May 8th, 2009
I started menstruating at the age of 13. For the first 12 months everything was fine, but I then started to develop acute pain in my right side. I went to my GP who referred me to a surgeon and I was then rushed to hospital to have my appendix removed. Strangely, my appendix was quite normal. I felt well for three months, but then the pain started up again. After having an ultrasound, I was admitted to hospital with a suspected ovarian cyst. A laparoscopy was performed, but everything appeared normal. I was sent home, having been told that it was quite normal to suffer some discomfort when having a period.
For the next year I tried to put up with the pain because I was sure the doctors would tell me it was ‘all in my head’. After another bout of severe pain my GP referred me to another specialist who ordered a barium enema. He said that I had an irritable bowel and to eat more fibre. Unfortunately, this made no difference to the pain. My GP then thought that perhaps I was suffering from pelvic inflammatory disease — a course of antibiotics made no difference. My mother wasn’t happy with the doctor’s explanations and so took me to another GP who immediately suspected I may have endometriosis even though I was only 17 years old. He sent me to a gynaecologist who immediately performed a laparoscopy and diagnosed endometriosis.
During the laparoscopy the gynaecologist ‘burnt off’ all the endometrial deposits that he could find. He explained to me that because there could still be microscopic endometrial deposits in the pelvis, I was to take Provera 30 milligrams a day for nine months. I am now pain free and have just finished the course of tablets. I am looking forward to starting university next year and enjoying life.
*45\83\2*
Categories: Women's Health
April 29th, 2009
While there is a direct correlation between your sleeping pattern and back pain and sciatica, how well you sleep is also likely to have a major effect on your overall health and stress levels, which in turn may also affect your back problems. Here are some extra facts about sleep that underline the importance of this often-neglected aspect of our lives:
Most of us spend up to a third of each day in bed – that’s about 29,200 hours in bed every ten years.
New research has shown that people who try to cut down on sleep are more prone to infection and irritability. In a recent study of 9,000 British adults, it was found that those who slept between six-and-a-half and eight-and-a-half hours enjoyed much better overall health than those who slept for less.
Lack of sleep can sabotage diets and knock our immune system for six: exhausted people are far more likely to pick up bugs and infections because of the way lack of sleep upsets the normal cycle of chemical and hormone release. When a representative sample of more than 300 adults aged 30 to 60 years were asked about the effect a bad night’s sleep had on them, 79 per cent of people saw a direct link between the way they had slept and how they felt the next day. A staggering 52 per cent said that they regularly experienced tiredness/lethargy, irritability, poor concentration, depression or headaches which they attributed to poor quality sleep.
Only 10 per Cent of people stated that they always had a good night’s sleep – these were the people who regularly got more than the average amount of sleep.
How much sleep do we really need? While this will vary greatly from person to person, the average amount of sleep needed each day, according to the Ushborne Book of Body Facts, is 16 to 20 hours for a new-born baby; 13 hours for a two-year-old; 10 to 11 hours for a five-year-old; 9 to 10 hours for a ten-year-old; 7 to 8 hours for an adult; and a mere 5 hours for an eighty-year-old. On the average, people sleep for just 6.7 hours before a working day and 7.1 hours before a day off.
*50\124\2*
Categories: Pain Relief-Muscle Relaxers
April 29th, 2009
Just as you need to have some sense of the weather in order to know how to dress and whether to take a raincoat or an umbrella along, so you need to have a good sense of your mood in order to make the necessary adjustments to your lifestyle. Sometimes fluctuations in mood occur during a single day. A piece of bad news, a valuable object mislaid or an encounter with an unpleasant person may plunge you into a gloomy frame of mind for several hours, only to be reversed later in the day by a piece of good news, the recovery of your lost treasure or a visit with a friend. Recognizing the connection between your mood and these external events turns out to be enormously useful in making the hour-by-hour adjustments to help even out your mood across the day.
Other mood fluctuations occur over days and are less easy to recognize. For example, people may become depressed a few days after the clocks are turned back at the end of autumn, after returning from abroad or after a big party. In these three situations the deterioration in mood may be due to the hour’s decrease in afternoon daylight, jet lag, or the delayed effects of alcohol respectively. One useful strategy for those who experience unexplained dips in mood is to keep a daily mood log, which will help you to recognize the connection between mood fluctuations and external events. At times such logs can be crucial in convincing you that a clear pattern exists. For example, it was only after she had kept a log for several months that one of my patients was willing to concede that the alcohol she consumed on Saturday night was responsible for the dip in mood experienced two or three days later.
