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Could Your Skinny Jeans Be To Blame For A Rash On Your Legs?

If your legs are red, bumpy, and irritated, don’t blame your soap or body lotion. It may be your skinny jeans. Those popular body-huggers may look hot, but they could be causing some very uncool things on your skin.

When you move in your skinny jeans, the material causes friction on your skin, which over time, can lead to folliculitis, inflammation of the hair follicles. If you have red, itchy bumps or pimples, especially on your thighs where skinny jeans tend to be tightest, then stop wearing them for a few days to let your skin heal. To treat folliculitis, Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at The Dermatology Blog*

Blue Jeans May Offer Protection From Rattlesnake Bites

When I was a medical student, I served a summer externship in 1975 with the Indian Health Service at Fort Belknap in Harlem, Montana. On some hot summer evenings, I went fishing at a place the locals called “Snake Lake,” which was loaded with cutthroat trout, and surrounded by rocky outcroppings that were home to scores of rattlesnakes. I was advised to stay away from the rocks, and to always wear long pants.

In the December, 2009 issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine (Ann Emerg Med 2009;54:830-836), there appeared an article reporting a study by Shelton Herbert, PhD and William Hayes, PhD entitled “Denim Clothing Reduces Venom Expenditure by Rattlesnakes Striking Defensively at Model Human Limbs.” The purpose of the study was to determine whether ordinary clothing (denim material from blue jeans) interferes with the kinematics of venom delivery, thereby reducing the amount of venom injected by a typical snake into a (model) human limb. Read more »

This post, Blue Jeans May Offer Protection From Rattlesnake Bites, was originally published on Healthine.com by Paul Auerbach, M.D..

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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