Month: September 2022

By ADAM BEAM and OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ

FRIDAY, Sept. 2, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Up to 9% of American teens say they’ve engaged in what’s known as “digital self-harm” — anonymously posting negative comments about themselves on social media.

As is the case with acts of physical self-harm such as cutting, this “virtual” self-harm is associated with a higher risk for thinking about or attempting suicide, according to a startling new study.

It found that teens who engaged in digital self-harm were up to seven times more likely to have considered suicide and as much as 15 times more likely to have made an attempt.

“We can’t say that one causes the other, but we do know they are connected in some way,” said lead author Justin Patchin. He’s co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

But why would anyone want to virtually trash themselves to begin with?

Patchin said that

FRIDAY, Sept. 2, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Many teenagers have a hard time discerning between accurate health messages and “fake news,” a new study finds.

Presented with a choice between fake and true health messages, about two in five teenagers considered both messages equally trustworthy, researchers found.

Further, about one in 10 actually considered the fake message more trustworthy than the accurate information, according to the report published Aug. 29 in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

“There has been an explosion of misinformation in the area of ​​health during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said principal researcher Dr. Radomír Masaryk, of Comenius University, in Bratislava, Slovakia.

“As teenagers are frequent users of the internet, we usually expect that they already know how to approach and appraise online information, but the opposite seems to be true,” Masaryk said in a journal news release.

For the study, Masaryk and his colleagues

FRIDAY, Sept. 2, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Yes, you can get monkeypox at the gym, but there’s no need to panic, one expert says.

“We have plenty of ways to protect ourselves in this setting,” said Dr. Thomas Giordano, chief of infectious diseases at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

First, wipe down equipment including weight machines, dumbbells, barbells and yoga mats, before and after use. Don’t share gym towels because the virus can be spread by touching a towel used by someone who has the virus.

“Most of the surfaces you’re coming across in the gym are hard, like plastic and metal, and not porous, like towels and linens,” Giordano said in a Baylor news release. “Because many gyms provided cleaning solutions before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, you can easily wipe away the virus from those hard surfaces.”

You can also bring your own cleaning solution, with permission

FRIDAY, Sept. 2, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Telehealth flourished during the pandemic, and now a new study shows it saved lives: The practice meant more people struggling with opioid addiction stayed in treatment longer and thereby lowered their risk of dying from an overdose.

For the study, researchers analyzed data among nearly 176,000 Medicare beneficiaries from September 2018 to February 2021. The analysis looked at telehealth services, medications for opioid use disorderand medically treated overdoses among patients starting a new round of care before the pandemic compared to those during the pandemic.

“Strategies to increase access to care and medications for opioid use disorder receipt and retention are urgently needed, and the results of this study add to the growing research documenting the benefits of expanding the use of telehealth services for people with opioid use disorder,” said lead study author Dr. Christopher Jones. He is acting director

Physician’s Briefing Staff