Health, Fitness and Style

Adrienne G. Cannon writes: My eye is a little blurry and aches but I can already detect a change in the perception of my "new" eye. It is a bit disconcerting at first but the colors adjust themselves as the day progresses. And there is a depth of field I perceive when I look at objects. The highlights seem sharper and the shadows are deeper. I know there will be more changes, more adjustments, and more delights as I discover my new 20/20 distance vision and savor the clarity permitted by my new lens. more »

In 2010, the Office of Inspector General for Health and Human Services said that bad hospital care contributed to the deaths of 180,000 patients in Medicare alone in a given year. Now comes a study in the current issue of the Journal of Patient Safety that says the numbers may be much higher — between 210,000 and 440,000 patients each year who go to the hospital for care suffer some type of preventable harm that contributes to their death, the study says. more »

“Pain is becoming an enormous burden on the public. The US government recently outlined steps to reduce the future burden of pain through broad-ranging efforts, including enhanced research,” said Linda Porter, Ph.D, the pain policy advisor at NINDS and a leader of NIH’s Pain Consortium. “This study is a good example of the kind of innovative research we hope will reduce chronic pain which affects a huge portion of the population. more »

"Even when they are not killed outright either in the womb or just after birth, this bias against girl children manifests itself in situations where family resources are limited and little food is available, in boys being fed before girls, leading to greater incidents of malnutrition among girls and a mortality rate that is 75 percent higher for girls below age five than for boys." more »