A right look at the left

August 13 is being celebrated the world over as the "International Lefthanders Day".

Right handed greetings to my left handed friends....

The left and right are really two complementary sides. However, the treatment meted out to the left is often far from complementary. It is often very confusing, and sometimes difficult, being left handed in a right handed world. The word "right" by itself, besides denoting a "side" also has a connotation of correctness; this makes everything NOT right , as being wrong. And so , many times, those preferring the left hand , and displaying "left handedness" end up suffering.

Even language is partial. You do not appreciate a "left handed compliment"; the words meaning "left" in , say French and Latin are "gauche" and "sinister", which is as bad as it can get; however, the words for "right" are an exemplary choice : from the French "droit", we get the English word adroit, and Latin for right is "dexter" (from which we get such words as dexterous), all very positive connotations.
My son was born and spent the first 25 years of his life in India. Somewhere around the time he was 6-7 months, his grandmother's sharp, about-to-develop -a-cataract eye noticed a distinct preference for what was called preferring the "wrong hand". In India, hands and their usage in everyday life is sacrosanct. The left hand is used for activities related to getting rid of body waste and cleaning oneself thereafter. The right hand is used for eating, conducting prayer activities, intellectual activities and the like. A family discussion ensued. Twenty years before, this would have been a crisis situation with people designing ways and means to get the kid to turn right handed. Luckily, better sense prevailed , and the child was allowed to grow up with his natural proclivities.

Then one fine day, when he was eight, a special teacher was selected to come teach the child the Indian percussion instrument, the "tabla". The teacher was aghast. The tabla consisted of two differently pitched percussion drums, and the main one, the actual tabla, MUST be played with the right hand. Strong will prevailed over the boys natural tendencies, and to this day, 20 years later, the boy plays the tabla, right handed.

One has heard about the use of force in changing the "handedness " of a child , leading to a sense of diffidence in the child, occasionally manifesting as stammering.

So one wonders as to what is this concept of left handedness, what does it imply, how advisable is it to be tough on such a child about changing, and how do children react to various levels of compulsion, about changing the "handedness".

Research done by a team from the Queens University at Belfast in 2004, suggests that the hand you prefer to use as a 10-week-old foetus is the hand you will favour for the rest of your life. These scientists, studied the foetuses through scans, and identified 60 foetuses sucking their right thumb and 12, their left thumb. They followed up these children at the ages of 10-12, and found that all the right thumb sucking foetuses were right handed children , but about a two thirds of the left thumb sucking Foetuses had developed as left handed children; the others had switched over from left to right!

Turns out that even at 10-15 weeks, when its too early to be thumb sucking, the foetuses still wave their arms about; majority appears to move their right arms more. At this point,at 10 weeks movements are not under brain control or conscious control, and could be just local reflexes determined by the spinal cord.

This team suggested that instead of the brain deciding the handedness, the opposite was probably the real story. Nerve connections from the body to the brain develop before the connections that allow the brain to control the body's movement. And so, my son must have been a vigorous left hand waver while in the womb......

The Jury is out on that one.

One in every 10 people is left-handed, and males are one and a half times more likely to be left-handed then females, according to Lefthanders International.

Statistics , of course , can end up showing connections you never anticipated. French researches at the Montpelier University indicate that left-handed people are more likely to be schizophrenic, alcoholic, delinquent, dyslexic, and have Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, as well as mental disabilities. As if that's not bad enough, they're also more likely to die young and get into accidents.

But this ability to "be different" has its own benefits. Particularly in sports . Babe Ruth in baseball, and of course John Mcenroe and Martina Navratilova in tennis. Sourav Ganguly and Yuvraj Singh in Cricket. Oscar de la Hoya in boxing. You name a one-on-one sport, and one can point out left handed sportsmen who were masters in their field.

Is being a lefty an advantage ? The aforementioned French researches think so. Since right handed folks are a majority, for a leftie , fighting with a rightie, would be a predictable thing. Easy. However, for right handed types, fighting suddenly with a left handed warrior would be a surprise factor, and would need some getting used to.

Turns out that murder rates in countries and the proportion of lefties in their population have a correlation. While one needn't look apprehensively at the next leftie one meets, consider the fact that amongst the Dioula of Burkina Faso in West Africa, where the murder rate was only 0.013 murders per 1,000 residents each year, they found only 3.4 percent of the population were left-handers. However, studies from the Eipo of Indonesia, show 27 percent of the population is left-handed, and surprise, surprise, there are three murders per 1,000 people each year.

This clearly explains , how despite Darwin, (and I do not know if he was a leftie), the lefties manage to survive through. Maybe they are fitter, maybe they just try very hard.

So why do people get born left handed ? Our handedness is controlled by certain pathways in the brain. According to Stanley Coren, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia , any kind of trauma during the gestation or even during birth, can mess up some of these pathways, and affect the handedness factor, as such. Turns out that women above the age of 40 having a baby, are 128 percent more likely to have a left handed baby than those who have babies in their twenties.

Sometimes these birth traumas reflect in the health problems that folks face when they are older, Bill Clinton and George(Sr) H.W. Bush both have histories of birth stress. Clinton suffers from allergies and Bush from Graves' disease (hyperthyroid). In the 1992 U.S. Presidential election, all three major candidates were left-handed. There have been six left-handed presidents: James Garfield, Harry S Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Regan, George Bush, Bill Clinton. Some sources also list Herbert Hoover, but he appears to have been more right than left.

Before the lefties get all depressed, we need to also mention that Alan Searleman from St Lawrence University, New York found there were more left-handed people with IQ over 140 than right-handed people. You really need to figure out the "handedness of Albert (Einstein), Issac(Newton) and Benjamin (Franklin). ALL lefties. Wow .

Actually, being a leftie is not to be restricted to the hands. Some people are complete lefties, hands, feet , eyes, everything. But most are a mixture like left handed and right footed. For example, when you throw the ball you may be just like the general tightie population, but while writing, you cannot sit on the same bench as a right handed person, without having a shove-shove altercation. Think of which eye you use to look through a keyhole . One eye is always stronger. If you closely watch your friend closely as he /she smiles , it will be clear that one side of the face is almost always more expressive . According to the University of Waterloo in Canada , only 57% of left-handers are also left-eyed !

Lefties sometimes referred to as “southpaws. Possibly originating in baseball, as , given a typical layout of a major league baseball field, a left-handed pitcher would end up facing south as he finished throwing the ball. Some experts say this is actually a term used in wrestling, and may have originated there.

Southpaws or not, and given the plethora of right handed instruments we use, it may be of interest to note that given the standard "qwerty" keyboard, the number of words in English that are typed solely with the left hand is in the neighborhood of 3400. Around 450 words are typed solely with the right hand.

And fancy research apart, there are some everyday things of note.

Left handers who get an interesting mug on their birthday, will never see the picture on the mug ,when they lift it too drink their tea.

A child I know went to hospital to have the appendix removed, and woke up to find an IV in his left arm. he was miserable as he couldn't do any of his drawings while recuperating. he was a leftie, and the doctor did not know that ....

If you see someone using a spiral bound notebook that is bound at the top, chances are he/she is a leftie.

A leftie who had ankle surgery, had some problem with the plate and screws used to align the bone, as the screw was bothering him. The doctor asked him to do "friction massage" using a circular motion. This guy did the massage in the wrong direction being a leftie and messed up stuff , so that the doctor was constrained to remove the hardware to the save the nerve from the wrong direction massage.

Something as simple as playing cards. If you fan the cards out naturally left-handed, the numbers disappear !

Lefties are very good at visualization of abstract geometric shapes which probably explains why so many creative people are lefties. Research conducted by Dr Nick Cherbuin from the Australian National University in 2006, indicates that left-handed people can think quicker when carrying out tasks such as playing computer games or playing sport. Connections between the left and right hand sides or hemispheres of the brain are faster in left-handed people, and fast transfer of information in the brain makes left-handers more efficient when dealing with multiple stimuli.

The aforementioned child mentioned in the beginning of this article , is predictably, in the creative field of architecture , as well as communication about sports.

The DNA , with its helical structure is like a right handed screw. However, several journals , in blatant inattention to scientific veracity and more attention to urgency of publication, actually end up printing a mirror image. Thomas Schneider , a researcher at the NIH, has actually tabulated these happenings , all in prestigious scientific journals, and even maintains a web page on it. In all these a random left handed orientation is given to the DNA spiral.

Probably goes on to show that the editors are predominantly right handed. using only one side of their brain. But on the other hand, this "creativity" in the DNA could be attributed to a leftie , maybe ? (Researchers , eat your heart out.)

While we learn to live with and wonder about the world of lefties, two persons called Coulson and Lovett from the University of California at San Diego, actually managed to do research on , believe it or not, "Handedness, hemispheric asymmetries, and joke comprehension! " (Exclamation mark, mine). They actually attached electrodes to 16 lefties and 16 righties, and did experiments, subjecting them to jokes . Among other things , they said "Differences may reflect more efficient inter-hemispheric communication in the left-handers, as they are reputed to have relatively larger corpus callosal areas than right-handers. Results support the portrait of more bilateral language representation among left-handers, and suggest language lateralization affects high-level language comprehension tasks such as joke comprehension."

Sure. But of course. That's right. (Or should I say, that's left ?)

It probably means lefties laugh more.

An Inconvenient Burp

There is a game called word association. You suggest a word and someone else comes up with a scenario.

For example, "Fireworks" immediately suggests Divali, and "hybrid" immediately suggests the Toyota Prius (or any of the new intelligent cars) . Time was when the word "hybrid" probably elicited a response of "some special variety of rice" . Someone mouthing the word "environment" would have had an entire population of educated folks suggesting how to go about saving it.

