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Happier Holiday Travel: 8 Ways to Minimize Jet Lag in Kids

By Kate Rope | November 23, 2008
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Recently, I took my 1-year-old daughter to San Francisco to visit old friends. It was her first time crossing multiple time zones, and I worried that the change would have us all up at 4 a.m. reading Baby’s Day 14 times in a row. So I asked my online parents’ group how to prepare.

The tips were many and varied, but I followed a few of them to great success. When I returned, I called up Christopher Tolcher, MD, a pediatrician in Los Angeles, to get his take.

Marrying medical expert advice with mom expert experience, here are my eight tips for happy, sleep-filled travels with your young child. Read More

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10 Ways to Save Money on Health Costs During the Recession

By Scott Mowbray | November 23, 2008
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Istockphoto

Whatever the prospects for health-care reform, the sick economy is going to put lots of pressure on Americans. Unemployment will be up, the number of uninsured will rise, companies will surely cut health benefits to employees, and all this stress will be, well, unhealthy.

Although there is some evidence that recessions can actually improve certain health trends (e.g., people may indulge in unhealthy behaviors less often when they have less money), it is surely true that health-related money anxiety will rise.

But there are ways to prevent and lessen health-money woes. Here are 10 to start with, along with links to more detailed explanations of how to make these changes. Read More

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They’re Here Again?! Facing the Holidays When You Have Diabetes

By Sean Kelley | November 23, 2008
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If it isn’t obvious from the twinkling lights in my neighborhood and the Christmas carols on a local radio station, everyone seems to be ready for the holidays. As a type 2 diabetic, I’m so not.

Just this week I came into work to find a line of festive cookie tins overflowing with homemade peanut butter, double-chocolate fudge, macadamia nut, and sugar cookies. They were less than 10 feet from my desk, and saliva threatened to drip out of my mouth every time I thought about them.

The office staff also recently gathered for a potluck Thanksgiving feast. Though I kept my distance from the dessert items, I still overate, feasting on seconds and thirds of ham, sweet potatoes, and corn pudding. I have to face the fact that my efforts to manage my blood sugar, which usually include avoiding office treats, are in full holiday meltdown. Read More

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Designer Vaginas: Protesters Speak Out Against Labiaplasty

By Sally Chew | November 21, 2008
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Leonore Tiefer

Plastic surgery for your breasts? How passé. Whether you’re looking for better sex or hoping to look like a 25-year-old porn star, now you can get your vulva plumped and sculpted too. As demand for these once secret procedures has picked up, so have concerns about the safety of permanently rearranging sex organs for a beauty fad that may be fleeting.

Between 2005 and 2006, there was an increase of more than 20% in cosmetic gynoplasty. Alarmed at this trend, the New York–based group New View Campaign organized a demonstration this week outside the office of a cosmetic surgeon who performs the procedures. The group says doctors are preying on women’s “self-critical anguish” with untested techniques and Internet-fueled ideas about what’s normal.

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Patrick Ojeda

“Say No to Designer Vaginas!” read a sign at the event, which included a protester dressed as a vulva before undergoing a labiaplasty (surgical reduction of the inner vaginal lips) and another who personified after. The number of labiaplasties in the U.K. apparently doubled from 2002–2007. Read More

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New Statin Study: What It Really Means for Your Heart Attack Risk

By Dena Rifkin, MD | November 20, 2008
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Istockphoto/Health

There’s a study out this week that’s gotten major headlines: Therapy with a statin may lower cardiovascular disease risk by about 50%, even in those with normal cholesterol. Sounds great, right? Not so fast. This may indeed be good news, but it’s much more complicated than the headlines suggest.

First of all, let’s talk for a minute about what a 50% decrease in risk means. Let’s say, for instance, that you had a crystal ball and knew that you had a 1 in 4 (25%) chance of having a heart attack in the next 10 years. (There are ways to guess at this risk for any given person, using their age, gender, blood pressure, cholesterol, and smoking history.) If a magic pill could cut your risk by 50%, you’d only have a 1 in 8 (12.5%) chance of having that heart attack.

Put another way, if I gave 100 people with a 1 in 4 chance of a heart attack that magic pill, I’d avoid about 12 heart attacks. Not too bad. Read More

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Down Syndrome Screening: My Fetus Passes the First Test

By Erica Kain | November 19, 2008
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Istockphoto

My husband and I got some good news today about our fetus: His or her nuchal fold measures 1.4 millimeters.

I never imagined that I’d know so much about the folds on fetuses’ necks, but now that it has become the most accurate noninvasive method by which to determine the odds of chromosomal abnormalities—such as trisomies 13 (Patau syndrome), 18 (Edwards syndrome), and 21 (Down syndrome)—it’s all the rage among women who fall into the “advanced maternal age” category. Read More

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When Siblings Develop Sympathetic Allergies

By Sean Kelley | November 19, 2008

In our house, there are two kinds of allergies. There are our son Graeme’s multiple food allergies and there are our daughter Elise’s recently developed sympathetic allergies.

Over the last six months, we’ve learned a lot about how to manage Graeme’s condition; I’ve even learned how to bake without essential ingredients such as wheat, eggs, and corn starch.

But Elise’s problems are more esoteric. For example, she’s recently announced allergies to aliens, beavers, and throw-up—mainly other people’s vomit, but she’s pretty certain she’s allergic to her own as well. She also frequently complains about phantom headaches, tummy aches, and pain in her elbow. Being 4 years old, it’s hard for her to keep track of which elbow hurts. Read More

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America’s Healthiest Grocery Stores for 2008 on News 4 New York

By Ross M. Weale Jr. | November 19, 2008

Eating healthfully starts at the store, but how do you know the best place to shop? Health magazine recently ranked America’s Healthiest Grocery Stores, and senior food and nutrition editor Frances Largeman-Roth shared some of them with NBC New York. Click here to learn where you can shop for the cheapest and healthiest food.

Related Links:

A Guide to Healthy Grocery Shopping Made Easy
America’s Healthiest Buys: Food
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Would Increased Risk of Birth Defects Deter You From IVF?

By Erica Kain | November 19, 2008
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123rf

According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study published yesterday in the journal Human Reproduction, fertility treatments that involve fertilization outside a woman’s body slightly increase the chances for certain birth defects in singleton pregnancies.

The study, which looked at some 13,500 infants born with birth defects and 5,000 born without, found that 2.4% of the children with defects were born with assisted reproductive technology (ART) compared to 1.1% of the children without defects. The researchers concluded that some birth defects, such as a hole in the heart and a cleft lip or palate, are two to four times more likely in babies conceived by ART than those conceived without it. Read More

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Fake FDA Agents Target People Who Buy Drugs Online

By Theresa Tamkins | November 18, 2008
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If you’re shopping for medication on the Internet, you probably want to save money, not lose it. So if you get a call from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) busting you for an international purchase, just hang up.

The FDA says scam artists claiming to be “FDA special agents” have been phoning people and threatening them with prison if they don’t cough up a pile of cash, typically thousands of dollars. (Don’t be fooled if the phone number looks like the caller is in the United States—the FDA says the scammers are hiding the numbers by calling from cell phones or computers “ported” to other computers.) Read More

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