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Wellness

Flu shots for pregnant women in Mumbai?

Huge rise in flu cases all over India spurs city gynaecologists to advise influenza immunisation shots to their pregnant patients.
by The Editors | editor@themetrognome.in

India has seen a significant rise in influenza (flu) cases over the years, exposing millions to serious life-threatening health complications. Data shows that influenza contributes between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of all acute respiratory infections (ALRI) such as pneumonia and bronchiolitis, leading to an upsurge in hospitalisation and even deaths.

Amongst the high risk groups, there is a gradual rise in vaccination only amongst children. However, even though pregnant women are also a high-risk group, unfortunately, they are not always advised to take this crucial vaccination. Pregnant women face an increased risk of flu complications because of the changes in their immune system. The complications include pneumonia, ear infections, worsening of pre-existing medical conditions such as asthma, diabetes, heart and kidney problems and can lead to hospitalisation. Influenza can also lead to adverse pregnancy outcomes such as babies with a low birth weight, premature deliveries, emergency caesarean, still births and neonatal deaths.

Dr Parikshit Tank, Chairman, Safe Motherhood Committee, FOGSI, says, “The number of pregnant women dying of flu is on the rise. Such cases could have possibly been prevented through immunization. Unfortunately in India, there is little or no awareness amongst pregnant women or the general population that influenza could lead to serious complication for them and their newborn child. Maternal immunisation against influenza protects the mother and also safeguards infants”.

“Immunisation for influenza should not just be administered in times of an epidemic, such as now. The need for immunization must be made a habit, and pregnant women must make sure to get the vaccination regardless of the surrounding health environment. Efforts must be made to increase awareness and access of the influenza vaccination”, added Dr Tank.

Dr Suchitra N Pandit, Imm. Past President FOGSI and Consultant, Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital, Mumbai says, “It is very important for a pregnant woman to take preventive measures to protect herself and her baby from the complications of flu. A single shot flu vaccine is the safest and most effective way to prevent flu and provide immunity to the mother and newborns. This is why our recent FOGSI Good Clinical Practice Guidelines have included the influenza vaccination in the recommended vaccination list for pregnant women. This will help raise awareness and reduce the risk of influenza and its severe outcomes.

“Globally a lot of work has been done to create awareness. Even in Asia we have an organisation named Asia-Pacific Alliance for the Control of Influenza (APACI), whose aim is to reduce the burden of influenza in the region, by assisting public awareness programs on influenza, promoting it among healthcare professionals, through the provision of educational information and activities”, adds Dr Pandit.

Seasonal influenza is characterised by a sudden onset of high fever, cough (usually dry), headache, muscle and joint pain, severe malaise (feeling unwell), sore throat and runny nose. Most people recover from fever and other symptoms within a week without requiring medical attention. But influenza can cause severe illness or death especially in people at high risk. India has already witnessed a swine flu flare-up that killed a total of 2,167 people across different states and affected 35,077 people as on April 11, 2015.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), vaccination against influenza is the most effective way to prevent influenza and its complications. Furthermore, WHO also states that pregnant women constitute the highest priority group for seasonal influenza vaccination. The flu shot has been given to millions of pregnant women over many years and has not been reported to cause any potential harm to either mother or baby. Lack of awareness, overcrowding, poor sanitation and myths about the disease, add to the disease burden.

Considering the benefits it has for the mother and infant, the Association of Physicians of India (API) and the Indian Academy of Pediatrics (IAP) also recommend vaccinating against influenza during pregnancy.

(Picture courtesy www.medicaldaily.com. Image used for representational purpose only)

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Beauty

The 3 best mud masks for your skin

Summer is here and the heat is on. Here’s presenting three natural mud masks to protect your skin this season.
by Rohit Soni

The skin is one of the most important organs of the body and everyone wants to have beautiful and healthy skin. A number of products are available in the market that claim to do wonders and make you beautiful. But instead of opting for a cosmetic product, why not go the natural way? Getting healthy and a beautiful skin is very easy if you use natural products, especially with the help of simple mud masks. These masks can help you get rid of a number of skin problems like acne, pimples, spots, aging etc.

Try these masks:

Anti-acne mask

One of the major problems that everyone faces is the problem of acne. No matter who you are or what your age is, the problem causes severe distress. Excessive oil and extreme dryness are the major reasons for acne breakouts, but you can get rid of the problem by using these masks.

For oily skin: Take some green clay, yogurt and rose water. Mix the clay powder and yogurt and add a few drops of rose water. Apply the mask to your face and let it set for about 20 minutes. Once the mask dries, use cold water to rinse it off.

