When You Can’t Stop Using Sleeping Pills You can’t sleep and you must. You start to take sleeping pills. They work – for a while. Then you find you need more. You try some nights without those pills. You can’t sleep at all – until you take the pills again. You’ve got rebound insomnia. Join […]
Going to the dogs – for your health (1/11/12)
Who Lives, Who Dies My internist cousin says he knows who will live and die among his older patients: those who own dogs. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) provisionally agrees. They believe the data show that dog (and cat) ownership can lower: Blood pressure Feelings of loneliness Cholesterol and triglyceride levels While increasing – […]
Is the flexible workplace a way to save your sleep? (12/19/11)
Flextime – Flexwork Americans are severely rest deprived. Combine 24-7 electronic availability with fast changing (or disappearing) jobs plus kids and elderly parents, and Americans are regularly slipping to around 6 and a half hours of sleep a night. Those are levels at which weight gain, increased cardiovascular disease, more flues, colds, and other infections […]
“Don’t talk to the patient” (12/16/11)
A Nurse’s Story You know things are screwy if nurses can lose their jobs for talking to patients. A nurse I know at the main regional hospital has an excellent record, plus decades of experience on medical wards. She was admonished that she was “wasting” too much time talking to patients. “They told me to […]
Who can I sleep with safely? (12/14/11)
Love, Strangulation and Suffocation When you see public health advertisements placing a meat cleaver next to a sleeping infant, it’s clear co-sleeping is no longer a simple matter. Milwaukee’s Health Department has received has enormous flack, but officials are convinced their ads keeping infants from parental beds will save many from strangulation and suffocation. But […]