Health / Wellness

It seems that although we love our sunburnt country, we’re not getting out in it enough – a Deakin University study of 11,000 Australian adults released earlier this year found one-third were deficient in vitamin D and almost three-quarters (73 per cent) had levels considered by many experts to be ...

“I moved in with Dad in February 2010, about a week after Mum died. Dad had been diagnosed with dementia about a year before. With his grief, at first it was hard to discern what was dementia and what was depression. He didn’t even want to live, so for the ...

Seven out of ten single women regularly practice unprotected sex, a UK report revealed this week. The study found that a large percentage of women aged 18 to 40 were most at risk of STI infection, since they admitted to routinely practicing sex without protection. Research found that the average ...

Mums count on it when they kiss their children’s injuries better and many involved in natural medicine admit to having faith in the concept. And with more and more research scientifically verifying its presence, practitioners of conventional medicine are being called to embrace the power of the placebo effect. It ...

About one in three women experience heavy bleeding when they have their period. Researchers at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne have now been given a $500,000 National Health and Medical Research Council grant to help find new ways to manage the problem. “This is a serious condition that affects ...

Bad news for those who regularly eat lunch glued to their computers: you have twice the chance of developing deep-vein thrombosis (DVT), a potentially fatal blood clot. A recent New Zealand study done on 400 workers found that deskbound eaters had a 2.2-fold increased risk of blood clots. Earlier research ...

We’ve all done it: had a health query and jumped online to find out more. But when Charlotte MacNeil, 36, did it she managed to persuade herself she had “mad cow” disease. “I moved to the UK in the 1990s, when hysteria surrounding Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), the human strain of ...

Figures from the National Joint Replacement Registry show that the number of knee replacement surgeries since 2003 has soared by almost 55 per cent. The spike in surgeries is largely a result of an increase in those affected by osteoarthritis – the most common form of arthritis that represents more ...

Ribbon days, pin days, moustache months – cancer awareness in Australia has never been higher. But imagine being diagnosed with the sixth most deadly cancer in the nation, only to discover there are no “days” for it, no specialists dedicated to its treatment, no support groups or networks. In short, ...

Around the globe, pollen counts are increasing and Australian Bureau of Statistics data suggests it could be affecting our health: 17.1 per cent of the Australian population reported hay fever symptoms in 2008, compared with 10.3 per cent in 1990. Meanwhile, the number ofasthma-related deaths among children more than doubled ...