The fizzy healthcare industry

Forbes India blog:

I bring up the issue of fizzy drinks as currently there is a big move on in the UK where the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, comprising of 220,000 doctors, is demanding the government to levy extra taxes on fizzy drinks.

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Think thrice before you choose your sports trainer

Forbes Blog India:

When a fitness trainer, attached to a premiere tennis academy tells me that muscle imbalances and poor posture are bound to happen in kids playing tennis for 4 hrs a day, I simply lose it.

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Run & Become, Become & Run

Ongkar Tony Smith began the first chain of running-specific sports shop in the UK

“Before I knew it, for once in my life, I was helping lead a boom, in road running.” Smith, while he headed the running club Runners are Smilers, now called Self-Transcendence, made his races some of the simplest and best in the UK.

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Fascinating response from a physiotherapist looking for a job

Check below a response (highlighted) from a physiotherapist looking for a job. 

From:

Date: Jan 8, 2013 9:36 PM

Subject: Re: Job | Physiotherapy/ Physical Therapist

To: "Back 2 Fitness"

if i had that much money, i mean 50,000 plus the 1 lakh rs u want as bond amount, i wud have started my own clinic

i knw very well knwn cricketers and i will earn better then ur so called 2 lakh per annum, this is the stupidest job offer i have got any tym 

dare not to mail me again

I sincerely pity this young enthusiastic lady. By just one response, she has shown her class. Her response reminds me of my Dean in Medical College, Dr. J. S. Nagra, a gentleman who did an amazing job of making a bunch of rogues into the finest doctors on the planet. He had once told a student, who was being over-smart, very similar to this lady, "to make a horse out of a donkey, no amount of money is ever sufficient."

Is healthcare industry very 'trigger' happy?

Consider the evidence from a series of widespread doctor strikes in Los Angeles, Israel, and Colombia. It turns out that the death rate dropped significantly in those places, anywhere from 18 percent to 50 percent, when the doctors stopped working! This effect might be partially explained by patients’ putting off elective surgery during the strike. That’s what Craig Feied first thought when he read the literature. But he had a chance to observe a similar phenomenon firsthand when a lot of Washington doctors left town at the same time for a medical convention. The result: an across-the-board drop in mortality. 

“When there are too many physician-patient interactions, the amplitude gets turned up on everything,” he says. “More people with nonfatal problems are taking more medications and having more procedures, many of which are not really helpful and a few of which are harmful, while the people with really fatal illnesses are rarely cured and ultimately die anyway.” 

So it may be that going to the hospital slightly increases your odds of surviving if you’ve got a serious problem but increases your odds of dying if you don’t. Such are the vagaries of life.

- Super-Freakonomics (Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner)

- Page 81

Medical Columns in newspapers

"Shut your eyes to the medical columns of the newspapers, and you will save yourself many forebodings and symptoms."
— Samuel Hopkins Adams
'The Sure-Cure School,' Collier’s Weekly (14 Jul 1906). Reprinted in The Great American Fraud (1907), 84.

This holds true even after more than a century. Most folks take every word in the newspaper as gospel-word without appreciating the source and person who has just taken something out of context without even understanding the condition and making it very sexy and sell-able.

Disclaimer: I write for a health column in Mint newspaper. The intention is always to present very well researched but simple advice to problems.