In the good old days, if you mentioned the word "cow", the first thing that came to mind was probably milk, and then one probably imagined scenarios where Jersey and other cows meandered through green and sylvan woods and meadows, chewing a bit here , ruminating a bit there, licking their calf clean during a break in the proceedings , and just to lighten the situation, generating a wonderful "moo".

Today, in the days of "Inconvenient Truths", cows have suddenly become inconvenient.

Believe it or not, but the problem lies in the fact that cows burp . It's certainly not a new phenomenon, cows have been burping ever since they existed, irrespective of the part of the world they came from, and what they ate and drank.

The culprit is methane, a greenhouse gas, which contributes to global warming.

Apparently, one of the biggest source of methane is the burping of the cow. A single cow, is supposed to be burping, 280 litres of methane gas every day. In case this boggles the mind, this is the equivalent of 140 two litre bottles of any soft drink filled with methane gas, being generated every day.

Now, cow dung, as we all know, also contains methane, but it is possible to harness that and generate fuel to aid in running farmland and even small village setups . Capturing and storing the burping methane is a dicey proposition, almost next to impossible, and so every year , the United Cows of America generate 6 million metric tons of
methane that, freely escapes and is supposed to contribute towards global warming.....

Of course, world wide, there are , besides cows , several other animals like sheep, goats,camels and others that burp too. I am sure all the animals in the National Parks and Safari Parks also burp to their heart's content. Some one has actually estimated the worldwide methane generation from these poor , unsuspecting animals to be 80 million metric tons.

And why do we get so excited about this ? It is because the methane molecule is 21 times better at trapping heat than the carbon dioxide molecule.

So now that automakers have faced their share of pollution and global warming related inconvenient truths, researchers have narrowed in, on the poor cows.

Before we humans got into the act analysing the milk production, and fiddling around with levels of fat and other things, cows the world over, were basically used in farms for milk, and ploughing the fields, and even in various indigenous oil mills in third world countries. They were taken to graze daily by the farmer's young children, and they wandered about through pastures and hilly terrain, getting their natural exercise as well as eating choice varieties of greenery. Sometimes the venues varied, and so, things were kept interesting for the cows. Wonderful novels and poetry were written visualising cows coming home to rest at sundown, trudging back with the herd, kicking up the dust , as the farmer sat in the compound , resting after a hard day at work, waiting with the evening meals , for everyone , including the animals.

Then , we humans got greedy . (So what's new ? We shouldn't be surprised at all.) Ploughing was now done by tractors, oil mills were mechanised, milk and milk products were in great demand across the world, and scientists started to figure out what to medicate the cows with so that milk production would increase. The poor cows were fed with hormones and antibiotics and experiments were done to see what worked best. Milk production increased. Television started showing advertisements about how milk was so wonderful a drink. Various celebrities , who probably actually preferred the tippling variety of drinks, got paid to do advertisements showing milk mustaches.


Today, health problems in humans have been associated with estrogen like compounds that exist in our milk, thanks to all the stuff the cows were medicated with. There is a hue and cry about that , papers are published, fingers get pointed, and , of course ,no one really worries about the poor cows.

Now some German scientists have come up with a wonder pill to reduce the cows burps. Not a coincidence in a country where meat eating is the relished norm. Dr. Winfried Drochner, professor of animal nutrition, leads the "ground-breaking" project at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart. The professor says "Our aim is to increase the well being of the cow, to reduce the greenhouse gases produced and to increase agricultural production all at once. It is an effective way of fighting global warming."

(How simply amazing ...I am speechless)

The idea is to introduce a fist-sized plant-based pill, known as a bolus, combined with a special diet and strict feeding times, and this would lead to reduction in the methane produced by cows, by trapping some of the energy from the methane, which is naturally produced in the fermentation process when a cow digests grass.

The professor would like to use the pill to boost the cow's metabolism. The cows could then use the methane to produce glucose , instead of wasting it as a burp. Supposedly, this would enhance the cows milk production. And, unlike humans, who take several pills everyday, the cow would be given this bolus pill, say once a month.

Now the mind really boggles.

Just imagine an entire herd of super energetic cows , all clean smelling, no burps. And all those people who eat beef with great relish, with get that extra dollop of glucose as well. Then someone from the National Institutes of Health will do research on why so many cows are showing signs of diabetes, supposedly a disease of rich people.

Some opportunistic multinational pharmaceuticals that make veterinary medicine will make a killing in the bovine diabetes market. Special types of cow insulin will enter the market.

Since glucose metabolism in the body is connected to how well the protein tryptophan is available to the brain to make the hormone serotonin, and very soon, we will then see examples of bipolar cows, depressed cows , and panicking cows, just to name a few. Harvard and UCLA will lead in designing special psychological treatments for the bovine variety, with University of California at Davis probably beating them to it, due to their superior agricultural qualification and understanding of cows.

All of a sudden, the cows that happily gambolled with their calves in meadows will indicate pains in their limbs. Earlier, if you poked them in their feet, you probably stood in line for the biggest kick on your face, with a lash from the tail thrown in. Now, the poor cow probably will not feel the poke in the first place, thanks to its Neuro-"pathetic" legs...

And this is just cows. Once this bolus thing is made applicable to all animals that pass methane as a burp, say, above a certain quantity per day, you will have an entirely new set of diseases that veterinary doctors can look forward too. I am not current on insurance for veterinary medical treatments, but things are certainly going to get complicated for the poor animals, with, insurance companies defining what treatment they can get.

What about all the humans who will consume the beef ? Ten years from now will some university do research on the rising levels of genetic defects in humans and cows ? Will Trader Joe's then come up with non bolus fillet-Mignon cuts ?

Now that our weather has started going haywire, and global warming appears to have something to do with it, why do we consistently ignore the rising number of automobiles on the road spewing forth their contribution to global warming ? Why are gas guzzling monstrosities not uniformly banned across the nation ? Is this sudden attention to cows and other bovine varieties a ploy to deflect attention from humans addicted to over consumption ?

We need to remember that unlike us, cows and other animals maintain their own balance vis-a-vis nature. They fertilise the same meadows they graze on. Unlike us humans , they live in harmony with other livestock, bravely facing up to Darwin's principles whenever natural selection demands. Cows have NOT polluted the environment with plastics and fluorocarbons. Whatever they produce is recyclable.

The topic of burping cows and methane has now also got school children thinking. Being driven to school in family size cars (not filled with family), tickled pink whenever they got to use the carpool lane , say 4 tims a month, thinking up topics for their lesson on environment, for a project in Chemistry, someone had a query about Boyle's law.

Boyle's law states that for an "ideal gas" , the product of its pressure and volume is always a constant.

Don't know if the methane in the cow's gut is ideal or not, but with the increase in pressure of methane in the body, with burps not allowed, according to Boyle, an exploding cow is now a reality......

(Time for more research on "A Statistical study on incidences of explosions (or is it implosions) of burping cows, (amongst those that were subject to the Bolus treatment between the ages of 1-6 years......) and their correlation with the automobile density in Los Angeles , Texas , Detroit and New York.")

100% wash their hands. Congratulations.

There is medical RESEARCH, and there is MEDICAL research.

Sometimes , it' s the earth shattering type that says, that your ability to smell or lack of it is closely connected with your ability to develop Alzheimers. Other times its the type that simply overwhelms you. Like it happened , when one read the latest from the June 2007 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Forget cancer, aids, cholera, typhoid, whooping cough, AIDS, heart attacks, Parkinsons, Alzheimers, and other diseases named after smart folks.

The latest research says that , "Most people want doctors to shake their hand and be greeted by first name when they first meet but the expectation is not always met".

This is THE path breaking, mind boggling conclusion arrived at by several doctors from Northwestern University, lead by a Dr Makoul, who , along with several colleagues, surveyed 415 adults in the U.S. between 2004 and 2005 to learn what patients expect and prefer, and then analyzed videotapes of 123 new patient visits to doctor's office to see what actually happens.

The study goes on to say that , 78.1 per cent wanted physicians to shake their hand, while 18.1 per cent did not; 50.4 per cent wanted to be greeted with their first name, 17.3 per cent preferred their last name and 23.6 per cent favoured the doctor using both first and last names; 56.4 per cent wanted physicians to introduce themselves using first and last names, 32.5 per cent expected physicians to use their last name, and 7.2 per cent would like physicians to use their first name only.

They reached these landmark conclusions, by actually videotaping doctors meeting patients and officially eavesdropping on what everyone said to each other.

Is medical research all about a statement of statistical facts ? Where technology allows me today to push thin hairlike wires across paths worse that Lombard Street in San Francisco, to burst and clear plaque jams in arteries, and one can actually trace a drug being delivered to a tumor and confirm that the pharma companies are not fibbing, what prompted someone to fund this research, the conclusions to which could have been reached by any doctor , having an open house for friends and patients , say, on Fourth of July ?

Sorry. Thats Blasphemy. HOW can a doctor , whose fees multiply in powers of 10 , as the clock ticks away in minutes, actually spend time for FREE , with , (gulp, gulp), patients ?

What happened to the "bedside manner" ? What doctors of yore learnt about communication with patients, was not by taking a communications course. You learnt by taking a "whole view" of the patient's problems. You needed to be informal with some patients, very formal with others. What did not change is the rigour with which the case was exhaustively looked at.

Otherwise, do we now look forward to scholarly papers presented on topics as varied as "Recommended Decor for Pediatric Consultants offices west of the Sierras", or "Statistical Correlation between Age of the Physicians Assistant and patient Cure outcomes in a University Environment"?

Can we expect art dealers to offer a rotating system of prints for the doctors waiting room, based on the latest research "Waiting room patient demeanour as a function of scenery depicted in the paintings displayed there " ? What do you think of a company called U. P. Serotonin, offering different pictures each month, and giving you a 13th month free if you sign a contract for 12 months?

