Thirty years ago, during the Falklands War, British ship HMS Sheffield was hit by an Argentinian missile.

Twenty crew were killed and the burning vessel was abandoned.

In all, 255 Britons died in the Falklands conflict, with many more physically injured. Countless others are still living with mental wounds.

Brian tried to repair his life, but was badly affected and continued having "episodes", even after leaving the Royal Navy in 1985.

Many have struggled alone with their symptoms, on average for 15 years, before seeking treatment.

"First, we treat people holistically. If your family is falling apart, if you are having financial difficulties and if you don't have anywhere to live, you are going to feel pretty rubbish", explains Commodore Cameron.

He adds that specialist outreach teams who understand the "background" and problems "from the veterans' point of view" can really help.

But he warns there "isn't a quick fix", especially for chronic conditions, and underlines the complex nature of PTSD in the Armed Forces which often results from "repeated exposure to trauma".

Commodore Cameron also counsels against focussing on PTSD alone, as other issues, including severe anxiety or depression, can be treated differently.

Sometimes veterans find it difficult to discuss trauma, so art therapist Jan Lobban uses painting to help them express themselves.

Thirty years on, many describe feeling "as though it's happening all over again", she explains.

"Perhaps they don't talk about it much because they feel they should have got over it, and they don't like to burden other people."

Society can give out that message, Mrs Lobban says, "but it's not that straightforward with PTSD".

For Brian, seeking help has made all the difference, giving him the strength and tools "to break the cycle of depression and the black thoughts".

"I was able to talk about the guilt, the shame, the anger that I felt about surviving and going home.

"I will still have them, but I can cope and carry on."

On arrival at Combat Stress, the veteran's artwork included a drawing of HMS Sheffield in flames, with black smoke billowing and a face crying tears of blood.

Brian's final drawing was of blue skies over a sandy beach, symbolising his hopes for a brighter future, 30 years after the end of the Falklands War.

Story By: by Richard Knox

Rice farmer Alexi Rochnel shows his blank cholera vaccination card. April is the beginning of Haiti’s rainy season, which will likely intensify Haiti’s cholera outbreak.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is in Haiti today to support two big vaccination initiatives.

One, a pilot project to prevent cholera, is already under way. The other, aimed at five childhood diseases, is set to begin later this week against .

The wider campaign aims to vaccinate 211,000 infants across the country with a five-in-one vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, hepatitis B and Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type B, a cause of bacterial meningitis). Children will also get vaccinated against polio and rubella.

Sebelius’s personal support of the cholera campaign is surprising, since U.S. health officials have been cool to that pilot project behind the scenes.

According to Haitian health workers, American officials have expressed skepticism about the plan vaccinate 100,000 Haitians against cholera. They say U.S. officials have viewed the cholera vaccination pilot project as a distraction, and have urged Haitians to focus instead on cleaning up their water supply, providing decent sanitation, urging people to wash their hands faithfully, and treating cholera.

But today Sebelius will visit GHESKIO, a Port-au-Prince health center that is vaccinating 50,000 slum-dwellers against cholera. The rural arm, involving an equal number, is being organized by the U.S.-based group Partners in Health.

An HHS spokesman says Sebelius will address cholera vaccination during her visit.

Last month, the country director in Haiti for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told NPR that the CDC has not “been negative” about the cholera vaccine project.

“I’m not aware of skepticism at CDC” over cholera vaccination, Dr. John Vertefueille tells Shots. “At certain points in time we’ve indicated — and we continue to indicate — that our primary focus is on prevention activities by improvements of water, sanitation, hygiene and good clinical activities” against cholera.

The position the U.S. takes on the issue matters. If the current cholera vaccination campaign succeeds — that is, if Haitians accept the vaccine, and if its organizers show they can deliver the required two doses over two weeks — it would open a larger debate about whether vaccination should be expanded to millions of Haitians at high risk of cholera.

Also, the Haitian government depends heavily on U.S. aid, and the CDC holds considerable sway over Haitian public health policy. Dozens of CDC staffers are stationed at the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince.

Meanwhile, the larger vaccination campaign against a slew of childhood diseases is no pilot project. It’s the first step in an ongoing campaign that aims to vaccinate every Haitian infant against seven deadly diseases at first. But beginning next year, the campaign will be expanded to the two leading child-killers: diarrheal disease caused by rotavirus and pneumococcal pneumonia.

