Medical Minute With Dr. Mel: Are Gas Stoves Harmful + More

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Source: Reach Media / Radio One Digital

In this week’s Medical Minute With Dr. Mel, we learn how Gas stoves may be harmful to us, how telehealth visits may be the new wave, and can a new variant of COVID protect you.

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Listen to the Medical Minute with Dr. Mel below

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Are Gas Stoves Harmful?

RUSS: Briefly, should be really worried about your gas stove.

DR. MEL: There’s 50 years of research that shows that exposure to gas stove emissions can be harmful, including a higher risk of childhood asthma, among other things. It’s worse if your home is poorly ventilated or you don’t have a range hood. You can rapidly exceed safe nitrogen oxide level exposure within just a few minutes, but you don’t necessarily have to get rid of your gas though. Because of this, you can lessen your risk by ventilating your kitchen by opening windows. If you have an exhaust hood, use it every time. You use your gas stove and consider buying an air purifier with a HEPA filter. All those make gas stove usage much safer.

Black History: A Black Woman Made Telehealth Visits Possible. Are They The New Wave?

DR. MEL: Well, it certainly, you know, kept people able to see their doctor during the pandemic, and it looks like it’s here to stay, cause people are using it so much more. Now, and the woman who invented something called voice over IP. She’s a black woman. She’s an engineer, Marian Croak. She’s a VP of Engineering now at Google. Holds more than 200. Patients, One of which is this voice-over IP that allows us to video conference. You know we use it for a lot of stuff. But in healthcare, those telehealth visits are really key. And just want to salute Marian Croak is her name for her brilliance and creativity.

What About COVID

RUSS: I just read where when if you recently got COVID with this new variant, they said that you’re extremely protected for the next 10 months. Did you say anything about it?

DR. MEL: Yes, absolutely. And you know, some people are using it to say, well, see, you don’t need to get vaccinated, but I think we forget that there’s so many people who are vulnerable who can’t afford to get COVID, instead of getting vaccinated. If we had taken that approach during the pandemic and not developed the vaccine, there have been 3 million people who died as opposed to I I hate to even say just one million. But there’s so much excess death that was saved because of the vaccination. What I would do with that information and say look, you know if you get COVID that’s and you. And you survive, that’s great. It means that you don’t need a booster for 10 months instead of, you know, getting one right away.

And the other thing is getting COVID isn’t doesn’t prevent long COVID.