Maybe GE will offer refrigerators free to those gynaecologists who agree to store a specific brand of fruit yogurt ("buy one get one free") in their waiting room, as a complimentary offering to ladies in their various trimesters, uncomfortably changing their positions every 10 minutes; all this after the latest path breaking research on "Effect of lactobacillus and fruit concoctions on maternal and foetal stress levels in the first, second and third trimesters ".....

And what do you think about the group of urologists who displayed prints of various sportsmen in action in their Group practice reception rooms AND examination rooms, after the latest research about " Manifestation and perception of pain in higher middle class, marginally alcoholic, urogenitally compromised patients in the sixth decade of their life, in the presence of visually stimulating sports visuals : a landmark study"..............

Hats off to the ENT (Ear,Nose and Throat) consulting surgeon who had a permanent MTV transmission of Shakira ("Hips dont lie" (they actually stand up and shake, silly girl..) ) playing in his waiting room.

Music heals. Well, so say the doctors who recently published a paper on "Statistical correlations between Musical songs (played by groups with Insect names in the 60's and 70's), the anatomy related wording and tympanoplasty outcomes in postmenopausal females, NOT on HRT".......

Asthma is rising in the US. But did you see the latest publication on "Differential Analysis on swimming as a Asthma Treatment, as a function of the type of swimming stroke "; or better still , Speedo and TYR have joined up as a social commitment , and are offering 20% off if you buy your swimsuits and stuff from the entrance lobby of a wellknown metroplitan hospital in Los Angeles?

Whatever happened to doctors who knew your family members.? Not just who and how many, but also who was delivered by him, how the child was doing well in school ; and how it was no problem if you brought your visiting parents on your next appointment , as you were a bit worried about your Dad's intermittent loss of memory .

Nothing came free then. Least of all the fees . But you never felt the doctor was "acting" , if you know what I mean.

But what came free in the days of yore was an honest interest in your wellness, a professional interest in your family , in the interests of knowing your genetic predispositions ,now that you were reaching middle age. You never felt you were wasting his time. You did not get overcome by a feeling of being an ignoramus in a world populated by smart white coated scholars, who passed opinions without explaining things. And the decor in the office was what the receptionist, a 40 year old lady , liked to have around : a jar of gummy bears, some popular magazines, some games and toys for children, some nice scenic prints on the wall displaying the natural wonders of America, a hat and coat rack, some paper and pens/pencils for children to scribble and draw on (while waiting for their mothers maybe); and the doctor came to the door to wish you and see you off, congratulating you on your latest golf score, before he welcomed in another patient with a smile.

What we need to know is that no one taught the doctor this. He did no research on how to deal with patients; his entire learning and research was on how to TREAT the patient's sickness.

He was trained rigourously for the latter, where as the former came with years anf years of honest dedication to the wellness of those around him. If he felt that an expert opinion would help, he recommended you to another expert, and then got in touch with him himself. This was not done as a routine act to the mutual commercial benefit of all the doctors involved, and besides, every decision was taken after painstaking evaluation over a decent length of time.

Todays medical professionals, spend little time on a given case, reach conclusions in a half hour visit, and prescribe medication that brings a smile on the face of a pharma representative.

What would be very useful, is that graduating doctors should spend a year of their residency in a small medical set up, in a community away from the big cities. This would be priceless in teaching the new doctors , a way of relating to patients, that does not treat the patients, just as "laboratory values".

In the meanwhile, if you are one of the 78.1 per cent (that wanted physicians to shake their hand), and one of the 23.6 per cent (who favoured the doctor using both your first and last names), or, one of the 100% that wanted to get well, irrespective of the style of the doctor, lets just hope, that in all this greeting and hand shaking, ALL folks have remembered to thoroughly WASH their hands.......

Clinton , Obama, and Shekhawat(2)

Electronic Voting Machine and the election officers being transported on an elephant?!!!..( A desert border so remote that polling booths arrive by camel/elephant caravan. One jungle district so inaccessible that only three voters are registered....... )

One returns from a short visit to the US, with news about Hilary Clinton and Barrack Obama coming out of one's ears. Will she be nominated, wont she be nominated ? Is America ready for a Woman President ? Why does this question need to be asked ? Is it time for the US to set an example and nominate Obama , who has so many interesting qualifications, but is noticed, clearly, predominantly for his non-whiteness?

Politics is strange.

The reasons that people do not like Hilary Clinton, are probably the same reasons that are ignored in, say, Cheney; an ability to partcipate in business deals, and an even better ability to emerge from them, battering others , self unscathed.

In any other country, a woman lawyer, who has actually seriously worked as one, been on the right side of the White House fence for several years, travelled around a world that doesnt constantly contain Europe, been elected a Senator from New York, produced a book about her observations about travels across continents. also understands things like microfinance, and finally, an additional qualification , been and continues to be , a mother - she would be considered a great candidate to run for the highest office.

Politics is even stranger in other countries .

India, no novice at having strong women heads of state, real and /or virtual, is in the throes of decsion making, about nominating and getting the electoral college to elect its next President, Pratibha Patil Shekhawat, a woman. To confuse matters further, her main opponent is also named Shekhawat.

Actually, her being a woman is not an issue at all.

Pratibha Patil Shekhawat (she is married to a Mr Shekhawat), also studied to be a lawyer. It is not known if she ever practised s one. Active in the sort of typical rural politics practised in India, that majorly has to do with starting co-operative sugar factories and banks, with government subsidies and blessings, she was a minsiter in the state government, years ago. In the tradition of those who swear blind allegiance to the first family of politics, she was appointed Governer of a northern state, ruled by the opposition. Recently nominated by the ruling party as their candidate for President, her being a woman is a non-issue.

The rank and file of the party is busy applauding her choice since the choice is basically dictated by another woman, who no one dares contradict. (Vive la femme ?)

The fun part , is that her main opponent is also a Shekhawat; except he is currently the vice-president, he is 84, supremely marinated in politics as practised on the subcontinent. He has been chief minister of the state where his opponent recently resigned as Governor.

The incumbent President, who will not get another chance , thanks to his habit of being an independent thinker, is probably the popular choice of the common man. (The common man doesnt vote for President. The electoral college, consisting of folks voted in by John Public , votes for the President). A scientist, a scholar, a man with a deep appreciation of things, both nuclear, horticultural, and in between ; a man who excelled at communication with the younger generation, replied himself to emails from school children, and was well versed in the scriptures of the major religions that are important to India, and a man who was not afraid to ask questions , was probably what we needed .

What a contrast.

The US clobbers its citizenry with an information-overload regarding the possible presidential candiddates. Candidates visit the biggest industries, address the employees, answer questions. There are debates; the debates are analyzed; people get secretly depressed over a drop of so many percentage points in public approval. At the end of the day, if Hilary loses, it will be because she is a woman. If Obama loses it will be because he is partially nonwhite.

In India, the information is all secret. There are no debates, no analyses. There are only newspaper exposures and reports, presumably prompted by interested parties releasing what they consider bombshell new items. An ability to start an engineering college and treat it as a business opportunity for great profit makes you an education czar. An ability to extract government approval for starting a cooperative bank, grant loans (preferably to your relatives posing as you) and then write them off, is standard qualification today for aspiring to a political post. When all else fails (or doesnt have that much impact), the regional aspect is emphasized. An entire state is supposed to shake itself out of the monsoon stupor and be thrilled to bits about its "daughter" being nominated to the highest post in the land.

But look at the similarities.

Just like every American President has had a brother involved in things he shouldnt be involved in, the current leading Indian contender has a brother who is being sued by someone for murder.

Just like some US Presidents have invoked their special communication chanel to God, in an effort to justify their destructive actions somewhere in the world, we in India, hear about :

(1) a candidate's planets aligning themselves just so, starting a certain date, so that she has no option but to win the selection trials, so to speak; so speaks the family's loyal astrolger, and,

(2) A hitherto dead sage speaking to the presidential candidate through another living sage's body, and the possible future president lady commentating favourably and respectfully on it.

May be what we need is presidential debates here. Not shouting matches, as is the custom developed in Parliament, with microphones and furniture being flung around and others ducking the missiles, with a proficeincy which would amaze the best cricketers facing a bouncer. But some kind of impartial media person, highly trusted and respected by the citizenry , conducting an illuminating debate on issues.

And maybe we can make the US elections more fun, by exporting astrolgers, wise men, sages, flingable furniture, and before we forget, voting machines.

We in India, have successfully used them in several elections now, with a watch dog election commission monitoring its use, and if required, ordering revoting. (And whats more, doing that).

Is Florida listening ? (Or is that the next thing to be outsourced .....:-) ?

I ain't sleeping. I'm just taking a good look at the insides of my eyelid...

Tina's just back from work. At 3:30 am. So are 15 of her friends, and they all work at the call center newly set up in the suburbs of Mumbai. The nice part, is , that she gets transport to and from her residence every single day, and so her folks are not really worried; though her mother doesnt really relax till she hears the sound of a jeep driving into the building compound, and the beep of the elevator as her daughter takes her time getting out of it.

The pay is fantastic by Indian standards and a pittance by US standards. And so today, all kinds of outsourcing call center jobs are getting filled up as soon as they are advertised.

So are doctors clinics.

Time was when you did a decent day job, left around 7;30 am , occasionally bypassing breakfast to arrive early at the office. You returned at around 7:30 pm, to eternal cribs about how late you were coming everyday. You met up with your old friends for coffee on occasional weekday evenings, and everyone had a grand time cursing whoever was the reigning ogre at the office. Sleep would relax you, and tomorrow was another day.

Ever since the world, specifically the English speaking section, discovered India as a huge storehouse of cheap,well-educated,trainable,computer-savvy youth, the information industry has never been the same. Thanks to the weird and persistent drifting of continents millions of years ago, India is at work when America sleeps; what is worse, is, that it is also at work, while the US is at work.