“It’s going to be a huge undertaking,” says Dagfinn Hoybraten, chairman of GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccine and Immunization, a leading nongovernmental agency promoting vaccination.

“It’s a remarkable achievement in public health just two years after the earthquake,” Hoybraten tells Shots. “It’s a marker of the government’s commitment.”

GAVI is paying for 80 percent of the pentavalent vaccine campaign, which will cost almost $9 per child. The CDC is picking up the other 20 percent. Over the next three years GAVI will spend more than $9 million on the Haitian vaccination effort.

The logistics are formidable. The pentavalent vaccine requires infants to get injections at six weeks, 10 weeks and 14 weeks. The vaccine must be kept chilled, which requires a complicated infrastructure.

Haiti has had a dismal record in childhood vaccination. “We know that only 50 percent of children have received their complete immunization coverage. This is awful,” said Dr. Jean William Pape, director of GHESKIO. (The French acronym reflects the group’s origins in the fight against HIV.)

Pape has been battling against the fear that the cholera vaccination project will interfere with the larger childhood vaccination campaign.

To avoid that possibility, Pape had hoped to finish the cholera project before the other one began, but bureaucratic delays have pushed them on top of one another. Since the cholera and polio vaccines can’t be given at the same time, it means that children under 10 who are getting the cholera vaccine will not get polio vaccine now. That will require GHESKIO and Partners in Health to track down those children later to protect them against polio.

In the long run, Pape says the vaccination campaigns will be synergistic. “Every effort we make to give one vaccine will make it easier to give the others,” he says. “We’re learning how to deliver the merchandise better.”

So far GAVI has not supported cholera vaccination anywhere. But that could change. Hoybraten says the last time the GAVI board discussed it, the cheaper and easier-to-administer cholera vaccine had not been approved by the World Health Organization. Now it is.

But it can make you feel not so great the next day. Luckily, there are ways to feel normal (or very close!) after a rocky night’s rest.

1. Open your shades

A big dose of sunshine is the first thing you’ll want to try. “Natural light resets your body clock, helping you function better all day,” Walsleben says. “Even the low light on a cloudy or rainy day wakes you up better than any indoor bulb.”

Early-morning sunlight is best for helping you start the day feeling rejuvenated. To perk up fast, open your shades as soon as you get up.

Health.com: 7 tips for the best sleep ever

2. Grab the right eats

“When we’re tired, our instinct is to reach for sugary foods for a quick rush,” says Samantha Heller, R.D., clinical nutrition coordinator at the Center for Cancer Care at Griffin Hospital in Derby, Connecticut. “But those foods make your blood sugar spike and crash, setting off a roller coaster of energy highs and lows.”

For lasting energy, start your day with healthy protein and whole-grain carbs, Heller says. Try a whole-wheat English muffin with peanut butter and a sliced banana.

Health.com: America’s healthiest fast-food breakfasts

3. Try this if you can’t take a nap

The ideal remedy for the mental fatigue that occurs after sleep loss is an afternoon nap, says Matthew Edlund, M.D., author of “The Power of Rest.” But since that’s not possible for most people with jobs, the next best thing is a form of active rest called “paradoxical relaxation.”

Edlund explains: Focus on one muscle group in your body for at least 15 seconds, concentrating only on how it feels and nothing else. Repeat up and down the body. Surprise — you feel recharged.

4. Drink your coffee nice and slow

No need to gulp down that morning brew: Pour it into a thermos and sip slowly enough to make it last most of the workday. People who consumed the caffeine equivalent of just 2 ounces of coffee per hour still got a kick, according to a study in the journal Sleep. Just cut off the java by 3 p.m., or you may have trouble falling asleep that night.

Health.com: Big perks: coffee’s health benefits

5. Take a walk to wake up

The time of day when the sleep deprived drag the most is between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m., says Michael Breus, Ph.D., author of “The Sleep Doctor’s Diet Plan.” If you find yourself yawning through afternoon meetings, try stepping out for a 10-minute walk.

“Movement boosts core temperature and stimulates the heart, brain, and muscles, preventing a slump,” Breus says. Even pacing around your office will help kick your body back into gear.

