HEALTH & LIFESTYLE •
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2013
kpcnews.com
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Daydreams at Disney focus on ‘super-power’ apps There are several things I could not live without: food, water, oxygen, etc. But there are many non-essential things that come in handy so much that I almost cannot imagine living without them. At the top of this list is my smart phone, which is an iPhone right now. It could or has taken the place of about a dozen things that I use frequently. It allows me mobility while I stay in touch with some of the world around me. It offers me resources, such as medical references, almost immediately that were nearly impossible to manage just a few years ago. On the other hand, my iPhone and its big brother, the iPad, have led me down a path that makes me think I can write this column from anywhere, at any time. So, here I sit, next to the pool at a Walt Disney World resort, writing to you.
What more could I want? Being the obsessive-compulsive person that I am, I will tell you a few things that are still lacking in my life that would make it better. The first thing on the list is a DR. TERRY recording device GAFF that would document the things I want it to, with a built-in editing tool. It would keep track of everything I see, hear and do while I am working, instead of me needing to summarize every patient visit into a computer. While I know that Google glasses and other products are trying to take on this challenge, they seem to need the things they
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record to be reality. What I want is for the device to record my perception of reality. There would need to be a filing system to take me back to previous information about the person instantly. But it would need to be in a summary form, so all the data I need would be there, with none of the confusing extra stuff. Providing this would be the job of the editing tool I mentioned earlier. I would also like X-ray eyes. It would be so handy to look into a patient and see what is going wrong without needing to send them off to someone else to produce images and interpret them. Of course, they would not really be X-ray eyes, because I would not want to expose patients to all of that potentially damaging radiation. The images would need to be produced safely
“An app that would let me see into the future … would be able to tell that a treatment plan will give the desired result, instead of making the “educated guess” that I am presently stuck with offering.” Dr. Terry Gaff
• and only when I really needed them. Perhaps even more important would be the ability to look into the thoughts of each patient and know what they actually feel instead of needing to guess what they mean when they say that their pain is a 12 on a scale from one to 10. It would also tell me when patients are lying to me in order to manipulate me into prescribing the wrong treatment for them. This tool would also be very handy
in the process of raising teenagers. Of course, an app that would let me see into the future would also be very nice. Then, I would be able to tell that a treatment plan will give the desired result, instead of making the “educated guess” that I am presently stuck with offering to each patient I see. There are other “killer apps” that I would like to have, just as I would like to have some of the super-powers I see in comic
books and movies. However, with great power, comes great responsibility and if everyone had the powers I want, I would no longer have the job that I love. I wrote this wish list not because I want to be a god, but because it seems like I am asked to do the tasks outlined here with the imperfect mind, body and energy that I am blessed with. Until someone develops something new, you and I will struggle along together with our educated guesses. Now, it is time to go wake up my wife and get back to the vacation time I promised her. DR. TERRY GAFF is a physician
in northeast Indiana. Contact him at drgaff@kpcmedia. com or on Facebook. To read past columns and to post comments go to kpcnews.com.
Schools criticized for bans on dreadlocks, Afros BY LEANNE ITALIE Associated Press
“Why are you so sad?” a TV reporter asked the little girl with a bright pink bow in her hair. “Because they didn’t like my dreads,” she sobbed, wiping her tears. “I think that they should let me have my dreads.” With those words, secondgrader Tiana Parker of Tulsa, Okla., found herself, at age 7, at the center of decades of debate over standards of black beauty, cultural pride and freedom of expression. It was no isolated incident at the predominantly black Deborah Brown Community School, which in the face of outrage in late August apologized and rescinded language banning dreadlocks, Afros, mohawks and other “faddish” hairstyles it had called unacceptable and potential health hazards. A few weeks earlier, another charter school, the Horizon Science Academy in Lorain, Ohio, sent a draft policy home to parents that proposed a ban on “Afro-puffs and small twisted braids.” It, too, quickly apologized and withdrew the wording. But at historically black Hampton University in Hampton, Va., the dean of the business school has defended and left in place a 12-year-old prohibition on dreadlocks and cornrows for male students in a leadership seminar for MBA candidates, saying the look is not businesslike. Tiana’s father, barber student Terrance Parker, said he and his wife chose not to change her style and moved the straight-A student to a different public school, where she now happily sings songs about her hair with friends. “I think it stills hurts her. But the way I teach my kids is regardless of what people say, you be yourself and you be happy with who you are and how God made you,” he said. Tiana added: “I like my new school better.” As for the thousands of emails and phone calls of support the family has received from around the world, she said she feels “cared about.” Deborah Brown, the school’s founder, did not return a call from The Associated Press. Jayson Bendik, dean of students at Horizon in Lorain, said in an email that “our word choice was a mistake.” In New York City, the dress code at 16-year-old Dante de Blasio’s large public high school in Brooklyn includes no such hair restrictions. Good thing for Dante, whose large Afro is hard to miss at campaign stops and in a TV spot for his father, Bill de Blasio, who is running for mayor. There is no central
AP
This 2013 image released by the Parker Family shows Terrence Parker, left, daughter Tiana, 7, center, and wife Miranda Parker in Tulsa, Okla. Tiana was at the center of a debate over her hairstyle.