This has given rise to a veritable flood of call centers, with almost all big companies jumping on to the bandwagon. Special training is given to Venkats and Nandini's so they can function as Dave and Sue, complete with American jargon and attitude. Saying "have a nice day" with a cyber smile at 2 am is the norm, there are supervisors functioning with a hawks eye to ensure that there is no verbal abuse on both sides, and for a girl, who looked forward to a secretary's job, where she brought her own packed lunch from home to save money, and travelled packed as one of the "sardines" in Mumbai's suburban trains, its a brave new world, where she is provided company transport to and from work, and an interesting pantry and cafetaria, where she gets midnight meals on the house, everyday.

After the first flush of euphoria, prosperity, and a sense that you have come up in the world, the little niggles begin.

Someimes it's lethargy; you lie down, count sheep, cows, goats, friends, even enemies, but sleep evades you. So you try to relax with a book, but it gets so difficult to concentrate. TV is the next thing you try. Its fairly a waste to watch, as nothing registers much.

Your Mom, worried, tries to tempt you with some freshly cooked stuff, and you try to hide the fact that your digestion is no longer the sturdy thing it was. You have joined the ranks of those with acidity. When guests come, you feel like disappearing into your room. Stress is the order of the day, and you realise that you really dont know your body anymore.....

The BPO industry , has given rise to an entire generation of young people, who have messed up their health, physically and mentally. Research indicates, that depression is a common finding among these troubled youths. Loss of hair, headaches, fatigue, sleepiness at the wrong time, reduction in body reflexes --- all these are terrible things to affect folks at so young an age. The body is being abused as never before, in pursuit of lucre.

Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen, a neurologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, and a postdoctoral fellow in sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School is the author of a study, that seeks to find out the relation between sleep and learning. The American Academy of Neurology annual meeting in Boston, will have learnt about their findings during a meeting on May 2, 2007.

48 people between 18, and 30 were asked to learn 20 words. Folks were divided into groups, that stayed awake after learning the words, and also those that were allowed to sleep after learning the words. They were also given a second set of 20 words to learn. The findings, indicated that those who slept after learning these words, had a noticeably better recall, compared to those who were kept awake (76 percent for the sleep group vs. 32 percent for the wake group). This was more, than that anticipated by the researchers, based on their scientific initial conditions and parameters.

This has clearly proved that good sleep is essential for memory consolidation, given that our educational learning systems require excellent declarative memories (memory for facts and events and time). It turns out that good sleep also leads to good physical and cognitive functioning, an improved immune function, and a mental control over moods.

Prehistoric man, woke up with the suns rays dappling across him through the canopy of green, as he stretched and got up in his forest abode. He spent his time playing, hunting, climbing, fighting, and at some point, eating , probably the freshest of meats and forest produce, freshly processed over the latest discovery , fire. The setting sun, brought a natural end to the days activities, and he sank back into a comfortable sleep, unconcerned about gas prices, inflation, whether the insurance would cover the latest medical test, whteher he was going to be laid off at work, etc etc.

Although fire did generate some light, it wasnt enough to give people unneccesary ideas. It was not till Edison got into his act and discovered the light bulb, that folks got greedy, and messed up their sleep patterns, and energy patterns.

Before the advent of the BPO industry, sleep related health problems, were the domain of the elderly. Today the patients at sleep clinics are getting younger and younger , often suffereing from sleep apnea, which if ignored and left untreated, would predispose one towards hypertension and strokes.

Burning of calories is something that we do less of when we sleep. So one would conclude that if you slept less, you were expending more calories, and so there would be more weight control.

Turns out, that this too , is untrue. In 2004, Columbia University scientists conducted a study and proved that those who slept less actually tended to be more obese, thanks to the effect of lack of sleep on the appetite hormones.

Thee are two hormones, leptin and grehlin, in our bodies, along with a huge orchestra of other hormones, that maintain the body in a decent balance. Leptin , is responsible for controlling appetite and weight, and telling our body the energy available to it. Grehlin simply encourages people to feel like they should eat.

As can be expected, when you dont sleep well, the leptin levels reduce and grehlin levels increase, leading to an optimum situation for piling on weight.

A quarter of your lifetime of working odd hours, and abusing sleep patterns, and you have a great chance of predisposing yourself, and collecting most risk factors for all kinds of deadly things such as heart disease, liver diseease, angina, osteoporosis, and at some point, depression and dementia.

We need to worry. An entire generation of young people , in the pursuit of the lucre, is "marching into the valley of sickness", inspite of the "charge of the health brigade" , as Alfred Lord Tennyson would have said, had he been composing his poems in 2007. It forebodes ill , for an entire future generation, that is already having to face other problems, like pollution, harmful food additives, lesser green spaces and so on.

Unless attention is paid to the health aspects of the BPO industry, there is a danger of the youth of the future, losing out on the learning capabilities, and abilities, that make todays workers so valuable. There will be an entire generation of physically unfit parents, leading to problem progeny, , and over a period of time, one stands to lose ability to learn , that has brought the BPO industry where it is today .

Reminds me of what is supposed to have happened to T-Rex and his other dinosaur friends, long time ago.

The earth is supposd to have experienced huge climatic changes towards the end of the era of the dinosaurs. Unlike mammals and birds, reptiles have a problem with the type of sleep (slow wave sleep) required to boost memories, particularly those related to learning new skills. Slow wave sleep enhances learning and also physical performance. Reptiles , (because of their messed up slow wave sleep system) , are much more limited in the type of complex behaviour they can experience than other animals such as mammals and birds.

It appears, that subsequent to the tumultous climatic changes , reptiles proved incapable of deveoping skills, required to emerge from them. This slowly led to the extinction of the lot, while birds and other mammals , kind of sailed through.

Lest you think that I am making this up, this is actually research carried out by Dr. Niels Rattenborg, of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany.

Unfortunately, we humans have a great capacity NOT to learn from our mistakes till its too late.

Putting old on hold.........

When I first went to the US 35 years ago, there was one thing that used to amaze me no end. Say, you were visiting some old folks, and the lady of the house had gone out for lunch or something. It was usual for the gentleman to say that the "girls" were out at lunch, and expected back shortly. The first time that happened, the sound of their garage door closing heralded the arrival of the "girls", and I half expected young , granddaughter types to appear on the scene. The arrival of two ladies in their 80's, with wisps of silver hair, full makeup, matching shoes and purses, fancy brooches et al, had me completely speechless.

Seniors and Superseniors. And I am not talking about outstanding performers in college.

There is a new category of folks getting defined these days. Thanks to excellent medicine, good exercise habits, careful diet control, and most important, a permanent learning curiosity, today, more and more people remain fitter well into their mid 80's.

There is an entire generation of folks, whose children are now , what are classified as senior citizens.

In a recent talk at the St Louis meeting of the Ameriacn Association for the advancement of Science , in February 2007, Prof S. Tuljapurkar Of Stanford, spoke about the economic and demographic effects of the anti aging therapies that are currently in use. Between 2010 and 2030, people's life expectancy is supposed to increase by 20 years, with folks living into their middle eighties, routinely. It turns out that what the nations economic czars are basically worried about , is the ratio of the retired population, to the working population. And it is estimated, that consequent to adoption of various kinds anti aging therapies and medications, this ratio is lilely to quadruple by 2035.

That has a , if I might use the word, a deadly bearing on Social Security and Medicare policies in the US.

Concentrated usage of certain therapies and usage of certain medications predominantly by first world countries, would have a telling effect on prices of medications, set by pharmaceutical companies, hell bent on profits. That doesnt bode very well for a world where other countries exist, , where the root cause of all strife, poverty, lack of progress is almost, always, money, and what you can buy or not buy with it.

And today, the policy seems to be to indulge in militant and /or military interactions, to satisfy our national craze for overconsumption, of many things, predominantly oil. The same goes for the obsession with never looking your age. The pharrma companies literally milk you dry, and you ask for more, and outlandish expenditures becomes the norm, blinding us to the real situation on the ground.

Fiscal scenarios apart, it is educative to visuaise what would happen in a world of superseniors propped up by the pharmceutical Gods.

Imagine a family getting together for Thanksgiving. The family patriarch and matriarch , (terms you would have laughed at ) very much on the scene, trying to orgainse a table for 55 people. Their 4 children , 2 of them senior citizens themselves, driving in from about 100 miles away. Their children, some working with big companies, some in business and some in academia , trying to make this trip in a combination of air/train/automobile systems. And their assorted off spring ranging from elementary school to college, making, what they think of as a mandatory family trip for the year, never to be missed, no matter what. Someone special has been employed to cook the meal, the varieties of liquid refreshments boggle the mind, given the alcohol, sugar, lactose, and celiac restrictions currently in effect across the family. The family ranges from great grandpa at 95 to the youngest third grader, who thinks figuring out everyone in the group, is the worst quiz he ever faced.

Half way through the meal, someone will fall asleep at the table; probably the oldest and/or the youngest. Someone's shaking hand, trying to pick up a glass on their own will probably spill something on someone. Someone else will shake their head. Great Grandma, overcome by the excitement will fall asleep in the living room listening to her granddaugter's account of her trip to Bangladesh to study the rise in ocean levels and sinking of land due to Global warming there. A couple of Grandpa's will cross each other making repeated trips to the bathroom; its so difficult these days , isnt it ?

The women, discussing the latest mammograms of the eldest; shaking their heads at the inevitable waiting list for getting ordibnary diagnostic procedures in hospitals; and the topic will inevitably veer around to how all this outsourcing of medical diagnostic reporting work to third world countries, is forcing folks to deal with fake sounding Bills and Carolyns who still spell "color" with a u after the second o, and pronounce the letter Z as "zed"....

