Categories

I'm going to be trying to deal with the mass of headlines that I haven't posted over the holidays by organizing them into categories for me to chat about. This first post is an aggregate of health information over the last few weeks that I have found interesting. I'm aware that you guys may have heard of most of this already, but have I ever really cared if I repeated myself?

There is a brain chemical that we are now able to synthesize and which, when ingested, seem to dramatically lessen the need for sleep. The studies are preliminary and, considering how much about how and why sleep works we are just beginning to figure out (the latest news is the increased risk of diabetes linked to disturbed sleep cycles), it is always best to be wary, but this is the first anti-sleep substance that has had results without causing overarching stimulation. Don't even think about the joke, there.

The newest and coolest surgical tool is called an Isnake and the hope is that it will enable surgeons to perform a much larger variety of surgeries in a laparoscopic manner, which could dramatically decrease the dangers and recovery time of those surgeries. Of course, in hilarious and sad news, there is a great deal of evidence that surgery could also be made much safer if surgery teams just used a checklist of their methods and materials, but attempts to enact such processes have been stymied because the FDA may class them as new medical procedures that have to be tested and approved just like any new surgical technique.

Also in the category of things it might have been possible to figure out without paying money for a study, binge drinking can be linked to dramatic increases in number of sexual partners and risky sexual encounters and binge drinking makes you stupid, even more than we thought, for a much longer time then we thought, especially if you are a teenager. And it turns out that the whole fasting (skipping meals) is only good for your health if you don't fast all day and then completely pig out at night. Who would've have guessed that?