We’ve been seeing a lot of highway mishaps lately including an overspeeding bus which went over the skyway’s ramp and landed on the highway about 30 feet below. Road accidents are now the fourth leading cause of deaths in the Philippines based on statistics from the Department of Health. The trend is alarming and health [...]
There appears to be a thin line between domestic corporal punishment of children and physical abuse, writes Ria Mae Verdolaga, a medical student at the University of the Philippines College of Medicine. Ria Mae, together with her other fellow “sisters” in the Mu Sigma Phi sorority have authored a comprehensive dissertation the subject which will [...]
“It’s scary to have Alzheimer’s, and doctors are not exempted from it,” Dr. Taddy Gonzales, a classmate of mine in medical school at UST, told me on the phone. The ever-witty Taddy gave amusing ripostes on our piece on Alzheimer’s disease (AD) last week in this column. Obviously, Taddy is least likely to develop it; [...]
B.C., previously a civil engineer who’s just barely in his early 60s, took close to a minute before he could even remember the name of his wife of 35 years. Whereas before, he could remember every detail of the housing plans he constructed, he cannot even determine now whether he’s in the doctor’s clinic or [...]
The world was shocked this week with the massacre that happened in Utoya, an island in Norway. The country would be the last place one would expect such a dastardly thing could happen in. I recall during a meeting we had in Oslo last year, we could see policemen patrolling without guns and when we [...]
WOMEN’S HEALTH is entirely a different medical field of its own. We usually refer our female patients to our OB-gynecologist colleagues for more competent care when it comes to such problems as menstruation, maternal and reproductive health, contraception, child birth, menopause and breast masses. But women’s health extends beyond issues specific to the human female [...]
Coming back from a meeting in Athens this week on heart attack and stroke prevention, I was saddened by the news that a highly esteemed trustee of ours in the Makati Business Club—Rizalino “Roy” Navarro—succumbed to an apparent heart attack while exercising in the RCBC corporate gym. His death is a big loss to the [...]
WE USED to think that migraine is a bothersome but otherwise benign type of headache. Recent data suggest that it may not really be as harmless as it was believed to be. Two weeks ago, I joined around 20 Filipino heart specialists who attended an international congress on the treatment of hypertension and its complications [...]
A FEW weeks ago, heart specialists from all over the country gathered at the Edsa Shangri-La Hotel for its annual convention to discuss common heart problems. Quite out of the scientific program on the last day, discussions turned to dealing with food poisoning as around 30 of the doctors, including my wife and I had [...]
As a rejoinder to our column last week on the RH bill, Dr. Ramon F. Abarquez Jr., a highly esteemed professor emeritus at the University of the Philippines College of Medicine and a distinguished academician of the National Academy of Science and Technology, e-mailed me his personal views on the current furor regarding the controversial [...]
I’m looking forward to the final happy resolution of the stormy debates which the reproductive health (RH) bill controversy has been spawning. Disagreement and differences in opinions can be healthy up to a certain point, but when the debates generate more divergence and it already creates a yawning gap that cannot be bridged by objectivity [...]
THERE IS no question that Manny Pacquiao is a most effective endorser for any product or advocacy. But there lies the big problem. Because he is sought after by practically anyone who has a product or cause to promote, he seems to be having a hard time saying “No” to these people, and he does [...]
