood pressure by as much as 80%.”  Here’s what they offer:

•    do some sort of exercise every day
•    go easy on the sodium
•    eat a lot of water-based foods like fruits and vegetables
•    low-fat dairy is always a good choice
•    supplement your diet with folic acid (especially pregnant women!)
•    “maintain a normal weight”

That last one seems a bit vague, and I’m sure that if you follow the other steps you’ll have a better chance at maintaining your weight.  My advice to you is this: when monitoring your weight, do not, I repeat, do not, rely on your visual system.  You know how you look at a picture of yourself and you think you look awful? Chances are, you don’t, but you are convinced that you do.  When you hear your voice on a voice recorded the normal response is to go “ewww! My voice sounds so weird, that’s not what I sound like, is it?” There are neurological explanations for this, but I’ll give you the simple version; your brain is bad at processing visual and vocal information about itself.  When you eat healthy for a day, you’ll convince yourself that you look better in a mirror, and when you eat poorly for a day, you’ll convince yourself that you have added at least 10 pounds that day.  Monitor your weight by how your clothes fit (not jeans, because they shrink and expand with washing and wear).  Try on those khakis to get a sense for how things are going.
Exercising every day can come in many forms, too.  You may be thinking that with your work schedule there is no way you could adhere to exercising every single day.  That is probably true, but it is good to know that exercise is cumulative.  Walking ten minutes in the morning, ten minutes in the afternoon, and ten in the evening is thirty minutes of walking a day.  You won’t improve your 10k performance that way, but you are exercising.  You can park farther away, take the stairs, walk the long way, etc.
This study is again one of those obvious papers that you probably could have written yourself, and a problem I have is that these papers don’t provide real world solutions to the problems.  They give you a bullet point list of the “easy” ways to maintain heart health.  Hopefully you can see a pattern in my simple solutions to these sometimes inconvenient health habits, and think of these three things: move more, eat every kind of food but in moderation, and reduce as much stress in your life as you can.

Obama stated not long ago that medicine has become more of a “business than a calling.” I could not disagree more with that statement. Medicine has remained a calling for many, but with the salary cuts and lack of regulation of insurance companies, physicians and surgeons have been forced to run a business. Obama has misinterpreted the situation. If you have read my previous posts, you understand that attending medical school at this time is close to a half a million dollar investment, followed by three to six years of a salary under $45,000, followed by one to five years of a salary under $60,000. If physicians have to spend $4,000 per month paying back loans for 10 to 25 years, and insurance companies will only pay 50% of what their procedures actually cost, one can imagine that pretty soon, the physician’s private practice has to operate as a business.

This is a small digression.  My purpose in mentioning Obama’s statement is that in order to make up for the extreme debt and very low net salary of private practice physicians, private practices have participated in incentives given by pharmaceutical companies.  These companies provide gifts, money, and various other incentives to physicians in order to ensure that their product is used. Often the drug companies will give significant monetary benefits for physicians to push the use of their product, and to push the drug over other, cheaper drugs that are essentially the same.

A law passed this summer in Vermont has set out to ban that practice. It is certainly for the benefit of the patients and their wallets to do so (and the physicians can only hope that reform comes soon so that they can stop taking all the hits when it comes to health care reform). The law, which was signed on June 8^th, “bans gifts to physicians from manufacturers of prescription drugs, medical devices, and biologic products, with few exceptions.” These exceptions “include the provision of drug samples for free distribution to patients, the short-term loan of medical devices to permit their evaluation, and the distribution of journal articles and other items ‘that serve a genuine educational function.’”

What all of this really means is that Vermont has taken the first real step forward in an effort to reform the health care system. Perhaps Obama can learn from this, in that we do not necessarily have to change the entire health care system in one giant leap; we can chip away at it by ridding of the small but numerous abuses of the system.

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A research group at the Institute of Aging recently published a paper in the scientific journal Nature showing that a compound named rapamycin could prevent aging in mice. Interestingly, this compound was found buried in the dirt of Easter Island (remember that one?) and it was initially studied for its immunosuppressive properties. The scientists at the Institute of Aging claim that in the set of mice, life expectancy for both male and female mice, who were the “human equivalent” of 60 years old, was increased by 28%-38%. So does this mean that we have found the fountain of youth?

The first question to ask yourself is, what exactly is aging? What does it mean to “prevent aging?” I believe that this question is the major caveat of not only this study but of numerous anti-aging projects. It is difficult to define just what exactly aging is. Can you die of age alone? Or does age cause cellular malfunctions, and lead to cancer, immunosuppressant, neurological problems, etc.? We know that death can occur by those alone, but it is difficult to understand what it is that these research laboratories are targeting specifically. One of the main focuses of the laboratories at the Institute of Aging is to test compound after compound to determine if any of them have an effect on aging.

The authors of the study address the ambiguity of the word ‘aging’ by claiming that they do not know yet whether the mice lived longer because aging was prolonged, or because the mice simply did not develop cancer. Do you think, then, that their first inclination would have been to claim that this drug might be an anti-cancer agent? Do you think it is a little premature to jump to anti-aging right away? The compound is already known to have anti-cancer properties, so perhaps this drug is not battling that all-too-abstract idea of aging, but rather cancer itself. I might be harsh on the anti-aging studies, but it seems to me like the process might be more efficient by attempting to study how the compound works first, then testing how that might be a positive factor in the aging process, rather than wasting hundreds of experimental mice to determine that a compound prevents aging for an unknown reason.