Health and Shopping Blog

Warning to all who watches their weight. Except that he’s talking about Antarctic minke whales. OK, so when did you last see a minke whale on your bathroom weighing scales? So if you’re holidaying in the north regions this Fall and see a Japanese researcher coming towards you with one of those big samurai swords, you may decide that you don’t want to be a part of the research.

It’s hard to get a whale to stay still long enough to get an accurate reading. And then there are those caliper things, the “fat pinchers”. The Japanese have just published a scientific report in Polar Biology - another of those must-read journals. Kenji Konishi, who works out of the Institute of Cetacean Research in Tokyo, said August 27 that killing was the only way to accurately measure factors such as body weight or fat thickness! Take these Acomplia tablets for six months and then we’ll kill you to find out how much adipose fat you’ve lost. Can’t they just guess? Actually, when it comes to human clinical trials, they use advanced science like tape measures for waists. Acomplia has done well. Participants lose an average 10% of their body weight and an average 3 inches (8 cm) from their waists. Perhaps the minke whales are buying Acomplia online. Let’s not kill them to find out.

Headlines are the life of newspapers. They are often developing people-animal stories. Now this is the ultimate cat story because the headline misses out the vital reference to squirrels. Yes, it was a double attack. But we don’t do sensationalism for its own sake here. We kept it simple. So you have to travel over to Smith Valley in Nevada. Richie’s cat was sick. She had visited with the local veterinarian to get drugs. One day, Richie cut her finger but thought nothing of it as she tended to the cat. Several days later, she was flat on her back with a high fever. It took a month for the lab to identify the problem. Well, back in 1911 (so long time ago?) there was a disease that almost wiped out the squirrel population in Tulare, California so they called it tularemia. Yes, very creative name. One thing - it was highly contagious between humans and animals. How did the cat come to be infected? It’s going to remain a mystery. Hey, do you want to say cat travelled back to visit squirrel relatives? Who knows. It died before we could ask. The good news Doxycycline was an almost instant cure. Just goes to show. Once you know which bacteria are making you sick, you get the right antibiotic and get better fast.

Every year, Xanax has been winning the prize in the “most bought” category. Naturally, Pfizer, likes these annual headlines. They help customers believe this drug is so popular because it really works. The US Government now accepts that prescription medications are routinely abused. You only have to go into the emergency departments of hospitals to see the truth of this. In 2005, there were more than 2 million admissions caused by the non-medical use of drugs. Well, that’s true to some extent. If you take xanax for the right reasons and under proper medical supervision, it does reduce levels of panic and anxiety. Take it for too long or at too high a dose and you’re likely to get hooked. So before you go down this path, think carefully. One of the reasons for this is the easy availability of drugs that can give you a “high” both over-the-counter and through the internet. Add in the longing barrage of advertisements for drugs, and people are persuaded to take FDA-approved medications without worrying about the consequences.

This medication gives you a breathing space. Use that opportunity to get counseling and therapy. In the medium to long term, psychological support is the way to learn how to control your fear and worry. Live life the natural way, don’t pay endlessly for help through a bottle of tablets. The way the world works today, people do need help. Drugs like xanax really do help them to cope with the stress. But it’s not helpful to see drugs as the only solution. Yes, xanax relieves anxiety, but you mustn’t become an addict. You need to change yourself.

And just so you can keep calling global warming a myth, poison ivy is one of the plants responding well to the increases in temperature, humidity and the level of carbon dioxide. You can see it spreading along hedgerows and into your back yard. It’s a misfortune to touch this plant or to touch something that has touched this plant - did you know your pet can pass through a thicket and bring its richness back to you on its fur? This plant is bursting with an oily resin called urushiol. If this penetrates your skin, you’ll almost certainly get blisters and, in due course, a rash. Only a very few people have an immunity from this. For light exposure - you realized the danger immediately and washed the affected area of skin with warm water and plain soap or a solvent like rubbing alcohol - an over-the-counter topical steroid cream will usually be sufficient. If you want to get more serious effect, use Prednisone. Two final thoughts on removing a patch of poison ivy from your yard. Lay in a supply of Prednisone and, wearing gloves, cut the vine and throw it on a bonfire. But watch out. Heat and smoke can lift urushiol particles into the atmosphere so don’t stand down wind of the fire. And if all else has failed, get a goat.

As if you already noticed, summer has arrived. That means we have to get interested in Lyme disease all over again. So let’s get the bad news out of the way first. What does it mean? The number of cases has been increasing dramatically and the infections are getting more virulent. Why is this happening? Because more people are building their houses out in the countryside where there are deer and other animals that carry the ticks. Now add in climate change (yes, global warming is here as well). It’s influencing tick feeding behavior. The result is a surge in the number of serious cases of infection. The good news is that treatment continues to be a steady performer. If you take the pills at least two weeks, ifnfection’ll go away. But over the next two years, there likely to be a change. The Center for Disease Control has begun development of a slow release version of Doxycycline. This may be by injection or by patch for those who are needle-shy. The aim is to replace the tablets with a single therapy active over a two week period. Until this comes out of the lab, you’ll just have to pop the tablets, but life may soon improve. Start taking doxy today, don’t wait!

One of the world’s leading scientists specialising in sports drugs, Dr Robin Parisotto, has gone on the record. It’s official. There are now new uses for existing and some new drugs that will fly under the radar of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s tests. Perhaps some of the better informed athletes have been using these techniques at the Olympics at Beijing. If so, we’ll never know. So what are these new techniques? So, you get the same effect with one-sixteenth of the dose and that makes the dose so much harder to detect. But the most interesting ideas are the use of Cialis and nitrous oxide gas. Yes, friends, inhaling laughing gas makes you go faster, jump higher, and so on. The point is that both operate as vascular dilators - they open up your blood vessels. Blood flows increase and bring more oxygen to those working muscles faster. The advantage of Cialis is that it stays in the body for longer - it’s not called the “weekend” pill for nothing. So the next time you see a runner coming down the street towards you covered in tattoos, popping pills and breathing from a gas canister, this is your next Olympian in training.