diet articles

Australian medics have just finished one of the world’s biggest studies into the treatment of pneumonia. Working for the University of Melbourne, Dr Patrick Charles took samples from 885 patients diagnosed with pneumonia in five hospitals over a two year period. He analysed swabs taken from the nose and throat, and samples of blood, sputum and urine.

He found that 95% of these patients had infections that could be treated with combination of penicillin and Doxycycline. In other words, almost all the people who fell sick, were victims of bacteria easily susceptible to the older drugs. They were all from nursing homes and other residential facilities where people had picked up bacteria resistant to the older cheap antibiotics.

There was no need to use the more expensive, broad-spectrum antibiotics. So what about the other 5% of patients? The moral of this research is very clear. You’ll do just as well by relying on penicillin and the other atypical antibiotics like Doxycycline. Don’t be misled by sharp advertising put out by the pharmaceutical industry. More importantly, don’t give all bacteria the chance to become resistant to the newer drugs. Save them for when the need is greatest (as in when you’re visiting a hospital or nursing home).

Headlines in newspapers are the life blood of media. Ever since the “Man bites dog” story, we’ve had every kind of animal story. Now this is the ultimate cat story because the headline misses out the vital reference to squirrels. The cat and the killer squirrels would have been more accurate. But we don’t do sensationalism for its own sake here. We kept it simple.

So you have to travel over to Smith Valley in Nevada. Richie Simmons’ cat was sick. She had visited with the local veterinarian to get drugs. One day, Richie cut her finger but thought nothing of it as she tended to the cat. A few days later, she was flat on her back with a high fever. It took a month for the lab to identify the problem. She had some kind of disease. Let me mention - it was highly contagious between humans and animals. How did the cat come to be infected? It’s going to remain a mystery. Did the cat travel back in time or just visit with some squirrel cousins in California? Who knows. It died before we could ask. The good news Doxy was an almost instant cure. Once you know which bacteria are making you sick, you get the right antibiotic and get better fast.

When several women get together, they often talk food. It’s all code for problems of self-image. When we eat too much, we put on weight and that is very dissapointing. It’s like that bit of Latin geeks use, quid pro quo, which actually means something for nothing. So we get this extra weight for that extra food. Cause and effect.

To reverse weight gain is very easy. Just eat less. Except it isn’t easy which is why there’s a whole industry out there to sell us diets. If you can’t help yourself with diets, there’s always the pills like Acomplia. All the clinical trials have shown this top European drug shaves an average 10% of your body weight and slims down those waistlines. I know no man who’d like to talk about diet with his friends. You never see them in a huddle comparing the results of only eating grapefruits as against cabbage soup. If they do get worried about their weight, they tend to do it behind closed doors. Most men I know walk in the house, open the refrigerator and pick out a cold one. It looks like ritual to mark the end of the hunter phase - gather a beer. But now men are giving up beer. They’ve done the math. They know how many calories are in each bottle or can. If that fails, there’s always a cold Acomplia.

Every minute my inbox gets another of those annoying spam messages telling me how wonderful Viagra is (or how many times another celebrity has had sex with the Boston Philharmonic). Gone are the days when I could just tweak the filter to include the latest permutation on Viagra or derivatives. Images are too hard to filter out. It’s not that I mind being reminded every now and then what the wonderful little blue pill can do. After all, there was that time a year or so back when I had a bad patch and found out how good Viagra is. Of couse it’s good to know last news about medications from all around the world, but not every minute. Why this article? Well, I’ve just had a déjà vu moment all over again. When I was just starting out in IT back in the 70s, one of the standard tools was American Standard Code for Information Interchange - a code for characters and other symbols, etc. And what did we clever people do when we got bored? We made pictures out of all those characters. And guess what’s just popped into my inbox. You’ve got it. It’s a headline, “Viagra - $1.10″ with the message built out of ASCII. So it made me sit up and take notice - just like taking Viagra really. Another way to beat the firewall is opened

One of the world’s leading scientists specialising in sports drugs, Dr Robin Parisotto, has gone on the record. There are now new uses for existing and some new drugs that will fly under the radar of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s tests. Perhaps some of the better informed athletes have been using these techniques at the Olympics at Beijing. If so, we’ll never know. So what are these new techniques? Well, let’s start with the go-faster tattoos. These are very interesting ideas, recent studies showed that taking a drug through tatoo can be more effective than direct injections of medications right into sportsman’s veins. So, you get the same effect with one-sixteenth of the dose and that makes the dose so much harder to detect. But the most interesting ideas are the use of Cialis and nitrous oxide gas. Yes, friends, inhaling laughing gas makes you go faster, jump higher, and so on. The point is that both operate as vascular dilators - they open up your blood vessels. Then blood flows increase and bring more oxygen and glucose to those working muscles faster. The advantage of Cialis is that it stays in the body for longer - it’s not called the “weekend” pill for nothing. Next time you see a runner coming down the street towards you covered in tattoos, popping pills and breathing from a gas canister, this is your next Olympian in training.

Can you imagine anyone thinking spots are hot? Jeez. There you are in the morning, looking in the bathroom mirror in despair. Your acne spoils all your positive features and leaves your alone with it. You’re lining up to take the Accutane - signing up for the iPledge is a real pain but it will all be worth it when the acne’s gone. Foreigners are really weird. Indonesia is just so way out there. If you’re born in USA, i’m sure, you don’t even know where Indonesia is. So you stop and then smile. It’s not quite what you thought. You’ve just got acne on your mind. It seems those Indonesians burn their forests and our great network of spy satellites can see the hot spots where the fires are burning most fiercely. That’s why you’ve signed the iPledge and your parents are going to buy drug online. With a little luck, it will all be gone in six months time.