Continuing on the heels of our legal year end wrap up, we now turn to health. Here is a collection of notable health-related stories for 2010, some sad, some joyous, and some just plain weird.
Fake doctors
Since Avvo now helps patients verify doctor credentials, it’s only appropriate to show some extreme cases of what happens when patients don’t do their homework:
Free breast exams
If a strange woman (who’s actually a man dressed as a woman) claiming to be a doctor offers to give you a free breast exam in a bar, she’s either a very altruistic healthcare professional or a fake doctor looking for cheap thrills. As it turns out, Kristina Ross was the latter.
What do you mean my husband isn’t a doctor?
We’ve all heard jokes about men dressing as doctors to pick up women. Not surprisingly some guys actually do this, but Eric Perteet took it to the next level. He managed to marry a woman, convince her he was a doctor, and had her drop him off at the hospital for “work” every day. His wife finally found out when she called the hospital and no one had ever heard of him.
Ex con poses as a doctor for three weeks
For ex cons on probation it’s a good idea to get a job and stay out of trouble. For Daniel Stewart, his idea of getting a “job” was to pose as a doctor at a North Carolina medical center for three weeks. Police eventually caught him and realized he had broken off his electronic ankle bracelet.
“Nice to meet you… want some butt injections?”
If a strange woman claiming to be a doctor approaches you in a parking lot offering to make your butt “look perfect,” that’s a little suspicious. Unfortunately for one Florida woman, her suspicions were’t roused, and she took the strange woman up on her offer. What she ended up with was not a perfect butt, but injections of an unknown substance that nearly killed her.
Celeb plastic surgery gone overboard
In 2010 America watched Heidi Montag’s reality TV antics, as well as her apparent descent into plastic surgery addiction. Heidi is reported to regret the surgery and wishes she could go back to the way she was.
Heidi Montag
Longevity
100 year old doc still doing rounds
If you’ve ever complained about getting old, this will make you feel like a total whiner. 100 year old Dr. Walter Watson, a gynecologist in Atlanta, is still seeing patients every day. Dr. Watson was delivering babies all the way up to 1995 and has delivered between 15,000 and 18,000 babies during his life. He delivered his first baby in 1944.
Immortality from Khazakstan
The President of Kazakhstan (the country made famous by Borat) has declared that discovering the secrets of immortality will be the focus of his country’s scientific research. Nazarbayev is 70 and has been in charge since the 80′s. When a diplomat once suggested that he rule the country until 2020, Nazarbayev replied that he’d be willing to, as soon as someone invents an elixir to keep him young. Apparently he wasn’t kidding.
The longevity genes
Many people think that when it comes to genetics and longevity, it’s all about not having bad genes. But there’s more to it than that. Researchers found another important piece of longevity puzzle is having genes that predispose you to living a long life. These “longevity genes” were found in 77% of the people studied who lived to 100, which of course means 23% didn’t have the magic genes, offering hope to the genetically challenged.
Heroic rescues
Saving twins inside the womb
Lisa Davis of Los Angeles was pregnant with twins, but facing a 95% chance of losing the pregnancy because of twin transfusion syndrome – a condition in which one twin takes too much blood from the other.
Fortunately Dr. Ramen Chmait came to the rescue, performing an ultra-rare surgery that uses a laser to separate the twins’ blood vessels inside the womb. The surgery was a success, despite it only having been performed a handful of times around the world.
Power drill brain surgery
Thirteen year old Nicholas Rossi fell off his bike and bumped his head in a rural town in Australia. When his mother noticed he was going unconscious, she brought him to the hospital where Dr. Rob Carson realized the boy’s brain was bleeding, and if he didn’t relieve the pressure soon, he would die. There was just one problem – the doctor had no surgical equipment, so he used a DeWalt power drill to bore a hole in the boy’s skull, which relieved the pressure and saved his life.
Elvis performs CPR
San Francisco anesthesiologist Claudio Palma completed a half-marathon in Las Vegas dressed as Elvis, then came to the rescue of a woman who collapsed after the race. He saved her life by performing CPR at the Mandalay Bay Burger Bar until she was taken to the hospital. Dr. Palma also got married at a run-through chapel during the race. What a day!
Are there any doctors on board?
