News for parents of colicky kids

According to a study in the Journal of Pediatrics, the probiotic Lactobacillus reuteri DSM 17938 helped settle the kids better than placebo in 80 kids.

Sounds like a safe enough treatment, if that is, you can find this probiotic because this study was funded by the company that manufactures it and that company happens to be in Poland.

Why we need to be wary of changes to existing standards for driving restrictions

A study from Ontario health records which was published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine found that when doctors warned patients not to drive (because of fears the doctors had about those patients’ abilities to drive due to chronic illness) resulted in a significant drop in the number of severe MVAs (those resulting in admission to an ER) those patients were involved in.

Ergo, doctors should warn more patients about not driving.

I have a concern about this conclusion, though.

Although age by itself was but one of the factors doctors used in deciding to whom to issue those driving warnings (chronic diseases all tend to rise with age, after all), and although in this study, a significant number of warnings were also issued to younger drivers, in part, of course because the prevalence of chronic illness is rising rapidly among young people largely because of their sedentary lifestyles, poor diets, and excess weights, I am still certain that if this study results in changed guidelines about driving limits, because so many doctors – and the health care system in general - have an underlying ageist bias (doctors are younger, often much, much younger than their patients, after all, so it’s understandable that so many doctors simply can’t put themselves in their patients’ shoes),  these new warnings will be issued disproportionately to older drivers, and limiting someone’s capacity to drive, whether that limit is self-imposed or not, can dramatically impact someone’s life negatively.

Another warning to use antibiotics with care

A study just published online Sept. 24 in the journal Pediatrics has concluded that using antibiotics early in childhood raises that child’s risk of ending up with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), an umbrella term for the conditions Crohn’s diseases ulcerative colitis.

And the younger the kids are when they take the antibiotics, these authors condlude, and the higher the dose of the antibiotics, the greater the risk of developing IBD.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that the risk if getting IBD from antibiotics early in life is quite low.

Nonetheless, this is just another warning – especially to parents as we enter that period when so many of us, particularly kids, will develop upper respiratory symptoms that will result in a visit to a doctor’s office and often we will be offered an antibiotic “just in case It’s a bacterial infection” (even though the great majority of such infections are in fact viral and an antibiotic will do nothing for them) that we must use antibiotics with great caution, and only when there’s absolute proof that they’re necessary.

And as with all medications, always use the lowest dose of the weakest form of the antibiotic for the least amount of time that will do the trick for you, which means that for many infections the old antibiotics such as ampicillin are preferable to the newer ones.

Why never trust an opinion that seems set in stone - it's not

A fantastically cute experiment from researchers in Lund University, Sweden, has shown quite clearly that we can change our minds when situations change, even about stuff that we think we believe whole-heartedly.

In this study published Sep. 19 in the open access journal PLOS ONE, researchers gave a group of students a questionnaire based on certain situations to gauge the “moral response” of the students to those dilemmas.

The questions and answers were written on a flip chart that had been manipulated so that when the researchers turned the page, the students’ answers were given back to them as completely opposite to the views that they had stated the first time around.

However, when confronted with the completely changed answers that were now attributed to them, many of the students put up good arguments about why they supported the new answers instead.

Which at least partly why, I think, we periodically choose to re-elect the “idiots” we threw out just a few years ago.

An important note for baby boomers

If your eyesight is going, and hey! Is there a boomer alive who still has the vision he/she had just a few years ago, here’s an important reason to get your vision corrected as much as possible as soon as possible.

According to a new study published online in the journal, Ophthalmology, and this is really just simple common sense,  people whose vision has gone downhill in both eyes are less physically active than people whose vision has not deteriorated.

And you know the bottom line: very few of us need yet another reason not to be physical active.