Pulse Beat

Prof Dr BM Hegde 20 January 2015

Medical developments from around the world

Birds Can Better Predict the Weather

Infrasound, which can travel thousands of miles, is not audible to the human ears but birds can hear it. They can pick up the sound of large storms in the sea at least 24 hours before our radars. Watching bird migration could be a better science than electronic signals. True science is learning from nature.

“The most likely tip-off was the deep rumble that tornadoes produce, well below what humans can hear,” explains BBC News. “Noise in this ‘infrasound’ range travels thousands of kilometres, and may serve as something of an early warning system for animals that can pick it up.”

Dr Chris Hewson, a senior research ecologist at the British Trust for Ornithology, agrees with the infrasound hypothesis. Based on his understanding of weather formation patterns, warblers, falcons and other birds must have a special sense for how these weather events form, long before human understanding and technology is able to pick up the signals.

Coffee Drinking Could Be ‘Good’

“Dr Qian Xiao from the National Cancer Institute has found that people who drink three cups of coffee daily are 25% less likely than non-coffee drinkers to have abnormal levels of liver enzymes.” Please understand that this study is funded by the coffee industry. Though Dr Xioa has studied 27,000 people, the data are retrospective and based on the ability of those people to remember how many cups of coffee they had consumed in the past. Many such studies keep cropping up. Do not be surprised if you find an equal number of studies show that coffee is the villain in many human ailments! That is exactly why Mark Twain had warned us: “Do not read health reports; you might die of a misprint!” How very true?

Lose Weight by Controlling Emotion

People who can read their emotions and control them better eat much more sensibly to keep their weight under control. Positive emotions could help lower your weight. If you are overweight and have failed to control it by eating less, try and see if you are at peace with your own self; it would help.

Free Healthcare for All?

Finances of the National Health Services (NHS) in Britain, where every kind of sickness care is free, are in dire straits. “If a crisis is the nadir, the turning point, the NHS in England can’t yet be judged to be in crisis,” said John Appleby of the health think tank—the King’s Fund—in a BBC interview. This is because things may well get worse. Hospitals around the country are declaring ‘major incidents’ because of a lack of beds or staff or both, emergency departments report that they are at breaking point, and general practice is under unprecedented pressure. And there is little sign yet of things improving. So says Fiona Godlee, the editor of the British Medical Journal, in her editorial. I think, the Modi government will take note not to give free Western medical services in our hospitals. We can still give better services, if only we had an integrated system of sickness-care where emergencies are managed with Western medical quick-fixes and the vast majority of minor illnesses can be managed by other systems after duly authenticating them. To give you an idea about how big the load is, see this data from a Canadian study. When a doctor sees ONE heart attack, he could have seen 36,000 minor illness syndromes. Most of the latter are self-curing but need something to boost their immune power which is better done with Ayurveda and other systems. This will be very healthy for the country’s Budget too.

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