TheUnCon

  T he COVID-19 pandemic changed us for good. Nobody thought much would come from being stuck with Netflix and the sheer abundance of time. And then, just like that, we turned to books when we were done scoring through all the OTT platforms at our disposal. It’s admirable how a global pandemic forced a hard stop to our fast-paced lives and made us sit down and read. I found a book during the pandemic that changed the way I live my life. Unlike my experience with most of the self-help books I have read, this book had me with a pencil and a notepad. I absorbed every word, phrase, and expression this book had to offer and can’t wait to bring it alive through this quick book review. I present to you Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a Hungarian- American psychologist best known for his work on the “Flow state.” As the name suggests, a flow state is a state of free-flowing consciousness and a calm mental state. He describes the flow state as a state...

  W hat is often regarded as an introductory lesson in psychology, the mysterious case of Phineas Gage is one of the most compelling stories in medical history. This famous incident seems to have made its mark in history even a century later. Scientists, doctors, and psychologists break down the narrative one piece at a time, with a fresh splash of perspective and wonder each time. The medical community owes its profound deep understanding of the brain and its functioning to the mystery of Phineas Gage. Hopefully, this account will furnish details in the context of the same.   PART I: THE ACCIDENT The intricate details and chronology of events in the accident are variable in various accounts in medical literature, given that this incident occurred in the year 1848. A young railroad worker, Phineas Gage, was assigned the job of breaking down boulders and heavy rocks using explosives. The task involved ‘tamping’ the powder with three-and-a-half feet long crowbar sharply t...

  Going Viral is a succinct account of India’s contribution toward vaccine development in the pandemic era. It is a detailed story of the combined efforts of the Government of India and premier research institutes around the country like the Indian Council of Medical Research   ICMR), National Institute of Virology (NIV), and others, in building the vaccine we are so proud of today. Dr. Balram Bhargava, the author of the book and director of ICMR, has taken enormous pride in writing this book as written documentation and proof of the struggles they went through as a team to create a historical vaccine – Covaxin. Through simple writing and detailed diagrams and images, Dr. Bhargava has tried to break down the nuances of the research that goes into making a vaccine and explain the process behind the scenes for a layman to understand. He has addressed various speculations that were raised regarding vaccine development with a background of scientific reasoning and lo...

INDIA'S JOURNEY IN DEVELOPING COVAXIN CHALLENGE FACED CONTEXT CHALLENGE DEFEATED Lack of health infrastructure Population of 1.3 billion Public and private sector models in India Public sector caters to financially needy   Private sector catered to those who could afford costs Aim of universal health coverage could not be met through the private sector alone   Impose a nationwide lockdown on 24 th March Restrictive measures to contain the spread of the virus Added time to ramp up resources Shortage of sufficient samples for ICMR and NIV to isolate and study virus Requirement of high-quality samples samples needed to have a high viral load Someone had to deliver them safely to the NIV lab 12 tourist samples arrived in New Delhi Genomic sequencing was conducted overnight Requirement of mass production of testing kits   First ...

  Part I – The Rise. Post war Germany was teeming with anxiety. Utopia would come at a price. There was news of poverty, unemployment, and sleepless nights everywhere. The closing years of the war had been harsh and with the surprise aerial bombings from the Allied, the Germans only went to sleep at night unsure if they would wake up unscathed in the morning. As many testified, “drugs were used as a panacea to solve personal problems” and tranquilizers and barbiturate sedative use was at an all new high. In fact, accidental and deliberate overdosage led to many deaths. This was appropriate context for the heroic entry of our wonder drug “Thalidomide.” Chemie Grunenthal was not a well-established corporation back in the day. The company had been family owned and had begun operations in Germany,1946. The company was the first to introduce penicillin to Germany in the post-war period. The Chief Scientist of  Chemie Grunenthal was  Dr Heinrich Muckter . Muckter had spent...

  Have you ever wondered what your doctor’s report of a 120/80mm Hg normal BP means? Blood pressure measurement is a routine part of a visit to a doctor’s clinic. A normal blood pressure status reflects your vital status, which is to say, your body is in an acceptable functional state. While most conditions can manifest themselves with outwardly presenting symptoms, high blood pressure may often go unnoticed until it comes as a shocker to you in the doctor’s cabin. Take a close look at the diagram shown below. This infamous “Rule of Halves,” is a pictorial representation of the statistical analysis that, while half of an entire community may have hypertension, only half are diagnosed with it, half of which are adequately treated for the same. According to a recent survey done by WHO in 2021, the global burden of Hypertension is an estimated 1.28 billion adults aged 30-79y.   Source : notes.medicalstudent.blogspot So, what is Hypertension and what do those two numbers...

S o, you hit 55, and your company decides that you and your family deserve a full body health check-up. "It's on the house," they say. So, you get those tests. The full package. The sugars, the lipids, the electrolytes, the scans, and the never-ending run on that treadmill. The next day, however, the reports couldn't be any less amusing. Your doctor folds his sleeves, puts his teeth down, ruffles his hair, and says, “Sir, your sugar profile doesn't look so good." He reconducts the entire panel of sugar tests, fasting sugar, premeal random, and post-meal sugar. Alas! Just as your waistline would have it, "The numbers don't look so good." Diabetes, as we all know it, is the sugar problem. "He has sugar!" they all say while depriving the middle-aged-white-eyed-office-going uncle of the one piece of confectionary that had his name on it. Let's dig this problem out and take it from the top. In this article, I would like to describe the ...