Resources
June 27th, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
As we age, crucial DNA mutations accumulate in our cells, and the mechanisms that regulate cell division fail. Out of control cell division plays havoc with our bodies: it’s called cancer. As the general population ages, the incidence of cancer increases. Science had progressed enormously in the understanding and treatment of cancer, and some amazingly sophisticated therapies do exist forme some specific types of cancer. For many other types of cancer, a big part of the treatment involves removing and killing cancerous cells. Thus, surgery to remove cancerous tumors is often followed by radiation therapy. In addition to dealing with sutures still healing, the patients (us) have to contend with…
June 15th, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Published scientific research, like any piece of writing, is a peculiar literary genre. By Carl Zimmer June 1, 2020 A lot of people are reading scientific papers for the first time these days, hoping to make sense of the coronavirus pandemic. If you’re one of them, be advised the scientific paper is a peculiar literary genre that can take some getting used to. And also bear in mind that these are not typical times for scientific publishing. It is hard to think of another moment in history when so many scientists turned their attention to one subject with such speed. In mid-January, scientific papers began trickling out with the first…
June 14th, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Let America Be America AgainLangston Hughes – 1902-1967 Let America be America again.Let it be the dream it used to be.Let it be the pioneer on the plainSeeking a home where he himself is free. (America never was America to me.) Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—Let it be that great strong land of loveWhere never kings connive nor tyrants schemeThat any man be crushed by one above. (It never was America to me.) O, let my land be a land where LibertyIs crowned with no false patriotic wreath,But opportunity is real, and life is free,Equality is in the air we breathe. (There’s never been equality for me,Nor…
June 13th, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
When you look at statistics, please remember that they are built on people like you and me. If the number of hospitalized Covid 19 patients is increasing in the intensive care units of your State’s hospitals, it is because people like you and I caught the virus. The virus is still here and it came to stay until it goes away, which may be in a few years or never. Please be careful and weigh the importance of the activity you are going to do today against the certainty that the virus is around. Wear a mask and try to maintain social distance. By now, we do know that facial…
June 12th, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
We Still Go Back and Read Darwin’ Scientist David Baltimore, 82 It’s like a bad dream come true. I started off as a virologist, have read a lot about the influenza epidemic of 1918–19, and I’ve always felt a wonderment that it doesn’t happen more frequently. There are so many viruses out there in the world. Between my junior and senior years of high school, I did a visit at a mouse-research laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. It was on a whim, a suggestion of my mother’s. What I discovered over that summer was that the forefronts of research were available to me. I could work on a problem that…
May 19th, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
The basics of skin pigmentation are the same for different skin colors. Here they are. My skin color is different from my daughter’s. In fact, all skin colors are different, because there are infinite combinations of amounts and types of pigments present in human skin. The color of our skin is partly due to the pigment called melanin. Other factors are the content of diet carotenoids, the bluish-white color of connective tissue, and the abundance of blood vessels in the dermis and the color of blood flowing in them (oxy- and deoxy-hemoglobin). Other minor pigments (minor unless you have a bruise) are bilirubin (the yellow hemoglobin degradation product that colors…
May 10th, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
An infectious outbreak can conclude in more ways than one, historians say. But for whom does it end, and who gets to decide? Picture. A Sicilian fresco from 1445. In the previous century, the Black Death killed at least a third of Europe’s population.Credit…Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images By Gina Kolata When will the Covid-19 pandemic end? And how?According to historians, pandemics typically have two types of endings: the medical, which occurs when the incidence and death rates plummet, and the social, when the epidemic of fear about the disease wanes.“When people ask, ‘When will this end?,’ they are asking about the social ending,” said Dr. Jeremy Greene, a historian…
May 9th, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
I can tell you, what my mother (gone a while ago) would tell me. She would tell me to take care of myself, keep my hair tidy, that I look very different from what I used to look but still beautiful. She would congratulate me for my children and grandchildren and what a great job I am doing at work and home. When our mothers are no longer with us, it is good to “keep them around”. I do it in a number of ways: cook the old recipes, listen to the old music, photos, talk (on Skype) with my cousins (my brothers are also gone). I also, always, keep…
April 24th, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Pulse oximetry is used to measure the oxygenation level of the blood. It is an easy, non-invasive and painless measure of how well oxygen is moved from your lungs to parts of your body furthest from your heart, like arms and legs. A clip-like device, the probe, is placed on a finger or ear lobe. Nowadays, the modest (about $60, used to be $20 before the pandemic) pulse oximeter is becoming a star. For a healthy person, the probe should read 95 or higher. Surprisingly, people who are sick with Covid-19 seem to have very low readings while seemingly doing still OK. What is going on? To understand you have…
April 22nd, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Note: this is an old post that I thought would be useful on Earth Day. You are not having déjà vu! The recipe for success: read the ingredient list of whatever you are planning to use. The problem is that sometimes the manufacturers “forget” to list an ingredient or two and then you need to read between the lines. First, let me tell you that herbicides are based on the same principle as antibiotics: they have to be selective, i.e. kill the baddie without harming the goodie, For antibiotics (and antifungals) the baddie is the microbe, and we humans are the goodies. For herbicides, the goodie is your pretty garden…
