General Medicine

[AndyinPA]

https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... offee-wine

Dark chocolate is a “joy” when it comes to keeping your heart healthy, coffee is likely protective, but wine is at best “neutral”, according to one of the world’s leading cardiologists.

As editor of the European Heart Journal for more than a decade, Prof Thomas Lüscher led a team that sifted through 3,200 manuscripts from scientists and doctors every year. Only a fraction – those deemed “truly novel” and backed up with “solid data” – would be selected for publication.

After stepping down from his role in charge of the world’s top cardiovascular medicine journal, Lüscher has given his verdict on one of the most frequently asked heart health research questions: are wine, chocolate and coffee good or bad for you?

(Edited to put the "n" in general. Thanks, RTH...)

[zekeb]

I saw what you were going to do and said nothing until after you did it.

Also too, why does not my Windoze 11 spell checker work on this site? It works on other sites.

[AndyinPA]

I saw what you were going to do and said nothing until after you did it.

Also too, why does not my Windoze 11 spell checker work on this site? It works on other sites.

Thanks. My spell checker does not work on titles for some reason. It's not the first time it's tripped me up.

[Lani]

https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... offee-wine

Dark chocolate is a “joy” when it comes to keeping your heart healthy, coffee is likely protective, but wine is at best “neutral”, according to one of the world’s leading cardiologists.

Coffee is my drug of choice anyway, so great! I'm going to the kitchen right now to get a glass of wine and will pick up some dark chocolate tomorrow. This is a health diet from heaven for me.

[Sam the Centipede]

A Hawaiian lady goes to her doctor:
"I'm sorry, i have bad news, your heart is fine but other test results show you have only two months to live."
"Oh dear, that's a shock, is there anything I can do about it?"
"Well, let me think. Do you enjoy coffee?"
"Oh yes, a mug of Costa Rican arabica with breakfast and a double espresso at midday really set me up for a day with my friends on Teh Fogbow."
"You'll have to cut all that out. How about wine? Do you like a glass or two?"
"Mmmm!! Lunch without a crisp white or dinner without a rich red Merlot are hardly worth eating!"
"Wine is off then. Just drink plain water. Or warm Budweiser. What else? Chocolate?"
"My one luxury! Rich, dark Swiss chocolate or Belgiian liqueur chocolates, I always have them in my house!"
"Throw them out. Eat plain crackers. I'm afraid that's the best advice I can give you."
"Thank you, doctor. And that will help me iive longer?"
"Oh no, you still only have two months to live. But it will feel a lot longer."

[AndyinPA]

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

Be sure to get Rainforest Alliance certified chocolate. Hershey's dark chocolate bar is certified. Yummy!

https://www.rainforest-alliance.org/commodity/cocoa/

The Rainforest Alliance is strengthening its pioneering cocoa certification program, which is the world’s largest scale initiative to drive more sustainable cocoa farming. Key priorities of the cocoa strategy are assurance, shared responsibility, supply chain transparency, and profitability and resilience.

With the support of the cocoa industry, the Rainforest Alliance is taking this unprecedented action to facilitate greater accountability and oversight in the cocoa sector. The organization’s goal is to improve the economic, social, and environmental conditions of the cocoa industry – beginning with the millions of smallholder farmers in the first mile of cocoa production.

[AndyinPA]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/hea ... 096481002/

Women who had surgery performed by a male surgeon were more likely to have adverse outcomes than women operated on by female doctors, according to a study published Dec. 8 in peer-reviewed medical journal JAMA Surgery.

U.S. and Canadian researchers analyzed more than 1.3 million patients in Ontario, Canada, treated by 2,397 surgeons between 2007 and 2019. They found that female patients treated by male surgeons had 15% greater odds of worse outcomes than female patients treated by female surgeons.

Women patients operated on by male surgeons had a 32% increase risk of death, 16% increase in major complications and 11% increase in readmission to the hospital within a 30-day window post-surgery, compared to women operated on by female surgeons, researchers found.

In most cases, men had similar outcomes when operated on by either a male or female surgeon. However, men operated on by a male surgeon had a 13% increase in death, compared to men treated by a female surgeon.

IIRC, it's also true that any patient's odds are better with a woman physician. My PCP is one, and she often refers me to other women, even a surgeon.

[RVInit]

I have always sought out women doctors, on purpose, after a certain point in my life. It started way back when I started getting treated for allergies. I got tired of being told that it was all in my mind. I decided to go to a woman doctor and the first thing she did was set me up with the skin prick tests. Which showed that I have severe allergic reactions to lots of tree and grass pollens. And, of course, since I prefer (and was in a profession that demanded) to be outside most of the time, I suffered lots of allergy symptoms most of the time. Which finally came at least a little more under control when I sought out a woman doctor who actually took my complaints seriously, unlike even a single male doctor had ever done.

[AndyinPA]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... stern-diet

More and more people around the world are suffering because their immune systems can no longer tell the difference between healthy cells and invading micro-organisms. Disease defences that once protected them are instead attacking their tissue and organs.

Major international research efforts are being made to fight this trend – including an initiative at London’s Francis Crick Institute, where two world experts, James Lee and Carola Vinuesa, have set up separate research groups to help pinpoint the precise causes of autoimmune disease, as these conditions are known.

“Numbers of autoimmune cases began to increase about 40 years ago in the west,” Lee told the Observer. “However, we are now seeing some emerge in countries that never had such diseases before.

For example, the biggest recent increase in inflammatory bowel disease cases has been in the Middle East and east Asia. Before that they had hardly seen the disease.”

Autoimmune diseases range from type 1 diabetes to rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and multiple sclerosis. In each case, the immune system gets its wires crossed and turns on healthy tissue instead of infectious agents.