Health.com: How to instantly boost your energy

6. Go to bed on time

As tempting as it is to crash at 8 p.m. the evening following a rough night’s sleep, you’ll feel most refreshed if you hit the sack close to your usual bedtime.

“Our bodies have a natural rhythm of sleep and wake — you’ll get the most restorative sleep if you stick to that pattern,” says Janet Kennedy, Ph.D., a New York City–based clinical psychologist who specializes in sleep disorders. “Changing your schedule to make up for lost sleep can actually lead to other problems, like early waking and even insomnia.”

Instead of hitting the sack (or sacking out on the couch) after dinner, go to bed no earlier than an hour before your normal bedtime and wake up no later than an hour past your normal wake time to catch up on lost sleep without overdoing it.

Health.com: Alarm clocks for heavy sleepers

7. Hang around the water cooler

Sleep deprivation can mildly dehydrate you, even if you’re not suffering from a happy-hour hangover. And dehydration actually compounds fatigue, Breus says — so sipping water will help lessen sleepiness. Drink enough so you’re not thirsty and you have clear-ish urine, Breus recommends.

Another trick: Throw in a few ice cubes. “Unlike warm drinks, which tend to relax you, cold beverages can increase alertness because they are more refreshing,” Kennedy says.

Copyright Health Magazine 2011

Story By: by Jon Hamilton

- Jonathan Grainger, researcher, Aix-Marseille University

But here’s the amazing thing: Dan and the other baboons also learned to tell whether a string of letters they’d never seen before was an English word. That’s something first-graders learn to do when they start reading, but scientists had assumed that children were simply sounding out the letters to decide whether they make sense.

Of course, the baboons couldn’t do this because they’re not learning to read a language they already speak. They had to rely on a part of the brain that can tell whether objects fit a known pattern.

Learning From The Baboons

This is where the experimenters started learning from the baboons. Grainger says his team realized that when people see a word, they are probably doing the same thing as their primate cousins.

“The part of the brain that we use to recognize words when we’re reading is actually part of the more general brain region for visual object identification,” he says.

Grainger says brain scans of people reading support that notion, though, of course, we also use language areas to understand what we’re reading.

Michael Platt, who directs the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, says he was surprised by what the baboons were able to do.

“I was really looking for holes to poke in this study, but it was very difficult to find any because it was really beautifully done,” he says. “And I think the linchpin here was that the baboons, once they had learned the rule, could generalize to new words that they had not seen before.”

Platt says when you think about it, the finding makes sense, given what’s known about human and animal brains.

“Brains are always looking for patterns,” he says. “They are always looking to make some statistical pattern analysis of the features and events that are in the environment. And this would just be one of those.”

Platt says that’s a big departure from the idea that reading is a direct extension of spoken language.

“It’s a very different way of thinking about what reading and writing really are, and it could have some implications, for example, for thinking about how we might improve education in reading and writing for young children,” he says.

Take children with dyslexia; the baboon study suggests their problem might be in parts of the brain that identify objects, not the ones that process language.

The new research appears in the journal Science.

A computer hacker who targeted the website of Britain's biggest abortion provider has been jailed for two years and eight months.

The court heard he did not access medical information about any of the women.

When Jeffery was arrested, police found his computer was "in the process of being wiped clean".

Daniel Higgins, prosecuting, said: "In order to demonstrate that he had hacked the website, he posted the log-on details of Clare Murphy, who is the head of communications at the charity."

Mr Higgins said: "Clare Murphy states women who contact the charity are often in a vulnerable situation.

"They speak to teenagers who have not disclosed their pregnancy to their parents, women who have been victims of domestic violence and victims of sexual violence – many women for whom an unplanned pregnancy is a very private affair and would not wish to share this with others.

"The publication of the information would cause great anguish for women who contact the charity in confidence and would put some of these women at serious risk mentally and physically," he added.

Shaun Wallace, defending, said Jeffery initially hacked the site to test its vulnerability but added: "The more curious he became, the less responsible he became."

He said of his client: "He is not a staunch anti-abortionist. He is a bit of a computer whizkid."

Mr Wallace said Jeffery was a "part-time" member of the hacking group Anonymous.

But the judge said: "In my view, it is significant that the online name you used on Twitter was that of notorious criminal Pablo Escobar."

