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I was flummoxed at the gym the other night when a certified personal trainer gave me some unexpected instructions. He was supervising me while I performed squats with an 18-pound kettlebell. After a few reps, the trainer suggested I sink deeper into the squat. Hold on! Doesn't the Tao of Health Editors say that the depth of a squat shouldn't exceed 90 degrees, especially during weight-bearing exercises?

The trainer explained that bending beyond 90 allows us to work the leg muscles through a wider range of motion, and this is helpful because there are many daily activities that require us to bend in this range -- like scooping a baby off the floor or picking up a bag of groceries. Bending lower while still showing excellent form will also help us build stronger quads and glutes. I wish I'd been able to take notes, but I was still holding the kettlebell, so I followed the trainer's orders and decided to look into this later.

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To our pain-addled brains (we're talking about headaches, "computer hunch" back pain, those fun things...), the recommended dose for Tylenol often means: as many pills as it takes. But Tylenol gets that people are popping their pills like jellybeans. We aren't paying much attention to how those pills are interacting with our other "medicine," like cough syrup, prescription pain killers or big glasses of pinot noir. That's why the company released new dosage instructions last week for Extra Strength Tylenol as part of a media campaign to help us understand that too much acetaminophen can can cause serious liver damage.

Instead of 8 Extra Strength Tylenol pills per day (4,000 mg), they're now recommending a daily cap of 6 pills (3,000 mg); instead of 2 pills every 4-6 hours, it's now 2 pills every 6 hours, period.

You should start noticing these new dosage instructions on Extra Strength Tylenol bottles this fall...just as you're reaching for something to help you deal with seasonal allergies, cold-weather sniffles, and back-to-school arguments. (A change in dosage instructions for regular Tylenol is scheduled for early next year).

Another option is to use the change in dosage instructions (and your newly-stirred fears of overdose-induced liver damage) to explore alternative forms of pain relief. For example, those who suffer from tension headaches might want to give acupuncture a try. Participants in one study found that six to 15 acupuncture treatments helped reduce their number of headache days by fifty percent. 

Keep reading:
Alternative Pain Treatments
Take Control of Your Pain
Doctor-Recommended Techniques for Easing Your Pain
Dealing with Chronic Pain

 

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When we're blasting out of town for vacation, we like to know three things: where's the closest beach, pizza parlor and pit-stop motel. What we rarely think about are the locations of the nearest trauma centers, hospitals and base helipads. Still, it might not be a bad idea to keep these in mind, especially since summer makes us more likely to try activities we might normally shy away from (who goes skydiving in winter?).

We were happy to find the American Trauma Center's interactive map that allows us to spot "safety zones" at a glance--because a skilled medical professional is more valuable in a health emergency than an expert pie-maker (unless a margherita pizza is your dying wish). The purple splotches denote areas where advanced trauma care is just 45 minutes to an hour away. Looking at the map, we were startled to see that some popular summer destinations fall into the country's most unsafe areas.

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Nearly every woman in America has used some method of contraception at some point in her life (the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute puts that number at 98 percent). But many women haven't been able to use them as consistently as they'd like, or as recommended. Consistent usage can be expensive: Brand-name versions of birth control pills, the patch or the ring can cost more than $60 a month if paid entirely out of pocket. The initial costs of an IUD (preferred by many couples who already have children) are even more intimidating: The medical exam, the IUD, the insertion of the device and the follow-up visits can range from $500 to $1,000.

Last week, the Institute of Medicine, a leading medical advisory panel, recommended that all insurers be required to cover FDA-approved contraceptives for women free of charge—that is, no co-pays or deductibles required. This is part of a set of eight empowering recommendations that also include free preventative services like screening for gestational diabetes and lactation counseling and equipment to promote breast-feeding (for example, rentals of breast pumps that would otherwise cost hundreds of dollars). You can read about all of the IOM's recommendations on the organization's website.

The next step is for the Department of Health and Human Services to review the IOM's report and make the final decision. Although the DHHS could act within the next few weeks, the earliest we'd see this affect our insurance plans (and our pocketbooks) would be January 2013.

Photo: Courtesy of Jennifer Byrne

Every week or so, we'll be asking one of the Best Life experts for advice on diet and exercise, ways to get better rest and strategies to live a little younger.

If you have a question, send it to us!

Q: What's the best time of day to work out?

A: We asked Michelle Kennedy, M.S., Best Life fitness expert, to answer this question. "It depends on your moods, energy level, work schedule, and family and personal obligations." Read Kennedy's advice to find out what time works best for you:

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There's a story in the August issue of Runner's World about two high-school seniors that makes me feel glad that not every runner is like I was at their age. It's about two old friends, Mack and Cameron, who race cross-country and track together. They're unusual because Cameron has cerebral palsy, so Mack has to push him in a wheelchair. Mack, one of his school's top ten runners, says he encouraged Cameron to join the team during their junior year because "he knew his friend was often bored after school, thought he'd enjoy trying something new." (From this photo, it looks like Mack's hunch was right on). When Mack pushes his childhood friend in a race, he breaks rules that mean he's ineligible to earn points. However, the coach agreed to Mack's plan because he believes that the duo brings more than points to the team.