April 19th, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
These days you can’t believe everything you read. Or maybe you never could. With the internet as a medium we are bombarded with messages telling us that whatever we are doing is wrong (and to buy that other product). Stop. The person (or bot, for robot) who is telling you that is only after your “click”. There is no real information behind the panicky message. Whatever the reason for the message, the result is a flood of misinformation. The target today is sunscreen, yesterday it was antiperspirant or petrolatum or preservatives or, worst of the worse, vaccines. Don’t trust them. But you can trust me. I read the scientific literature…
April 18th, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Your roots may be showing but you can’t get to the hair dresser? Now it’s the time to fix that area that is looking a bit forlorn. A couple of weeks is all you need to get hair regrowth and strengthening. There are so many reasons why we can lose hair at one time or another. It may be just a small area or a more generalized problem but it is usually reversible. Illness, stress or menopause are the most common causes. Chemotherapy will usually result in hair loss. What to do? Use this time when you have to stay at home to apply hair serum with keratinocyte growth factor…
April 10th, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Ignacio López-Goñi Regardless of whether we classify the new coronavirus as a pandemic, it is a serious issue. In less than two months, it has spread over several continents. Pandemic means sustained and continuous transmission of the disease, simultaneously in more than three different geographical regions. Pandemic does not refer to the lethality of a virus but to its transmissibility and geographical extension. What we certainly have is a pandemic of fear. The entire planet’s media is gripped by coronavirus. It is right that there is deep concern and mass planning for worst-case scenarios. And, of course, the repercussions move from the global health sphere into business and politics. But…
April 6th, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
By Margie Donlon PhD, a clinical psychologist in New York. 1. Stick to a routine. Go to sleep and wake up at a reasonable time, write a schedule that is varied and includes time for work as well as self-care. 2. Dress for the social life you want, not the social life you have. Get showered and dressed in comfortable clothes, wash your face, brush your teeth. Take the time to do a bath or a facial. Put on some bright colors. It is amazing how our dress can impact our mood. 3. Get out at least once a day, for at least thirty minutes. If you are concerned of…
April 2nd, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
“Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is.” Rob Watson That’s “all” she is. But looking at Mother Nature as an entity that we can study, research and understand, is by no means less beautiful that the images that humanity has drawn of an imaginary Gaia for millennia. I prefer “my” Mother Nature, powerful but knowable. Instead of being disappointed that Mother Nature (and all the other names people in all ages have given to Mother Earth, Gaia, Pachamama) is not a magic goddess we can please with crystals and candles, let’s recognize the beauty involved in understanding and learning about “Mother Nature”. The crystal…
April 2nd, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
From the newspaper El Litoral from Santa Fe, Argentina, April 1, 2020 By Luciano Andreychuk “Basic science is very important in all areas of human life: it is key to solving problems of all kinds”. Dr Alberto Iglesias. Two local scientists explain why enzymes are the “Achilles’ heel” of the virus that causes Covid-19 Anyone who believes that the effective coronavirus vaccine and antiviral will appear miraculously, from one day to the next. is wrong. The production of vaccines and antiviral drugs for this pandemic will take a lot of effort and time from the world scientific community. However, basic research has already taken encouraging steps, which allow solid developments…
March 27th, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
By Siddhartha Mukherjee In the third week of February, as the COVID-19 epidemic was still flaring in China, I arrived in Kolkata, India. I woke up to a sweltering morning—the black kites outside my hotel room were circling upward, lifted by the warming currents of air—and I went to visit a shrine to the goddess Shitala. Her name means “the cool one”; as the myth has it, she arose from the cold ashes of a sacrificial fire. The heat that she is supposed to diffuse is not just the fury of summer that hits the city in mid-June but also the inner heat of inflammation. She is meant to protect…
March 27th, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/20/science.abb3405 Some great news on the scientific side. Know your enemy and you will be able to fight it! It is amazing and beautiful that this viral protease, crucial for the assembly of the virus, has been crystallized so quickly. From here, scientists will be able to design an inhibitor that should be able to stop or at least, slow down the virus and allow people to get better sooner. Remember: we are not in 1918 anymore! The pandemic is occurring in a world that knows how to defeat it. Let’s do our part and let doctors and scientists do theirs. I am working from home. Skin Actives Scientific…
February 27th, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Every woman knows that if she lives long enough, menopause will happen. We’ve seen it happen in our grandmothers, mothers, friends and eventually it will happen to us. Ovaries will naturally decrease their production of the sex hormones estrogen and progesterone, and the decline will affect the whole body. We know what to expect: not fun effects, but tolerable with some adjustments and some help from the MD. This is normal and to be expected unless you decide to go for hormone replacement therapy, in which you take extra estrogen and progesterone, oral and/or in patches. Many women will have to face a different kind of menopause: induced menopause. This…
January 1st, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Answer: We understand the seriousness of the problem and we face it differently. The key concept is that the skin is alive and quite capable of doing its job, until it isn’t. What has changed? The skin ages, or is damaged, or the environment changes and overwhelms the defenses. Our answer: we replenish the skin’s natural defenses, by carefully following the established antioxidant system already at work in our skin. We don’t innovate in the sense that we don’t build from scratch, we only refresh, “top-up” the natural order. We can achieve this because we understand how the skin functions: its anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and molecular biology. Amazing scientific advances…