The court heard Jeffery wrote BPAS a letter of apology expressing remorse and suggesting ways they could improve their security.

Jeffery told police he had also identified "vulnerabilities" on websites belonging to the FBI, CIA, Houses of Parliament, West Midlands Police, US Navy, Arizona police and Spanish police.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. courts have authority to decide whether President Barack Obama’s healthcare law is valid under the Constitution, his attorney general told a federal court on Thursday in a further bid to defuse a controversy Obama ignited earlier this week.

After Obama appeared to question the role of the courts in reviewing the two-year-old law, which seeks to expand healthcare coverage to 30 million-plus uninsured Americans, a conservative Texas judge on the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the administration to explain itself.

Attorney General Eric Holder told the appeals court in a three-page letter that the power of courts to review the laws “is beyond dispute” and that the administration has not sought to limit or reconsider that principle.

He argued that when courts do consider such challenges, precedent dictates that “Acts of Congress are ‘presumptively constitutional’” and that the executive branch often urges courts to respect such laws passed by Congress.

“The president’s remarks were consistent with the principles” described in the letter, Holder said.

Obama on Monday said he did not believe the Supreme Court would take the “unprecedented, extraordinary step” of overturning the 2010 law and questioned whether the court would be engaging in judicial activism if it indeed struck it down.

That drew swift criticism from conservatives who questioned whether he was trying to send a message to the justices and whether he understood that the courts did have a role in reviewing whether laws Congress passes are constitutional.

Obama, White House aides and administration officials have since tried to clarify and soften the tone, acknowledging that the courts have a responsibility to review such laws but insisting the president only meant the court has rarely struck down laws on national economic issues.

The president’s initial remarks prompted Judge Jerry Smith of the 5th Circuit Court, an appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, to demand clarification about the courts’ role in reviewing laws during separate arguments this week on the healthcare law, a rare courtroom response to outside remarks.

On Thursday, lawyers for hospitals challenging the healthcare law asked the appeals court for an opportunity to respond to Holder’s letter, saying in a filing that it advanced the government’s position in the case and warranted a response.

While unusual for a president to weigh in on a Supreme Court review after the arguments, academics have said that opponents of the healthcare law had been outspoken and Obama was within his rights to do the same.

“To be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the president saying this. Why might the president do this? It is an election year,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Irvine law school. “If the court strikes down the law, this will be the message. He is getting it out now.”

Randy Barnett, a Georgetown University law professor involved in the constitutional challenge to the healthcare law, declined to comment directly on Obama’s remarks.

But as a general matter, he said, “It is wrong to accuse the Supreme Court of acting politically simply because some justices disagree with how you think the precedents apply to a case … like this one.”

To read the letter, click here: here

(Reporting By Jeremy Pelofsky and James Vicini; Additional reporting by Terry Baynes; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Paul Simao)

The founder of the controversial Dukan Diet, Dr Pierre Dukan, faces an ethics hearing after suggesting children could pass a new exam by staying thin.

The French College of Physicians says he breached medical guidelines that say doctors must consider the impact of their comments on the public.

He faces a disciplinary hearing within six months, and could be struck off.

His diet, said to be followed by some celebrities, recommends avoiding starch and carbohydrates.

Some nutritionists say it can be dangerous.

In January, Dr Dukan sparked controversy in France when he said the Baccalaureate exam should include a new anti-obesity option, which 17-year-old children would pass just by staying within recommended weight guidelines.

The College of Physicians said this could have a negative impact on young girls who are already overweight or anorexic.

The College said in a second complaint that Dr Dukan was focused more on commerce than medicine, in breach of a part of its code that says medicine must not be practised like a business.

And the body also said his best-selling diet books meant he was neglecting medicine.

If he is found guilty at his ethics hearing, the punishments he could face range from a reprimand to being struck off the medical register.

Dieting is a major issue in France which like many European countries has seen an increase in obesity. In 2009 the ministry of health said one in six people was obese.

Dr Dukan has sold more than seven million copies of his dieting books.

In July last year, Dr Dukan lost a libel case against a fellow nutritionist who described the Dukan diet as dangerous.

Dr Jean-Michel Cohen said the protein-rich diet could cause heart disease and breast cancer.

Story By: by Greg Henderson

President Obama signs the national health care law at the White House on March 23, 2010.

