Tag Archives: Medical

The Top 10 Reasons Why School Sports are Unhealthy

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I believe that high school sports, and behaviors related to school athletics, are fostering obesity, eating disorders and illness in America. Here is my Top 10 List of reasons why school sports are – counter-intuitively – leading to bad habits and worse health for America’s young people.

1)    Rapid weight-gain in childhood is associated with life-long obesity and heart disease. Bad behaviors that are associated with school athletics include bulking up for football, dropping and gaining weight for wrestling, and ultra-thin eating habits, leading to anorexia in young gymnasts.

2)    The concept that, “You’re an athlete – you’re working out, so you can eat whatever you want to eat,” promotes consumption of junk foods, which also extends to the spectators who consume junk foods sold at sporting events.

3)    Teaching the concept that endurance and intense aggressive training is a healthy lifestyle – “no pain, no gain” – reduces the likelihood that voluntary athletic behavior will continue into adulthood.

4)    If “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” as the goal in sports participation, then inevitably there will be many losers. Ultimately this concept becomes a psychological negative when one thinks of health and its relationship to exercise.

5)    Lengthy afterschool practice sessions, combined with late-evening competition in Junior Varsity team sports, leads to missed hours of sleep, a drop in metabolism and a propensity toward obesity.

6)    Head injuries in soccer and hockey, as well as football concussions, are becoming a common cause of extended illness in young people.

7)    Repetitive damage to joints results in long-term disability, including back, knee and hip disease.

8)    This results not only in limiting one’s ability to ambulate as an adult, but subsequently results in weakened cardio-pulmonary function due to a lack of mobility, thereby increasing the likelihood of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

9)    Sadly, school athletics encourage the culture of drugs:  Taking stimulants for added stamina, including energy drinks such as Red Bull, often leads to the accepted use of steroids and other harmful and/or prohibited substances.

10) The overriding concept that winning is the most important part of the game is perhaps the umbrella theme promoting all the other unhealthy behaviors that affect today’s young athletes.

Are Your Supplements Killing You?

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Certain benefits that have been widely publicized for many years regarding dietary supplements may be ill-advised at best, according to a recent study in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Indeed, one might almost say that confusion abounds. This new study on women’s health reports that dietary supplements are resulting in a higher mortality rate for women. But before we start to panic, let’s look at a few facts.

1) This study was conducted on older women with a mean age of 61 years.

2) Those taking iron supplements showed the greatest risk of earlier mortality.

Excess iron in the bloodstream is associated with increased atherosclerosis and subsequent heart attacks and strokes. It acts as a catalyst that increases the risk of free radical damage to the vascular system and associated tissue, thereby accelerating the aging process.

But back to the study.

When attempting to analyze this study, the most important piece of information is that these women are in a post-menopausal group that would no longer need to take extra iron to maintain health. After loss of menses, the risk of iron-deficiency anemia is low, and the risk of over accumulation increases.

Of course, most women who are trying to stay healthy are probably getting enough iron from fortified foods and dark green vegetables, as well as the occasional intake of red meat.

So here’s the bottom line: Iron supplementation is needed for the iron-deficient person. This is much more common in younger women, especially those who experience a heavy menstrual flow each month.

So, my recommendation for older men and women is to be smart, have blood work to check your iron status. Unless you receive a doctor’s indication that you are iron deficient, it’s best to skip that vitamin that contains iron.

Making Health Connections: Family-Centered Care

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The new wave in medicine is family-centered care. The journal “Dimensions of Critical-Care Nursing” just published an article titled, “Goal of the Day: Initiating Goal of the Day to Improve Patient- and Family-Centered Care.” But just what is family-centered care, and who are the family members? Is it the classic family unit, or is it much more?

It has been well documented that, with ailing patients, human or animal connections improve health.

In women diagnosed with terminal breast cancer, simply meeting regularly with other women in a similar disease-state improved outcomes.

Talking and connecting with other women resulted in a doubling of life expectancy – a result that could not be achieved by any known medical intervention.

Walkers of dogs have less incidence of heart disease and are more adept at surviving heart attacks. Even observation of animal behavior can achieve dramatic results in treating and potentially curing some forms of autism and Asperger syndrome. This phenomenon was illustrated by anthropologist Dawn Prince-Hughes, M.A., Ph.D., in her book “Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey through Autism.” The book chronicles her journey from social isolation and homelessness as an Asperger sufferer to her emergence as a world-renowned researcher. Prince-Hughes attributes her dramatic personal transformation to her early experiences observing and interacting with gorillas at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, Wash., where she was employed as a young adult.

While some of her subsequent conclusions concerning primate behavior are inevitably controversial, the researcher’s life story is itself an important demonstration of one kind of transformative health connection.