By Eulalee Thompson, Staff Reporter
New Year's Eve presents an opportunity to
highlight some of the popular 2003 health stories based on readers' response throughout the year.
Madness
downsized: phasing out Bellevue Hospital
(February 5)
(Dip them Bedward, dip them, dip them in the healing stream...)
BACK IN April 1921, Bedward, the popular black activist from August Town, St. Andrew, was committed to Bellevue Hospital and he never again saw the light of day. He died in that institution on November 8, 1930. The British colonial authorities of the day claimed that he was a mad man but the common belief was that he was locked away because his inciting of the black masses to action and his other goings-on had made him a thorn in the side of the colonials.
This snippet of Jamaica's history still remains controversial but is also an indication of the history of Bellevue Hospital entwined with mental healthcare and echoes of imprisonment.
'The British have been using it (mental health institutions) as a custodial sentence and they are still using it mainly to lock up black people. It is a big issue in England where you have institutions of varying levels of security housing mentally-ill patients...because they want to be able to scrape up black people and put them under tremendous straightjacking,' said Professor Freddie Hickling, head of psychiatry at the University of the West Indies.
Mystery illness (March 26)
Even while the world is distracted by air raid sirens and the 'shock and awe' launched on the Middle Eastern country, Iraq, international scientists have been locked away in their laboratories, trying to identify the germ that could be causing an emerging infectious disease, described as an atypical pneumonia named Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
At the beginning of this week, 456 cases of this mystery illness were reported, mushrooming from the 350 cases identified at the end of last week. The death toll reported by the World Health Organisation (WHO) had also quickly moved from 10 at the end of last week to 17 at the beginning of this week. The scientists suspect that the culprit germ is Paramyxoviridae virus.
Stress, tension & belly fat (April 16)
Cavemen would have much use for the hormone, cortisol, but in the modern world, researchers now say this fight-or-flight response hormone, is out of place and does nothing more than contribute to flabby bellies especially among women who are slim.
The theory is that it's all in the body's intricate, environmental defence system. A stressor is perceived in the environment, this urges the brain to get on the alert, releasing corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) in preparation for the fight-or-flight response. Almost simultaneously, other things happen in the body the lungs pull in more oxygen, the pupils dilate, appetite reduces and digestion shuts down.
A new normal blood pressure (May 28)
Up to May 13, 2003, a blood pressure reading of 140/90 millimetres of mercury (mm Hg) was accepted as normal by the medical community. On May 14, 2003, things changed. On that day the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation and Treatment of High Blood Pressure (a U.S.-based health group) issued their seventh report (the famous JNC reports), redefining and reclassifying normal and abnormal blood pressure.
Their report, published in the May 21, 2003 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), indicates that based on a review of all the medical evidence, since the last report was published in 1997 (the JNC VI), a blood pressure reading of 140/90 cannot be classified as normal but as stage one hypertension. Normal blood pressure is now defined as any reading below 120/80 mm Hg.
"The report has made a few new suggestions which are not all that earth shattering, it's just demonstrating something we knew all along but we are just getting the evidence...," said Professor Rainford Wilks, director, Epidemiology Research Unit, Tropical Metabolism Research Institute (TMRI).
Patients are dying in pain! (September 24)
In a report carried recently on the BBC's world-wide electronic and print services, Dr. Dingle Spence, a local consultant in oncology and palliative medicine, in referring to cancer patients here, is quoted as saying that, 'a majority of people die in hospital but with uncontrollable pain'. She was also quoted as saying that, 'sadly, in Jamaica the management of cancer and end-stage cancer is probably where the UK was about 30 years ago'.
This widely-distributed interview may have caused considerable embarrassment to Dr. Spence's local colleagues but that's her story and she is sticking
to it.
Clueless on mammogramms (October 8)
The gold standard in breast cancer detection is still the mammogramm. Sometimes, it is shrouded in controversy it might not detect a true cancer or it might erroneously define a find as malignant when it is not. So, the breast X-ray is not perfect, promising an 85 per cent chance of finding breast cancer.
But, in spite of the mammogramm's high performance as a diagnostic tool for breast cancer, a large chunk of the Jamaican population is still unaware of what a mammogramm is and they don't have a clue about what it is supposed
to do.
Wired for
violence (October 15)
Labour pains ends and a new mother, flushed with love, gazes admiringly at her buddle of joy. But this happy mother, with newborn in hand, may be cuddling a child who is already a victim of violence.
It is new research, which Dr. Earl Wright, Director, Health Ministry's Mental Health Services, indicates that the pregnant woman's experience of violence triggers chemical reactions which can alter the development and function of the unborn child's brain cells.
Surgery of
the future (October 29)
Perhaps patients, a generation or two into the future, will see as really passé, the huge incisions their mothers received on their bellies to remove fibroids or ovarian cysts. They will feel this way because the surgery of the future, already backing up against the conservative trends in medicine, is the more high-tech laparoscopic surgery.
"The results from laparoscopy are far superior to (traditional) 'open' surgery, for example, in (destroying adhesions)," said Dr. Matthew Taylor obstetrician and gynaecologist. These patient-benefits from laparoscopic surgery versus traditional 'open' surgery are linked to the smaller cuts that are made on the abdomen and the thinner instruments used.
In 'open' surgery, Dr. Charles Rockhead, obstetrician and gynaecologist, explained, that a large cut is made to expose the area being operated on but in laparoscopic surgery, the need for this large cut is eliminated.
Low sperm count among Jamaican men (November 12)
The machismo of Jamaican men notwithstanding, in far too many cases, their sperm are either too weak to make the journey up the fallopian tube to meet the woman's egg, for fertilisation and pregnancy to take place or in some cases, they have no sperm to make the journey.
Sometimes, creation actually needs a little assistance and this is where British-born embryologist, Denise Everett, enters the picture. A large chunk of her week is spent behind her microscope in the in vitro fertility (IVF) laboratory at the University Hospital of the West Indies' (UHWI's) Fertility Management Unit, analysing the quality of men's semen. She performs about 20 cases of semen analysis each month.
The ebb and flow of lupus (November 26)
The partially-peeled orange fell from Kerine Hamilton's trembling hands and onto the kitchen floor, along with the knife she was using to peel it. The news was too overwhelming. Her doctor had just called; she said that her blood tests came back positive for lupus. She had to go see the specialist right away.
"I actually felt scared...I remember going to work and just standing in the lady's room and saying, 'Oh Lord this is not happening'. It was a Monday and I remember that by coincidence, on that very morning, I was hearing a former co-worker of mine, who was a member of the Lupus foundation... on the radio, talking about Lupus because it was Lupus Awareness Month. Basically that was the only knowledge I had about this disease," Mrs. Hamilton said.