clearinghouse for local school board policies on hairstyles, or surveys indicating whether such rules are widespread. Regardless, mothers of color and black beauty experts consider the controversies business as usual. “Our girls are always getting messages that tell them that they are not good enough, that they don’t look pretty enough, that their skin isn’t light enough, that their hair isn’t long enough, that their hair isn’t blond enough,” said Beverly Bond of the New York-based esteem-building group Black Girls Rock. “The public banning of our hair or anything about us that looks like we look, it feels like it’s such a step backward.” Bond founded the organization in response to an episode in 2007 when radio host Don Imus called members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos.” He later apologized. In Chicago, Leila Noelliste has been blogging about natural hair at Blackgirllonghair.com for about five years. She has followed the school cases closely. The 28-year-old mother with a natural hairstyle and a year-old son said it is a touchy issue among African-Americans and others. “This is the way the hair grows out of my head, yet it’s even shocking in some black communities, because we’ve kind of been told culturally that to be acceptable and to make other people kind of comfortable with the way that we look, we should straighten our hair, whether through heat or chemicals,” she said. “So whether we’re in non-black communities or black communities, with our natural hair, we stand out. It evokes a lot of reaction.” Particularly painful, said Noelliste, is the notion that natural styles are not hygienic.
AP
Indigo Wren Strawn, Fayetteville, Ark., watches a cutout of Alice, from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” grow from the neck up at a library exhibit entitled “The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter,” on display at the New York Public
Library, Monday, in New York. The library released a list of 100 great children’s books from the last hundred years. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” is not among the 100 recommended titles because it is more than 100 years old.
N.Y.C. library offers list of 100 great children’s books NEW YORK (AP) — Beloved authors Judy Blume and Eric Carle helped the New York Public Library celebrate children’s literature Monday as the library released a list of 100 great books from the last 100 years. The list includes picture books for preschoolers as well as books for older readers like “The Hobbit” and “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” “The Cat in the Hat,” ”Pippi Longstocking” and “Where the Wild Things Are” all made the list, which accompanies an exhibit on children’s literature at the library’s main building in midtown Manhattan. Blume and Carle joined librarians for a reading and
Online: nypl.org/childrens100
panel discussion. “Viewed over time, children’s books are the collected memory of our hopes and dreams,” said moderator Leonard Marcus, a book critic and the curator of the exhibit. “They are the message in a bottle that each generation tosses out to the next generation in the hope that it may wash ashore and be read and be taken to heart.” Blume, whose “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing” is on the list, said that when she was in the fourth grade herself she always had stories
in her head. “But I never told anybody about them because I thought if I did they would think I was weird,” she said. Since Blume began publishing in the 1970s, many of her books dealing with subjects like racism, divorce and sexuality have been banned by authorities who considered the topics inappropriate for children. “Books that are loved by children are often the books that scare adults,” Blume said. Carle made the library’s list with “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” his 1969 picture book about a voracious bug that becomes a butterfly. He said he created the caterpillar by folding and manipulating paper; he first thought of the
character as a bookworm, Willie the Worm. “And I had this wonderful editor and she didn’t like the worm so much,” Carle said. Students from Public School 41 in Greenwich Village and Our Lady Queen of Angels School in East Harlem sat up front as the two authors read from their work. Fourth-grader Brianna Astacio of Our Lady Queen of Angels said Blume’s “Double Fudge” was her favorite book because “it’s funny.” Carle read his brand-new book, “Friends,” about a boy who swims across a river and climbs a mountain in search of his friend. Spoiler alert: He finds her.
Study: Most twins can be born without a C-section THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Expecting twins? You probably don’t need to schedule a cesarean section. Most moms can safely give birth without surgery, a big study finds. It’s the latest research to question the need for C-sections, which are done in one-third of all births in the United States and three-fourths of those involving twins. Studies increasingly are challenging long-held beliefs about cesareans, such as that women who had one need to deliver future babies the
same way. Now doctors are looking hard at C-sections for twin births, which are on the rise because of infertility treatments. Twins have more risk for birth complications and some studies suggest C-sections lower that risk, but this had not been put to a rigorous test. Dr. Jon Barrett of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto, led a study in 25 countries of 2,800 women pregnant with twins. All of the first of the twins to be delivered were in good position for birth (most
doctors still recommend a C-section if the first twin is in feet-first or breech position). Half of the moms were scheduled to have C-sections and the rest, vaginal births. About 40 percent of the latter group wound up having C-sections, and 10 percent of those scheduled to have cesareans ended up giving birth vaginally. About 2 percent of newborns died or had a serious problem, but the manner of birth made no difference. Nor did it affect the rate of complications in moms.
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research paid for the study. Results are in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine. “These results do not indicate that all sets of twins should be delivered vaginally,” but that planning to do so is a reasonable choice if the doctor is experienced in twin births and knows when a C-section becomes necessary, Dr. Michael Greene of Massachusetts General Hospital wrote in a commentary in the journal.