Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Sweet SCAM – Part 2

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English: This is an Indian sweet, which is giv...
Image via Wikipedia

So Dr Prasad has treated about 100,000 diabetic patients with the ‘unconventional treatment’, laddu! He claims that if sugar is included in the diet, it can rejuvenate the pancreas damaged by conventional treatments like insulin. So you just have to eat a laddu and go for jogging to cure diabetes. Our honourable MP Mr PT Thomas took no time to realise that diabetes being an incurable disease is a myth and started eating laddu. The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation alone contributes $110 million for diabetes research every year. So if laddoo was missed by them, then it is a very costly mistake indeed!

So Is this an an all too familiar combination of a placebo effect and over emphasized anecdotal evidence?

I  will discuss my (philosophical) views on this (in short) but I don’t claim that I am right. It is a well known and accepted fact that mind has a profound effect on health and disease states. But unfortunately modern medicine is designed to ignore this effect. Our clinical research protocols are designed to ignore/nullify this effect by introducing the concept of ‘double blind placebo controlled trial’.

But we have successful systems of alternative medicine like homeopathy that depends entirely on placebo effect. Yoga, as per my knowledge is a very well designed system to augment this placebo effect. So it could have a beneficial effect on many (almost all) ailments. I think Indian Yogi’s were infact the first proponents of the philosophy of idealism that we now attribute to Kant. But if we try to test these systems of ‘medicine’ all trials will fail because of the intrinsic ‘weakness’ of clinical research.

To enhance the placebo effect these alternative systems adopt two strategies.
1. Give a very complicated and sometimes irrational explanation for the effect which nobody can understand and hence perceived as plausible.
2. Give a ridiculously simple explanation that everybody can identify with.

Homeopathy adopts the first strategy with the principle of ‘dilution augments potency’ while Yoga and Wayanad treatment adopts the second strategy of ‘massaging the pancreas’.  There is nothing wrong in this approach as long as it gives favourable results. But it may not work for me since I can think of more direct ways of pancreatic massage. Now will it work for you?


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Sweet Scam – Part 1

Category : Uncategorized

Hey.. This is not about the top 10 Indian scams this year! I have used SCAM here as an acronym for a Specialist in Complimentary and Alternative Medicine. And you must be wondering who is the SCAM I am referring to. He is none other than Dr M.V.Prasad, who proposed a revolutionary sweet treatment for diabetes.

Though I am an allopathic doctor, my intention here is not to set a partisan tone to a debate on its credibility. In this and subsequent posts, (probably it may take quite a few posts to complete this and I don’t blog frequently) I will blabber on the philosophy of such scams (believe me guys, no pun intended.) BTW Dr Prasad is not even a SCAM, He passed MBBS in 1995, from Calicut medical college, and is presently working as Asst.surgeon at PHC, Kenichira. Since laddoo is not the conventional treatment for diabetes, let us give him the title of SCAM and continue with the discussion of his revolutionary methodology in the next post.


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H Syndrome

Category : Uncategorized

Hi

Have U
heard of
H syndrome? OMIM 612391

H Syndrome
has
hyperpigmentation
hypertrichosis
hepatosplenomegaly
heart anomalies
hearing loss
hypogonadism,
height is low
hyperglycaemia/diabetes mellitus
hallux valgus and

Histologically
histiocytic infiltrate

haha


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The city of Kombodinjamakkal in Google Earth

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(Click on the image to enlarge)
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Vanilla Cultivation in Kerala (South India)

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Vanilla planifolia is an orchid native to Mexico, now widely grown throughout the tropics. Decreased demand caused by the production of synthetic vanilla (95% of vanilla products), have pushed the international market price down to the $40 per kilo range in the middle of 2005.

The farmers of the South Indian state of Kerala realized the potential of this crop and started cultivating vanilla in the fertile lands of this picturesque state in the last few years. However they are now in a crisis owing to lack of local demand and export policies bringing the cost down to less than $15 per kilo.

The picture shows last years crop, carefully processed and stored in air tight wooden containers to retain the flavour. Contact us for more information.


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Zostavax

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Merck recently gained approval for a vaccine called Zostavax for preventing herpes zoster reactivation in elderly people. This live virus vaccine is unusual in that it is to prevent reemergence, not to prevent initial infection. Can the same concept be used for recurrent herpes simplex infection which is much more disabling than herpes zoster in younger people?


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Seborrhoeic Keratosis

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A biosy proven Seborrhoeic keratosis (acanthotic varient) in one of my European patients.

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Tomcat installation

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Tomcat installation

Today I installed Tomcat 5.5 on my computer. Though it may be helpful to debug my servlets (if I write a new one) I actually installed it because of some other reason. I started the service from the program menu. But the loop back address with 8080 port was not working.  I tried to figure out the problem. I tried to start the service through component manager and I found that the service was automatically shutting down after some time! Internet search was not helpful.  However it started working after updating the JRE. So it was a version incompatibility.  So if somebody else encounters the same problem try updating your JRE.

Bell
GulfDoctor.net


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