Tag: medicine

Viruses

You can hardly pick up a magazine or turn on the TV these days without hearing about viruses. Dustin Hoffman battles them in the film “Outbreak.” Richard Preston’s “The Hot Zone” is a best-seller. AIDS is regularly in the headlines. In Zaire a whole city is quarantined to contain an outbreak of Ebola. It’s amazing …

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Cholesterol

Archaeologists five thousand years from now, piecing together a picture of our civilization, might well conclude that we were a highly religious culture, all worshipping at the altar of the great god cholesterol, whose name appeared on all of our food containers and who was a constant topic of discussion in books, magazines and newspapers. …

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Eyeglasses

I got my first pair of glasses in kindergarten. Everybody in my class wanted to try them on. By the time I was 10 my vision was 20/200, which made my classmates even more eager to try on my glasses: seeing the world through my thick lenses was a mind-blowing experience, and, hey, it was …

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Anger

I’ve always had a temper. I know of several holes in several walls that I could autograph, I once smashed my hand through the plastic covering of a light switch in a high school classroom, and we won’t even mention the window in another classroom just down the hall. Believe me, anger is something I’m …

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Pimples

Beauty, the old saying goes, is only skin deep. Unfortunately, so are pimples. The difference is that while very few of us can claim to be beautiful (certainly not I, as a glance at my column photo will attest), almost all of us have had pimples. Our skin contains two kinds of glands: sweat glands …

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Headaches

Few afflictions are more common than headaches. Statistics (themselves the cause of many headaches) show that in the U.S., up to 50 million people go to the doctor for headaches annually. They’re continuing an ancient tradition. Around 5000 B.C. in China, acupuncture was the treatment of choice. About 160 B.C., the Greek physician Galen recommended …

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Bones

Our bones, being hidden away inside our skins, are not something that we normally think about much. But once you break one, it’s hard to think about anything else. I had an early introduction to the subject when I was seven years old and my big brother broke my arm. Not deliberately: we were rolling …

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Sunburn

Summer, contrary to recent evidence in this part of the country, is usually considered the time for fun in the sun. But although some sun is nice, too much sun isn’t, because only 60 percent of sunlight is visible, and only 25 percent is heat. The remaining 15 percent falls in an invisible part of …

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Allergies

A few years ago my father was informed by the doctor, after some tests, that he suffered from allergies: several, in fact, one of which was cats. Being the cat person that I am, and in view of the fact that at the time my parents still had Tiger, an old friend (with an admittedly …

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Disease

In the 14th century, bubonic plague–The Black Death–swept Europe, killing 25 million people, one quarter of the population. In the 18th century alone, smallpox killed 60 million people worldwide. Measles kills 900,000 people annually, mostly in developing countries. Respiratory infections such as influenza kill up to two million people annually. Intestinal infections such as cholera …

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The heart

“Have a heart!” “You’re breaking my heart!” “He’s a man after my own heart.” “He showed a lot of heart.” “He wears his heart on his sleeve.” “Hey, wanna play hearts?” We use the word “heart” in a lot of different ways–so many, in fact, that the Oxford English Dictionary (which admittedly is not known …

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