Here's a list of inexpensive, over-the-counter skin care products... and I'm talkin' over-the-counter, as in drug store, not as in Saks Fifth Avenue... these reasonably priced products work just as well as their designer counterparts...

For Face
Cleansers:
- Moisturel sensitive skin cleanser (the one I love for winter dryness)
- Purpose liquid or bar (I use the liquid in summer)
- Cetaphil bar or liquid (really burned my eyes)
- Basis liquid cleaner for sensitive skin
- Oil of Olay fragrance free cleanser
- Eucerin gentle hydrating cleanser

Moisturizers for Face-Daytime-SPF:
- Purpose dual treatment
- DML for face
- Eucerin 25
- Ombrelle 15
- Oil of Olay for sensitive skin
- Not on list, because it's newer than list, but I use and love Neutrogena Healthy Skin Face Lotion, with SPF 15

Nighttime
- Oil of Olay daily renewal
- Complex 15 for face
- Eucerin Q10
- Kinerase cream or lotion (twice a day)

For Body
Moisturizers
- SBR lipo cream (great for flakey patches)
- Moisterel lotion
- DML forte
- Eucerin Plus
- Aguaglycolic lotion ($15 might be high for a drug store product, but this stuff works as well as designer brands. Caution, as with all glycolic acid formulas, don't use this after shaving. I also use the face cream version)
- Cetaphil moisturizing lotion or cream (I also use this)

Body Soaps (bar)
- Lever 2000 unscented (used to use, now unfortunately I'm in love with a French soap at $8.50 a bar)
- Dove unscented
- Cetaphil bar
- Dial sensitive skin

Body Soaps (liquid)
- Oil of Olay daily renewal
- Dove

Sun Blocks
- Solbar AVO
- Pre-sun Ultra 30 lotion or gel
- Ombrelle 15, 30 (my choice)
- Vanicream SPF 15 or 35

updated 6:33 p.m. ET, Fri., Jan. 9, 2009
WASHINGTON - The number of obese American adults outweighs the number of those who are merely overweight, according to the latest statistics from the federal government.

Numbers posted by the National Center for Health Statistics show that more than 34 percent of Americans are obese, compared to 32.7 percent who are overweight. It said just under 6 percent are "extremely" obese.

"More than one-third of adults, or over 72 million people, were obese in 2005-2006, the NCHS said in its report.
The numbers are based on a survey of 4,356 adults over the age of 20 who take part in a regular government survey of health, said the NCHS, which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The figures come from the 2005-2006 survey and are the most current available.

"During the physical examination, conducted in mobile examination centers, height and weight were measured as part of a more comprehensive set of body measurements," the NCHS report said.

"Although the prevalence of obesity has more than doubled since 1980, the prevalence of overweight has remained stable over the same time period," it said.
Obesity raises serious health risks
Obesity and overweight are calculated using a formula called body mass index. BMI is equal to weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. Someone with a BMI of 25 to 29 is classified as overweight, 30 to 40 counts as obese and people with BMIs of 40 or more are morbidly obese.

In the 1988-1994 surveys, 33 percent of Americans were overweight, 22.9 percent were obese and 2.9 percent were morbidly obese. The numbers have edged up steadily since.

Being overweight or obese raises the risk of heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, arthritis and other conditions.

In May, the CDC reported that 32 percent of U.S. children fit the definition of being overweight, 16 percent were obese and 11 percent were extremely obese.

Childhood and adult obesity has emerged as a growing problem not only in the United States but also in many countries around the world.

Troubled not just at night, insomniacs may be in a "state of hyperarousal" because they don't have an adequate supply of a certain inhibitory neurotransmitter, according to new research...

Insomnia Tied to Lack of Brain Chemical

Who the heck named this thread?  "Other Medical Stuff"?  As in, "Things That Are Not, Cancer, Autism, or Women's Issues, and Don't Neccessarily Make You Go Wow"? 

