SUSAN MILIUS
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DOES EARLY TREATMENT HELP BACK PAIN: Wait and see for a month -- the current U.S. recommendation for people who have just picked up one too many bags of groceries and developed low back pain -- may not be good advice, says Jan Richardson, an orthopedic physical therapist on the board of directors of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA). At its national meeting this year, the organization's governing body voted to urge the federal government to review and revise that wait-and- see recommendation. Issued in 1994, it conspicuously does not advise immediate medical attention. Instead, the federal policy sends sufferers to over-the-counter medications, exhorts them to spend no more than three days in bed and to carry on as best they can with their usual activities. Richardson takes a different view, suggesting that seeing a physical therapist early, even within the first 24 hours to 48 hours, could make a difference. What the therapist would do depends on the injury, but Richardson lists several nonsurgical possibilities that she believes could help: manipulating the legs or spine, helping patients mobilize their bodies or designing special exercise programs. ------
SPORTS CAUSE IMPOTENCE: Sports, particularly bicycling, causes lots of impotence, says Dr. Irwin Goldstein from Boston University School of Medicine. He and colleagues estimate that 600,000 men in the United States became impotent after a crotch injury. More than 40 percent of these injuries happened during some sports activity. The most common sports accident, accounting for a third of the cases, was a straddle fall against a bicycle crossbar. Other men reported serious damage from falling onto parallel bars during gymnastics and landing badly on trampolines, horses or even water. The injuries restricted blood flow in the groin. 'The trauma may not be severe enough to cause immediate blockages,' says Goldstein. 'However, the blunt injury may result in damage to the inside lining of the arteries that alone, or in combination with other vascular risk factors, may progress to blockages. ' Surgeons often can repair these blocks, Goldstein says, but he thinks bicycle seats and protective clothing for sports need redesigning. ------
LEARN ABOUT LEARNING DISABILITIES: People have serious misconceptions about learning disabilities even though 10 to 15 percent of Americans are learning disabled, says the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation in Meriden, Connecticut. The foundation commissioned a poll of 1,207 adults to see how savvy and tolerant American society is. The answers are not cheering. Learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, affect people of normal or above-average intelligence, preventing them from processing information in the usual way because of neurobiological conditions. However, between 60 percent and 84 percent of people in the poll mixed learning disabilities with other conditions including mental retardation and emotional problems. When reporting conditions in society, 65 percent of respondents reported believing that adults who openly admit they have learning disabilities will be fired from jobs, and 85 percent reported that learning-disabled children get put down in school. ------
DEATH AT THE OFFICE: Lowering risk factors for coronary heart problems can make a huge difference in death rates, say Jeremiah and Rose Stamler from Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, who studied coronary deaths in workers in 81 companies. After reviewing 20 years of data from 40,000 employees, the researchers found that a man who lowered his risk factors (didn't smoke, kept his cholesterol and blood pressure down in the safe range) had only 20 percent the risk of coronaries faced by the average middle-aged man. For a woman with control over her risk factors, the chances of a coronary were only 20 percent of those faced by other women. ------NEWLN:For more information about BACK, please call 703-706-3216; about SPORTS, call 617-638-8491; about LEARN, call 914-381-4196; about OFFICE, call 312-337-7800. Please do not publish these numbers.)
