RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR We all know the remarkable connection that exists between psychology and immune function — in health and illness. While harmony between the two is suggested to denote optimal health and well-being, a ‘sickening’ imbalance between them is said to be the cause of a host of diseases, including tuberculosis and AIDS. Though a […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR We all know what anger is. We have all felt it, more or less, on a regular basis, whether as a definitive, or fleeting, epithet of annoyance, or as full-fledged rage. Anger is, in précis, a normal phenomenon. It is also a healthy human emotion. It becomes a dilemma, a difficult-to-handle emotion, or […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR There’s this celebrated story of a patient, with flu, who went to his physician with the illness. The latter quickly scribbled a prescription in his customary difficult-to-decrypt handwriting. The patient put it in his pocket, but forgot to go the chemist. Each morning, for two years, he displayed it to the conductor as […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR First things first: an elderly woman in China, who became seriously ill after getting infected with the COVID-19 virus, made an uneventful recovery following stem cell therapy. Similar treatments were undertaken elsewhere — the outcome was reassuring. However, the fact is — it is early days in the chronicle of stem cells foretold. The […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Our brain is the control centre for conscious, unconscious and automatic life processes. The interesting part also is all of us have not one but, in effect, three brains in consonance with our evolutionary ‘construct’ — the ‘logical’ brain, the ‘heart’ brain and the ‘gut’ brain. Our brain abounds with neuropeptides. Neuropeptides, as […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR When the Austrian paediatrician, Clemens von Pirquet, MD, first used the term, allergy, in the early 1900s — from the Greek allos, for altered state, and ergon, for reaction — to illustrate excess physiological responses to substances in the environment, the fascinating expression caught the fancy of the world. Today, allergy is, doubtless, the most clichéd […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR What has colour fluctuation in certain leaves got to do with the change of seasons? More than meets the eye and mind. The changes are collectively called biological rhythms — or, behavioural changes that may not be just passive responses to environmental variations. Such changes are driven by ‘endogenous oscillators,’ called biological clocks, […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR When Linus Pauling, the legendary chemist and two-time Nobel laureate, discovered that a specific heritable protein variation in a single component of haemoglobin protein complex resulted in sickle cell anaemia, it initiated a new era in biomedical sciences. Years later, the gene responsible for the haemoglobin variant was discovered — including an entire series […]