What has this miraculous anti aging medicine given us ? Beauty ? May be . Mobility ? Maybe. But Mobility was never an issue in the US. Comfort ? Physically, maybe. Alertness ? Sometimes . Better Healing ? Certainly.

Peace of mind ? I dont know.

When we say anti aging therapies and medications succeed, we are only talking about the physical aspects. The immediately visible aspects.

Not withstanding the fact that pharmaceutical companies, being those who are most interested in marketing these antiaging tricks, treat the body as a physical engine, it is necessary for us to keep in mind, that there is a mental aspect to it all; there is something called "mind and body", and everything good that happens to the body immensely depends on how happy and optimistic the mind can be.

The social system, with its obsession with individual independence and privacy, makes it difficult for seniors today to visualise a life with their children and grandchildren , together. One or the other thinks its a burden. Everyone is obsessed about what the insurance company will pay for and and what it wont pay for. Seniors have been reduced to being thought about as an expense.

Think of an entire extra generation of folks above 80, living into thei midnineties, maybe working till their mid eighties. Spruced up and spritely, not missing a single dose of their Omega 3- fish oil and Coenzyme Q 10 , Botoxed faces gleaming in the sun, their cars with special click buttons to aid semi arthritic trigger thumbs cope with doors and trunk openings, driving into their senior communty house, in a car with a GPS that they dont really use as they think its a bit complicated.

And they reach their suites/rooms, rest in their armchair, (with all the embedded call buttons on the arm rest, with a special hot link to the main office), and wish they werent home. Its lonely. It worries them that something may happen and there may be no family around them, no child to gaze at and pour out your best wishes to, as you get that sinking feeling. . All those stem cell therapies, electrical stimulation of brains, and what have you, cannot hide the fact that this body is now an old machine; the forgetfullness has increased; sometimes they remember things from their childhood, and its as if scenes flash in front of their eyes. Old episodes from their younger days come to life. You try to get up from the armchair in that dream about your youth, only to realise that bone densities have changed, and you need help. And your spouse cant help you either. She has fallen asleep with the coffee getting cold. You just wish you had your family around you....

This entire generation of superseniors as created by these anti aging miraculous medications and procedures, will be basically worthless unless acompanied by a hard look at the existing social family systems. Extended family systems. That help preserve the mental peace and sanity of an old person now in the evening of their life.

Life as we know it in the US cannot and should not be dictated by fiscal and monetary issues. Insurance should not decide whether a parent lives or dies.

It has often been instructive to study various populations in China, Mongolia, Russia, and various Asian destinations, where people merrily live well into their 100's, with their own hair (uncolored, untreated), their own teeth , and whats most important, their own self confidence.

Turns out that these folks dont make a special effort to imbibe all kinds of , so called magic foods, hitherto unheard of in the west. They have strong social family systems, eat local traditional food, the local traditional way, enjoy their drinks, are probably consciously unaware of things like cholesterol etc, but unconsciously probably eat all the correct foods over their lifetimes, in consonance with their physical surroundings, the local flora and fauna, and the local water.

Sicknesses are not considered calamities; they are events that are ordained to rest your body , maybe overstrained by some indiscriminate imbibing of stuff. Food itself can be used as medication, and that knowledge is constantly available in the family, updated and passed on to the newer generations. Tolerance for views of those different in age and attitude, comes with having close contact with all members of your family. Folks in the family chipping in , emotionally, during the bad times afflicting any member is a routine affair, and nobody glamourises it.

Various stages of ones life are defined with various functions. The Indian Scriptures, define , in addition to birth, childhood, adoloscence, marriage, a state called "house holding". Thats when you are a householder. You have children, support a family, slpervise the growing up and chanelling of the childrens energies. The children grow up , set up their own families. The Sriptures , at this point , define a way of life , which when loosely translated, means "retiring peacefully into the woods". The operative word here being "peacefully".

In these days of Global Warming and Inconvenient Truths, woods may be difficult to find. But many have interpreted this to mean that one now provides the family a virtual green area, where elders, having completed their family responsibilities, now help with the grandchildrens bringing up. Ambitions at the age on 70 are quietly ignored; occasioanlly an indulgent son or daughter urging the grandparent to go ahead and try something new is then a great pleasure.

These ways of life , may not be smart in a medicated world. But it is a way of life, tried and tested over a number of centuries, where the mind is given as much, if not more importance than just the physical body. Life has to be lived in balance.

Stress doesnt get reduced by defining it, or fiddling around with receptors in the brain.

If at the end of the day, we can honor these superseniors in our family, by giving them our time, place, care, dedication , and of course, occasionally, other resources like money, we would have earned the right to live well into a comfortable, happy, cared for (by family) old age ourselves.

What goes around often comes around. Life is hardly ever linear. Cyclic, more likely.

And that is why, although statistics says that we will have folks merrily working into their late eighties, causing all kinds of economic, congressional, presidential, fiscal, pharnaceutical, and other crises, I firmly believe, that there will be social family system upheavals that will force us to examine the existing set ups, leading to fairly strong changes, a reassessment of what is good, essential medicine and what is not, and the price that we pay for it.

In the meanwhile , maybe I can tell you about a friend, a lady who is 90, who disdainfully ignores all these physical antiaging therapies, teaches mentally challenged children a few days each week, reads to people at an "old" age home 2 afternoons a week, volunteers at the local library on the remaining few days, and says that what keeps her fit is all the gardening she does daily in the wonderful Northern California weather.

And if this is not enough, she is off with 3 other friends the same age as her, on a trip to Africa to watch the animals, flora and fauna.

Maybe she can teach the pharma companies a thing or two about aging, or should I say, non-aging ?.....

The life of the death stick

Someone once made, what I consider a very profound observation; a cigarette is a pipe with a fire at one end and a fool at the other. And while the embers continue to glow and consume the oxygen, the fool at the other end, true to his or her classification (as a fool), continues to nicotinise the air and blood pathways of the human body.

Some people smoke to look cool. I have never figured out why you need to heat yourself up by clogging your body engine to look cool. Then there are some people, who do so, as a stress relieving thing; you puff away the stress , so to speak; or maybe, in the overall murky gloom, you dont really "see" the stress as it puffs away.

Weight control. happens to be an objective of those who like to be statistical in the manner of 36-24-36, and doesnt matter if they end up being another kind of statistic at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Hospital later on......

I have always wondered, how and when people started smoking.

Tobacco appears to have existed in plant form in prehistoric times. Certain medicinal plants associated with those ages, such s Belladona, and "Nicotiana africana" show small amounts of nicotine. However, a study of human remains, and various kinds of pipes used then show no traces of habitual use of tobacco, like say in Africa and the near East; there is some use noticed in, once again, what were then called the Americas.

As far back as 6000 BC, turns out that tobacco was known in the Americas. Which is a fairly confusing statement as its not really clear what constituted the Americas at that point. May be the continents were joined to each other someplace, may be they were drifting, and depending on the direction of the drift, we could be talking of Russia, South America or even Europe. Never mind.

Around one thousand years before Christ, folks started figuring out that chewing and smoking tobacco was fun. They say the Mayan civilization was the leader in this regard then , and slowly the bad habits spread, once again, through the Americas. Not only did people figure out the pleasures of chewing and spitting the tobacco (the original pollutants), , or smoking the tobacco in various ways, but the more innovative types like the Peruvian Aguaruna Aboriginals, used it to give each other Hallucinogenic Enemas.......(and I thought enemas , per se, were bad news. This was probably the first and last time, anyone ever got high on an enema).

Subsequent to Christ, roughly around Anno Domini 430-650, turns out that the Mayans were really getting around. They went as far as the Mississippi valley , and introduced the folks there to the smoking habit. The creators of the Aztec empire then started experimenting around, mixing tobacco with resins of various weird leaves and smoking it in all kinds of pipes and tubes. These guys were really the pioneers, as you might say, of the after-dinner smoke. The fancy types used pipes and stuff and puffed away , looking at each other and the future through heavily lidded eyes, pretending to see varius deities and stuff appearing in the haze. The hoi-polloi simply rolled up tobacco leaves and smoked them, and history probably says that they certainly didnt seee any gods through the pervading gloom. Smoking basically became a vice and a fashion from then on.

Lest you think Columbus discovered only America, it would be interesting for folks to know that he discovered the use of tobacco too. While cruising around, Columbus managed to land at the Bahamas and the native Arawaks, seeing these fair men in their finery, decided to honor them with among other things, leaves. Typically Columbus took all the other goodies and threw the leaves away. Some time later they intercepted a man in a canoe taking a bunch of these leaves someplace else, and figured out that these were a trade item, and of good value. The stuff was taken away from the canoe. This was Columbus's introduction to tobacco , as a smokable entity.

Taking after Columbus, who navigated to the US thinking he was going to India, two of his colleagues Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, landed up in Cuba, thinking they were looking at China. Seems to have been a habit.

Jerez fooled around with the local cigars, got addicted and took the bad habit back to Spain with him. His style was his undoing, while he nonchalantly sat around smoking and puffing smoke rings from his mouth and nose, the neighbours got petrified and complained, and the Spanish Inquisition people simply caught him and threw him in jail for 7 years. However, by he time he was released, the whole of Spain had gone crazy over the habit of smoking.

Legend says that Columbus again sailed around the West Indies (his obsession with finding India needs to be admired, notwithstanding his habit of calling natives of the US as Indians, and naming Islands as the Indies, as a measure of "If you cant find it, just name it ! Voila !". He even named Trinidad and Tobago, the latter in honor, it seems of tobacco.

Around the 1500's tobacco was a sensation in Europe, and in Germany, a Dr. Michael Bernhard Valentini had written up s scholarly book, on what else, numerous different types of clysters, or enemas, out of which the tobacco enema was great for colic, nephritis, hysteria, hernia, and dysentery.