Then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney shakes hands with Massachusetts Health and Human Services Secretary Timothy Murphy after signing a landmark state health care law on April 12, 2006, in Boston. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., stands at center.

“Starting today — through the oral arguments before the Supreme Court — Rick Santorum and his campaign will expose the dangerous actions of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney’s role in laying the foundation for this infringement on individual freedom,” Santorum’s campaign said in a statement Thursday.

Santorum promised to use Friday’s second anniversary of the national law — and then coverage of the six hours of Supreme Court oral arguments spread out over three days next week — to draw parallels between the national health care law and the 2006 Massachusetts law championed by Romney, when he governed the state.

Obama, in a radio interview that aired Thursday, also took a jab at Romney on the issue.

“We designed a program that actually previously had support of Republicans, including the person who may end up being the Republican standard-bearer and is now pretending like he came up with something different,” Obama said, speaking on American Public Media’s Marketplace.

Obama has said the national law was modeled at least in part on what Romney did in Massachusetts. Romney has said his law found state solutions to a state problem, has denounced the individual mandate when used as part of federal legislation, and has pledged to try to repeal the national health care law if he becomes president.

But comparisons of “Obamacare” and “Romneycare” are sure to come up next week. Especially when Santorum steps before a microphone.

Story By: by Scott Hensley

Doc, don’t be caught red-faced online!

Can your doctor really say that online?

Well, doctors can and do say all kinds of derogatory things about patients online. On the other hand, some doctors take another tack and use their computers and smartphones to ask patients out. And then there are the doctors who go online to prescribe medicines for patients they’ve never seen.

A majority of state medical boards, the groups that license and discipline doctors, have received reports of doctor behaving badly online, according to a nationwide survey. Most often the boards learn about the problems from patients or their families.

The results are summarized in a letter in the latest issue of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Most doctors aren’t running into trouble online. And there’s no sense of what the rate is for problems because the survey asked if the boards had ever been told about such issues.

Still, some of the problems were serious and led to disciplinary action. All told 56 percent of the boards had restricted, suspended or revoked at least one doctor’s license at some point for bad behavior online.

“Professionalism is a core competency required for maintenance of licensure and specialty recertification,” the authors write. “Regulators and physicians should therefore address emerging online practices.”

It’s the latest look at how doctors and medical students misbehave. Some of the same researchers previously documented how some doctors have gone too far on Twitter.

And some of these online mistakes start early, as some of the researchers found in a separate study two years ago that looked at the unprofessional things some medical students were putting on their Facebook pages and other places on the Web.

Three years ago, when my doctor sent me to have a colonoscopy, the last thing on my mind was seeing footage from the exam.

At 39, I was mortified about having a procedure that I associated with older people. I didn’t even want to talk about it, let alone see it.

But March is National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, so I’m coming clean. While drinking two liters of liquid that tastes like dirty sea water to evacuate my bowels doesn’t rank highly on my list of things to do, neither does dying from colon cancer. And having a colonoscopy, although unpleasant and embarrassing, was one of the best things I have ever done for my health.

Of all cancers affecting both men and women, colorectal cancer — cancer of the colon or rectum — is the second-leading killer in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Overall, the lifetime risk of developing colorectal cancer is 1 in 20, and up to 150,000 new cases a year are reported in the United States, the American Cancer Society says. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that removing precancerous growths spotted during a colonoscopy can cut the risk of dying from colon cancer in half. More than 95% of tumors are detected during a colonoscopy.

Yet despite these statistics, people feel squeamish about the exam and tend to put it off.

“It’s a potentially embarrassing procedure. It’s not like an eye exam in terms of personal exposure,” said Dr. Anthony N. Kalloo, the director of gastroenterology and hepatology at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The American Cancer Society and the American College of Physicians recommend that adults be screened for colorectal cancer starting at age 50. Doctors urge people with a family history of colon cancer to begin screening much earlier.

I guess I’m an overachiever. While I don’t have a family history of that kind of cancer, I did have one of the common symptoms — bleeding, a change in bowel habits, weight loss, poor appetite, bloating and/or abdominal pain — that sent me running to my family doctor. He referred me to St. Jude’s Knott Family Endoscopy Center in Fullerton, California, for a colonoscopy.

