Walking around with a chip on your arm

Regina and Douglas Haggo / The Hamilton Spectator | April 1 2006

About 100 people in the United States have had microchips implanted under their skin so that doctors can instantly access their medical records.

Most of them are employees of VeriChip Corp., which manufactures the chips. Daniel Hickey, 77, of Washington, D.C., is not, but he didn't think twice about having it done.

"If you're unconscious and end up in the emergency room, they won't know anything about you," he told The Washington Post.

"With this, they can find out everything they need to know right away and treat you better."

Similar devices have been implanted in more than six million cats and dogs to identify pets that get lost.

The electronic microchip and a copper antenna are enclosed in a glass capsule about the size of a grain of rice. In humans, this is usually injected into the fleshy part of the upper arm. Each unit transmits a unique 16-digit number that can be read with a hand-held scanner. The number links up to a computerized medical record on a secure website.

Some doctors welcome the introduction of radio-frequency identification technology, but privacy advocates worry about the potential for abuse.

"It may seem innocuous," said author Liz McIntyre, "but the government and private corporations could use these devices to track people's movements."

Dagwoods on drugs

A popular sleeping pill, Ambien, has turned thousands of insomniacs into sleep-eaters.

"The drug's users sometimes sleepwalk into their kitchens, claw through their refrigerators like animals and consume calories ranging into the thousands," says the New York Times.

"These people are hell-bent to eat," said Dr. Mark Mahowald, director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis.

This is no surprise to the manufacturer, Sanofi-Aventis.

The Ambien package insert warns that a sleep-related eating disorder may occur.

More than 26 million prescriptions for Ambien were dispensed in the United States last year.

Zapping the zzz's

Snoring is so troubling for some sawyers of logs -- and their spouses -- that they resort to surgery.

New Scientist reports that the Institute for Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California is developing an alternative that is supposed to be less extreme.

The sound of snoring is produced by vibrations of the soft palate or the uvula, which dangles from it at the back of the mouth.

The air flow makes these tissues vibrate because they are relaxed. The new solution is to tighten them with tiny jolts of electricity.

Coils of wire are injected into muscle near the troublesome soft tissues. Another coil under the pillow, linked to a microphone to detect snoring, triggers pulses of power, each lasting less than a second.

A myth put to bed

It's a myth, not a fact, that people need less sleep as they grow older.

They certainly get less sleep in an average night, but they need just as much, according to sleep research reviewed by the New York Times.

There are two reasons why seniors are sleep-deprived.

First, as the years go by, people spend less and less time in deep, restorative sleep.

Second, as we age, our sleep is more likely to be interrupted by pain, chronic illness or other health problems.

A word in your ear

The word snore is closely related to snort, in sense as well as sound. In fact, snore used to mean snort, and snort used to mean snore.

Both belong to a sizable group of words starting with sn- that have to do with the nose: sneeze, sniff, sniffle, snifter, snivel, snook, snot, snoot, snout, snuff, snuffle.

In standard Old English, spoken around a millennium ago, the ancestor of snore started with an f sound. During the Middle English period (circa 1150 to 1500), the fn- version was elbowed aside by the sn- version, which may have come from another dialect or from Old Low German, the predecessor of Dutch.

The same thing happened with sneer (fnaeren in Old English) and sneeze (fneosan in Old English).

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