Tag Archive for Wolfgang

Nanny Versus Nano

Medicine has advanced since and quietly keeps advancing. And maybe, we will witness the moment when not the nanny but the nano makes us help the medicine go down.
An exciting technology is emerging, offering possibilities as diverse as radiation does and medicine has discovered it, too. Nanotechnology works in dimensions which are hardly imaginable for us – matter no bigger than the size of 400 hydrogen atoms (the smallest atom).

Extremes In Medicine

Medicine, or let’s say the functioning and malfunctioning of human bodies and minds still remains fascinating for me. There is more to it than cholesterol, blood pressure, PSA and mammography; it’s like an old chest in the attic.

Life is Tough

It does not seem that I am able to resist the subject of coffee at present and I have good and bad news for coffee lovers: you die younger, but not because of the coffee, but because coffee drinkers are more likely to have other unhealthy habits. The NIH-AARP Diet & Health Study which followed 400,000 people over 13 years has shown, that coffee drinkers are more likely to die, because they are more likely to smoke, drink alcohol, do little exercise and abstain from fruit and veg consumption.

Bowel Cancer – Trust The Medics

Last month two meta-analyses were published about health strategies on how to reduce the chances of developing bowel cancer. A meta-analysis is not a new piece of research, but it looks at all the published research on a subject, thus unifying conflicting results and drawing a conclusion out of the whole body of existing evidence.

Food or Morals?

‘Food is the first thing, morals follow on’ is a famous quote from the song What Keeps Mankind Alive from Bertold Brecht’s Three Penny Opera. Maybe this is an appropriate phrase for a Boxing Day afternoon reflecting on the opulent Christmas dinner or a loose interpretation of the Pope’s Christmas message asking for more consciousness from a satisfied and saturated society.

Altering (gene) Behaviour

Our life depends upon a combination of our very own chromosomes and our environment (apart from all the events that happen and the choices we make).
But while the chromosomes with their genes (genome) are considered as the blueprint of life, many of those life experiences — the foods we eat, or the toxins we’re exposed to — indirectly affect the genes and tell them what to do.

Rich Pickings

In October the news was coming in like machine-gun fire, quite different to the last few months: for example 55 billion Euros was found in a state supported bank – ongoing accounting errors reported assets as losses.

Medical Musings

Axel and I have frequently written about the sense and nonsense of treatments, but hardly about tests. Tests are neither a magic wand to keep you healthy, nor to detect illness. For example everybody agrees on fasting blood sugar testing, but what does a normal result say? Everything and nothing. As a single test it may be useful to screen for diabetes, but a normal test does still not exclude it entirely.