I can’t describe the pure joy I felt at receiving THAT news.

I didn’t know too much about the procedure but what I did know sounded horrible. During a colonoscopy, a doctor examines the inside of the colon and rectum by inserting a colonoscope, a thin, flexible instrument that sends images to a TV screen or computer.

In order for the doctor to do a thorough exam, the patient needs to prepare by fasting; I drank only liquids the day before the exam. He or she may also be required to chug down a solution that will … let’s just say keep them at home, near a bathroom.

“It literally takes a whole day away from your life, where you could be doing normal things and instead you are drinking this bowel prep that is uncomfortable and that limits your social life,” Kalloo said.

Following the instructions I was given, I started fasting the day before the procedure. I was restricted to certain fluids and particular colors of Jell-O (nothing red or purple.) I spent the morning longing for my usual massive cup of coffee and substantial breakfast and instead downed water, Gatorade and chicken broth.

Around 5 p.m., the fun really started. I began drinking a liter of a polyethylene glycol (PEG) bowel prep. I had to down 8 ounces of this stuff every 15 minutes followed by 16 ounces of clear liquid. I drank another liter several hours later while trying not to vomit.

The manufacturers said the solution was lemon-flavored; it really resembled a noxious mix of chemicals that I can still taste to this day.

Dr. Gene Yoon, my gastroenterologist, concedes that for most patients, the preparation is the worst part. Yoon and other physicians now use magnesium citrate, which he said requires patients to drink less, is easier to tolerate and works just as well.

By the time I arrived at the Knott Family Endoscopy Center the next morning, I was nervous and praying the worst was over. It was. I don’t remember anything past the point where I was sedated. An IV solution sent me into a “twilight sleep.” It also made me forget the procedure, which no doubt was for the best.

When I woke up, I was groggy but I also felt incredibly well rested. I had only a small amount of discomfort, including abdominal cramping that doctors say is normal.

I don’t remember getting dressed or leaving the hospital. But in my daze, I asked my father to swing by Starbucks to pick up a cup of coffee and a sandwich. When I got home, I dozed for a few hours and that was that.

Yoon called the next day with my results: He’d found and removed a 1.5 centimeter villous adenoma polyp from my sigmoid colon. After examining the polyp, Yoon estimated that there was a more than a 50% chance of that polyp becoming malignant.

Yoon removed the polyp before that had a chance of happening. Of all the polyps, villous adenomas are associated with the highest mortality and morbidity rate.

I consider myself extremely lucky I had a symptom. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had a colonoscopy until I was at least 50 — and who knows how long I would have put it off after that.

“Colon cancer is one of the few cancers that can actually be prevented, mainly because it goes through this polyp stage before it turns into colon cancer,” Yoon says.

Given what he’d found, Yoon suggested that my younger brother also have a colonoscopy. Craig had his colonoscopy when he was 36; the doctors didn’t find anything.

Two important people in my life, my husband’s stepfather and my trainer, have had colon cancer. For both of them, the cancer was detected during routine colonoscopies. I thank God they were proactive about their health.

Polyps are slow-growing and asymptomatic, Yoon says. The cancer can also be slow-growing and asymptomatic — until it starts spreading.

“Usually once you start developing symptoms from colon cancer, things are way too late,” he said.

Eating a high-fat diet, consuming red meat and smoking will increase your risk of developing colorectal cancer, as is a familial history of the disease. Doctors recommend exercising and eating a diet rich in vegetables, fruit and fiber.

At Hopkins, researchers are looking into the role that curcumin – a spice commonly used in India – may play in reducing the risk of colon cancer. Preclinical and laboratory tests show it may be useful, Kalloo said. I’ve always loved curry, and I’m thinking about ways to incorporate this spice into our meals.

But even if you play by the rules of healthy living, it’s important to get screened.

“We have to do better,” Kalloo says. “Family care physicians and everyone who sees patients should ask someone over 50, ‘Have you had a colonoscopy?’ It’s just not a convenient test. Even physicians tend to procrastinate.”

After Yoon called me with the results, I sent a thank you note to my family doctor, telling him how much I appreciated him referring me for a colonoscopy. Yoon’s office called me recently to set up another appointment. I’m not looking forward to it, but there’s no question I will do it again.

Considering the alternative, I’d be crazy not to.