For the longest time, doctors basically ignored the most basic and frustrating part of being sick — pain. In this lyrical, informative talk, Latif Nasser tells the extraordinary story of wrestler and doctor John J. Bonica, who persuaded the medical profession to take pain seriously — and transformed the lives of millions. He literally gave us modern pain relief.
The history of science is “brimming with tales stranger than fiction,” says Latif Nasser, who wrote his PhD dissertation on the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962. A writer and researcher, he’s now the research director at Radiolab, a job that allows him to dive into archives, talk to interesting people and tell stories as a way to think about science and society. He has reported on such disparate topics as culture-bound illnesses, snowflake photography, sinking islands and 16th-century automata. Now: the history of modern pain relief.
I’m not sure how to write about some new research on infant circumcision because I am aware that the subject has seemed to develop sort of a cult of non-believers not dissimilar to that of the non-immunizers.
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We’ve had plenty of previous posts about reading to children and its benefits. We haven’t however specifically mentioned the benefits of this parenting practice at bedtime – until a few days ago.
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What’s this HPV thing they want to do to my kid? Isn’t this just about sex diseases? Why would I want to give my girl (or boy) that? She’s too young to even date?!
Perhaps, you’re one of the many who think the information is so confusing that you’ll just ignore it until the recommendations get more clear and convincing.
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You may be too young to remember, but a hugely profitable company at one time saturated the airways with a television commercial showing a burly football (American) player in full uniform speaking to the camera in a nearly Neanderthal or mentally challenged dilect saying “buy one – get one free!” [For you younger generation it’s the dialect of the dim-witted Vincent Crabb when he asked Harry Potter “What’s a die-dum” in the audio-tape version of Deathly Hallows]
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Since mom isn’t daily reminding me to “think of all the starving children in Biafra” I must confess that, perhaps like all of you, I don’t regularly consider that there are millions of other people going about living their daily lives in thousands of other countries – most of whom are also not thinking of me.
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Previously in this series about puberty we’ve learned about the physical changes girls and boys traverse morphing into women and men and how early research by Dr. James Tanner (of the Tanner Scale of puberty) helped further our understanding.
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Many of you have seemed to enjoy posts where I let you test your own knowledge on medical topics that are helpful for parents to know. Let’s do it again with a few simple cases of rashes which parents can probably diagnose on their own.
Some of them you can treat on your own, some don’t need any treatment at all and a couple will need the help of the pediatrician.
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An article with the above title appeared in a medical news mashup site that I read frequently and gave some interesting facts and insight.
I’ve been mulling them over in my mind since; so thought that I’d take another opportunity to talk about the difference between Read more→
I’ve noticed that there are a lot of blog posts on the internet with outdated information about childhood immunizations. Even the links on a whole lot of physicians web pages fail or point to outdated material.
It’s really not surprising due to the many new ‘official recommendations’ published recently following the frequent recurrences of diseases we thought we had eradicated. Un-immunized children are making new epidemics Read more→
New research has provided a bit more validation and credibility to the Developmental Milestone questions we’re asking at all the “Well Baby Checks” we’ve been doing.
We already seem to have a bit of a handle on the risk factors for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD); but, Read more→
July 4th is upon us in ‘the states.’ The day with the largest concentrations of explosions and other pyrotechnics of any; and the day with the greatest numbers of burn and explosive related injuries of any other in our parts.
Many areas have illegalized certain classes of fireworks for safety reasons. Of late much of the new legislations Read more→
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