For dry skin: Mix white clay powder, honey and rose water and apply over the face. Wash off after half an hour.

Anti-aging mask

The appearance of aging on the skin is enough to embarrass you. Several factors like nutritional deficiencies and a sedentary lifestyle may lead to aging, as also stress and pollution, but you can easily reduce aging marks with this mask.

Prepare a mask using sea clay powder, egg white, lemon juice, green tea extracts and rose water. Mix the clay and lemon juice, and add green tea extract and egg white. Add rose water last. Apply the mask to the face and wash off when dry. Use this mask regularly.

Fairness mud mask

Pollution, oil, dirt and exposure to sunlight can affect the beauty of your skin and make it skin look dull. Therefore it is advisable to use a fairness face mask that will restore your complexion.

Make a mask using green clay, mashed cucumber, mashed strawberry, milk and honey. Start by mixing the clay powder, honey and milk to make a smooth mixture. Next, add mashed cucumber and strawberry to the mixture. Apply this paste over your skin and allow it to set before you wash. Rinse it off using lukewarm water. Do this regularly to get clearer and fairer skin.

So girls, get ready to dazzle the world with your skin with these simple mud masks – without ever stepping out to buy a mask ever again.

Do you have a natural mud mask recipe? Tell us in the comments section below.

(Picture courtesy www.jumia.com.eg)

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Wellness

Are you not getting better? Your diet is the culprit

Dr Nandita Shah gives a simple mantra to completely reverse diabetes, cardiac problems, and even cancer – the right diet.
by The Editors | editor@themetrognome.in

India leads the world in diabetes, depression and heart disease. The numbers of cancer, HIV-AIDS and other auto-immune disease cases is also on a daily upswing in the country. What are we doing wrong?

Dr Nandita ShahDr Nandita Shah, Founder, SHARAN, tells The Metrognome about what we’re doing to make ourselves sick – eating all the wrong food. She insists that simply cutting down on meat, salt, oil and sugar will not do the trick, it is time we all went completely vegan. In a freewheeling chat, Dr Shah explains the benefits of veganism and why it is the best option to reverse the most serious illness.

Excerpts from the interview:

How did you stumble upon the concept of reversing diseases through diet?

Being a doctor myself, I realised through my practice that real health is not about giving medicines to get rid of symptoms of a disease. I practiced homoeopathy, which is a holistic system of treating diseases. But even with that, people would get better with a remedy, but soon return with the same problem.

In 1981, when I began my practice, diabetes, hypertension, and cancer were rare and usually occurred only in the aged. Today, these diseases are not just striking a lot of the population, but even young people are developing them. Our bodies are designed to heal themselves, but we come in the way of the healing process. Observe animals in nature – they know how to heal themselves. They don’t need hospitals and doctors to the extent that humans do. I asked myself, ‘Are we causing our own diseases? And if so, how?’

We have a herd mentality; we do what others do. This also applies also to what we eat daily and how we choose to treat ourselves when we are ill. For instance, a diabetes doctor will ask you to cut sugar and carbs from your diet to lower your sugar levels, and we do this blindly even though we know that no one gets well from this regimen. Sugar is not the cause of diabetes, high blood sugar is the result of it.

The food we put into our bodies has a direct effect on our health.

What is the principal problem with our dietary habits that causes diseases?

The biggest problem is that we will put anything into our months. Eating is a completely instinctual exercise – all animals in nature eat according to their instincts but we don’t know what our instincts are. Take the example of a child. He will refuse to drink a glass of cow’s milk. So his mother coaxes him to drink it with sugar and chocolate powder added to it, knowing that these substances are harmful for him. No other animal, except humans, will drink another animal’s milk.

We are constantly brainwashed by the media and by other people to eat all the things that we shouldn’t eat at all; sugar, refined and processed foods are at the top of this list. The first thing I do in my practice is to connect patients to their instincts. I teach people to eat the right food. You would be surprised to know that even a long-standing 30-year-old diabetes can be completely reversed just by correcting the diet. Our bodies are interested in healing, but we don’t allow the healing to happen.

How does a vegan lifestyle impact the diseases or disorders we may be experiencing?

Like I said earlier, we eat anything and everything that comes our way, and this causes sickness. The first thing to do is, make a list of everything that’s being advertised, and then refuse to eat it. No one would spend money on advertising foods that are instinctual. We already know that we should eat them. Cut out sugar, cooking oil, animal products (including milk), and refined and processed foods from your diet, and see the difference it makes. When preparing food, use grated coconut or crushed peanuts in place of oil. Sweeten your food or drink with dates and raisins.

