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Dr. Sid Pani is an internal medicine physician in practice with Dr. Paula Jo Carbone, MD at 490 Boston Post Road, Sudbury, Mass.The other day a young woman came to my office with symptoms of frequency and a burning sensation while urinating. This was her third time this year with similar symptoms. Each time she was treated with an antibiotic. Before seeing me, she was taking plenty of fluids and cranberry juice. Bladder infections are commonly seen in 10 percent of young women each year. About 60 percent have an infection at some point in their lives. The condition, however, rarely occurs in men younger than 50 years old unless they have had some kind of genitourinary procedure. Why do women end up having more …
I happened to see a 56-year-old woman with a history of chronic obstructive lung disease in my office the other day. Besides her inhalers, she was on steroids because of frequent breathing issues. At this visit, I noticed that she had lost 1 centimeter in height since her last visit. An X-ray showed a compression fracture in one of her thoracic vertebra. A DEXA scan was subsequently done, which showed evidence of osteoporosis. Osteoporosis means "porous bones." Osteoporotic bones are weak and brittle with low levels of calcium and other minerals. Twenty percent of all women older than 50 …
With the change of seasons, a bulk of my office patients in Sudbury are now presenting complaints about facial pain, nasal stuffiness, thick greenish or yellow nasal discharge, cough and problems with their sense of smell. The majority of these patients suffer from acute sinusitis. Sinusitis affects 35-37 million Americans every year. It amounts to about 16 million office visits per year and costs about $3.4 billion to the economy. We have four paired sinuses in the bones of the face and the skull. These are the ethmoid, maxillary, frontal and sphenoid sinuses. Each sinus has an opening …
Unless you are at risk for heart disease or stroke, you need to check your lipid profile once every five years after the age of 20. Men aged 35 years and women aged 45 years should be routinely screened for high lipids. If you are at risk for heart disease or stroke, your lipid profile needs to be screened annually. Atorvastatin, which is a cholesterol-lowering medication, is probably the most prescribed medication in the world. This gives us some indication of how prevalent the problem of high cholesterol is in the community. Total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol (bad cholesterol) and …
"Pardon me for being rude, It was not me it was my food. It got so lonely down below, it just popped up to say hello." When you eat, food passes from the mouth to the stomach through a tube called the esophagus. Once food is in the stomach, a ring of muscle fibers (sphincter) prevents food from moving back into the esophagus. If this sphincter does not close well, food, liquid and stomach acid leak back into the esophagus from the stomach causing reflux (gastroesophageal reflux disease or GERD). The two most frequently reported symptoms of GERD are Heartburn, which is a burning discomfort …
About 27 percent of men and 30 percent of women in United States have hypertension (high blood pressure). By the age of 70, almost 70 percent have hypertension. The incidence and prevalence is about 50 percent higher in African Americans compared to their Caucasian counterparts. Of concern, national surveys indicate that the prevalence of hypertension is increasing among children and adults. What is really dangerous about hypertension and important to recognize is that you may not even realize that you have it. When your heart beats, it squeezes blood into arteries to be circulated through …
