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Pain
It’s strange but true: exercise is not always good for your bones. Researchers have known for years, for example, that competitive road cyclists often suffer from a loss of bone density, probably because the body loses calcium during intense exercise and as blood calcium levels drop, the parathyroid gland produces excess parathyroid hormone, which can mobilize calcium from the skeleton. Now, in a study funded by the National Institutes of Health and the American College of Sports Medicine, researchers have [...]
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Pain
The good news is that a new study conducted at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston strongly suggests that low-risk, localized prostate cancers can safely be treated with active surveillance or “watchful waiting” instead of surgery, which almost always has unpleasant side effects. The bad news is: it’s still hard to tell low-risk from high-risk prostate cancer. That inability to distinguish the not-so bad from the very bad leads us to the current dilemma, in which “70 percent of men [...]
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Attitude Pain
No, the world is not cleanly divided between designated drinkers and designated drivers. There is some serious overlap; the kind that puts many people at risk. In fact, a University of Florida study found that 35 percent of designated drivers had quaffed alcohol and most had blood-alcohol levels high enough to impair their driving. A University of Florida news release reports that when researchers interviewed and breath-tested more than 1,000 bar patrons in the downtown restaurant and bar district of [...]
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Fitness Pain
Yikes! What if endurance training were not good for your heart? That’s the suspicion of some cardiologists at Uppsala University Hospital, where researchers tracked the heart health of 52,755 cross-country skiers who competed in the 90 kilometer cross-country ski race known as the Vasaloppet between 1989-1998. Checking in on the racers in 2005, the researchers found that those who completed five or more races in ten years had a 30 percent higher risk of developing any arrhythmia than those who [...]
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Pain
Yes, biking can be tremendously good for you, but it can also be tremendously bad for you, if you’re one of the tens of thousands of cyclists who suffer serious head injuries while biking each year. Anahad O’Connor, writing in the New York Times, reports that cycling accidents played a role in about 86,000 of the 447,000 sports-related head injuries treated in emergency rooms in 2009. He also points out that 90 percent of bicyclists killed in the United States [...]
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Pain
Lyme disease, the second most often reported infectious disease in New England, (chlamydia is first) may infect as many as 30,000 more people in Massachusetts alone over the next few months, and it will cause a host of unpleasantness, including flu-like symptoms, arthritis, heart blockage, extreme fatigue, mental decline, irritability, and depression. As reported by Beth Daley in the Boston Globe, it may also be blamed for the miseries of tens of thousands of others, who do not have Lyme [...]
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Gear
Many day hikers head out to the mountains seeking adventure, and return with more than they bargained for. Ryan Mason, a fourth-year medical student at Brown University, thinks he knows why. Mason and other researchers from Brown studied surveys of hikers in New Hampshire’s White Mountain National Forest, and found that many people hit the trails without essential equipment, often because they don’t think it’s needed for short hikes. Wrong. Young, inexperienced hikers were most likely to lack essential gear. [...]
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Fitness Pain
Is the benefit of cooling down just another exercise myth? The short answer, according to Gretchen Reynolds, of the New York Times, is “yes”. Reynolds points us to a recent study of 36 active adults, who did a strenuous, one-time program of forward lunges while holding barbells, an exercise, Reynolds says, “almost guaranteed to make untrained people extremely sore the next day.” Some of the group warmed up for 20 minutes on a stationary bike. Another contingent blew off the [...]
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1:38 am
Interested
10:35 pm
Hmm, I found out today that my PSA was 3.5. Time to junk the charcoal grill, cut down on dairy prodcuts and increase consumption of tomatoes!