Tag: lady

Impact Lab > lady
Analysis, Culture, Health & Fitness, Report

High Heels can Ruin a Woman’s Health

6 High Heels 893

High heels are very popular, especially with celebrities such as
Gwyneth Paltrow, but there is a steep price to pay over time

Like the tall Lara Dutta or the shorter Rani Mukerji, you might want to flaunt stilettos to look glamorous and sleek. But experts feel this style statement can cause serious harm to the body if proper care is not taken.
“Increased pressure puts the forefoot at risk of injuries such as stress fractures, bunions and hammer toes. Knee pain is also common when high heels are involved,” says Ashish Jain, M.S. (orthopaedics), consultant joint replacement specialist at Max Hospital.
“The heel height causes increased strain on the knee joint and associated tendons. The quadriceps muscle group in the front of the thigh works harder, increasing pressure on the kneecap by up to 26 percent.”
“This can ultimately increase the incidence of osteoarthritis of the knee and quadriceps tendonitis,” Jain added.
Jain also spoke of other hazards.
He revealed that when the heel is constantly elevated, the calf muscle and Achilles tendon can contract and shorten. Wearing high heels habitually can result in a woman not being able to tolerate a flat shoe. On occasions, this can even require surgery to lengthen the Achilles tendon.
Sometimes the tight fit of many heels will force the toes to conform to its shape. The pressure of the shoe itself can cause corns to form. Furthermore, the compression of the metatarsal bones can cause pressure on the nerves that run between them.
“The toenails are also at risk as the incidence of in-growing toenails and nail infections is higher in heel wearers. In-growing toenails can be very painful, unsightly and require surgery to correct,” Jain added.
Women feel high heels like gladiator sandals, tip toes and others add a touch of elegance and glamour to one’s overall style and the legs appear longer and slimmer. Thus, to look special in that chic footwear and not experience painful after effects, many are going in for dermal fillers.
“It has been observed that women are undergoing filler injections to plump up the underside of their feet, thus filling them out and providing padding inside the foot to relieve the pain that comes from wearing high heels,” said Satish Bhatia, dermatologist and skin surgeon, Lady Ratan Tata Medical and Research Centre.
“This trend is rising despite the fact that the effect does not usually last for more than six-seven months,” Bhatia added.
Given that certain industries like hospitality, aviation and fashion place a premium on height and appearance, wearing heels becomes a norm, thus making women opt for the expensive solution to ease pain arising out of use of high heels.
“The dermal filler injection is injected in the ball of the foot to ease the pain caused by wearing high heels. The injection costs between Rs.12,000 and Rs.15,000,” he added.
Rajesh Malhotra, professor of orthopaedics, AIIMS, threw light on a few other ways of curing the pain arising out of extended use of stilettos.
“The best way to avoid pain is that one stops wearing high heels at all because they are the cause of the problem. But if that is not possible then there are a few treatments,” he said.
“The entire body pressure is on the ball of the foot; so among many treatments one is that we put the metatarsal bar on the sole of the footwear so that the entire body weight is not on the ball of the foot, which results in less pain,” Malhotra told.
If it is very essential to wear heels, the maximum height advised by doctors is not more than an inch.
“The height of the heel also changes the amount of weight on the forefoot. A one-inch heel will increase the pressure by 22 percent, a two-inch heel by 57 percent and a three-inch heel by 76 percent. So anything not more than an inch is fine,” said Jain.

More women are wearing higher heels, and for longer, and experts are increasingly concerned about the long-term damage they are doing to their feet. Recent research suggests that up to a third of women suffer permanent problems as a result of their prolonged wearing of ‘killer heels’, ranging from hammer toes and bunions to irreversible damage to leg tendons. (Pics)

Continue reading… “High Heels can Ruin a Woman’s Health”

