Monthly Archives: April 2013

NYC’s Anti-Salt Campaign

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salt

New York City seems to always be looking out for public health, and while I was anti-soda ban (and found their pouring on the pounds campaign slightly offensive),  I appreciate knowing that the city and Mayor Bloomberg are taking pains to promote healthy living. First, NYC celebrated a decade of banning cigarettes indoors last week. The Smoke-Free Air Act was introduced in 2003, and though its opposition at the time thought that it would hurt restaurants, bars, and the tourism industry, these arenas continue to thrive. And what’s more, health officials believe it has prevented 10,000 premature deaths over ten years. New York City residents total number of smokers has dropped to only 15% of the  population since 2002 when it was over 20%. However, Bloomberg is not satisfied. He has plans in the works to make shops hide cigarettes from open view, and to restrict access to discounted or illegal cigarettes.

Furthermore, CBS reported yesterday that the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene would be introducing a new subway campaign against too much sodium intake. The ads will encourage subway riders to look at nutritional labels for packaged foods, and to pick those with less salt with the hope of lowering rates of heart attack and stroke. The campaign is partially financially backed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and comes in combination with the city’s voluntary guidelines for manufacturers to reduce the salt in their foods. While experts are split on if reducing the amount of salt in your diet can actually decrease health risks in normally healthy people, the new ads are bent towards raising awareness that salt can be hidden in unsuspected places (like bread) and giving people more knowledge to carefully select when choosing processed or pre-packaged foods. Here’s to hoping the ads don’t get as extreme as the Pouring on the Pounds campaign.

At Least You’re Not Pregnant?

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healthcare

I can’t even tell you how many times I went to the health center on my college campus for a cold and a cough, and ended up being questioned about my sex life. Their go-to diagnosis was, “Well, she’s probably pregnant (or if not, maybe she has an std).” I always assumed it was because I attended a Jesuit university that the nurses were a little paranoid about sex outside of marriage, and wanted to discourage it at all costs–even when it was not medically implied.  Yet, this article on Women In The World of The Daily Beast and a more recent health care experience made me realize that maybe it’s a phenomenon other than that. For me, in college this line of questioning was nothing more than a minor annoyance/funny story to tell in the caf about the health center’s continued incompetence.  Both of my parents are medical professionals, so I learned about your more basic illnesses and how they should be treated at a fairly young age. With that knowledge, I was able to bring the nurses around to medicating my true illness (usually a sinus infection) without a lot of unnecessary pregnancy tests.

But for some, it isn’t that simple. When doctors jump to the conclusion that all young women are, to quote the author of the article, “reckless harlots,” it can jeopardize their health by ignoring the real problem, create unnecessary stress, fear and shame, and subject women to needless (and often costly) medical procedures. What is going on in medicine today that leads practitioners to lean towards sexual shaming when ladies visit the doctor’s for unrelated ailments? And are men being subjected to the same line of questioning when they visit a doctor for the sniffles?

Catherine Schurz contacted 20 hospitals and urgent care facilities on the East Coast, and found that many organizations agreed with this line of questioning for women of menstruation age. They admitted there is no standard policy for testing women for pregnancy or STIs, and many said they would test for pregnancy without permission, and without even asking if the women was sexually active first, if they had any inkling the women could possibly be pregnant and withholding the information. And while I thought I had left this type of sentiment behind with college and university health centers, I experienced the same type of treatment in a Manhattan ER after I fainted and hit my head pretty hard. After hours of waiting and wondering when they’d check to see if I had a concussion, a doctor swung by, confirmed that my pregnancy test was negative, and discharged me with the advice that I should take some advil and see my primary care. Though many questions and a whopper of a head ache remained, at least I wasn’t pregnant? It makes me wonder what leads doctors to doubt the information that women are providing them is true, and what contributes to their inklings that a woman is withholding potentially telling medical information.

Have you run into this experience with doctors?