Dr Rajiv Desai
An Educational Blog
SELF MONITORING (MEASUREMENT) OF BLOOD GLUCOSE (SMBG)
_______ SELF MONITORING (MEASUREMENT) OF BLOOD GLUCOSE (SMBG): _______ _______ Prologue: Way back in 1991, on a Sunday afternoon, a young Parsi lady from Mumbai who was holidaying in a nearby village came to me with sudden breathlessness at my nursing home at Vapi, 160 km north of Mumbai. Clinical examination was normal except severe breathlessness. I suspected diabetic ketoacidosis and asked about history of diabetes. Patient and her relatives flatly denied any history of diabetes and told me that she was investigated in Mumbai for weakness recently and there is no diabetes. In those days, glucometer was not available in India. We used to blood sugar by Folin-Wu method. Being Sunday, laboratory was closed, so I could not do blood and urine sugar. I believed the story of relatives, ignored my gut feeling of diabetes, did ECG and X-ray chest which were normal, gave some primary care and sent […]
SELF MEASUREMENT OF BLOOD PRESSURE (SMBP):
SELF MEASUREMENT OF BLOOD PRESSURE (SMBP): ________ The figure above shows correct way to measure blood pressure at home. _______ Prologue: When the heart beats it generates a pressure in the arteries to pump blood around the body. In some people, the pressure generated is too high and this is called hypertension. Way back in 1981, Dr. R. C. Hansoti was head of cardiology department in Nair hospital, Mumbai and he was taking a clinic on hypertension for a group of medical students and I was one of the medical student attending his clinic. He asked a question to everybody: What are the symptoms of hypertension? Some said headache, some said giddiness and some said palpitation. When my turn came, I said hypertension has no symptoms. Dr. Hansoti was satisfied with my answer. He said that there is only one wise doctor among the crowd. I felt elated. Even today, I […]
ALCOHOL (beverage based on ethanol)
______ ALCOHOL (beverage based on ethanol): ______ President Obama loves Irish beer and celebrates the St.Patrick’s Day only with it! ________ Prologue: Abraham Lincoln said: “It has long been recognized that the problems with alcohol relate not to the use of a bad thing, but to the abuse of a good thing.” We find alcohol throughout our daily lives. Alcoholic beverages have been consumed by humans since prehistoric times for a variety of hygienic, dietary, medicinal, religious, and recreational reasons. We associate the consumption of alcohol with the most pleasurable aspects of our culture. Parties and sports, picnics and vacations, summer and winter are all influenced by the attraction of alcoholic beverages. World Cup 2014: festival of football or alcohol? Whichever country hoists aloft the World Cup trophy, the real winner will be the alcohol industry according to BMJ report. I had written article on ‘Alcohol’ on February […]
SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE
_ SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE: _ The figure above shows English to Gujarati mappings for consonants: _________ Prologue: Human life in its present form would be impossible and inconceivable without the use of language. To the question: “Who is speaking?” Mallarme, the French poet, answered, “Language is speaking.” The traditional conception of language is that it is, in Aristotle’s phrase, sound with meaning. Everybody uses language, but nobody knows quite how to define it. Language is arguably the defining characteristic of the human species, yet the biological basis of our ability to speak, listen and comprehend remains largely mysterious; about its evolution, we know even less. The origin of language is a widely-discussed topic. Whole doctorates have been based on it, thousands of books have been written on it, and scholars continue to argue about how and why it first emerged. Many animals can communicate effectively with one another but humans […]
MEDIA
_______ MEDIA: ______ ________ Prologue: When traditional American & Indian media started blocking my comments on internet, they thought nobody would know as they control power to disseminate information via newspapers and televisions. They underestimated my resolve to disseminate truth overriding lies propagated by them. They underestimated power of internet, the new media. Information is knowledge – and knowledge is power – and power in human hands can lead to very bad and (well used) very good results. Modern age is the age of information. Information plays an important role in each and every sphere of life. It is rightly said that Iraq War was not a war between America and Iraq, but it was a war between two parties, one equipped with information and the other deprived of all information. Hence, the result was a natural outcome. We are living in an age of information revolution. Newspapers, radio […]
