Blog
Blood pressure, diabetes, thyroid, kidneys — the day-to-day of them.
A migraine sufferer typically identifies two or three triggers by memory — usually the recent, dramatic ones (a specific food that time). The full trigger picture is often broader and more subtle, and only a…
Obstructive sleep apnea affects an estimated 10-15% of middle-aged Indian men and is diagnosed in a small fraction of those. The condition breaks up sleep dozens of times an hour without the person realising, drives…
Thyroid disease is one of the commonest conditions in Indian women and one of the commonest missed diagnoses. The symptoms — fatigue, weight change, hair thinning, feeling cold or hot, low mood, irregular periods —…
Kidney disease is diagnosed late in India because its early stages produce no symptoms and are found only in blood work most patients do not do routinely. By the time swelling, fatigue, or a change in urination is…
Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease affects around one in four Indian adults, and most of them do not know. It shows up incidentally on an abdominal ultrasound done for something else, produces no symptoms for years,…
Most Indian lab reports flag total cholesterol as the headline value, and most patients read only that. It is the single least useful of the six numbers on a lipid profile. What actually predicts a heart attack — and…
A hypertension diagnosis produces a burst of enthusiasm — the app is downloaded, the cuff is bought, the daily readings begin. Six weeks in, the enthusiasm fades, the readings become sporadic, and by month four the…
A person with a chronic illness five years in has accumulated more information than can be read in an evening. Individual reports, prescriptions, hospital visits, specialist letters, symptom logs — hundreds of…
A person with type 2 diabetes for five years has, in most cases, fifteen to twenty HbA1c readings, thirty to forty fasting glucose readings, dozens of BP measurements, several lipid profiles, and a stack of…
Why a three-month average is the number that gets watched, and what a diabetes record needs to contain to be worth anything at the next appointment.
For Indians, heart disease and type 2 diabetes are the two conditions where family history most directly changes what an adult should do this year. Both are highly heritable in the sense that risk clusters strongly…
Insulin is not a pill you can casually miss. A missed rapid-acting dose before a meal spikes blood sugar within an hour. A missed long-acting dose destabilises the whole 24-hour baseline. Injection-site rotation,…
A blood pressure tablet missed on a Tuesday and again on a Saturday feels like nothing. The BP the next day is a little higher, the day after that a little higher, and by the following week the reading is back where…
A person with type 2 diabetes in India often takes three or four medicines a day, forever. At branded prices, a monthly medicine bill can run ₹1,500 to ₹3,000. At Jan Aushadhi prices for the same salts, the same…
A blood pressure reading taken in a clinic is one data point in an unnaturally stressful room. It is why 'white-coat hypertension' has a name: office readings are frequently 10–15 mmHg higher than the same person's…
India is the diabetes capital of the world and the heart-disease capital of it too. Both cluster in families for reasons that are only partly explained by shared genes — cooking oil, exercise habits, weight patterns,…
High blood pressure is treated by taking a pill every day forever. There is no course, no finish date, and the reward for taking it is nothing happening — no headache, no visible change, no gratitude from your body.…
Chronic disease is a paperwork problem as much as it is a medical one. Diabetes, hypertension and heart disease together account for roughly 63% of deaths in India, and every one of those diagnoses generates a decade…