Category: Life Style

Mal de mer: Nausea: This dictionary word of the day means sea sickness. Lets explore what it is!

Posted by on in Evidence Based Medicine, Health & Fitness, Life Style, Personalised Medicine, UncategorizedLeave a comment

sea sicknessMotion sickness is a syndrome that occurs in response to real or perceived motion, which can include gastrointestinal, central nervous system, and autonomic symptoms.

Motion or sea or travel sickness is considered a physiological form of dizziness, since it is not indicative of a disease process. This can be induced in nearly all normal human subjects. The affects and conditions may vary in severity, as it may be produced with minimal provocation in some individuals but can be very difficult to elicit in others.

What is Nausea: The symptoms of motion sickness were first described by Hippocrates. They frequently occur during boat travel, and the principal symptom (nausea) is derived from the Greek word for ship (naus).

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Complementary, Alternative, and Integrative Medicine-Some modalities will garner sufficient support to become part of mainstream care and the next generation of physicians will never know they were once controversial.

Posted by on in Cancer Genomics, cardiology, dr puneet chandna, Human Genetics, Life Style, Nutrition2 Comments

medicine wheelThe side picture to this post is indicative of all about the essential elements of the integrative medicine wheel to include Energy Medicine, Mind/Body Medicine, Manipulative Therapies, Herbal Medicine, Lifestyle and behaviour. Medicine and medical professional in the current generation is arguably a team of specialists and allied professionals—radiation physicists, cytologists, nurse practitioners, psychiatric social workers, dental hygienists, and many more.TA common man’s expectations of health and the nature of the health care system have been altered and is frequently guided by information, goods, and services ; regulations and laws that constrain medical practice on the one hand and rarely accelerating choice in health care on the other. 

Read More “Complementary, Alternative, and Integrative Medicine-Some modalities will garner sufficient support to become part of mainstream care and the next generation of physicians will never know they were once controversial.”

Gibe, Gybe, Jibe, and Jive-how moods affect your health

Posted by on in dr puneet chandna, Life StyleLeave a comment

moodsAs your irritation mounts, you can feel your blood pressure rising. And that’s exactly what is happening to your body when you have an argument. The effects, it seems, can be lasting. In the week after the irritating incident, you just need to think about the argument and your blood pressure will rise again, according to research published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology. So if you’ve recently experienced a dispute, a seething irritation or a simple frustration, you could be best off forgetting about it.

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From a colleague at TMC- Social drinking and occasional bingeing is just as bad in the long run.How far is death?

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Social drinking and occasional bingeing is just as bad in the long run. City docs offer sobering facts. Mumbai Mirror today

We’re all guilty of the two drink diet at social dos. It may seem reasonable and one would imagine it to cause minimum damage to the liver. But Dr Aabha Nagral, gastroenteritis, Bhatia Hospital says that it depends on how you define the word ‘reasonable’. “Earlier, most doctors went by the British Society of Gastroentology, which suggested that consuming more than 30 grams (for women) or 40 grams (for men), can cause liver disease,” she says. But since these numbers were defined for the West and the concentration of alcohol too would vary, it was much higher than the permissible limit. Nagral offers an India-specific thumb rule: women must not consume more than three units and men must restrict themselves to less than four.

Read More “From a colleague at TMC- Social drinking and occasional bingeing is just as bad in the long run.How far is death?”

Combine and Conquer | Therapy yields reduction in HER2+ breast cancer recurrence

Posted by on in Cancer Genomics, Evidence Based Medicine, Health & Fitness, Life Style, Personalised MedicineLeave a comment

Combine and Conquer | HMS.

Therapy yields reduction in HER2+ breast cancer recurrence

Image: iStock/AngiePhotosImage: iStock/AngiePhotos

In a phase two clinical trial, women with small (stage one) HER2-positive breast tumors who received a combination of lower-intensity chemotherapy and a targeted drug following surgery were highly unlikely to have the cancer recur within three years of treatment, investigators at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report in a paper published Jan. 7 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The findings may help establish the therapy—which combines the chemotherapy agent paclitaxel and the targeted drug trastuzumab (Herceptin)—as the first standard treatment approach for this group of patients, the authors state.

Get more HMS news here.

Many previous studies excluded women with small HER2-positive breast tumors that hadn’t spread to nearby lymph nodes from clinical trials of trastuzumab because it wasn’t considered prudent to expose them to an investigational drug given the relatively low risk that the disease would recur. Without a single standard treatment for this group of patients, treatment approaches have varied widely. Breast cancers are classified as HER2-positive if their cells have surplus human epidermal growth factor receptors on their surface, making them extra sensitive to signals to grow and divide.

“Women with small HER2 positive, node-negative breast tumors have a low, but still significant, risk of recurrence of their disease,” said the study’s senior author, Eric Winer, HMS professor of medicine and director of the Breast Oncology Program at the Susan F. Smith Center for Women’s Cancers at Dana-Farber. “This study demonstrates that a combination of lower-intensity chemotherapy and trastuzumab—which is associated with fewer side effects than traditional chemotherapy regimens—is an appealing standard of care for this group of patients.”

The study enrolled 406 patients with HER2-positive, node-negative breast tumors smaller than 3 centimeters. They were treated with the drug combination for 12 weeks, followed by nine months of trastuzumab alone. Traditional drug regimens for women with HER2-positive breast cancer involve chemotherapy with adriamycin and cytoxan followed by paclitaxel and trastuzumab.

Three years after completing therapy, 98.7 percent of the participants were alive and free of invasive breast cancer. The side effects were generally milder than those associated with traditional chemotherapy regimens.

“We’re committed to identifying treatment regimens that are geared not only to the specific biological features of a woman’s cancer, but also to the stage of the cancer—the size of the tumor and how far it has advanced,” said the study’s lead author, Sara Tolaney, HMS instructor in medicine at the Susan F. Smith Center. “This study is a prime example of the value of that approach.”

Financial support for the research was provided by Genentech and Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

Adapted from a Dana-Farber news release.

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