Cynical Activities - S
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SPERMICIDES
Women who use a common spermicide may increase their risk of contracting HIV from an HIV-positive partner. |
SPORTS, PLAYING
All you couch potatoes, give yourselves a pat on the back (if you can reach that far): as a health measure, playing sports is overrated. More than eighty thousand people annually suffer brain injuries during recreational sports, or at least sports that were supposed to be recreational. And more than 775,000 children under the age of fifteen are treated in hospital emergency rooms in the United States each year for sports injuries ranging from bruises and sprains to fractures and severe injuries to the neck and spinal cord. |
SPORTS, WATCHING
If you're desperate to drag him away from the playoffs, here's your leverage: watching important sporting events can cause deaths among men from heart attacks and strokes. |
SPORTS UTILITY VEHICLES
No matter what you may think, you and your SUV are not cool. If you own an SUV, your vehicle is much more likely to roll over, leaving your overall chances of being killed in an accident the same as for occupants of ordinary cars; and if you collide with someone else, they're three times more likely to be killed than if you'd been driving an ordinary car. The greater dangers associated with SUVs mean you'll pay higher insurance premiums. Large SUVs get extremely poor gas mileage, and for some reason that could not possibly have anything to do with the political clout of the auto and oil industries they are allowed to release several times as much smog-causing pollution as cars. Remind us: why exactly did you buy the damn thing in the first place? |
SPRING
The joys of spring are clearly overrated. Spring is the peak time for suicides in the United States. People born in the spring live four to seven months less long than people born in the fall. And late spring is high season for strokes. |
ST. JOHN'S WORT, TAKING
The alternative antidepressant St. John's wort can interfere with some prescription medicines, including birth control pills, antibiotics, AIDS treatments, cardiac drugs, and anti-rejection drugs taken by transplant patients, and it can have adverse effects on pregnancy and prolong the sedative effects of anesthesia following surgery. It also may not work well, in fairness, very few antidepressants work if your birth control pills, antibiotics, and heart medicine have all let you down. |
ST. JOHN'S WORT, STOPPING TAKING
Doctors may have to increase your dosage of prescription drugs if you're taking St. John's wort, because it can reduce the levels of the drugs in your blood. If you then stop taking the wort, your blood levels of the drugs can increase dangerously. (Of course, in that case, it's actually the prescription drug that's bad for you, but the study wasn't about to point this out.) |
ST. LOUIS
Over a ten-year period, St. Louis had the fifth highest murder rate in the U.S., more than two-and-a-half times the average for major American cities. On the other hand, they have the world's only set of three-foot-high fiberglass teeth (no, really), so don't cancel your holiday bookings just yet. |
STAPLERS
In the U.K. alone, 1,317 office workers were injured by staples and staplers during the year 2000. There are times when the question "I wonder what would happen if I..." is better left unanswered. |
STRESS
Stress can take away your appetite, suppress your immune system, squash your sex drive, make you infertile and irritable, and give you panic attacks, depression, diabetes, and hypertension. It can make vaccines less effective, give you asthma, diseases of the gastrointestinal tract, memory loss, and back pain, and weaken your skin's ability to heal wounds and fight disease. If you're under stress around the time you get pregnant, your baby may have an increased risk of congenital defects such as heart problems, neural tube defects, or cleft lips; if you're stressed during pregnancy, the child may risk a heart attack later in life. HIV-positive people under stress progress more rapidly to AIDS. Maybe we should have warned you about this at the beginning of this book. |
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