Combining two recent reports in medical journals, one realizes that rollercoaster rides can be used to counteract the effects of Facebook, in the case of asthma sufferers, sometimes maybe.
A 2006 report in the journal Behaviour Research and Therapy tells how rollercoaster rides were used to treat symptoms of asthma. (The Dutch authors of that study received a 2010 Ig Nobel Prize.)
Now a report in The Lancet tells how Italian doctors diagnosed a possible new trigger for asthma symptoms:
“Facebook: a new trigger for asthma?” Gennaro D’Amato, Gennaro Liccardi, Lorenzo Cecchi, Ferdinando Pellegrino and Maria D’Amato, The Lancet, vol. 376, no. 9754, November 20, 2010, p. 1740. The authors explain that:
Facebook is a social networking website launched in February, 2004. It had more than 500 million active users in July, 2010,4 and is in some ways replacing real relationships, especially among adolescents and young adults. We present the case of an 18-year-old man for whom Facebook use seemed to trigger asthma exacerbations…. The worried mother learned that his girlfriend had broken up with him, leaving him in a depressive state. The girl had erased him from her list of Facebook friends, while “friending” many new young men. With a new nickname on Facebook, our patient succeeded in becoming her friend once again and finally in seeing her picture on her Facebook profile. The sight of this seemed to induce dyspnoea, which happened repeatedly on the patient accessing her profile.