1 . Hang your tongue out of your mouth while your eyes look upwards. Breathe loudly and use your hands to pull your head in every way. This is yoga(瑜伽) for your face.

Fumiko Takatsu, creator of the Face Yoga Method, has written six books on face yoga and has been practicing facial exercises for about 15 years. Takatsu, 50, said she came up with the idea of facial exercises after a car accident when she was 35 years old, which left her face out of its proper position. Around the same time, Takatsu said she began to notice signs of aging, but gave up using creams and beauty treatments after they became too expensive.

Koko Hayashi, 39, a face yoga instructor in Los Angeles, said she first heard of face yoga by discovering Takatsu’s work. Hayashi said she had a chin implant(下巴植入体) when she was 27 years old, but took it out because it misshaped her face. ”That’s why I’m so interested in more natural beauty instead of plastic surgery(整形手术) ,” Hayashi said. Like others who practice facial exercises, Hayashi believes it can fix signs of aging and help reduce wrinkles(皱纹).

The question that often pops up when someone mentions face yoga is, “Does it actually work?” A study out of Northwestern University found that the exercises may help middle-aged women.

“This is a pilot study that suggests that there might be some factors of face exercise that can be helpful to at least certain patients in improving certain signs of aging,” said Dr. Murad Alam from Northwestern University. “But we need more studies to better understand exactly how much exercise is necessary to have any benefit, whether it works for men and women of different ages, and then how much exercise is needed to keep that benefit.”

Medical reporter Dr. Jennifer Ashton said that she is not sure whether face yoga works and that any benefits are most likely going to be up to the person trying it. “If you feel better after trying face yoga, it may be something you should keep doing,” she said.

2 . When Arvin Kuipers, who graduated from Beijing University of Chinese Medicine in 2017 and loves Chinese culture, asks his patients to stick out their tongue so he can diagnose(诊断) their illness, many are confused.

Kuipers, 30, practicing Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, said, “In TCM I need to do face and tongue diagnosis. That’s strange for people in my country.” One elderly woman had been visiting him occasionally for advice, but her first experience with TCM surprised her. She had never experienced acupuncture (针灸) or any other TCM treatment. “She came in, and I examined her face and tongue,” said Kuipers. “I told the patient her kidneys were not doing well and that she wasn’t getting proper sleep.” The woman was shocked by his insight and asked if he had been spying on her. “Actually, it was easy to diagnose her condition when I saw the dark rings under her eyes. Her energy levels were also very low at the time.”

Kuipers opened his TCM clinic in September. Most of his work involves performing acupuncture, cupping as well as tuina — a TCM massage that patients in the West like the most, he said. In some cases he also gave his patients traditional herbal medicines.

Kuipers usually makes a cup of Chinese tea to calm his patients if they are nervous about the acupuncture needles. He also explains to them the meridian (经络) system, which is a central concept of TCM, yin and yang, and other concepts. “In TCM, good health requires balanced yin and yang, so practitioners not only pay attention to a patient’s illness, but also to his or her overall physical condition,” said Kuipers. “TCM is also a different culture and offers a new perspective, instead of being a curing method.”

As of early April, Kuipers has treated more than 200 patients, many of whom come to his clinic every week. “TCM does work, and works well. My patients really feel better with it, so I value it, and when my patients feel better I also feel better.”

5 . Dr. Ofri’s new book, “Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue,” recounts her experiences as a doctor at New York’s Bellevue Hospital. NPR’s Melissa Block, host of All Things Considered, recently spent a day at the hospital to get a sense of her world, through her relationships with her patients.

Dr. Danielle Ofri is an attending physician in internal medicine at Bellevue. For her, poetry and literature are as much a part of the job as X-rays and pills. She’s written about her experiences there in the book, Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellewe. It’s a collection of essays about learning to listen to the narrative of her patients.

Dr. Ofri tries to keep an ear turned to the stories behind her patients’ medical complaints. Answers to questions about family or jobs may not help with medical diagnosis, but conversations like these can help gain a patient’s trust, and they help the doctor, too. “At night, I recall our conversations, and wonder what else I could do for them. It makes me curious about them,” Dr. Ofri says, “so when I go back the next day, I’m more connected with them. And I think a connection has healing powers. Most of the patients brighten, when they talk about themselves and I think they actually feel better.”