Dr Monardes, from Seville , Spain, wrote a book describing 36 maladies that tobacco could cure.

Not to be left behind, a bunch of English seafarers like Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, and his cousins, took it upon themselves to introduce tobacco into England. The first tobacco shipment reached Britain in 1565.

Its amazing how Britain , who gave us the Magna Carta, Parliament, and other wonderful things, also was the forerunner is showing how rulers could do a complete about turn, when considering rules, that were considered to be potentially beneficial to the state's and individual royal "treasuries". In 1604, King James the first, in the great tradition of the Surgeon generals to come , published a treatise called "A counterblast to Tobacco". The tobacco weed was associated with , Satan, and he simply banned tobacco from the pubs of those days. In a sort of full turnaround , that reminds us about certain people in certain high places today , he then allowed himself to be convinced to overturn the ban. Not only that, but he nationalised the tobacco industry, and proceeded to reduce the taxes on it. Rings a bell ?

The 1600's were an exciting time.

Across the world, rulers had much more guts and spirit compared to James the first.

The first Romanov Czar in Russia, Michael Feodorovich, declared tobacco consumption a deadly sin. The normal punishments were as drastic as slitting of the lips, and sometimes, even a potentially fatal and terrible flogging. In Turkey, Persia, and India, the death penalty was the usual punishment.

So many people pointing out that smoking was bad. In 1624, based on the great logic that tobacco use prompts sneezing, which too closely resembles sexual ecstasy, Pope Urban VIII issued a worldwide smoking ban and threatened excommunication for those who smoked in holy places. A century later, snuff-loving Pope Benedict XIII repealed all papal smoking bans, and in 1779, the Vatican opened its own tobacco factory. Smoking , per se, was then extremely popular in Europe and the Americas.

Sultan Murad IV , in 1634, prohibited smoking in the Ottoman Empire; as many as eighteen people a day were executed for breaking the law. The Sultan had a successor called, of all things, Ibrahim the Mad, and he lived up to his name, by lifting the ban in 1647; tobacco became an indulgence of the upper ecehlons of society, and along with coffee, wine, and opium, became, in the words of a historian, "as one of the four cushions on the sofa of pleasure.". Some sofa.

By the middle 1800's , Cuban seegars (as they were then known) were sold by Robert Lewis in St James's Street. In a shining example of how bad habits dont take too long to spread, Russians and Turks learned about cigarettes from the French, who in turn may have learned about smoking from the Spanish. (Paupers in Seville were making a form of cigarette, known as a 'papalette', from the butts of discarded cigars and papers as early as the 17th century. ).

In 1891, the Shah of Iran, offered some unneccessary trading concessions to England. The people got mad. The then reigning Ayatollah, as a sign of , probably , times to come, issued a Fatwa, and delared that Shiites would have nothing to do with tobacco. This sparked the Tobacco Revolution, the Shah versus the clergy. The Shah ended up revoking the deals with England, and the following year everybody forgot everything and happily started smoking again.

Then, tobacco. Today Oil. Tomorrow, what ?

By 1900's smoking became a lifestyle thing. Not having much to enjoy in terms of fashion, otherwise, men in England started wearing "smoking jackets" in an endeavour to look important while having an after dinner smoke along with a bottle of port.

Thankfully, someone got some sense in the early 1900's.

Actually, as early as 1858, the Lancet, had published a paper on the health dangers of smoking. But with all the bucolic lifestyles, no one paid any attention.

In 1895 , North Dakota, banned the sale of cigarettes. Over the next 26 years , 14 other states brought in anti smoking laws. A lady by the name of Lucy Gaston, who was an antismoking crusader, stood for President on 1920. The same year Warren Harding won the Republican nomination in a smoke filled room filled with the election bosses, and by 1927, most of the antismoking legislation was repealed.

Today, despite studies indicating the perils of being a smoker, various cancers being investigated in relation to smoking, we still live in a world where, planes and restaurants have smoking and no-smoking zones. The right to smoke is scrupolously honoured. The right to provide safe , non-trans-fat-containing food to America's children, is debated; and the Olympics, a showpiece of fitness and fineness of body, is has as its official drink, a cola, containing harmful phosphates, and 9 spoons of sugar in one teaspoon.

Nicotine, the main culprit in the cigarettes gets inhaled into our lungs, where most of it sits, while some part of it gets into our brain in like 10 seconds, and gets dispersed throughout the body in 20 seconds. While nictine by itself is fairly bad for you in the sense that it increases your risk of heart disease, cigarettes per se, contain carbon monxide and tar. Tar can play havoc with the lining of your lungs, and carbonmonoxide does its bit in keeping oxugen away , and affecting the artery walls so that all the fat you eat is encouraged to deposit itself there.

So, one way of looking at things is that you are really converting your body plumbing into a sewer sytem, which continues to get clogged with all the undesirable chemicals you keep pouring in. And yet you have folks going ecstatic over the first puff, inviting all the junk in, and spewing out some more junk in the form of smoke (in an artistic fashion); and all the time science tells us that while the lungs (in their semi destroyed state) still manage to partially cleanse the air you exhale, it still contains some of the poisonous chemicals. And so we come to passive smoking. Messing up the lives of those around you, by converting youself into a chimney exuding poisonous fumes.

If you were a factory, you would be fined by the EPA and forced to pay fines, and install pollution control measures. But because you are human, can think, have control over your actions, you have the freedom to be stupid and harmful to those around you.

Anyone with a smoking habit has an increased chance of lung, cervical, and other types of cancer; respiratory diseases such as emphysema, asthma, and chronic bronchitis; and cardiovascular disease, such as heart attack, high blood pressure, stroke, and atherosclerosis (narrowing and hardening of the arteries). The risk of stroke is especially high in women who take birth control pills.

Smoking can damage fertility, making it harder to conceive, and it can interfere with the growth of the fetus during pregnancy. It accounts for an estimated 14% of premature births and 10% of infant deaths. There is some evidence that smoking may cause impotence in some men.

Smokers are likely to exhibit a variety of symptoms that reveal the damage caused by smoking. A nagging morning cough may be one sign of a tobacco habit. Other symptoms include shortness of breath, wheezing, and frequent occurrences of respiratory illness, such as bronchitis, poor circulation, with cold hands and feet and premature wrinkles.. Smoking also increases fatigue and decreases the smoker's sense of smell and taste.

Sometimes the illnesses that result from smoking come on silently with little warning. For instance, coronary artery disease may exhibit few or no symptoms. At other times, there will be warning signs, such as bloody discharge from a woman's vagina, a sign of cancer of the cervix. Another warning sign is a hacking cough, worse than the usual smoker's cough, that brings up phlegm or blood-a sign of lung can

Countries have passed various legislations to ban smoking in public places. The Surgeon General has decreed that his message be dislayed on all cigarette packs and cartons. The tobacco lobby does its stuff in Washington, and cigarettes continue to be widely advertised as a lifestyle thing.

The question is whose life and what style .

Once the going looked like its getting tough at home, the tobacco companies turned to developing countries. They removed some warnings from the packs, and blithely sold the stuff in Africa, Asia, South America and Eastern Europe. And so, today, smokers in Argentina will not see any warning on a box of American cigarettes that smoking causes emphysema or heart disease. Smokers in Kenya will be told even less. American cigarette packs in Kenya do not even warn of the harm to pregnant women, that smoking causes lung cancer, or that quitting might be a good thing to do.

Many countries have now decreed that cigarette packs should carry pictures of people affected with various cancers and sicknesses attributable to smoking and tobacco chewing.

Cigarette packs sold in Canada require that color pictures of blackened lungs, diseased hearts, lip cancers and other tobacco-related diseases be displayed on the cigarette packs.

The Brtish medical Association is all for supporting anything that drives the point home.

Come June 2007, all cigarette packs sold in India will show graphic pictures of a corpse and mouth cancers will be displayed on the packs. Poignant pictures of a toddler with tubes in his nostrils will be part of some packs, designed to fill the smoker with dread regarding the potential fallout of smoking on innocent children. Tobacco products will also display the skull and crossbones picture on the packaging along with messages like "Tobacco causes a slow and painful death".

Today, It is estimated that above 2,500 Indians die every day due to diseases related to the consumption of tobacco products. Hopefully the gruesome display of graphics will serve as a deterrent.

Despite these measures, tobacco companies, are now in negotiations over the percentage of the surface of the cigarette pack that must display the graphics. Grown men squabbling over making money out of something already proven to be a massive body pollutant.

Profits increase and decrease on a continous scale . The health status of a person who has been a loyal consumer of these death sticks, only slides lower on a continous scale.

As if this was no enough, the New York Times on December 1, 2006, reported : "The [tobacco] industry has been aware at least since the 1960s that cigarettes contain significant levels of polonium. Exactly how it gets into tobacco is not entirely understood, but uranium “daughter products” naturally present in soils seem to be selectively absorbed by the tobacco plant, where they decay into radioactive polonium. High-phosphate fertilizers may worsen the problem, since uranium tends to associate with phosphates..." .

And you want to know why cancer cases are increasing all over the world ?

A look at the Wikipedia entry on "smoking" indicates a remark at the top of the page saying that this is a biased article, and someone has taken objection to it !

All educated people, none of them blind, all having exposure to quick information access, and still, inexplicably, this little weed of a plant has these loyal folks who defend it, warts and all .

James the first who ruled Britain in the 1600's had the right idea when he wrote a piece called "A counterblast to tobacco", and he said : "A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.

Then, he nationalised the tobacco industry and reduced taxes.

Now you know what rulers learn from each other, irrespective of which century they exist in.....

There are mother's days and there are Mother's Days. A day that really goes back to Greek and Roman times, and universally has a lot of relevance, irrespective of religion or culture.

