Healthcheck Issue XX • Media Bulletin
In this issue:
The importance of vitamin D
Put your best foot forward
pg 2
Helping your skin survive this winter
pg 3
pg 4
With winter having firmly laid its roots for 2011, there are a number of steps that we can take to ensure we look and feel our best during these dark, cold and dreary months.
Greetings from
Amanda Hallums
Matron The London Clinic
In fact, there are many aspects of our personal health that we naturally have front of mind during summer, but we don’t tend to focus on at other times, when we are all recovering from the festive season and wrapping up warm for the winter months. In this edition of Healthcheck, we take a detailed look at winter health, and the services and expertise The London Clinic can offer to help keep you in top condition. You will find advice on how to look after parts of your body from your liver to your feet, how to avoid winter sporting injuries, and how to ensure you maintain vitamin D levels in times of limited sunlight. We are also delighted to welcome Dr Conal Perrett, The London Clinic’s new Consultant Dermatologist, who discusses the importance of looking after your skin during the cold spell, as well as being vigilant about checking your moles all year-round.
Pouring yourself a ‘winter warmer’? – just be reasonable... Dr Peter Fairclough, Consultant Gastroenterologist and Professor Simon Taylor-Robinson, Consultant
ine
look after your liver and gastrointestinal tract, and
W
Hepatologist at The London Clinic discuss how to what steps can be taken to limit damage to these vital organs. How much alcohol is it safe to drink? The best advice is for people to routinely keep to the limits recommended by the Department of Health: 21 units for men and 14 units for women per week. We all recognise that people will drink a bit more at certain celebratory times and this shouldn’t do longterm harm, provided they don’t
frequently drink above the limits, and they take great care not to drink and drive, run risks with operating machinery or pastimes such as skiing or cycling. Alcohol and dangerous sports definitely don’t mix. What harm does alcohol do? Excessive drinking can lead to a wide variety of serious health
problems including fatty liver disease, alcoholic hepatitis (severe liver inflammation), cirrhosis of the liver, pancreatitis (inflammation of the pancreas, which may lead to diabetes), high blood pressure and heart muscle damage (which may lead to heart failure and strokes). Long-term alcohol misuse can also
cause irreversible brain damage, including to the areas of the brain that process thought and memory. Long-term drinking damages the liver. As with any other part of the body that is injured, such as a cut to the skin, the body tries to repair the damage by forming a scar. Continued over>