Dr. Heiks is a board certified Family Medicine doctor and lives in Bluffton, Ohio.
Dear Dr. Heiks: My husband has gout but doesn’t want to take anything for it. Is there anything natural he can try?
Reader from Bluffton, Ohio
Dear Reader: When I think of gout, needles come to mind. An acute gout attack is the equivalent of needles poking around in the joint, oftentimes the large toe. Understandably, this will result in a lot of pain and swelling.
You can't have a Super Bowl without Ada, Ohio. But you already know that. The 2013 Super Bowl footballs are already created and shipped – and there are lots of them. Each ball was created in Ada.
According to officials at the Ada Wilson factory, 54 balls were shipped to the Baltimore Ravens and 54 to the San Francisco 49ers. Those will be used for pre-Super Bowl practice.
Beyond that, 54 balls are used by each team during the Super Bowl. Then, there are 12 “kicker” balls, called “K” balls used by the game officials.
For the second year running, 'Mason' was the most popular name for Blanchard Valley Hospital (Bluffton campus) born boys. Of the over 200 names provided to the Icon by BVH, Bluffton OB Department, 'Mason' appeared four times, more than any other name, boy or girl.
For the rest of the boys, the following names appeared more than once:
Abram Aidan Asher Carter Connor James
Jase Jaxson/Jaxon Joel Kaleb Landon Levi Logan/Login Oliver
Ryker Samual Thomas William Wyatt
For girls, there was no clear front runner among the first names. 'Savannah' appeared on our list three times. The names that appeared twice were:
The internet is ripe with many cool things. We at the Icon thought this was pretty neat.
Brandon Martin-Anderson created a map that contains a dot for every single person counted in the last U.S. and Canadian censuses. That means 341,817,095 dots.
According to the site, he wanted "an image of human settlement patterns unmediated by proxies like city boundaries, arterial roads, state lines, etc." So he wrote a computer program and fed in the information from the census.
From time to time The Ada Icon posts a photo - really, just part of a photo of a familiar Ada image. Here's the first quiz for 2013. How well do you know Ada? For the answer check the photo below.
You'll find it at the Ada Public Library - children's section.
The Ada Icon encourages Facebook fans interested in all the latest information about the local community to consider liking the Ada Icon Facebook site and its sister publication of the Bluffton icon.
The Ada Icon site was recently launched and continues to grow weekly. It currently has 80 followers. The Bluffton Icon site is older and has 821 followers.
Both sites provide worthwhile news updates for the communities they serve.
