Is is a cold or the flu?
There’s a joke, probably only funny to someone from the great frozen tundra where I live, that goes something like this . . .
Q: How does a person from Minnesota say “Hello”?
A: (sniffles) . . . . “Hello.”
Get it? It does seem like everybody around here has a runny nose and they’re all sneezing and coughing and talking with a scratchy throat. In other words, a typical Minnesota fall. Otherwise known as “cold and flu” season. Not to be confused with “winter” which doesn’t start for another day or two. Also not to be confused with the season of “road construction” which lingers on indefinitely or until the first foot of snow falls . . . .
So in keeping with the season, our Healthy Matters radio broadcast this past week had lots of buzz about colds and flu. Perhaps the most common question I get: How can you tell if it is a cold or the flu?
Glad you asked. Real bread and butter medical stuff.
For starters, I can’t count how many times people insist to me that they have the flu – not a cold – because their symptoms are so much worse than everybody else’s. And the fact is that influenza (the “flu”) causes more severe symptoms than does a cold. But most of us, even those who feel pretty darn crummy, actually have a cold, not the flu.
To listen to the podcast of our most recent “Open Lines” Healthy Matters radio broadcast (without commercials!), click the logo here.
Look for Healthy Matters show #458, October 15, 2017. You can listen while you read this post!
Why we should care about kids’ teeth
By Frank Vincentz via Wikimedia Commons
I get approached fairly often by colleagues and regular folks with ideas for radio show topics. With over 450 hour-long radio broadcasts so far, you may imagine that staying topical and interesting is something I hope to do. But in all those shows over the past nine years, I have never done a show about dental health in children. Not too surprising, I suppose, since my specialty is adult internal medicine, meaning I know very little about children’s health and I know just about nothing about teeth. (I think there are 32 or them in the human mouth, right? Or maybe it is 28? They don’t teach teeth in medical school).
So when Dr. Eileen Crespo approached me to do a show about the oral health of children, I was intrigued. Dr. Crespo is a pediatrician who has a keen interest and lots of expertise in kids’ dental health. She suggested we include two our Hennepin’s terrific pediatric dentists and – voila – we had a radio show.
So I though I’d explore a bit why the dental health of children should matter to all of us of any age. Here’s the gang who helped me in the WCCO studios in downtown Minneapolis for the show. That’s Dr. Crespo on the left, and next to her are two pediatric dentists, Dr. Andrea Leyland and Dr. Elisabeth Fulling. Click their names to learn more!
As always, I invite you to listen to the podcast of the show (it is shorter with no interruptions when in podcast form). When looking through the podcasts, select Healthy Matters show #456 from October 1, 2017.
In this post I’ll look at:
- Why the dental care of children matters
- Some basic tips for promoting healthy teeth in kids
- A call for more dentists for children
An introduction to acupuncture and chiropractic care
Medical school is four years long. This is after four years of college. It is then followed by three more years of intensive training during medical residency. It’s a lot of learning.
So in all those years, do you know how much I learned about chiropractic care? Just about nothing. How about acupuncture? Even less. These are not disciplines that are taught in most US medical schools (at least the allopathic kind like I went to).
But research shows, and our day-to-day human experience probably confirms, that many people see chiropractors and acupuncturists for a variety of ailments. In fact, many major medical systems, including my own at HCMC, offer a wide range of services to include chiropractic and acupuncture care.
To learn more about these disciplines, this past month on the Healthy Matters radio broadcast I invited two guests to help me out. They were Robert Crane, an acupuncturist, and Peter Polski, a doctor of chiropractic care. That’s the two of them in the WCCO studios during the live broadcast in the picture above. Super nice guys, the both of ’em.
I encourage you to listen to the podcast of the show by clicking here –> Healthy Matters show #453, September 10, 2017. Podcasts are great ways to listen, commercial-free, to the shows at your own pace. Just download the show you want to your phone or computer and listen!
In this post, I won’t attempt to cover any of the specifics about chiropractic care or acupuncture. They are disciplines to themselves and I couldn’t do either one justice in just a few paragraphs. Rather, I’m going to give a bit of background on the two disciplines to give the neophytes among us a taste of what these practitioners can offer. This is fairly new stuff to me as well as many of you, so I’m doing my best to learn something. Read on, and more importantly, listen to the podcast! read more…
