What’s in a massage?

Know your Thai from your Lomi Lomi? In The Guardian, Lisa Buckingham broadens our horizons:

Ayurvedic massage

What is it? Ayurveda translates as “science of life”, and is based on an ancient system that believes our personality or constitution is predominantly one of three doshas (forces in the body that act on different systems): kapha, vata or pitta. The aim of an ayurvedic massage is to balance out this dominance for total wellbeing.

Origins: This massage originates from India, and is believed to be 6,000 years old. No one person is responsible for its creation.

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The itch

His book, Better (Picador) was one of Amazon.com’s 10 best books for 2007. Born to Indian immigrant parents, both doctors, Atul Gawande is a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. Gawande writes extensively on public health issues. Here in the latest issue of New Yorker, he analyses the itch.

It was still shocking to M. how much a few wrong turns could change your life. She had graduated from Boston College with a degree in psychology, married at twenty-five, and had two children, a son and a daughter. She and her family settled in a town on Massachusetts’ southern shore. She worked for thirteen years in health care, becoming the director of a residence program for men who’d suffered severe head injuries. But she and her husband began fighting. There were betrayals. By the time she was thirty-two, her marriage had disintegrated. In the divorce, she lost possession of their home, and, amid her financial and psychological struggles, she saw that she was losing her children, too. Within a few years, she was drinking. She began dating someone, and they drank together. After a while, he brought some drugs home, and she tried them. The drugs got harder. Eventually, they were doing heroin, which turned out to be readily available from a street dealer a block away from her apartment.

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TV swami offers a cure for all ills

In The Guardian, Randeep Ramesh goes to Haridwar to meet Yoga evangelist Swami Ramdev:

At 5am beneath the Shivalik hills in northern India, Swami Ramdev sits cross-legged swaddled in saffron robes commanding the rapt attention of 500 devotees of his brand of yoga. The crowd is made up mostly of middle-class Indians, many suffering from chronic conditions for which traditional medicine has little to offer but comfort.

Each “patient” has paid 7,000 to 40,000 rupees (£90 to £500) to be among the first to spend a week at the swami’s newest venture: a village of 300 bungalows offering spiritual retreat in the shadow of eucalyptus trees.

Swami Ramdev’s pitch is that pranayama, the ancient Indian art of breath control, can cure a bewildering array of diseases. “Asthma, arthritis, sickle-cell anaemia, kidney problems, thyroid disease, hepatitis, slipped discs - and it will unblock any fallopian tubes,” he tells his audience in the yoga village, who line up to have their blood tested and receive herbal remedies.

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School for marriage

Getting married? Worried about ‘happily ever after’? Fear not, help is at hand with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences conducting a pre-marriage course. Read the PTI report [via MSN News]

In a first of its kind initiative by country’s premier health institution, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) will conduct a ‘pre-marriage course for happy married life’ for people who are getting married.

The two-day course, scheduled for July 29-30, 2008, is being organised by the Health Promotion and Health Communication Unit of the hospital.

The course is open to any person more than 18 years of age and planning to get married, said Dr Bir Singh, Professor of Community Medicine and Convener of the course.
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Sceptics challenge ‘fish cure’ for asthma

Hundreds of thousands of people suffering from asthma flock to the Indian city of Hyderabad once a year in the belief that swallowing a medicine of live fish and some herbs will cure them. The ‘medicine’ is dispensed once a year by the city’s Goud family. Sceptics say this is sheer quackery. Samanth Subramanian reports in Mint:

The oldest habits are the hardest to break. Bathini Harinath Goud is part of the fourth generation of a famous family that has, for 163 years, dispensed an asthma “cure” packaged inside a live murrel fish. Calling it dawai, or medicine, comes naturally to him, but he must keep tripping himself up over the word.

Since 2000, a small but seething opposition has decried the remedy as sheer quackery and protested the government’s tacit, at times overt, support of the magnetic annual event. The family cannily took to calling their offering a “fish prasadam” instead of a medicine, to avoid legal implications. But this leaves Goud engaging in constant self-correction.
Now, a public interest litigation filed in a Hyderabad city civil court challenges five government departments and the Gouds; the case comes up for hearing on 19 June.

[Photos: Left, an asthma patient being given a live fish; and right, the Goud brothers who administer the 'fish medicine'.]

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John Cleese goes to a laughter yoga club in India

India’s top five yoga centres

In BusinessWeek, a guide to India’s most famous yoga institutes for the serious student of the practice:

Fortunately for the purists, there are several yoga schools run by grand masters who still teach the practice in the time-tested way, steeped in ancient traditions and philosophy. For them, yoga isn’t instant nirvana; indeed, it is mastered only after years of rigorous practice.

• Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute, Pune
• Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute, Mysore
• Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram, Chennai
• Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Dhanwantari Ashram, Trivandrum
• Parmarth Niketan, Rishikesh

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Yoga for people with disabilities

Yoga can be adapted for people with health conditions and disabilties, writes Georgiann Caruso in CNN

A middle-aged woman arrives at yoga class, a guide dog beside her wheelchair. She slides onto a mat on the floor and begins warming up with help from the instructor, stretching her knee and leg muscles to the side. Nearby, a man lying on a bench gets an assist from a class helper as he lifts his leg and brings his knee toward his body. Another person, an overweight student, sits and places his feet on brick-like props to enable him to stretch higher.

This is the scene at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, Georgia, where students attend weekly adaptive yoga class. Derived from traditional yoga, poses are modified for those with disabilities or health conditions.

