Monday, August 6, 2007

Today's Globe: residency rules, fitness and cancer, bending it like Beckham, poison ivy, C-sections

Limiting medical residents' hours has helped relieve their exhaustion. But patients aren't yet much better off, and training may be suffering, anecdotal evidence and the first round of studies on the impact of the rules suggest.

There's actually surprisingly little evidence that dietary changes that cancer patients make prolong survival -- except perhaps for colon cancer. What is crystal clear, though, is the importance of exercise and weight control.

David Beckham's skill is so impressive that it sent a team of international scientists into the lab to answer a question that soccer fans have long asked themselves: How do you bend it like Beckham?

Jon Sachs (left) is an accidental enthusiast with a very traditional poison ivy story: it started with an unintentional encounter and has turned into a long-term itch.

Also in Health/Science, do masks provide protection for healthy people in airplanes and how can a person drill a hole into glass?

Vice President Cheney's "One Percent Doctrine" -- the title of Ron Suskind's 2006 book on post-9/11 national security policy -- perfectly captures an approach to decision-making in American medicine that misallocates resources and undermines primary care, Eugene Declercq of the Boston University School of Public Health and Judy Norsigian of Our Bodies Ourselves write on the op-ed page. One shift -- the rapidly rising caesarean rate -- exemplifies this problem.

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 06:52 AM

Print | E-mail to a friend | Permalink | Subscribe via rss