Analysis, Hot Issues, Human Behavior, Report

It’s Official: Men look at Women’s Breasts First

6 Letterman 763

David Letterman is famously guilty of looking down before looking up

Women often say that men tend to ogle at their breasts and their face is the last thing they notice, and now a scientific study has found evidence to prove them right.
Scientists have found that almost half – 47 per cent – of men first glance at a woman’s breasts. A third of the “first fixations” are on the waist and hips, while fewer than 20 per cent look at the woman’s face, reports the Daily Mail in UK.
In fact, breasts are not only the first thing men look at, they also glance at them for longer than any other body part, revealed experts. Many believe that the reason behind such male tendency could be evolutionary, as women with larger chests and slim waists – such as Jennifer Hawkins, Lara Bingle and Rachael Finch – have higher levels of the female hormone oestrogen, indicating greater fertility. But the researchers conceded that there could be a more prosaic explanation.
“Men may be looking more often at the breasts because they are simply aesthetically pleasing, regardless of the size,” the Daily Telegraph quoted them as saying.
Subjects tested by researchers from New Zealand’s University of Wellington were presented with six images of the same woman, digitally altered to increase or decrease the size of her bust, waist and hips. The scientists recorded which areas men looked at first, the number of times they looked, and how long their gaze lasted, using cameras and mirrors to measure tiny eye movements.
“Eighty per cent of first fixations were on the breasts and midriff. Men spent consistently more time looking at the breasts and also made significantly more fixations upon them than other regions,” the study concluded.
It also found that men began to gaze at the “components of the hourglass figure” within 0.2 seconds. The research also discovered that few glances were directed at the arms, lower legs and feet.

Women often say that men tend to ogle at their breasts and their face is the last thing they notice, and now a scientific study has found evidence to prove them right. Scientists have found that almost half – 47 per cent – of men first glance at a woman’s breasts. A third of the “first fixations” are on the waist and hips, while fewer than 20 per cent look at the woman’s face, reports the Daily Mail in UK. (Pics)

Continue reading… “It’s Official: Men look at Women’s Breasts First”

Analysis, Health & Fitness, Medical Breakthrough

Coming Soon, One-Shot Radiotherapy for Breast Cancer

Breast-Cancer-346

Radiotherapy for breast cancer patients could soon be a single dose 30-minute affair, instead of the tedious present-day regimen lasting over six weeks.
In a major breakthrough, a team of British doctors headed by University College London’s Dr Jayant S Vaidya — an Indian from Goa — has succesfully created and tested a new technique that will blast the remnants of a tumour inside the breast in just one shot, lasting half an hour. The team used radiation on areas just around the tumour rather than the whole breast, as is done presently.
A 10-year trial of this Targeted Intraoperative Radiotherapy (TIR), conducted in nine countries involving over 2,200 women, confirmed that radiation targeting a specific area of the breast was as effective as whole-breast radiation in reducing breast cancer recurrence in women.
The results of this trial was published in the latest edition of the medical journal ‘The Lancet’.
So, while a patient is still under anaesthesia following the removal of the tumour, a series of gentle X-rays are administered to destroy any remaining tumour cells at the cancer site. The technique is highly convenient, requiring just one session of radiation, making it less time consuming and less costly than whole-breast treatment.
“TARGIT trial can change two fundamental principles in the treatment of breast cancer: whole breast radiotherapy can be replaced by a targeted one-time shot and a much smaller dose of radiation may be adequate,” Dr Vaidya told TOI from UK. Several hospitals in India, including Breach Candy in Mumbai and AIIMS in Delhi, have expressed interest in his work, he added.
“Breast cancer usually recurs around the area where the tumour was detected the first time. So it’s logical to give concentrated dose of radiation to the tissues at highest risk of cancer coming back rather than the whole breast,” he added.
Dr Vaidya said that since 2000, the team started delivering TIR to patients. A special machine called Intrabeam administered radiation from inside the breast to the exact site of the cancer, instead of the present-day external beam radiotherapy.
“Our decade-long TARGIT trial has now confirmed that old and new methods are as good as each other,” Dr Vaidya said.
The therapy, however, has a few limitations at present. It can be done on patients over the age of 45 and the tumour should not be bigger than 3cm. “Our trials till now tried this technique on women above age of 45. So we don’t know how effective it will be in stopping recurrence of cancer on younger women. Trials to find this are going to start soon,” he said.
Dr Vaidya launched the TARGIT trial on March 24, 2000. In this randomized trial, women aged 45 years or older with breast cancer undergoing breast-conserving surgery were enrolled from 28 centres in nine countries. Patients were randomly assigned in a 1:1 ratio to receive TIR or whole-breast external beam radiotherapy.
The study said, “At four years, there were six local recurrences in the intraoperative radiotherapy group and five in the external beam radiotherapy group. Recurrence in the conserved breast at four years was 1.2% in the targeted intraoperative radiotherapy and 0.95% in the external beam radiotherapy group. Radiotherapy toxicity was lower in the TIR group.”
Prof Michael Baum, professor emeritus of surgery at University College London who carried out the first procedure using intraoperative radiotherapy in 1998 said, “Many women specially in the developing world who live hundreds of miles from a radiotherapy unit will be spared six weeks of treatment going back and forth to the radiotherapy centre.”
* Targeted Intraoperative Radiotherapy (TIR) has a comparable recurrence rate of around 1% with presently used external beam radiation
* Radiotherapy toxicity were four times lower, with an incidence rate of 0.5% compared with 2% from EBR
* The new technique involves an intense blast of radiation to the tumour site extending to a radius of 2 cm lasting 30 minutes
* It takes place after the surgeon has taken out the tumour and before the wound is closed
* TIR completely avoided irradiation of the heart, lung and oesophagus causing no damage to these structures
* It is currently only available to women taking part in clinical trials

