Your Health This (No Shit Sherlock) Week

You might have thought this “Your Health” topic was already covered when Anna posted the Your Health This (Obvi) Week. But see, there are just so many headlines out there that are begging to be made fun of for being so darn self evident. Here are a few. May they hearten your common sense.

People retire and get lazy. A recent study from the American Journal of Epidemiology reports that retirees are three times more likely than working adults to have a decline in “work-related” physical activity. The bad part is the retirees didn’t compensate for their increased vegetativeness. But who can blame them?

Highways drive city populations away. That’s right. City dwellers use said highways to leave the city behind, to the tune of an 18% reduction in city populations across the U.S. Without roads, the nation’s city populations would have grown by about 8% instead, presumably because none of the disaffected teenagers could find their way out. Or so concludes Brown university economist Nathaniel Baum-Snow in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Wide Disparities in Health Care Across the U.S. , a state scorecard reports. Oh yes that’s right. No joke. One of the report’s bullet points goes like this: “States vary widely in their health care performance and this means there is lots of potential for the nation overall to improve.” When health care spending outstrips economic growth and 46 million Americans don’t have health insurance there isn’t “potential” to improve, there’s an acute need.

Back in 2003 the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education decreed that interns couldn’t work more than 80 hours per week. Why? Because sleep deprivation increased their risk of crashing their car or making grave errors on the job. Keep in mind, these so-called curbed hours still work out to a robustly workaholic 11.4 hours per day, every day. But more (relatively) humane work conditions for medical residents create more humane conditions for their patients. With the (somewhat) shorter hours residents work, fewer patients get sent to intensive care and fewer patients get mistakes in their prescriptions, according to a Yale School of Medicine study in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Because if your doctor’s going to touch you there, a limp cold handshake just won’t do… Patients Want To Shake Hands With Their Physicians, Survey Finds. As opposed to those who prefer a song and dance.

Late weekend sleep among teens may lead to poor academic performance. Teenagers who stay up late on school nights and make up for it by sleeping late on weekends are more likely to perform poorly in the classroom. Which is ironic cause that was me in a nutshell and I did okay. Bet you readers did too.

This one’s a doozie too. “If your teenage son or daughter starts having mood swings, and stays out late, then it could very well be a sign that your kid is in love.” You can also tell if this is the case by such physiological changes as “sweaty palms, pounding hearts, and increased and excessive energy when they were around their beloved.” God. High-school palms were SO gross and sweaty.

Disclaimer: Your Health This Week may contain inaccuracies, errors, omissions and in a few rare cases outright fabrications, especially in the disclaimer. This is normal, and adjusting your screen or wireless connection will not make it better. Except for errors in this week’s This Week, which Anna typed with sweaty palms, pounding heart, and increased and excessive energy.