News — Health

More myths and misconceptions about what you should—and shouldn’t—eat By Wendy Haaf   You can get mental whiplash trying to reconcile what you read in the headlines or on the cover of the latest diet book with what you thought you knew about how what we eat affects our health. Myths about food seem to multiply in step with the size of the supermarket’s frozen pizza section. Here are the facts about a few popular food myths and misconceptions that have popped up in recent years. No, butter and other animal foods rich in saturated fat haven’t magically been exonerated...

What to Ask Before Surgery   You’ll be a lot more relaxed going into an operation if you’re not worrying about things such as whether the operation is really a good idea By Wendy Haaf     Your doctor diagnoses a problem and tells you that you could or should have an operation. If you’re like most people, you’re surprised, if not shocked, and at least a little fearful—not emotional states conducive to thinking through important decisions calmly and rationally. Then there’s all the medical information you’re being given—unfamiliar, possibly confusing. Surgeons do their best to lay out what patients...

  There are steps you can take to reduce your chances of falling By Wendy Haaf    One night last summer, Kerry Delaney was dog-sitting in a house where she’d stayed before when she got out of bed and shuffled down the hallway, still half-asleep, to use the washroom. “I guess I was doing the old eyes-closed shuffle along. I took that last step—and down the stairs I went,” she recalls. The 63-year-old from Whitby, ON, broke her wrist and suffered a compound fracture of the femur in one leg, meaning the jagged end of the bone pierced her skin....

By Wendy Haaf Thanks to advances in modern preventive dentistry, more Canadians than ever are retaining most if not all of their own teeth well into later life. According to Statistics Canada, the proportion of the population aged 65 to 79 with no remaining natural teeth fell from 43 per cent to 19 per cent between 1990 and 2003. “That’s great from a functional, nutritional, and cosmetic point of view,” notes Dr. Tom Raddall, a general dentist in Liverpool, NS, “but it also presents a number of challenges.” It turns out that a number of different factors contribute to making...

Some medical tests are intended to detect serious diseases in apparently healthy people before symptoms appear—a good idea, but what are the trade-offs? Research suggests that many of us simply don’t know.