“Oh, hi! I’m Michael Jackson’s doctor…go ahead and relax for me”
Here’s an odd coincidence. You might think you’re pretty lucky if you have a medical emergency on a plane and a doctor happens to be on board – but you might not feel so lucky when you realize it’s Dr. Conrad Murray, Michael Jackson’s doctor, who has been accused of killing him.
Dr. Murray found himself as the only doctor on board a plane with a woman who went unconscious. Dr. Murray administered an IV and stabilized the woman until the plane made an emergency landing. Regardless of whatever Dr. Murray did or didn’t do with Michael Jackson, he saved the day on that flight.
Heart attack at 25,000 feet
Dr. Steve Schubert was on board a flight to New York when an elderly man a few rows up started having chest pain. Dr. Schubert examined him and determined he was having a heart attack. With Dr. Schubert’s diagnosis, the plane made an emergency landing and the man recovered.
A glimpse into the future?
Robodoctor
We all know we’re eventually going to be replaced by robots, but we usually think of them as doing things like digging ditches and manufacturing cars, not taking your blood pressure. But if the scientists at Vanderbilt are correct, robots could be used in the future to take patients’ vital signs and even diagnose them. Creepy or wonderful? Maybe a little bit of both?
Interesting studies
Who doesn’t love health research studies? These little gifts trickle out of academia, letting us know what we thought was safe will kill us, and what we thought will kill us actually extends our lives.
Here are some of the more interesting studies from 2010:
Pictures of meat calm men down
Having a stressful day at the office? Think it might help to look at a picture of your loving wife and kids? Wrong! What you should be looking at instead is pictures of meat, big juicy hunks of meat, with grill marks, according to a study that found the sight of meat calms men down. Some speculate it’s because meat reminds men of meal time with family. More likely it’s because the sight of meat triggers that sense of satisfaction cavemen felt after killing a woolly mammoth.
Old people love watching young people screw up
If you think it’s unhealthy for grandma to watch the news because it causes her to curse those “no good kids,” please reconsider. It turns out old people enjoy reading stories about young people misbehaving because it raises their own self confidence. It therefore follows that parking the elderly in front of MTV’s latest alcohol-fueled, hot-tub-filled adventures in reality TV will extend their lives by at least 5 years.
The older you get, the happier you get
Feeling a little discontent with your life? Hang in there, because the older you get, the happier you will be. As it turns out, an increased awareness of our own mortality helps people enjoy life’s pleasures and puts things in perspective.
$75,000 will buy you happiness
They say money can’t buy happiness. That’s wrong, sort of. It can, but only up to $75,000/year. Beyond that you may have an increased sense of success, but you won’t have an improved mood day to day.
Men in red
We all know men are drawn to ladies in red, thanks to Chris De Burgh’s ground-breaking 80’s hit “Lady in Red.” But you probably didn’t know that women also prefer men in red. Researchers discovered that women found men in red more attractive, even if there was just red in the background.
Parallel parking
To the delight of misogynists everywhere, a study confirms that women are worse at parking than men. Specifically, they take an average of 20 seconds longer to park and are still less likely to wind up in the middle of the parking space.
Opposites don’t attract
We all know couples who are a lot alike, but is it because they chose mates like themselves, or is it because spouses tend to rub off on each other? Thanks to researchers at Michigan State University, we now know the answer – it’s because people tend to select similar mates, not because the rub off on each other. The exception is aggression, which begets more aggression.
TV kills
I once read that “I don’t own a TV” is a mating call in Seattle. Well, thanks to researchers, we now know the evolutionary purpose behind that mating call — TV watching shortens your life. Researchers found that each hour a day spent in front of television is linked with an 18% greater risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and an 11% greater risk of all causes of death. In case you were thinking it’s inactivity, not TV per se, that’s really the problem, researchers found TV’s ill effects still held even for those who weren’t overweight and exercised.
Drinking extends life
Many studies have come out showing drinkers live longer than non-drinkers. However, skeptics argue that it’s not the alcohol extending people’s lives. They argue the real reason non-drinkers have higher mortality is because many of them are former alcoholics, who have already damaged their health. Others skeptics argue that those who don’t drink often don’t because they can’t afford it, so it’s really poverty that kills them.
To find out what’s what, researchers at the University of Texas studied non-drinkers, moderate drinkers and heavy drinkers, and then controlled for every possible variable you can imagine, like former alcoholics and income. The result: they still found drinking, for some reason, is associated with longer life, even heavy drinkers when compared to non-drinkers, although moderate drinkers live the longest.