I wish these friends had been on my cross-country team. It was a small group, and one of my teammates had the name of a cheerleader--and the hunched shoulders and whispery voice of a mathlete. I thought that Buffy needed a nickname that better suited her tentative personality. So I gave her one. My best friend and I always referred to her as Myrtle behind her back. Myrtle had a funky, shuffly gait and breathed heavily.

Myrtle had goals, and one of them was to speed up. The other, I believed, was to beat me. She lifted weights and ran extra laps after practice, and before long, I stopped laughing when I said, "Old Murt was tough to shake today." In races, Myrtle and I were often neck and neck.

After one big meet during my senior year, when I was begrudgingly complimenting Myrtle on her speedy finish, she broke into a little skip and a huge grin. Then she showed me these special arm exercises she'd been doing, and encouraged me to give them a try. She didn't seem smug (as I would have been) and she definitely didn't seem to guard this proprietary arm-swing secret that she believed propelled her to the finish (as I would have).

Years later, it occurred to me that when Myrtle breathed down my neck, she was following our coach's orders to keep the pack tight. While I was racing Myrtle, she was racing the other team. Old Murt tried to teach me about sportsmanship, but I didn't realize it at the time.

It thrills me to hear that students like Mack and his teammates in Utah are learning about sportsmanship when it matters -- and teaching others.  

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Kids get sick. Most parents learn this pretty quick and by the third child, they're pretty unfazed by fevers and sore throats. So when Deborah Copaken Kogan, an author and columnist for the Financial Times, noticed that her son developed a strange rash and swollen face, she snapped a photo of him and posted it to her Facebook profile. It was simply way to keep her son and herself entertained while they spent Mother's Day at the pediatrician's office.

But as the poor little guy's condition worsened, Kogan continued to update her friends on her son's health. "Was I consciously trying to find an answer out there in the hive mind?" she writes in this hold-your-breath-while-reading essay on Slate. "No, but some subconscious part of me must have been wondering whether one of my hundreds of 'friends' might be privy to some expertise on the befuddling Nutty Professor syndrome that had my child in its grips."

Thankfully, some were--and Kogan was able to beat her doctor to the punch in diagnosing her four-year-old with an extremely rare childhood auto-immune disorder.  "Bravo, Facebook," said the doc. "Hooray for 'friends'!" is what we say. 

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There are wonderful doctors out there, compassionate, empathetic, with jargon-free vocabularies and an ability to make you feel as if, yes, everything is going to be okay. And then there are the doctors who blurt out a mortifying diagnosis--or worse, a distressing one--in a crowded room. Or treat you like a child who doesn't know how to listen. Or bully a nurse.

The way to avoid having those less-than-helpful doctor-patient interactions, says Cynda Ann Johnson, MD, MBA, dean of the medical school at Virginia Tech Carilion, is to recruit nice people and train them to be "the kind of doctor you want to go see." Yes, most medical schools offer communications and etiquette courses (sometimes with actors playing patients), and U.S. licensing requirements involve a clinical skills test that assesses communication. But a new entrance exam used by VTC and at least seven other medical schools around the country involves a "multiple mini interview" test that screens for courtesy, diplomacy, flexibility, decision-making and tact. (Gardiner Harris, the public health reporter for the New York Times, recently visited VTC on the day the multiple mini interviews took place, and called them the "equivalent of speed-dating.")

Johnson says that students can witness some pretty appalling behavior during their clinical training, and the school's goal is to give them a strong ethical foundation "so the won't succumb" to that--in other words, so they'll know better than their Dr. House-like instructors.

Until the new generation of docs takes over, use this advice to get the best possible treatment from yours:

How to Train Your Doctor

67 Questions to Ask Before an Office-Based Surgery

Four Ways to be a Patient

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We've known since age 5 what causes brain freeze: delicious, cold treats that demand to be gulped with gusto. But we're grateful to the blog Food Republic for explaining exactly what's going on when we get those intense, temporarily-immobilizing headaches. Here's the deal: Blood vessels in the roof of the mouth constrict at the touch of cold food or beverages, and then quickly expand to allow blood flow to warm the mouth back up. The pain receptors in the mouth use nerves in the face to communicate with the brain, and the pain socks us in the forehead. We can't help but wonder: if you don't let the cold stuff touch the roof of your mouth, will you avoid freezing your forehead?

We're going to try that trick the next time we eat or drink something cold. Even if it doesn't work, these icy treats are definitely worth the brain freeze risk:

• Fresh fruit ice pops
• Goopy ice cream sundaes
• Watermelon ice with roasted strawberries and lime parfait