Not in Urinate-ture?
Some people find it kind of hard to urinate with other people standing near them. And some can’t urinate at all when they’re out on the town. They structure their whole lives so they can urinate in the privacy of their homes.
Steven Soifer, associate professor of social work at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, reckons there are a lot of these “shy bladder” types out there. He used to be one. And, as president and co-founder of a group that deals with the problem, he has a mailbag stuffed with plaintive missives: from a Greek lad worried about how he’s going to urinate during military service; from a man who holds his bladder during flights between Japan and America.
Soifer is touring the country conducting workshops. Latest stop, L.A.! Earlier this month, seven men and one woman got together to rap about their problem and to work through a series of drills. They loaded up with fluids, paired up and practiced urinating again and again with their “pee buddy” lurking closer each time.
Everybody improved, Soifer says. “And we had one of those miracle events. Before the workshop, the woman was unable to go with someone standing outside her closed hotel room door. By the end of the workshop, she could use a public restroom with her ‘pee buddy’ sitting in the next stall.”
Of course, one weekend workshop does not a full cure make: Soifer aims to leave behind support groups wherever he goes. Want to know more? Call Soifer’s group, the International Paruresis Assn., at (800) 247-3864.
Apple Preservation
Apples are scrumptious, nutritious--and a royal pain to peel and slice and dice. Unfortunately, the shelf life of pre-cut apples is only five to seven days because of dehydration and that infernal brown color the cut pieces take on.
But never fear. Scientists have solved the browning problem. In a study reported in this month’s Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, clever chemists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture dipped fresh-cut Red Delicious apples into a solution of antibrowning and enzyme-inhibiting chemicals, and stored them in bags.
They then measured the slices’ color using a machine, the Minolta Chroma meter, and did some impressive-sounding number-crunching known as “one-way nonparametric Kruskal-Walis ANOVA.” The slices, they said, stayed unbrown for up to five weeks.
Snooze News
The news has been a tad snorey, of late, but we’ll share it with you anyway. First off, cleaning up on your nighttime snuffling and honking could do wonders for your life, reports this month’s Archives of Otolaryngology. Scientists in Sweden fitted 42 heavily snoring men with cunning “nostril dilators” to help keep their airways open at night. As snoring decreased, so did the men’s daytime tiredness. Their wives too slept better.
Snoring’s been featured recently in the Lancet as well: In one curious case from England, a 65-year-old man with chronic bronchitis was admitted to a hospital because of confusion and hallucinations. The diagnosis was dementia, until the man’s wife happened to mention that he snored. This was the clue to the man’s real problem: obstructive sleep apnea. His air-ways were so blocked at night thathe wasn’t only snoring: He was starving his brain of oxygen.
