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Home Remedy Of The Week: You Can Find It At The Deli Counter

A friend of mine had a bad reaction to a heart medicine, dropping her blood pressure to as low as 76/49 as a result. She was feeling understandably dizzy but didn’t want to go to the ER so she asked me if there was anything she could do at home to help raise her blood pressure. I recommended that she drink a large volume of water and take some salt tablets. She had no salt in pill form, and didn’t want to take it straight out of the shaker so asked if there was any other way to get the salt in. I asked her to describe the contents of her refrigerator and pantry, and made a mental note of what I thought had the highest salt content.

My friend thought that potato chips might do the trick, and was surprised when I told her that she had something almost ten times saltier at her disposal. Four ounces of prosciutto contained almost 2g of sodium, an entire day’s worth of salt! So she dutifully consumed the sliced meat, washing it down with about a liter of water. Two hours later she was back up to 98/66 and six hours later her blood pressure had returned to a healthy 116/83.

This was a rare case where a “high salt diet” had its benefits. In the case of ham versus hypotension, ham won… and saved my friend a costly, and unnecessary ER visit. Let’s hear it for deli meat!

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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