A good part of Dr. Ofri’s day is also spent overseeing the work of new doctors. The days are filled with jargon (行业术语) and medical shorthand. But Dr. Ofri also tries to inject another kind of language into the training poetry. She carves out five minutes or so each day to gather with her interns and read a poem. She calls it her “literary rounds”. Through these brief pauses in the day, she says she’s giving her students “a chance to let the other part of their brain flower a little bit”. “I’m just hoping the experience of doing that is helpful, and also trains my students to listen more carefully to patients.” she said.

7 . In recent years, more and more people begin to receive some first aid training.     1     Ask any individual who has taken a first- aid training program if it is worth it and their answer will be “Yes!”

Besides saving lives, it does more. It’s true that having first-aid training helps save lives.     2     Giving appropriate first aid immediately can help to reduce a person’s recovery time and make a difference between whether the patient has a temporary or long-term disability.

It encourages healthy and safe living. One of the first things you will learn during your first-aid training is that you must look after yourself and ensure your own safety as a priority. It’s not being selfish but practical.    3    

It enables you to increase a patient’s comfort. Not all accidents, injuries or illnesses require a trip to the hospital.     4     A child crying because of an injured leg or with a fever is in pain and is suffering. By knowing how to act, you’ll help to reduce the child’s discomfort.

    5     In some situations if a patient doesn’t receive basic first aid care immediately their situation will become worse——often rapidly. A trained person would know how to keep the situation from becoming bad to worse. By being able to provide basic care you can stabilize (稳定) a patient until emergency medical services arrive.

8 . There was a time when the word “surgery” used to scare people, and they would try their best to avoid a surgical procedure. The feeling is understandable, as the idea of a large cut on your body is discomforting in many ways. However, thanks to the advances in medical science, surgical techniques have improved considerably.

Compared with the traditional open surgery, minimally invasive surgery (微创手术)has several benefits to offer. Not only is the procedure quick and less painful, but also ensures rapid recovery. Now, surgical procedures, either big or small, are done within a few minutes to a few hours. The best part about the minimally invasive surgery is the painless procedure. The advanced techniques are helping with quality treatments to patients who have to undergo (进行) surgical procedures.

Unlike the traditional open surgery that requires a large cut, a surgeon makes multiple tiny cuts of less than an inch. For the process, the surgeon uses small surgical instruments, such as a tiny tube with a mini camera at one end. Once the surgeon marks the cuts, he then passes the tiny tube through one of the cuts. The doctor monitors the images taken by the mini camera on the screen and uses them as a reference. These images give the surgeon a clear picture of the area undergoing the surgery. After the surgery, the surgeon cleans the cuts and sometimes places a bandage for additional support.

Minimally invasive surgery has become the first choice of patients with multiple medical conditions. In fact, it would not be wrong to say that these surgeries are now the standard surgical procedures for many routine operations. Whether you have a minor issue or want a surgical intervention for a major health condition, it is the best option.

9 . On January 7, David Bennett went into the operating room at the University of Maryland Medical Center for a surgical procedure never performed before on a human. The 57-year-old Maryland resident had been hospitalized for months due to a life threatening disease. His heart was failing him and he needed a new one.

Bennett’s condition left him unresponsive to treatment and ineligible (不合格) for the transplant list or an artificial heart pump. The physician-scientists at the center, however, had another-also risky- option: transplant (移植) a heart from a genetically-modified pig.

“It was either die or do this transplant,” Bennett had told surgeons a day before the operation. “I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s also my last choice.”

It took the medical team eight hours to finish the operation, making Bennett the first human to successfully receive a pig’s heart. “It’s working and it looks normal. We are thrilled, but we don’t know what tomorrow will bring us. This has never been done before,” Barkley Griffith, who led the transplant team, told the New York Times.

While it’s only been five days since the operation, the surgeons say that Bennett’s new pig heart was, so far, functioning as expected and his body wasn’t rejecting (排斥) the organ. They are still monitoring his condition closely.

“I think it’s extremely exciting,” says Robert Montgomery, transplant surgeon and director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, who was not involved in Bennett’s operation. The result of the procedure was also personally meaningful for Montgomery, who received a heart transplant in 2018 due to a genetic disease that may also affect members of his family in the future. “It’s still in the early days, but still the heart seems to be functioning. And that in and of itself is an extraordinary thing. Up to now most experimental heart transplant procedures have been done between pigs and other animals. This is the first time that surgeons have taken it into a living human.”