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Next time you sit down to dinner, dim the lights - but not too much.
Both bright light and dim light may make you eat more. Watch the
background music, too. If it's too fast, you'll eat fast, and
therefore more; too slow and you'll keep eating. And think small for
plates - a portion that looks skimpy on a dinner plate looks ample
on a salad plate.
06/23/08
Hip surgery hype
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An alternative to hip replacement is popular with the young and
active, but is it worth the risks? Jeff Stewart, 43, a house painter
and former high school and college athlete, remembers the exact
moment his hip gave out: Valentine's Day 2006.
05/26/08
'Fighting' isn't how you deal with
cancer
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Fight, Ted, fight!" This mantra, chanted over and over to give moral
support to Senator Edward M. Kennedy as he faces brain cancer,
drives me nuts. The caring behind it is wonderful; the metaphor is
not. Cancer is not a football game. It's more of an involuntary
dance with a partner you didn't choose, more judo than battlefield
warfare.
05/12/08
Time to cleanse? Think again
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To read the Internet ads, you'd
think that our bodies were awash in "toxins" -
usually unspecified - and that we should therefore
go to dramatic lengths, like "colon cleansing" and
chelation to get rid of all this bad stuff. Don't believe it. Or, to put it a
bit more gently, don't risk your health or your
pocketbook on programs that promise to "detoxify"
you, without at least doing lots of homework first.
Like asking exactly what these supposed "toxins"
are. And thinking twice - or 20 times - before
undergoing chelation, a procedure that uses powerful
drugs to rid your body of heavy metals such as mercury or lead.
04/14/08
Women athletes win equal time
on injury list
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A week from today, 10,375 women - and 14,737 men - are expected to
run in the Boston Marathon. The presence of so many women - the most
ever entered in the historic race - is a sure sign of how far women
have come in athletics. So is this: In 1972, before Title IX, the
law that spurred women's athletics, fewer than 300,000 high school
girls played sports, according to the National Federation of State
High School Associations. Now it's more than 3 million.
03/17/08
A sinus sufferer chooses
surgery
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After years of suffering from chronically inflamed and infected
sinuses, I finally decided I'd had enough. I chose to do what
500,000 other Americans do every year - have sinus surgery. It
wasn't an easy decision. I had to balance my need for a fix against
my fear of surgery and research that raised questions about the
procedure.
02/18/08
Weight-loss surgery increasingly seen as
treatment for diabetes
- Elizabeth Soto used to say no when her husband suggested they go
dancing. "I didn't want to go," she said. "I felt tired and ugly."
She also was carrying 314 pounds on her 5-foot-7-inch frame and had
diabetes. She had gastric bypass surgery last June and now, at 235
pounds, the 38-year-old Chelsea resident said she feels "energetic
and beautiful. I want to go out every weekend." Even more
astonishing, her blood sugar, which goes awry in diabetes,
normalized within days of her surgery. A delighted Soto now
proclaims: "My diabetes is gone."
01/21/08
The
unsung benefits of lifting weights
- I'm an exercise junkie - and proud of it. I swim, I run, I bike.
But, like many other people, I'm a disaster when it comes to lifting
weights, also called strength, or resistance, training. The closest
I come is lifting a few tiny dumbbells at home in front of the TV.
And that's only when the Red Sox are on. This is about to
change, and not just because of lingering New Year's resolutions.
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2008
General
Medicine