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Psychotherapy for all: An experiment in India

A new program in Goa, India, trains laypeople to identify and treat depression and anxiety and send them to community health clinics. David Kohn reports from Siolim, India, in The New York Times:

At the faded one-story medical clinic in this fishing and farming village, people with depression and anxiety typically got little or no attention. Busy doctors and nurses focused on physical ailments - children with diarrhea, laborers with injuries, old people with heart trouble. Patients, fearful of the stigma connected to mental illness, were reluctant to bring up emotional problems.

Last year, two new workers arrived. Their sole task was to identify and treat patients suffering depression and anxiety. The workers found themselves busy. Almost every day, several new patients appeared. Depressed and anxious people now make up “a sizable crowd” at the clinic, said the doctor in charge, Anil Umraskar.

The patients talk about all sorts of troubles. “Financial difficulties are there,” said one of the new counselors, Medha Upadhye, 29. “Interpersonal conflicts are there. Unemployment. Alcoholism is a major problem.”

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Indian doctor at centre of hepatitis scare in US

As many as 40,000 people in Las Vegas may have have been infected with Hepatitis C or HIV as a result of reused syringes and other medical material at Dr Dipak Desai’s clinic. KP Nayar reports from Washington, DC in The Telegraph, Calcutta:

An Indian American doctor is at the centre of what is emerging to be America’s biggest medical malpractice scandal. As many as 40,000 people may have been infected with the deadly hepatitis C virus or HIV from a Las Vegas clinic, owned by Dr Dipak Desai, which has been reusing syringes and medical vials for nearly four years.

Desai, who has been practising medicine in Nevada for 28 years, is an alumnus of Gujarat University and later did his medical residency at the Catholic Medical Center in New York. He is said to be an influential political fixer in Nevada, having made financial contributions to the election campaigns of President George W. Bush and former vice-president Al Gore, among others.

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Foreign couples turn to India for surrogate mothers

Reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding enterprise in India. Amelia Gentleman reports from Mumbai in International Herald tribune:

Yonatan Gher and his male partner plan eventually to tell their child that it was made in India, in the womb of a woman they never met, with the egg of a Mumbai housewife they picked out from an Internet line-up of candidates.

The embryo was formed in January in an Indian fertility clinic about 4,000 kilometers, or 2,500 miles, from Gher’s home in Tel Aviv, nurtured by a team of doctors who have begun specializing in surrogacy services for couples from around the world.

As they waited to see if the fertilization process had been successful, Gher, 29, and his partner sped around the streets of Mumbai in the back of an autorickshaw, drinking in scenes of a country they had never previously visited, staring at the unfamiliar faces of Indian women and children and “trying to imagine our child,” he said.

(Photo: Surrogate mothers at the Kaival Hospital at Anand, in the western Indian state of Gujarat in February 2006. AP)

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IHT also has photos and audio of an Israeli man searching for a surrogate mother

Smoking will kill a million Indians a year

In Mint:

A million Indians in the productive age group of 30-69 years will die every year starting 2010 from a range of conditions caused by smoking, according to a new study released in Thursday’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
The number of people who die from smoking related illnesses currently isn’t known.

The study, conducted by the Center for Global Health Research at the University of Toronto, Canada, is the first nationwide research on smoking and death in India.

More: and The New England Journal of Medicine:

How to take care of Pakistan’s mentally ill

Practically no help for Pakistan’s 14 million mentally ill people — a vast majority of them women, their illness made worse by the social stigma associated with it, says Irum Sarfaraz in his blog All Things Pakistan

If one was to analyze the worst of all afflictions of the Pakistani society, then mental illnesses and the stigmas attached to it would, in all probability, top the list.
Perhaps not so much for the actual damage they render to the suffering individual but for the other spin-off consequences that result as a direct cause of mental problems. The shame associated with mental illness, even if just depression, permeates every class of the society indiscriminately and the women are the worst casualties of it.

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Diabetes stalks the modern Indian

Urban India has recorded a 600 per cent increase in diabetes cases since 1972, reports Dinesh C Sharma in Mail Today 

City life seems to have added to India’s diabetes epidemic and since the Seventies there has been a rise of over 600 per cent in the prevalence of the disease in urban India, the largest ever survey of diabetes in the country has shown.
A nationwide diabetes study, sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), has revealed that the prevalence of diabetes in urban India is an estimated 14.6 per cent of the urban population, a rise of more than 600 per cent since the last such study in 1972.
According to the 1971 census figures, 19.91 per cent people (107 million) people lived in urban areas. This number grew to 286 million or 27.8 per cent of the total population in 2001. In this population, the prevalence of diabetes is now estimated to be 14.6 per cent.

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Adopt eastern diet to prevent diabetes: expert

Look east to prevent diabetes, lower cholestrol, reports the Business Standard 

An American expert said today that type-II diabetes can be kept under control by avoiding “western” food.

“Westernisation of diet has led to a health crisis. What we need is an easternisation of dietary practices worldwide,” Dr Neal Barnard, nutrition researcher with US-based National Institute of Health, said today.

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Made in Mumbai, wanted by the world

Hindustan Times

Reshma Patil reports on the world’s smallest wearable cardiac monitor made at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

The world’s smallest wearable cardiac monitor, a toffee-sized silicon locket, is almost ready at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B).

While the tiny computer that can store a week’s electrocardiogram (ECG) data awaits a manufacturer, it is already in demand. IIT engineers borrow it, rig some adjustments and the locket meant to monitor a heart without hospital visits measures tremors in buildings instead.