Water on tap

Rehydration therapy may not be the best remedy for a busy day in the office, suggests Maurice Gueret, as he examines our chi-chi children’s hospitals

Best tap

Oral rehydration therapy is what doctors recommend for treating dehydration. Making a water solution with electrolytes such as sodium, potassium, chloride and other elements is a good way to replenish the body during a nasty bout of diarrhoea. You’ll find formulated oral rehydration packs in every good chemist, as they are on the World

Health Organisation’s List of Essential Medicines. Millions of lives have been saved in the last 50 years by ORT. So, it’s interesting to see a TV advertising campaign under way to promote the use of oral rehydration tablets as a remedy for a busy day in the office, an afternoon in the sun, or a workout in the gym. My personal view is that hydration is a very good thing. Just so long as a county-council boil notice isn’t operating, it’s best to take it from the tap. Hydra in the word hydration comes from the Greek for water. I see no good reason for dissolving either salty tablets or sugars into your favourite water bottle after a day sitting on an office chair or a stint in the gym. Ordinary tap water should do you just fine. Therapies are for nasty bouts of gastroenteritis and obsessive sort of folks who think running marathons is good for you.

Chi-chi children

Two more hospital name changes are under way. Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital, formerly known as Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children, is no more. The new, less religious name, is CHI at Crumlin.

Its northside cousin, the Children’s University Hospital, is also being rebranded. It’s now the CHI at Temple Street. CHI stands for Children’s Health Ireland. Someday soon, the two CHIs will combine in our new children’s hospital. Minister Harris seems to have given up on calling it Phoenix, following legal threats from Arizona. If Venice doesn’t object, they might name it the CHI at Rialto. The word chi-chi refers to something that attempts to be very stylish, but instead only achieves over-elaborate pretentiousness. Judging by the colossal amounts of cash that cement trucks have poured into the site at St James’s, the chi-chi Children’s Hospital may have a ring of truth to it.

Waterworks

Urology is a surgical speciality that deals with diseases of the waterworks. From your kidneys, down the ureters, into the bladder and out through the urethra and other unmentionables, it can be a busy medical field for all age groups. For men, there is the added burden of a prostate gland that nourishes and protects sperm. It’s walnutsized in your 20s, but may grow to the size of a lemon in later years, which can pressurise the bladder and interfere with a good night’s sleep. Which brings me back to urology and the urologists that look after them. We don’t have enough of them. The men of Denmark (population 5.6 million) who play us in a big soccer match this month have the services of 250 urologists. We in Ireland (population 4.8 million) have 37. Which is why Irish men and women can wait up to five years to see one. In New Zealand, whose All Blacks gave us a salutary lesson last month in how to play rather than talk rugby, they have

120 urologists for a population smaller than ours. Maybe that’s something they could exercise each other’s buzzers about in Dail Eireann.

Eau de school

Nurses have a lot to put up with in their day (and night) jobs and for some, things have become a lot worse on the olfactory front. For the first time, now vaccination teams are being sent nationwide into boys’ secondary schools as well as girls’ ones. HPV vaccination is now being offered to teenage lads. It not only reduces their personal risk of developing anogenital warts and rarer cancers, but will also help to eliminate cervical cancer completely from the female population. A noble aim. I hear that what is being noticed by our nursing brigade is that boy-only schools can really smell something rotten. An abundance of sweating after puberty, combined with less tolerance of Mammy monitoring the personal hygiene, means that taciturn male teenagers can, and do, smell something rotten. Schools that offer sports or gym classes in the midst of other subjects, without the opportunity of a good shower afterwards, are very much the worst. Not to mention uniforms that are lucky to receive just one weekly wash. We could do with more research in this field, but I doubt it will come from the perfume companies of Paris. Eau de l’adolescent is a very restricted market.

Dr Maurice Gueret is editor of the ‘Irish Medical Directory’ drmauricegueret.com