Tag Archives: Medicine

Don’t Take Your Health Lightly


I’ve found this to be an almost natural – and quite comical – attribute to the Lebanese person (and possibly applicable everywhere too), which is: there’s nothing wrong with me unless I can’t stand on both feet anymore.

Take my mother for instance. Yesterday evening, she was shaking and trembling, suffering from acute pain in her lower back area, and she was hypothermic. I insisted we’d take her to the hospital because what was happening to her was not normal. But she vehemently refused. And soon enough, after taking a collection of over-the-counter drugs, she felt good enough to function.

My dad woke me up this morning, a scene that is oddly deja-vu, to tell me that we have to take my mother to the hospital. Why? She was having the exact same episode she had the night before. So we took my mom to the hospital and she got examined by an ER doctor who determined that she might be suffering from kidney stones. Further tests need to be done, obviously, but this is not something that over-the-counter drugs can fix.

The scene of my dad waking me up to take my mother to the hospital is deja-vu because it happened eighteen months ago when, after suffering from a mild stomach-ache which she dismissed as stomach flu, my mother couldn’t walk from pain in her lower-right abdomen the following day. Yes, you guessed it: appendicitis.

And the “funny” thing is that this doesn’t apply to my mom alone. Have you ever found yourself in the midst of those visits where people start chit-chatting about their health and prescribing drugs to each other? Well, if you haven’t  let me lay out the scenario.

Person A knocks on person B’s door. Warm Lebanese greetings ensue. Person A enters and sits down. Person B goes to prepare coffee or calls up on the maid to do so. Coffee is served. Person A and Person B start chatting about the most mundane of things. Then Person A mentions that they’ve been having this weird rash on their back. Person B knows just the thing for that! This ointment that he got prescribed by Person C who got it from Person D, etc…

It baffles me how some people can conceive and fully accept the idea that they know more about their health than a physician who went through a decade long educational process and who – in his/her most rudimentary mental form – knows at least a little more about that rash or ache.

So people, instead of seeking help from people who’s only medical knowledge is what they watch on Doctors, how about you go see a real doctor next time? Pain is the body’s way of telling  you something’s wrong. Consider it as a text message. You always reply to text messages (when you have credit). How about a text message that might be the difference between you staying alive or dying?

Love And Other Drugs – Review

Love And Other Drugs, aka one of the most hated movies of the year. But unlike the overall opinion regarding this movie, I actually loved it!

Love And Other Drugs stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Jamie, an ADD son of a doctor, who doesn’t want to follow in his dad’s footsteps, so he gets a job as a pharmaceutical sales rep for Pfizer, the company that later on brought the world Viagra. While trying to sell his company’s drug, he meets Maggie, the character portrayed by Anne Hathaway. Maggie has an early onset of Parkinson’s and this where the story starts.

The movie is very life-like. It’s about commerce (trying to sell drug to doctors who can be bought by gifts and schmoozing), ambition and ultimately love. Aren’t those things what life is all about? You have ambition to basically set a name for yourself. This ambition will lead you to make good money, fall in love and raise a family. This is where the life-like approach comes from.

Each one of the main characters of this movie has their own journey. Jamie’s path is to grow out of the careless womanizer that he is into a man. And Maggie’s growth revolves around trust in people, to let go of her own secure but fragile little world and let go.  Jake Gyllenhaal is heartfelt, engaging in his portrayal of Jamie. He draws you in and makes the character very likable. But the true star here is Anne Hathaway.

Anne Hathaway has very much grown since her The Princess Diaries days. And if the first hour of movie, which is basically sex, is not convincing enough, she blows you away (no pun intended) with the emotions she gets across in the second half. It’s not hard (again no pun intended) to like her in any movie that she does, be it the drug addict in Rachel Getting Married or as the sick woman in this one. Her embodiment of a Parkinson’s patient is very good. The tremors she makes, the way she lives the disease… it is all done with the right touch of credibility. And this is coming from a person who has lived firsthand with someone with Parkinson’s. The struggle to get the drugs, the disappointment when she discovers she forgot to refill her prescription… you live the movie and the character through Maggie’s eyes, predicting what she’ll do next: will she open up to Jamie or will she remain secluded? Will she let herself truly live or will she just keep in going by? It’s a multi-layered character, delivered brilliantly. And I’m not ashamed to say I prefer this performance over Annette Bening’s performance in The Kids Are All Right.

There’s one particular scene involving a vodka bottle that is very haunting. You can’t but feel sorry for her character at that point.

Some say that the nudity is unnecessary, especially with the amount it is in this movie. I disagree. The sex scenes in this movie are the vehicle by which these two characters communicate and get to know each other. Relationships usually start the other way around. This is not the case here. Instead of having their minds do the talking, their bodies do.

Moreover, you feel at times that the plot can be taken to an extra level. Sometimes, it feels as if the script could have used an extra draft to make this movie into one that could have actually been a very strong contender at this year’s award season. Some scenes are dispensable and very Hollywood-like cliche, in a movie that is not very cliche. An extra revision would have probably tied those scenes up and delivered a truly great movie.

To finish this up, I prefer Love And Other Drugs over all the other  movies in the Motion Picture – Comedy nomination at the Golden Globes. It’s not for all tastes. But I loved it.