Radiotherapy for breast cancer patients could soon be a single dose 30-minute affair, instead of the tedious present-day regimen lasting over six weeks.

In a major breakthrough, a team of British doctors headed by University College London’s Dr Jayant S Vaidya — an Indian from Goa — has succesfully created and tested a new technique that will blast the remnants of a tumour inside the breast in just one shot, lasting half an hour. The team used radiation on areas just around the tumour rather than the whole breast, as is done presently.

Continue reading… “Coming Soon, One-Shot Radiotherapy for Breast Cancer”

Analysis, Culture, Historical Perspectives, Hot Issues, Human Behavior, People Making a Difference

The State of our Women: What the Future Holds

women afghanistan 872

For centuries the veils have been used to mask cultural abuse to women

Mallika Sarabhai
Nobel laureate Dr Amartya Sen estimates that 100 million women have disappeared from South Asia and Africa in the last three decades. While people might quibble about whether this figure is 100 million or 50 million, the point is that the news should be horrifying, and the trends daunting to the future of humanity. Whether or not climate change kills us, this certainly will. The fewer the women there are, the fewer the children there will be. Five or 10 men might gangrape a woman, but she can still only carry a single pregnancy at a time. Even for those patriarchal so-and-so’s who think of women as baby-making machines, the killing of women and girls is bad news, if not for you, then certainly for your grandsons.
But the future is already with us. The larger Patel samaj in Gujarat realised the calamity a couple of years ago and called a huge yagna to swear to protect female foetuses (As far as I know, no research has been conducted into whether live female births among the 12 lakh people who took this oath have risen). In some Patel villages in Gujarat, there is not a single female under the age of 20 years — a sure sign of genocide against women, on for more than 20 years. People from Haryana go shopping for family wives in Kerala and take back unfortunate women — bought for sex and housework — to families where they understand no one, can speak to no one. And I do mean ‘family wife’, for she is shared by all the males in the family.
Do we, from the so-called sabhya samaj, think of any of this when we plan huge wedding and huger dowries for our daughters? When we rush around buying kilos of gold, hundreds of saris, a new house for the groom’s family, and so on, do we see the direct, possibly the only relevant connect, between disappearing daughters and our own actions?
The government takes many steps to curb the killing off of girl children, most of them useless and leading to even more corruption and crime. Most of us know of doctors who, banned from running sex determination tests openly for fear of prosecution, do this very thing and inform the bride’s family by greeting them with Jai Matadi (It’s a girl) or Jai Ramjiki (It’s a boy). And innovative and greedy businessmen have set up rickshaw testing labs which go around slums and villages, giving the families information at their doorsteps.
But this is only one part of the story. Why are we not speaking of dowry deaths, those hundreds of thousands of young women married with dowries, who are tortured and forced to kill themselves or worse, tortured and killed? Did the dowries insure their wellbeing? Or do we just concern ourselves with getting the daughters off our hands and saying to ourselves that we have fulfilled our roles as families? Why has an issue that used to be spoken of with horror become so commonplace that we do not even speak of dowries being given in hushed voices any more? When does a crime become so common and so lauded that it becomes convention?
I can hear some of you say, “Ha barabar chhe pun shun kariye, ena vagar koi paranshe nahi. Dikrine kyar sudhi ghare rakhay?” (Yes, that’s all right. However, there is no alternative, how long would one keep their daughters at home?) Ask yourself this question bluntly — given that there is in India nearly a 50 per cent chance that your daughter or sister will be tortured and killed, do you really want that for her? And then I hear you say, “Pan samaj shun kaheshe?” (What will society say?) Again ask yourself, “Shun kahashe?” (What will it say?) That you are a lousy parent? That this is established practice in ‘our’ samaj? That “kutumb nu naak kapai jashe?” (Will the family’s reputation suffer a blemish?) That your neighbour gave a dowry of 50 lakh and you will be diminished by giving less? That this is the way you show your love and care?
Let them say all of that. Once again ask yourself what is more important to you, your daughter’s life or your “naak”?
Have you ever sustained a burn? And shrieked? Then imagine your daughter burning, from kerosene poured over her, or yet another imagined stove burst. Imagine the million-fold pain she is going through. And know that you are responsible.
I am being harsh, because the time has come to confront the worst in our society, to become an outcast, and to fight for her life. Be the first. Say no to dowry – yours, your child’s or your sister’s. Nothing that society can do to you will hold a candle to your child or you or your sister not being tortured or killed. The time is now. Tomorrow will definitely be too late.

