For Your Consideration, a Few Real Winners

Here are some awards from our mailbag: Most Persistent goes to the PR folks for Coca-Cola, who have called many times to suggest we write about their new bottled water. (We assure them we will if they ever dare change the recipe.)

Most Pungent goes to Aromabands, colorful, rubbery bracelets that exude scents that supposedly influence one’s mood. Even as we speak, I am wearing three and waiting for clarity, energy and serenity to kick in (but did not dare loose passion from its wrapper--there’s a newspaper to get out, after all).

Finally, the Early Bird award goes to New York-Presbyterian Hospital for its package of tips on avoiding winter weight gain and controlling stress during the holidays.

Speaking of stress, psychologists at the University of Washington, Seattle, have come up with a way to measure the emotional effects of business travel. The Air Transit Stress Scale scores how wigged out people get by 11 things--lost baggage, a missed connection, crowded planes and more. When the psychologists tested the scale on more than 300 men and women in business, they found that anger-prone men and anxious women tend to react especially badly to travel snafus.

Since these people can’t exactly be banned from planes, airlines would be well-advised, the researchers say, to provide videos that teach passengers how to relax and deal with problems “adaptively” instead of, for instance, “throwing a drink or screaming at a flight attendant when a flight is delayed.” Maybe attendants could hand out serenity bracelets too. If they dare.

Feel as if Your Body Is Taking Sides?

A woman in a nail salon recently told me that my eyebrows were uneven, but for seven bucks she could change all that. My brows are now most symmetrical--unlike the rest of my face, which is saggier and more wrinkled on the left. Why, oh, why? To find out, I called up Dr. Arnold Klein, clinical professor of dermatology and medicine at UCLA.

Reason No. 1, says Klein: driving.

Sunlight, after all, is a potent wrinkle-causer: It breaks down the structure of the skin so that lines and furrows form where our muscles crease our face and from gravity’s relentless pull. When we drive, we get a lot more sun from the left--and it doesn’t matter if the window’s up because wrinkle-causing UVA rays still get through.

In the United Kingdom, says Klein, you’d see exactly the opposite--since people there drive on the other side of the road. (And yes, we do note that a colleague who for years lived and drove in England is saggier on the right side of her face.)

There are other reasons wrinkles form asymmetrically, says Klein: We rarely grimace our face muscles evenly. Most of us sleep on one side more than the other, unevenly smooshing the face. And if you show Klein a smoker, he can probably tell you which side that person dangles their cigarette--from the position of the wrinkles around the mouth.

Pre-Aspirin Era Was Marked by Purging

Finally, we dipped into the “Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine” (Cambridge University Press, 1996) one more time to learn more about the practice of medicine in years gone by. Back in the early 1800s, we read, the doctor’s medicine bag was brimming with potions--few of which did any good at all.

Yes, there was opium, a very effective painkiller. But it was usually given by mouth, dissolved in alcohol (as a tincture), and was largely destroyed in the stomach before it got into the body. There was foxglove tea too (foxgloves contain a heart medication called digitalis that’s still used today), but 19th century doctors used it for all kinds of inappropriate illnesses such as tuberculosis.

For the most part, doctors focused on “purging” the body with various plant-based medicines that would induce vomiting or defecation. In one 12-month stretch from 1891 to 1892, reports the book, Americans worked their way through 255,000 pounds of aloes (a laxative), 113,000 pounds of jalap (another laxative), 1.4 million pounds of nux vomica (an emetic) and 13,000 pounds of mercury-containing laxatives such as calomel.

Thankfully, new drugs were on the way--such as the aspirin family of anti-fever/painkillers. Aspirin itself, though, sat on the shelves for nearly 50 years before scientists recognized its value. It was introduced 100 years ago--and went on, the book says, to become the most popular drug ever.