Sometimes the skin on my hands has completely peeled away, leaving a very soft layer of new skin. This has happened a few times of the course of the last few years. Was wondering if this is some type of fungus or virus?
Many kids are exposed to at least 4 hours of TV every dayâeven if they aren’t watching. Researchers did the study using phone interviews. They talked to 1,454 families. Each had at least one child between the ages of 8 months and 8 years. Children in the study were exposed to 4 hours of TV a day. Younger children were exposed to even more. So were African-American children and low-income children. Parents may think that having the TV on in the background is okay, even if they know that a lot of TV watching isn’t good. Experts recommend no TV for kids under 2. They say that older kids should have no more than 2 hours a day of TV, computer and video game time. The background TV study was published in the journal Pediatrics. USA Today wrote about it October 1.
I’ve been taking temazepam nightly for three months. My doctor is afraid I’ll become dependent. Do you have any suggestions?
Active video games can increase heart rate and energy use for kids, a small study suggests. The study included 18 children, ages 11 to 15. They were asked to play a traditional seated video game, a dance game and a boxing sports game for 15 minutes each. The dance and boxing games used the Kinect system for Xbox 360. Kinect does not use a controller, so the kids had to move while playing. Researchers measured the children’s heart rate, oxygen use and overall energy use during each game. All three increased. The children used twice as much energy for the dancing game as for the seated game. They used three times as much energy for the boxing game. The journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine published the study. HealthDay News and Reuters Health news service wrote about it September 26.
I’ve heard about drug education programs for kids. But what are “harm reduction” programs? And what impact do they have on adolescent alcohol and drug use?
Older adults in the South take antibiotics more often than those in other regions, a new study shows. And it’s not because they get more infections. The results suggest that some of the prescriptions may not be needed, the authors said. Antibiotics are used to treat infections caused by bacteria. Excess use of antibiotics can help bacteria to develop resistance to the drugs. Then the drugs won’t work when needed. This is a growing problem around the world. The new study looked at 3 years of Medicare data on prescriptions and infection rates. About 21% of Medicare patients in the South used an antibiotic in an average 3-month period. The West had the lowest average, about 17%. Regions with more prescriptions did not have higher rates of infections that needed antibiotics. For example, the Northeast had the highest rates of bacterial pneumonia.
I was diagnosed with an enlarged prostate. My urologist has prescribed finasteride (Proscar) and tamsulosin (Flomax) to treat it. My urine flow has improved and I am able to empty my bladder. When can I stop taking these drugs?
Knee replacement operations on older adults have risen 162% in the last 20 years, a new study finds. Many had to be repeated. Second operations such as these doubled. Medicare spends about $15,000 on each knee replacement. All of these numbers will only go up as baby boomers get older. Researchers used Medicare data for their study. Medicare patients had 243,802 knee replacements in 2010. There were 93,230 in 1991. Some people needed “revisions,” or second surgeries. The number of these procedures doubled, from 9,650 to 19,871. The average hospital stay for knee replacement was cut in half during these two decades. But there were more problems afterward for people who had revision surgeries. They were twice as likely to need a second hospital stay after surgery as patients in 1991. The Journal of the American Medical Association published the study September 26.
My nose is chronically stopped up. Most days when I get up in the morning the first thing I have to do is blow my nose. What can I do about this congestion? What could be causing it? I get hay fever in the summer that makes me sneeze.