Showing posts with label cyberchondria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cyberchondria. Show all posts

Monday, October 9, 2017

The Never-Ending Battle Against Sport’s Hidden Foe


by Bill Pennington,
NY Times October 6, 2017

I have serious questions about the value and validity of articles like this.  They tend to scare people and promote health anxiety and lead to cyberchondria.  However, we should know what our patients are reading and what frightens them.

Article in Full
"Although the most recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2015, reported a decrease in MRSA infections in the general public since 2005, it is difficult to tell what is happening in locker rooms because there has been no study specifically on sports. Anecdotally, based on the number of cases they have treated in recent years, athletic trainers and team doctors nationwide have insisted that MRSA cases in sports declined substantially in the last decade. But they, too, have no data.

In the N.F.L., the effort to curb MRSA now borders on a crusade, with an official prevention manual that is 315 pages long. There are meticulous protocols for dozens of procedures… [What about C.T.E. I thought while reading this?]

[There have been many MRSA scares.]  About 10 years ago, a Bowdoin athlete was unaware he had contracted MRSA, and with a contagious, open wound on his leg, he wandered around the campus — to the dining hall, the weight room, the locker room and the coaches’ offices."
from "BiologiyStories" web site

Sunday, October 8, 2017

Health Anxiety in Dermatology

by Valencia Long and David Elpern
Int J Dermatol. 2017 Sep;56(9):968-971. doi: 10.1111/ijd.13692

Patients see doctors with varying degrees of concern regardin their health. While some require tests or treatments, a subset has severe health anxiety and cannot be reassured by tests, procedures, or pharmaceuticals but may be helped, at least temporarily, by a sympathetic listening face and reassurance. Hence, we designed a questionnaire to investigate health anxiety in patients recruited from a general dermatology clinic.

The study can be accessed at this pdf: Health Anxiety in Dermatology

Skin Disease: Beyond the Visable

The Lancet  Editorial:  Volume 408 , Issue 10555   p577  August 15, 2026 Even the very word vitiligo denotes stigma—it probably comes from t...