Today, all that is visible and emphasized by the super commercialised society we live in, is the various ways you show your appreciation to your mother; and most of the times, it is restricted to buying gifts, at sales, advertised weeks in advance, or taking your mother out for a great meal. And the retailers and restaurant industry folks go laughing all the way to the bank.

In the midst of all this hoopla, there are some people , who have missed the bus , so to speak, while endeavouring to become mothers. Advanced ages, medical reasons, inability to carry a pregnancy to term, mental unwillingness to considering adoption as an option, abnormal attention to career matters at a younger age, putting child bearing/rearing/family matters etc , very low on the priority list; all these have today forced several couples to seek other avenues to become parents.

There is something to be said for having a child at an age that you are optimally designed to do so. The world over, people in different strata of society, different levels of financial security, and different family situations and conveniences, have children, and bringing a child up , to the best of ones ability, facing problems, attempting to surmount them, teaches one a lot about, existing in set of people, with varying personalities and habits, stress handling, respecting age and privacy, and we become all the richer for it, in people terms, if not dollar terms.

Today, with advances in medical technology, we are now celebrating the teenage of the first test tube baby, and going in for In vitro fertilization (IVF) techniques hs become a common thing.

Another thing that seems to be taking hold is the concept of Surrogate Motherhood. In all the buzz about what is lawful, what is unlawful, should we ban it, should be allow it, is it ethical, is it non ethical, folks seem to be confused about whether the emphasis should be on the "Surrogate" aspect or the "Motherhood" aspect.

Surrogacy itself is not new. Tales of surrogate mothers and intended parents can be found in Roman plays and the Holy Bible. Throughout history there have been many cultures where a relative carrying a child for an infertile relation was not uncommon.

Surrogate Motherhood, as such, came into public prominence with the controversial widely-publicized "Baby M" case in 1986. A lady by the name of Mary Beth Whitehead agreed to carry a baby to term, for a couple, and then waged a custody battle for the same child, unsuccessfully. Mary Beth, was what is termed a "traditional surrogate", or a surrogate mother who is genetically linked to the child.

Since that time, medical advances have now allowed "traditional surrogacy " to be replaced by "gestational surrogacy". In the earlier case the child was related to the mother genetically. In the Gestational case, the surrogate mother is smply the carrier of the child, and the sperm and ova belong to the parents of the child, who may be totally different people.

Being genetically related to the child often results in a lot of psychological problems to the birth mother, the new family, and sometimes , as a result, even to the child, should the problems persist into his/her childhood. Gestational surrogacy, makes things slightly less complicated. Research reveals that the predominant feeling that the Gestational surrogate mothers bear is an altruistic feeling , towards the childless couple. It is their child/embryo, and by carrying it , she is providing a safe, healthy environment , for the growing foetus, that the actual genetic mother cannot provide for various reasons. This has resulted in cordial and sometimes excellent long term relations between families.

Unlike adoption of a child, surrogacy legislation is not so well developed today. Severeal states have their own rules on whether to allow it, and to what extent. its still a fairly unregulated field, and experts say that number of babies born through surrogacy every year could actually go into hundreds.

There are several agencies that have come up that match clients to potential surrogate mothers. These are not fly-by-night spurious things, but proper places, staffed with doctors, lawyers, and mental health professionals. web search indicates at least 80 surrogacy programs or centers functioning across the country.

The main question one may have , is about the cost of surrogacy. What does it cost to have a surrogate mother carry a child to full term? Legal, medical, psychological, and administrative fees to an infertile couple can easily top $50,000. The surrogate mothers need to take hormone injections everyday for four months, for example, and several ultrasound and other tests are routinely required to monitor the progress. The possibility of twins and triplets is high. the commitment of the gestational surrogate mother has to be outstandingly high; today the demand still far outstrips the supply, and the Los Angeles center (Center for Surrogate Parenting and Egg Donation in Los Angeles), has a big waiting list.

Is surrogate parenting being done simply for love and altruism ? The answer is no. The surrogate mother is adequately compensated for her time, effort,dedication, and commitment, and several healthy experienced mothers, who have had early healthy pregnancies have participated in surrogate motherhood activities of the gestational kind. They have put aside a nest egg for the education of their existing children, or used the money for some other important family reason such as someones serious illness etc.

Speaking of waiting lists, can outsourcing be far behind ?

The answer is a resounding NO.

The Nagla family , an Asian family in London found that they were unable to have children. After four years of marriage , Lata the daughter-in-law was unable to get pregnant. All kinds of treatments, medications, etc had absolutely no effect. This whole thing, tended to actually tear the very traditional family apart. A test tube baby was considered, but was finally ruled out by the doctors.

They finally decided on the surrogate mother system, but found the costs in England to be too prohibtive.

Fortunately for them, as is the custom in families in India (from where they hailed), the extended family was able to get the contact of a Clinic and the Doctors where these specialised treatments were conducted. Dr Nayna Patel, who specialsed in these treatments, suggested that someone from the extended family itself, be the gestational surrogate mother. She felt it would be nice for the babies to have someone from the family carry them. The brides mother, after a lot of encouragement from her own family and the grooms family, decided to offer herself as the surrogate mother.

The first attempt at implanting the embryo failed. The second was a success. Grandma carried the grandsons to full term, and delivered two great healthy babies. The genetic mother was overjoyed to have her own mother carry the babies, and her in-laws think that this is a very great and wonderful effort on the maternal grandmothers part. There is an immense amount of respect for the surrogate mother within all the families. Today, the twins are happy and growing up in Ilford England.

Not everyone has such co-operative relatives, but to a lot of women in India, the concept of gestational surrogate motherhood has come as something that can help their families to a better future.

A year ago, a couple flew down from London to this dusty, unremarkable town of Anand in India's Gujarat State, where Dr Patel has her Clinic, to choose a surrogate mother. They were part of a growing number of childless foreigners beating a track to India, drawn here for many of the same reasons that have made India a top destination for medical tourism: low costs, highly-qualified doctors, and a more relaxed legal atmosphere.

The finances, actually tell why these things work. In the US, surrogate mothers are typically paid $15,000, and agencies claim another $30,000. In India, the entire costs range from $2,500 to $6,500. Getting $2800, say, for a surrigate motherhood effort is a big sum by Indian standards.

Despite the urge to shout "Expoiltation!" , this needs to be viewed in non financial terms. It is, for example, not the same as donating a kidney, or an eye. Dr Patel, who runs her Anand Clinic, says "A nine-month pregnancy can never be forced; beyond the commercial angle, having a child is a deeply emotional issue."

The Centre for Family Research at Cambridge University did research on the mental attitude of surrogate mothers post the-baby, and found that British surrogate mothers did not suffer major emotional problems , and the initial natural feelings sort of settled down as time elapsed.

"Many surrogate mothers see this not as 'handing over' the baby, but as 'handing back' the baby, as the baby was never theirs to keep." says Dr Nayan Patel of the Fertility Clinic in Anand.

Each day, dozens of inquiries from India and abroad inundate the clinic. Parents and prospective surrogates are carefully screened and counseled by the clinic, and both parties must sign an elaborate legal contract that signs over the surrogate mother's rights to the baby and underlines the financial terms.

Being a surrogate mother in India is not easy. Moral pressures, and your position in your society need to be considered. Neighbours may not understand, you may be socially boycotted and/or abhorred. Sometimes the mothers move to a different town for the duration of their pregnancy, and come by only for checkups with the clinic.

And its not as if, advanced countries with "advanced" ideas of morality and social behaviour are supportive of surrogate motherhood, whether gestational of traditional. Today, Sweden, Spain, France, and Germany. do not allow it. Other countries such as South Africa, the UK, and Argentina, have ethics committees that look at each case and decide whether to allow it or no.

Critics exist. Armchair and otherwise.

They call it "commoditisation of motherhood" and an "exploitation of the poor by the rich.".

While it is true that the poor benefit financially, and offer what is called by non-sensitive types, as a "rent-a-womb" service, there is a social dimension to all this. Irrespective of whether the surrogate mother is rich or poor, particularly in the cultural, multireligious ethos of India, there is a great empathy for the childless couple's situation, reproduction is viewed as a sacred obligation, and is considered that all the good you do for others in this life , is always rewarded by God.

At the end of the day, irrespective of which country you hail from, a mother is a mother, helping someone else become one.

History is replete with instances of wet-nurses; lactating women functioning as nursing mothers for babies, where the birth mother had no milk, or sometimes, surprisingly, no interest or no time to feed the child, typically in royal households through the ages.

Laws will come, debates will be held, God will possibly be invoked. Oprah might have several programs dedicated to this. Brangelina might even show their support for this in some way by donating maoney . Prominent people will take prominent positions on this. Folks may even invoke Mom and apple pie. In a country where same sex marriages are subjects of legislation, in various states, its a matter of time before surrogacy becomes an issue, and someone flogs the "outsourcing" aspect as a political issue.

In the meanwhile, on the second Sunday in May, while you take your Mom to dinner with the wonderful card from Hallmark and a bouquet of roses, not to speak of the fantastic present you got her, spare a little thought for those surrogate mothers, who give nine months of their time, care and dedication, so that someone , who actually dreamt of children, may now actually have them......

In Honor of March 16, 2007, National Hiccup Day !

Remember the last time "uck"/"glug" (excuse me), you had these embarassing , as I call them, "blips", in the middle of a great after-dinner conversation , with an even greater after-dinner partner ? And you sort of gulped some water, took a funny breath, and nothing changed ?

Well, hiccups have a funny way of appearing randomly. They dont give you a choice of sound, or a guarantee that they will last just for a short time either. You just have to, as they say, grin (try that while hiccuping), and bear it.