No Mug? Drug Makers Cut Out Goodies for Doctors

To Lehman Brothers, Linens ’n Things and the blank VHS tape, add another American institution that expired in 2008: drug company trinkets.

Starting Jan. 1, the pharmaceutical industry has agreed to a voluntary moratorium on the kind of branded goodies — Viagra pens, Zoloft soap dispensers, Lipitor mugs — that were meant to foster good will and, some would say, encourage doctors to prescribe more of the drugs.

No longer will Merck furnish doctors with purplish adhesive bandages advertising Gardasil, a vaccine against the human papillomavirus. Banished, too, are black T-shirts from Allergan adorned with rhinestones that spell out B-O-T-O-X. So are pens advertising the Sepracor sleep drug Lunesta, in whose barrel floats the brand’s mascot, a somnolent moth.

Some skeptics deride the voluntary ban as a superficial measure that does nothing to curb the far larger amounts drug companies spend each year on various other efforts to influence physicians. But proponents welcome it as a step toward ending the barrage of drug brands and logos that surround, and may subliminally influence, doctors and patients.

“It’s not just the pens — it’s the paper on the exam table, the tongue depressor, the stethoscope tags, medical calipers that might be used to interpret an EKG, penlights,” said Dr. Robert Goodman, a physician in internal medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

In 1999, Dr. Goodman started No Free Lunch, a nonprofit group that encourages doctors to reject drug company giveaways. “Practically anything you can put a name on is branded in a doctor’s office, short of branding, like a Nascar driver, on the doctor’s white coat,” Dr. Goodman said.

The new voluntary industry guidelines try to counter the impression that gifts to doctors are intended to unduly influence medicine. The code, drawn up by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry group in Washington, bars drug companies from giving doctors branded pens, staplers, flash drives, paperweights, calculators and the like.

The guidelines also reiterate the group’s 2002 code, which prohibited more expensive goods and services like tickets to professional sports games and junkets to resorts. And it asks companies that finance medical courses, conferences or scholarships to leave the selection of study material and scholarship recipients to outside program coordinators.

Diane Bieri, the executive vice president of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said the updated guidelines were not an admission that gifts could influence doctors’ prescribing habits. Instead, she said, they were meant to emphasize the educational nature of the relationship between industry and doctors.

“We have never said and would never say that a pharmaceutical pen or notebook has influenced any prescription,” Ms. Bieri said.

But some critics said the code did not go far enough to address the influence of drug marketing on the practice of medicine. The guidelines, for example, still permit drug makers to underwrite free lunches for doctors and their staffs or to sponsor dinners for doctors at restaurants, as long as the meals are accompanied by educational presentations.

“Pens or no pens, their influence is not going to be diminished,” said Dr. Larry M. Greenbaum, a rheumatologist in Greenwood, Ind. He has made a point of collecting ballpoint pens advertising formerly heavily promoted medications, like the painkiller Vioxx, that were later withdrawn after reports of dangerous side effects.

Last year, besides giving away nearly $16 billion in free drug samples to doctors, pharmaceutical companies spent more than $6 billion on “detailing” — an industry term for the sales activities of drug representatives including office visits to doctors, meal-time presentations and branded pens and other handouts, according to IMS Health, a health care information company.

The industry code also permits drug makers to pay doctors as consultants “based on fair market value” — which critics say means that companies can continue to pay individual doctors tens of thousands of dollars or more a year.

“We have arrived at a point in the history of medicine in America where doctors have deep, deep financial ties with the drug makers and marketers,” said Allan Coukell, the director of policy for the Prescription Project, a nonprofit group in Boston working to promote evidence-based medicine. “Financial entanglements at all the levels have the potential to influence prescribing in a way that is not good.”

About 40 drug makers, including Eli Lilly & Company, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer, have signed on to the code. Representatives of several pharmaceutical makers said their companies intended to comply with the guidelines, but they declined to discuss past marketing programs involving branded gifts.

The restrictions come as a blow to the makers and distributors of promotional products, an industry with an annual turnover of about $19 billion, according to Promotional Products Association International, a trade group. Such companies, accustomed to orders of up to a million pens a drug, stand to lose around $1 billion a year in sales as a result of the drug industry’s voluntary ban, the group said.

