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Kidney Stones

I've written about this previously , but it's often hard to explain to people what a 10 is on the "1-10" pain scale if they haven't been in that spot before.  For women who have had children, they generally know what a 10 is, but for men it's a little harder.  When I was a medical student on my psychiatry rotation, we had a patient calmly sitting there saying his pain level was at a 10 and our resident, who was an ex-military sniper with a large skull tattoo on his forearm and a crosshair through the eye, calmly leaned forward and asked, "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you could not be in more pain than you are now, correct?"  The patient changed his answer. Getting to the point, a kidney stone is about the close I can come to describing a 10/10 pain to people who haven't gone through childbirth.  The fundamental issue is similar - your body is trying to move a big solid thing through an opening that was not really desig...
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Trick or Treat or Toy

I was looking for something fun and Halloween based and I found this small study . If you've ever wondered how to give out healthier treats effectively on Halloween without getting your house destroyed, this study looked at close to 300 Trick-or-treaters between ages 3 and 14 to see what would happen if they were offered toy treats instead of candy.  It found that children were just as likely to choose toys as candy and there were no gender differences. The implication of this study is that children will not be disappointed by toy treats on Halloween!
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What is the Best Type of Exercise?

Reader submission: "What is the best type of exercise to get a low heart rate"  The idea being that cardio-respiratory fitness, basically how well your heart and lungs are working, goes along with a lower resting heart rate as we can see marathon runners and sprinters with resting heart rates in the 40's or 50's.  It's also more recently been shown to have some beneficial long term effects on brain volume as people get older, which sounds like a good thing, unless you have a small head.  Fun fact:  For UFC fight clearance, they make us check people's heart rates before and after doing 100 jumps - it doesn't change much from what I've seen. There's a lot of different opinions out there, so instead of doing a lot of reading, I walked into the middle of our cardiology office and just asked the question loudly and the answers I got boiled down to either long-distance running or high-intensity interval training.  I'm assuming that you can also l...
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