Quality of life is the key: our goal shouldn’t be just to live to a ripe old age. No one wants to be old and decrepit (or decrepit at any age, frankly). But old and healthy – now that’s an exciting goal. Jeremy Walston, M.D., a gerontologist at Johns Hopkins, co-directs the Biology of Frailty […]
Medicine wears off. If you take a pill, its benefit might last for 12 or even 24 hours, and then you have to take another one. The same holds true for acupuncture. Although administered differently – inserting very thin needles through your skin at strategic points – its effects tend to fade just as […]
Do you feel connected, or tethered? While you’re mulling that over, here’s another one: Can you handle downtime? The art of loafing — made famous by such characters as Huckleberry Finn; the morbidly obese passengers of the spaceship, Axiom, in the Pixar movie WALL-E; and cats everywhere – has its good points. There’s something to […]
This post, as many Vital Jake posts do, came because of a conversation I happened to have with a guy at church. He said he felt bad, and that he had been waking up with itchy eyes and a headache. I asked him how often he changed his sheets, and he was stumped. He didn’t […]
When Lyme Disease Doesn’t Really Go Away Ticks are evil. Deer ticks are even worse: little dots of evil, the size of a freckle. They spread Lyme disease, and what can happen next sounds like a horror movie. But first, the ticks: They are the minuscule vectors that transmit Lyme disease. But really what they […]
Good news for people who love barbecue, hot dogs, burgers, and steak cooked on the grill: It pays to eat your veggies. The key to this story is something called “PhIP.” A few years ago, noted Johns Hopkins scientist Bill Nelson, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, began investigating its role […]
A broken heart. Shoveling snow. Being a weekend warrior. Eating like a pig, no offense to pigs. What do these things have in common? They all have the potential to cause a heart attack. They could kill you. “But wait!” you may say. “I exercise. I have a good diet. Gosh darn it, […]