The following is an article written by Mallika Sarabhai and published by India’s Diligent Media Corporation in their publication, DNA (Daily News & Analysis). This story is more than shocking. It is a call to action….

Nobel laureate Dr Amartya Sen estimates that 100 million women have disappeared from South Asia and Africa in the last three decades. While people might quibble about whether this figure is 100 million or 50 million, the point is that the news should be horrifying, and the trends daunting to the future of humanity. Whether or not climate change kills us, this certainly will. The fewer the women there are, the fewer the children there will be. Five or 10 men might gangrape a woman, but she can still only carry a single pregnancy at a time. Even for those patriarchal so-and-so’s who think of women as baby-making machines, the killing of women and girls is bad news, if not for you, then certainly for your grandsons.

Continue reading… “The State of our Women: What the Future Holds”

Analysis, Current Events, Historical Perspectives, Latest Trend, New Discoveries, Report

Study: Women Gaining Ground In Family Decision Making

Study: Women Gaining Ground In Family Decision Making

One small sign of a larger social shift

Count this as another busted myth of modern times: In family life, the husband always wields the television remote. Lately, the wife is just as likely to be changing the channels. A poll released yesterday by the Pew Research Center showed that 21st century couples share decision making in many aspects of American family life, and nowhere is that equity greater than in front of the household television. The poll found that 27 percent of people say women control the remote; 26 percent say that men do; and 25 percent say the couple decides together.

Continue reading… “Study: Women Gaining Ground In Family Decision Making”

Analysis, Health & Fitness, Hot Issues, Latest News, Report

Study: Challenges in Online Dating

Study: Challenges in Online Dating

Judging body language, a key to most relationships, is missing online

An April 2008 Harris Interactive survey conducted on behalf of WooMe identified some problems with online dating and making a first impression on the Internet.

More than 70% of the single US online adults surveyed said flirting online was more difficult than in person.

Continue reading… “Study: Challenges in Online Dating”

1
Analysis, Art, Brain, Culture, Health & Fitness, Hot Issues, Human Behavior, Photo Perspectives, Science & Technology News

The Art of the Female Orgasm

Face of Orgasm 712

The ecstasy of the orgasm

By puritanical society norms, the female orgasm is an event seldom witnessed, and virtually never recorded. However, for the new age of modern women, the orgasm is a thing of beauty. Shown here is a collection of some of the finest moments in human history. (Pics)

.

Continue reading… “The Art of the Female Orgasm”