Dr Rajiv Desai
An Educational Blog
VACCINE
_____ VACCINE: The figure above shows a victim of smallpox. ______ Prologue: “You let a doctor take a dainty, helpless baby, and put that stuff from a cow, which has been scratched and had dirt rubbed into her wound, into that child. Even, the Jennerians now admit that infant vaccination spreads disease among children. More mites die from vaccination than from the disease they are supposed to be inoculated against.” –George Bernard Shaw, 1929. The world has come a long way since George Bernard Shaw fulminated against vaccination in the 1920s. Small pox was declared eradicated from world in 1980 largely due to small pox vaccine. In 2008, Barack Obama called science on vaccines ‘inconclusive’. But in 2015, the same Barack Obama called science on vaccines “indisputable”. Vaccination was voted by readers of the British Medical Journal in 2007 as one of the four most important developments in medicine of […]
REFRACTIVE ERROR
________________ REFRACTIVE ERROR: ________ Prologue: Way back in 1973 when I was 12 years old and studying in 7th standard, I noticed that I could not read black-board from last bench. Initially I thought that everybody must be finding difficult to read black-board from last bench but it was not the case. Soon I visited eye doctor who found that I have refractive error and he prescribed -4 (minus 4) eyeglasses for me. Since then I have been wearing glasses. Refractive errors are usually present in the childhood and continue in the adult life. Unfortunately, they are not given much importance in our society which is evident from the fact that there is no effective system of pre-school visual examination of children either in the government sector or in the private sector. The earth was formed 4 billion years ago. Society has been around for about twenty thousand years. Spectacles […]
EBOLA
EBOLA: ________ _______ Prologue: The most dangerous outbreak of an emerging infectious disease since the appearance of HIV seems to have begun on December 6, 2013, in the village of Meliandou, in Guinea, in West Africa, with the death of a two-year-old boy who was suffering from diarrhea and a fever. We now know that he was infected with Ebola virus. After Ebola infected the boy, it went from him to his mother, who died, to his three-year-old sister, who died, and to their grandmother, who died, and then it left the village and began moving through the human population of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Ebola virus is one of a group of zoonotic viruses that can cause severe disease in humans. The virus is known as a “zoonotic” virus because it’s transmitted to humans from animals. With pressures from a growing global population, climate change, deforestation, urbanization […]
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 […]