What has been your most interesting experience in reversing a disease in your patient?

That the ones who have minor illnesses are resistant to change, but those to whom doctors offer little hope will do anything to get better! I find that those who are willing to think and stand up for themselves, get better. People must realise that expensive treatment systems are not aimed at making you better, because they do not address the cause. They must understand that the solutions are often simple and available in nature, there is no need to take medicines just because everybody else does.

(Pictures courtesy SHARAN and abcnews.go.com)

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Deal with it

‘People should want you around, not out’

Mumbai’s favourite son, Sachin Tendulkar, talks about life post-retirement, and why the second innings is as important as the first.
by The Editors | editor@themetrognome.in

The debate over whether he is the greatest cricketer of all time may continue to rage for several more years, but there’s no disputing the class and humility of cricketing legend Sachin Tendulkar.

The second innings is as important as the first one in life, cricketing legend Sachin Tendulkar told the audience at the keynote session of the India Today Conclave. “When I was playing, all my energy and concentration was focussed on the game. My family, and my well-wishers, made sure I did not have to worry about the other aspects. And now that I am playing the second innings of my life post-retirement, I want to give something back to the society, and the people who have stood by me ever since the first day I went to Ramakant Achrekar sir’s nets at Shivaji Park in Dadar,” he said.

Dwelling on his fascination for the game, Tendulkar said he was in love with cricket right from age six. Sunil Gavaskar and Viv Richards were his childhood idols, but he said he was always his own man. “I wanted to bat like them, but I still always wanted to be Sachin Tendulkar,” he said.

Revealing how he realised he made the right call on retiring after the home series against West Indies in 2013, the legend said he had to play an exhibition game at Lord’s last July without getting any practice beforehand since it had rained. “When I was in there, my body told me that I had made the right decision to retire!” he said.

Tendulkar went on to exhort the audience to avoid shortcuts in life: “Try and be a good person. My father used to say that people should want you around. They should not want you out.”

 

Asked if he intended to play a long innings in politics now that he is a Rajya Sabha MP, Tendulkar said, “I won’t join politics. Once a sportsman, always a sportsman.”

“To me, cricket is team work and not about individuals. There are stages where the captain come into play and he will guide, take important decisions on the field but eventually the batsmen would have to go out and score runs and the bowlers have to land the ball in those areas,” Tendulkar said.

“I was dropped from captaincy after only 12 or 13 months in my first stint. That was a disappointment because you select the captain thinking that he is going to take the team forward and then if that stint is not long enough, then the success rate becomes zero. If you play four matches, you lose two, then you are 50 per cent successful, so on and so forth.

“My tenure was not long enough and it was a big disappointment for me to overcome,” Tendulkar revealed. He then cheered the audience by saying that he firmly believed that “India would win the 2015 World Cup. There is not a single box that the team has not ticked. We don’t give enough credit when the team does well. I give full credit to this team.”

(Picture courtesy www.punjabupdate.com)

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Wellness

Looking for a good doctor? Let this site help you

Run by three Mumbaikars, the website treatum.com helps doctors and patients connect instantly without either of them wasting any time.
by The Editors |editor@themetrognome.in

A good business model is seldom born out of complicated Powerpoint presentations or lengthy sales talks. It is often born out of a simple concept, which you can then refine into a workable enterprise.

Three Mumbai men and friends – Amol Sonavane, Ayub Siddiqui and Ravi Shet – met at a café and were merely discussing different areas in healthcare and IT, when they stumbled upon the perfect solution to an age-old conundrum: how can a person find the right doctor without going to several others or asking around for help? Out of this question came www.treatum.com, the site that the three founded in March 2014 and which is a platform for patients and doctors to find each other with minimum fuss and without wasting time. “If one wants a doctor in a certain area, for example, they can call up a phone-based service like Justdial or go on the Internet and launch a general search. The problem with this is, firstly, that you will receive the names of doctors in a wide geographical area. Secondly, the results are often what not you require – if you have a skin ailment, you can’t go to just any skin doctor. Getting the right doctor for your problem is difficult,” explains Ravi ShetRavi (in pic on left), speaking to The Metrognome.

How does it work?

