HB Mag Health Research Team
Wearing a soft cervical collar correctly comes down to three things: the right fit, the right position, and the right amount of time. The collar should sit with its front edge resting under your chin and its back edge supporting the base of your skull, snug enough that it stays in place but loose enough … Read more
You check the weather app, see an air quality number, and wonder what it actually means. The Air Quality Index, or AQI, is a scale from 0 to 500 that translates pollutant levels into one simple number. The higher the number, the more pollution is in the air and the greater the health concern. An … Read more
You wake up but your body does not. You can see the room. You can hear sounds. But your arms and legs will not move, and for a few seconds that can feel like minutes, you are locked inside yourself. This is sleep paralysis, and it happens when the line between sleeping and waking gets … Read more
You look in the mirror and see someone overweight. The scale says otherwise. Your clothes fit the way they always have. Other people describe you as thin. Yet the image in the mirror does not match any of that. This is a real and well-documented experience, and it usually has more to do with how … Read more
Most people have experienced a crush that lingered too long. But there is a difference between a passing infatuation and a consuming, intrusive fixation that disrupts sleep, work, and sense of self. That difference sits at the center of what causes obsession with a person — and why limerence is sometimes confused with obsessive-compulsive disorder. … Read more
Fear of pregnancy and childbirth is common, and it has a name: tokophobia. For some people it is a mild worry that fades with information. For others it is a persistent, distressing fear that affects decisions about whether to have children at all. The way through it is rarely a single trick. It usually means … Read more
There is no single normal height for a man. Adult male height follows a bell-shaped range, and where a man lands on that curve depends mostly on genetics, nutrition, and health during childhood and adolescence. In the United States, the average adult man is about 5 feet 9 inches tall, but plenty of healthy men … Read more
Eighteen percent body fat sits in a range that most health organizations consider healthy for adult men, and it is generally viewed as fit and lean for men. For adult women, 18 percent is low but still within some healthy ranges, depending on age and how the number was measured. Whether it is “good” for … Read more
Polyethylene glycol 3350 — sold in the US as MiraLAX — is an osmotic laxative. It works by holding water in the stool rather than by stimulating the bowel. Most people get a bowel movement within 1 to 3 days of starting it, though some notice a change in 24 hours and others need up … Read more
Rickets is a bone disease in children caused by a failure of bone mineralization — the process that hardens growing bone with calcium and phosphate. It is not an infection and not a single disease, but a group of conditions with different causes that produce similar bone changes. The classic form is nutritional rickets, caused … Read more