Let me enlightten folks about the fact that March 16th, 2007 is supposed to be National Hiccup Day.

There are various things one can do on this day. You can avidly look for people who are getting hiccups and sympathize with them. Offering them a glass of water would get you a look of wordless gratitude. If you know the person better, you can even rub their back, and pat their heads. Pinch their nose. Offer them a spoon of sugar. Look suitably pained.

Actually the word hiccup is a messed-up transformation of "hicough", which really tells you in an onomatopoeical way, what a hiccup is : a short quick cough.

Scientists have an explanation for what happens when you hiccup. The diaphragm has a spasmodic contraction, typically several times a minute. As a result of the air pressure differences inside and outside the lungs, there is a big rush of air into the lungs, and the space between the vocal chords, or the "glottis", immediately snaps shut, generating the , what else, HICCUP sound.

People have always questioned what purpose the hiccups serve. Is it a remnant left over from perhistoric days, like, the tailbone ? Is there a secret need for it that scientists have yet to find ?

Turns out that, not just people like you and me, but folks like babies still in the womb also get hiccups. Ultrasound scans have demonstratd that babies get hiccups. While one would like to think that these are, in training, for the problems they will face later on in life, thanks to pollution, global warning, inflation, food adulteration, crime etc, the real reason is different .

One theory is that the movements prepare babies' respiratory muscles for breathing after birth; another says, that they prevent amniotic fluid entering the lungs. Dr Strauss at the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, suggests that the contraction of the diaphragm suggests throwing "out" of air as in coughing, and not "gulping in" of air as in hiccups. He points out the similarity in amphibians having gills for breathing , in whom there is this type of glottis-closing (to protect lungs from water entering them), while water passes over the gills.

While, one may not have heard, say, a tadpole hiccuping and/or coughing , this observation of Dr Straus and his team suggests that this entire "hiccup technology", is a remnant from so many millions of years ago, and there is a great similarity in gill ventilation and the hiccuping action. While we have evolved over the last 370 million years into (hopefully) smart, twolegged thinking folks, it seems like although the need for such respiration is not required, the brain circuitry that manages it , still sits quietly dormant , and gets activated every now and then.

Scientists have also suggested that babies hiccuping in the womb, is a sort of a hint or practice for the babies, on what suckling is going to be, and something that would help them suckle easily.

While these things are serious stuff that scientists work on, we humans have hiccuped our way through history, with a plethora of cures and suggestions on how to stop hiccups.

Hiccups are commonly caused by distention of the stomach, which you get if you eat too much, drink carbonated beverages, or swallow too much air. They may sometimes be caused by all kinds of serious medical problems too, and research indicates that hiccups can be caused by people having , drastic problems like skull fractures, epilepsy, dianbetes, myocardial infarction (heart attack to us ignorant types), tuberculosis, meningitis, ulcerative colitis, and most embarrasing f all, bowel obstruction.

Children also get hiccups more oftener than adults. An ongoing myth says that hiccupping children indicates growing children. Actually, it has more to do, with their relative anatomy, size of their stomachs and other organs. Kids imbibing soda, tend to expand their stomachs which puts pressure on the diaphragm, and voila ! we have hiccups ....

There is also a school of thought that says, that a hiccup is a mechanism designed by the body to sort of "shake up" a piece of food which may have got stuck in the foodpipe, maybe due to abnormal size . Actually, our food moves down our foodpipe, due to peristalsis or successive contractions across the foodpipe, as well as due to gravity. This has to do with us humans being bipeds. However, a look back (difficult as that may be ), at human evolution of 370 million years , suggests that this hiccup mechanism would possibly be an important thing for four legged creatures, where gravity really didnt come into the picture, as the food sort of trundled its way, towards the stomach in a more or less horizontal plane.

Be that as it may, we humans are now the species of choice on this planet (at least I hope so), and it would be useful then to enumerate the various cures that are specified for hiccups:

Hold your breath for as long as possible, then swallow when you feel a hiccup is about to come.

Swallow while holding your nose closed.

Drink a glass of water very quickly, while a friend puts their hands over your ears.

Pant deeply.

Bend forward and drink water from the wrong side of a glass.

Pull your knees up or lean forward to squeeze your chest.

Pull your tongue fairly forcefully.

Use a teaspoon to lift the uvula. This is the fleshy tag that hangs down from the back of the roof of the mouth

Use a cotton wool bud to tickle the roof of your mouth, at the point towards the back where the hard roof becomes softer.

Take a teaspoonful of sugar, swallowed dry

Chew and swallow some dry bread.

Hold your breath for 10 seconds.

Breathe into a paper bag for 2-minutes, re-breathing the air inside the bag.

Using your thumb, apply gentle pressure to the space between your teeth and upper lip. Using the index finger of the same hand, apply pressure just below the right nostril on the outside of the lip.

Close your eyes and apply slow, gentle pressure to the outside of the eyelids, over the eyeballs.

Besides the above popular remedies, serious doctor types have specific remedies , say, in Acupressure, Homeopathy, Imagery, Reflexology, and even Meditation. It is suggested that folks trying for cures under these categories, make it a point to consult medical professionals before taking any medicines.

There is a yet another category of hiccups called "persistent hiccups". These are hiccups that just refuse to stop within decent intervals, and where, none of the above mentioned sensible cures work. These kind of hiccups often arise from some serious problem somewhere else in the body, and sometimes even surgery ends up being part of the solution. Persistent hiccups are more likely in men than women and, usually, decrease or disappear during sleep, but resume when the person wakes.

A typical cause for persistent hiccups could be, say, some conditions that irritate nerves near the diaphragm. This condition, could possibly be something like an enlarged thyroid. Sometimes, blood pressure medications such as methyldopa and some tranquilisers are also known to induce such hiccups. Very low levels of salt in your body may sometims serve as a trigger for persistent hiccups.

On a more serious note, the various medical conditions that can act as triggers may include but may not be restricted to : (take a deep breath, and here goes....) : skull fracture, closed head trauma, surgery, aneurysms, tumours, goitres, diverticuli, subdiaphragmatic abscess, cholecystitis, pleurisy, meningitis, encephalitis, heartburn, spicy food, gastritis, peptic ulcers, pancreatitis, achalasia, gastric distension, oesophageal rings and strictures, multiple sclerosis, cerebrovascular accidents, psychogenic, uraemia, and finally, what else , drugs. (I am surprised they left out tooth pain, chicken pox, fractured limbs, .....:-).....)

(Above study published by PETER J KAHRILAS, GUOXIANG SHI, of Northwestern University Medical School, Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, in a journal with the amusing name of GUT, November 1997 issue).

The tricky thing here is a thing called the Phrenic nerve. Together with the Vagus nerve , these two nerves often play havoc with a persons comfort level. When these nerves get irritated, particularly the phrenic, messages flash back and forth , to and from the nerve center in the brain, and the result is probably a command that says "BEGIN HICCUP". Basically these nerves are everywhere, so you are never sure just where you are antagonising them to throw them into a tantrum.

The cure is then based, obviously, on the original cause, and the identification of the body part , which could be the culprit.

And so we have the case, of a 16-year-old girl who began hiccuping after receiving a blow to the jaw. A brain scan found that a blood vessel was pressing against the vagus nerve in her neck. Surgeons inserted a Teflon spacer between the nerve and the blood vessel, and the hiccuping stopped. When the spacer later fell out the hiccuping resumed. Hmm.

And then there is the 27-year-old man who complained that he'd been hiccuping for four days. The doctor looked into the guy's ear and saw a hair tickling the eardrum. The hair having been washed out, the hiccups stopped.

When all else doesnt work, doctors may try drugs like chlorpromazine, or , say, tickling the pharynx (thats in your neck, just in case you get strange ideas), with a catheter stuck through the nose, sometimes even hypnosis, or acupuncture.

In India, when someone hiccups, they say that someone is remembering the hiccuping person. This is always the cause of much mirth and teasing; one has sometimes suspected whether the resultant laughter was part of a naturally and brilliantly designed solution , to get the hiccuping to stop.......

Back in 1833, with the concept of anaesthesia still to sink in, and bloodletting, leeches, and similar terrorising tactics being the order of the day, the choice treatment of persistent hiccups was, that you blistered or burned the skin above the phrenic nerve on the neck and back . (It has occured to me several times that back in the 19th century, doctors took an unusually enhanced interest in very dramatic , war-like, and violent, screaming solutions, to simple things like hiccups. The problem in those Victorian days was probably the complete inability to say "excuse me" as the hiccups kept coming everytime you thought of apologising. Perfectly revolting, hmm ? )

With the advent of the 21st century, life has become slightly more civilised.

Well, almost.

There was this 60 year old man who was hiccuping for two days, non stop. The man was being treated for a disease of the pancreas, and had a tube inserted in his nose, which kind of triggered the hiccups. They tried the obvious solution of removing this tube. No luck. The phrenic nerve never forgets. The hiccuping continued unabated. What they then tried, was , if you think about it, a very embarrasing but completely logical thing.

Logical, because if you tried inserting things thru the mouth, it would aggravate trouble in the already troubed area; if you tried inserting through the ear, you would pierce the ear drum and make the man deaf for life. The only other apertures were below the waist. What the doctors tried was a "digital rectal massage". (Those wallowing in confusion, at realising their gross ignorance of human anatomy may consult their doctors).

SHAZAM ! THE HICCUPS STOPPED. Severeal hours later they started up. Another D.R.M. was performed. And that was the end of the poor 60 year old man's hiccup problem, (and in addition, the problem of being subject to massages in embarrasing places).

In case you think I made it up, please see:

The Journal of Internal Medicine, 1990 Feb;227(2):145-6.
Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage.
Odeh M, Bassan H, Oliven A.
Department of Inernal Medicine, Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel.

Simple solutions for simple problems ?