The sudden scarcity of free goodies, though, could enhance the cachet of collections that some doctors have assembled over the years as a mocking countermeasure to drug marketing. Dr. Nathan Anderson, a resident in internal medicine at a hospital in Texas, has posted photographs of the various items he has received on his blog, drugreptoys.blogspot.com.

Dr. Jeffrey F. Caren, a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, has collected more than 1,200 pens and mounted them on a pillar in his office.

While some doctors applaud the gift ban, others seem offended by the insinuation that a ballpoint pen could turn their heads. “It seems goofy to us; we like getting our pens,” Dr. Susan B. Hurson, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Washington, said in a telephone interview.

Dr. Hurson said she paid no attention to the logos on the pens she carries around in her doctor’s coat.

Prompted by a reporter’s question, she pulled out a handful of pens from her pocket and read off the drugs advertised: Clindesse, a cream for vaginal infection; Halo, a system for detecting breast cancer, and Evamist, an estrogen spray. “It’s hard for me to believe it influences what you prescribe.”

But Dr. Phillip Freeman, a psychiatrist in Boston, said that physicians who contended that the giveaways were benign might be suffering from denial.

The year in weird science and myth-busting

Researchers debunk conventional wisdom about poinsettias, sugar and holiday suicides — and note that Coca-Cola can only do so much.

By Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times

Contrary to popular belief, poinsettias are not toxic to people or animals, suicides do not increase over the Christmas holidays, and sugar does not make kids hyperactive. Also, Wales winning the rugby grand slam does not influence the death of popes, and douching with Coca-Cola is not an effective contraceptive method.

Those are some of the conclusions of reports in the British Medical Journal's annual Christmas issue, a compilation of the weird and lighthearted papers its editors accumulate over the year. In a related vein, a report in the journal Lancet details the curious case of a woman who fainted every time she ate a sandwich.

The supposed toxicity of poinsettias has been a subject of warnings ever since the red and white flowers have been associated with the Christmas holiday, but numerous reports from poison control centers do not support the warnings, according to Drs. Rachel C. Vreeman and Aaron E. Carroll of the Indiana University School of Medicine. 

They reviewed nearly 900 calls to such centers reporting poinsettia consumption and found that none of the incidents resulted in serious illness and few produced any symptoms at all. Moreover, experiments with animals show no effects even at very high consumption, they found.

Similarly, researchers reviewed data on suicides in the United States for the last 35 years and found no increase before, during or after the holidays. In fact, despite widespread talk about winter gloom's effects on humans, they found that suicides peak in the summer and are lowest in winter. They conclude that people actually receive additional emotional and social support during the holidays, which decreases suicidal thoughts.

Other common beliefs are also not supported by fact, they said. Studies showed that children who consume large amounts of sugar are no more hyperactive than those who don't. But parents who think their kids have eaten sugar, even when they haven't, tend to rate them as being hyperactive. 

The ill-mannered behavior, the authors wrote, was "all in the parents' minds."

Other myths that have been disproved: Not wearing a hat causes one to lose excessive body heat, and eating at night makes you more likely to pack on the pounds. Also, they found, there is no consistently effective cure for a hangover.

Coca-Cola douches for pregnancy prevention were a part of folklore in the 1950s and 1960s, before the contraceptive pill. People thought that the acidity of the soda would kill sperm and that the classic Coke bottle provided a convenient "shake and shoot" applicator.

Dr. Deborah Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine had previously reported that Coke can impede the mobility of sperm in a test tube. But further study, she said, shows that sperm get to the cervical canal so quickly that postcoital spritzing is ineffective.

For it to work, she wrote, the soda would have to be put in the vagina before sex, "but that would undoubtedly be messy."

(Full story)

If I had known that in high school, it would have spared my girlfriend the ludicrous experience of climbing into a laundry room basin with a soda bottle following a broken condom episode!