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.

A new and better way to prepare for some colonoscopies

Best news of the week.

Actually of the year, perhaps even of the decade.

At the Mayo Clinic, prepping for a colonoscopy now only involves only – and I want to put that in capitals – ONLY - swallowing four cleansing tablets instead of that ocean of liquid laxative that’s been the standard pre-colonoscopy diet for decades.

In fact, for most people who’ve had them (conflict of interest admission: I’ve had a colonoscopy - actually had more than one, but you already know more about me than is good for you) will tell you that the worst part of that procedure is the bowel prep because that liquid is simply awful tasting (another truthful admission: I’ve never finished the whole bottle and it’s never seemed to make a difference).

The only fly in this smelly ointment is that this prep only works for a “virtual” colonoscopy, that is a 3D CT scan of the bowel, and not for the standard ram-the-tube-up-the-rear colonoscopy but if this new table prep is w3idely advertised, I’m willing to bet that a lot more people will be willing to come forward – or something like that – to get a colonoscopy.

How to drink less alcohol

Easy, Just change the shape of the glass and apparently you’re likely to consume less alcohol.

But this work only if you’re British.

This all comes from a stupendous study out of the august University of Bristol, in England, in which the researchers asked one hundred sixty social drinkers in England to drink beer and lager from either curved glasses or straight glasses, and lo and behold, the drinkers consumed much more alcohol from the curved glasses, leading the researchers to speculate that it was hard to figure out how much alcohol they had consumed when the glass is curved.

And people wonder about why the UK produces so few Nobel Prize winners.

Hey, if they were just to change the shape of the glasses they use in their pubs, and presto, lads, there’d be a Nobel winner in every bar.