Financial & Travel Musings » Medicine

Isn’t it worrying that swine flu is killing “normal” people?

Arnold — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 13:14:29 +0000

Nobody knows. The problem is that normal flu also kills people and, for the most part, there’s no great investigation into how they were before.

Obviously most of those who die are weak in some way whether that be through being old or sick or having some medical condition that weakens them. The difference with swine flu is that each case is investigated and usually overall details are published too. That doesn’t happen with normal flu deaths: at best you get the overall numbers at the end of the year.

So, despite all the publicity, nobody actually knows if we should be worried about the number of healthy people dying from swine flu as it could well be that just as many (perhaps many more actually) die from normal flu.

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Way too many acne treatments

Arnold — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 13:02:35 +0000

It’s nice to have choice, but when the choice is too wide it’s a bit of a problem, isn’t it?

That’s the case with acne treatments with row upon row of seemingly identical treatments on offer in the pharmacies. Enter acne treatments reviews at this point. If only there weren’t so many review sites around it would be a simple matter. Sometimes it seems like what’s really needed is a review of the review sites!

Do you self-prescribe?

Arnold — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 11:26:35 +0000

You’d never think of prescribing medication for yourself, would you?

What about when you do something like buy Fenphedra though? It’s drug after all. That it doesn’t require a prescription doesn’t change that. After all, you’re planning on taking it to cause a medical change in your body, aren’t you?

It’s not so much that nobody should self-prescribe but it makes the point that you are taking medication and should at least read the leaflet on side-effects before just downing a whole heap of pills.

Getting to sleep

Arnold — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 22:13:32 +0000

Our lives are so busy at the moment that there seems to be no chance that we’ll ever need any kind of sleep aid but that situation is something that can change very quickly indeed.

Full lives naturally don’t always mean that you conk out in the evenings as they’re often associated with quite a lot of stress which tends to counteract any hope of getting to sleep anyway easily. That’s the problem of course: keeping your life in balance is something that’s quite difficult to do.

Calcium for young and old

Arnold — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 22:08:28 +0000

We’re all know that calcium is needed for growing bones in the young but it’s also needed for everyone else too.

Amongst all the weird and wonderful supplements, the calcium supplements are one that’s definitely not one to include in the “yeah, right” category. It’s surprisingly easy to find that you’re not getting as much calcium in your diet as you actually need but the snag is that it’ll only be noticeable years later when it’s far too late to do anything about it.

Pre-pregnancy vitamins

Arnold — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 19:01:03 +0000

Pregnancy is quite a difficult time in one’s life. You’ve zero control over anything really and are totally dependant on others to look after you. Much the same as old age really.

What pregnancy does show up in a big way are deficiencies in your own diet. Unfortunately, it tends to show them up as problems for your baby which is why it’s best to start looking into prenatal vitamins as soon as you are thinking of becoming pregnant rather than waiting ’til after you find out.

On the whole prenatal vitamins are a package of things that you don’t need in vast quantities but they are things that you just have to have at specific points in the pregnancy. For instance, follic acid is absolutely essential for building what are known as neural tubes and if you don’t have enough of it, the baby will end up with really, really serious problems.

The snag is that in most cases you won’t notice that you’re lacking in one of these vitamins as they generally don’t make a whole lot of difference to your own health. Which is why there are still many preventable problems in children that arise from some lack of one of these essential dietary components.

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How to speed up the weight loss at the gym

Arnold — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 15:37:50 +0000

The biggest problem with the gym is that it takes a lot of time before you start to see any effect in terms of weight loss. Moreover, you need to build up your gym time over a period.

Together that generally means months before you notice any effect worth writing home about.

What you can do alongside this is to look into fat burners which do part of what you’re using the gym time for. The differences are that taking the pills doesn’t take any time and they work all the time (albeit not as powerfully as the exercise).

The gym is the long term solution but by adding fat burners into the mix you may achieve your goals a lot faster.

Chipping away at the signs of ageing

Arnold — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 15:25:06 +0000

The problem with ageing is that, at the moment, there is no cure for it.

However, since the baby boom have realised this there is a whole lot of money riding on finding things like the best anti wrinkle creams, getting us to exercise more and all kinds of dieting pills to keep us in trim. So far though there’s no cure as such so all these things are designed to camouflage the effects of ageing.

Still, there is that tide of money on the research front which presumably will one day actually reverse the effects of ageing.

Is it worth bothering with acne products?

Arnold — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 10:31:16 +0000

The main problem with acne products is that the vast majority of them are basically just plastering over the problem rather than tackling the underlying causes.

To be fair, for teenage acne the underlying issue is hormonal and it’s just not realistic to “correct” that as any “correction” is likely to cause more problems than it solves. However, that’s not the case with adult acne generally and, usually, it has underlying causes that are solvable. For instance, if it’s a stress related issue then something can usually be done about the stress.

Supplement complexities

Arnold — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 18:59:46 +0000

After a while at the gym, you can’t help but notice the massive pile of diet supplements as you go into the gym and after a while you wonder if you shouldn’t be taking some of them.

But where on earth would you start? In addition to all the standard stuff in enormous bottles there are the smaller ones with all kinds of vitamin supplements, chromium supplements, and every possible supplement you could possibly imagine.

I suspect that the best plan is to buy the cheapest and see how it goes.