All a user has to do is log on to the site and ask a question pertaining to his or her problem. “The site offers answers if you want to ask an expert. We also connect you to the right doctor after first understanding what you are looking to address. This saves the patient’s valuable time,” Ravi explains. He adds that many people are unsure of which kind of doctor they need, so they simply describe their problem to the site and get feedback. “At our end, we have over 70 doctors listed with us, in Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Thane and Pune, so we find out the geographical location of the patient, details of his or her ailment, and then coordinate with the doctor. We don’t interfere in the patient-doctor interaction at all, nor does our business work on the principle of taking a commission from the doctor for every patient that comes through us,” he says.

He also explains that the patient’s query is also looked into to separate pranksters from genuine patients. “We also work only with doctors who have a good track record. Some background checks are also conducted on the doctors’ credentials, because we don’t want to have fraudulent doctors on our roster,” he says.

The site does not charge patients for asking information or eventually interacting with a doctor and taking treatment. “The site is completely free to use for patients, while we charge a small premium for doctors registering with us,” Ravi says.

Why doctors should tie up with the site

On the other end of the spectrum for this site are the medical professionals who register with them for a yearly fee. “Many doctors today don’t have their own website and may be listed with a phone search company. This means that their names will often be lost in the overall lists that these search companies have. Instead of this, we offer doctors a microsite that lists all their information, past successes, any photos or videos, all contact information, etc. We develop the content for the microsite ourselves and maintain the backend processes, too,” Ravi explains.

He claims that doctors and hospitals can register themselves with the site in just 60 seconds. “All the doctor has to do is click on the ‘Are you a Doctor?’ section to get started,” he explains. Depending on the package the doctor pays for, he or she may get a range of services from the site.

How patients can benefit further

Apart from the ease of finding a reliable doctor and getting an appointment with the site’s help, patients can also call up their helpline and speak to the staff to get accurate information. “We also offer patients attractive discounts on some services under the ‘Save your money on Treatments’ section where they can get the best deals on skin, hair, eye, and other treatments, and we don’t charge for these deals,” Ravi says.

He says the site has helped several patients already, and not just in Mumbai. “We had a query from Finland recently, and the patient received excellent treatment from our doctor in Mumbai. There have been queries from other places, too. Ultimately, our site runs on the basis of quick help and trust. We are not here to make money out of patients who are looking for urgent help,” he says, adding that patients appreciate the process of appointments being made for them and quick service.

(Featured image courtesy www.newindianexpress.com)

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Guest writer

Are you raising a racehorse?

Umpteen tuition, skill and hobby classes, sky high expectations…are we raising a generation of decent, smart children or super intelligent robots?
Aarohi Mehtaby Aarohi Mehta

If someday I were to make a list of FAQs put to me, the undisputed winner would be, “So which after-school classes does your child go to?”

Now, I have nothing against nurturing a child’s talent and letting him or her pursue a hobby. In fact, in today’s times, when all one seems to be doing is getting up, rushing to catch an already-packed local train, slogging away and coming home drained of all senses, a hobby is a cozy nook where one retreats to find solace. So why not get the kids started when they are still young?

But then, the proverbial buck refuses to stop here. It is now a plethora of hobbies that a child is exposed to. So an average eight-year old is expected to excel at academics, play the keyboard, dance away to glory, swim on weekends, win accolades in school competitions, and somewhere between all these find the time to attend the phonics and abacus classes regularly. If for some reason the child lags behind and cannot cope with these Herculean standards, voilà! The “Mid-brain activation” seminars come to the rescue.

These seminars supposedly help in using both sides of the brain optimally. The results proclaimed by the activation centers are “super kids” Burden of expectationswith super intelligence. And pray, why does one need to have super kids? Is it so that they can solve a Rubik’s cube or read a newspaper blindfolded? I am still waiting for a day in my life when solving any puzzle blindfolded has helped me resolve a life-threatening situation, or even pull myself out of whatever soup I may be in, to say the least.

Gone are those days when children used to come home from school, throw their school bags on the floor and head out to play till late in the evenings. I lament the fact that today,  hardly any mother has to go searching for her child in the colony’s play area and bring back a sweaty, bruised but happy child at the end of the day. Hobbies become burdens when enforced. Mozart’s mother did not latch a satchel on to his little back and bundle him off to learn the piano from some coach. Shakespeare’s father never took him to any creative writing class. Even Vishwanathan Anand never  attended those hourly weekend chess classes!

Water always finds its level. All we need to give it is space to flow. Let nature work its magic. Our role as parents is to raise children, not breed racehorses.

Aarohi Mehta is a Professor of French at Alliance Française de Bombay, a full-time mom, bibliophile, holder of opinions and dabbler in words.

(Pictures courtesy www.thehindu.com, www.ibtimes.co.uk. Images are used for representational purpose only)

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