Finally, there are mood changes that have a longer period of duration, such as the monthly mood changes of premenstrual syndrome or the annual mood fluctuations that occur with the change of the seasons in people with SAD or the winter blues.
Mood may change with the environment – physical, climatic or human. One of my patients would feel depressed every time she went to her office. This seemed strange as she liked her colleagues and was passionate about the work itself. The clues to her depression lay in her associated symptoms – headache, dizziness, fatigue and difficulties with short-term memory. She worked in an air-tight office block full of office chemicals – printer cartridges, copiers, FAX machines and other sources of organic solvents. She was a victim of the so-called sick-building syndrome, and depression is one of the key symptoms that affect people suffering from this disorder. One patient with seasonal affective disorder experienced depression after she moved from a bright high-rise block of flats to a dim ground-floor studio. A third patient became depressed every time she visited her mother-in-law. The patient was very self-conscious about her looks and was constantly battling to lose weight. Somehow her mother-in-law always managed to direct the conversation to the patient’s figure, often in the guise of a compliment. ‘That dress really suits you,’ she would say, ‘it’s just right for your shape. Where did you find it?’ This would invariably make the patient self-conscious and depressed. In all of these cases, the first step in handling the problem was understanding it. An old medical adage is that you cannot treat before you diagnose. I therefore recommend that if you are of a moody disposition, become your own diagnostician, find out what is depressing you and then proceed to take remedial steps.
*66\75\2*
Categories: Anti Depressants-Sleeping Aid
April 28th, 2009
Although we hope that such gases will never be used, we have deliberately introduced the topic at this point to explain the difference between the diagnosis of ‘an epileptic seizure, and the diagnosis of ‘epilepsy’. It would clearly be ridiculous to label as ‘epileptics’ those soldiers who had convulsed on exposure to the nerve gas. The cause of their seizures is readily apparent, and, not only that, the tendency to convulse is present only in the presence of the nerve gas. Someone is said to suffer from epilepsy if he or she has a continuing tendency to epileptic seizures.
This example polarizes, as it were, the explanation, but there are many grey areas, some of which we explain here. Take for example the case of a young man who has a single seizure at the age of 19, after a rather-too-good office party at Christmas time. It would be justifiable to assume that alcohol played some part in the genesis of the seizure—but there were others who drank just as much who did not have a seizure. So we must presume that the man has a lower convulsive threshold than his colleagues. A single seizure is not considered sufficient to make the diagnosis of epilepsy, as, until time has passed, it will not be known whether or not this seizure will prove to be the first of others.
Doctors will make a diagnosis of epilepsy when they hear of more than one seizure of any type not associated with fever. Convulsions associated with illness. Clearly there is no difficulty in doing this if the time scale is short, but what do we call a man who has one fit at the age of 19 and another at the age of 80? It would seem a bit nonsensical to tell the elderly man that he had been an epileptic all his life, as we would be obliged to do if we followed rigidly the definition of ‘more than one non-febrile seizure’. Another problem—what do we call a woman aged 40, who has had ten seizures between the ages of 15 and 25? We cannot, unfortunately, say that she is a ‘woman cured of epilepsy’, as experience shows she is still slightly at risk from further seizures.
These examples clearly show that the label ‘epilepsy’ has to be applied with common sense. It is not one of those tidy diseases such as myocardial infarction, in which there is little argument about the heart attack or the coronary disease causing it.
These medical uncertainties are reflected in patients’ minds. After all, if a doctor cannot give a crystal-clear definition of a disease, how can the patient be expected to understand it? The uncertainties in peoples’ minds are compounded by a series of half-or un-truths that, perhaps because epilepsy is so common, are held in the collective imagination as folk lore—that epilepsy is inherited; that it begins in childhood; that it is always convulsive in nature; and that it is related in some ways to mental illness. Glimpses of this stereotype of epilepsy are seen in the clinic when a patient, or his relative, says ‘it can’t be epilepsy because . . . .’ We hope that this book will dispel some of these confusions.
Part of the difficulty in understanding about epilepsy is a hangover from the ideas of the great physicians of the nineteenth century. ‘Diseases’ were described—for example, Bright’s disease of the kidneys. Such diseases have proved unexpectedly more and more complex with further research. For example, Bright described the dilute urine containing protein, and changes associated with high blood pressure that are merely symptoms common to a number of processes resulting in chronic kidney failure.
With these comments in mind, an epileptic seizure should be regarded as a symptom—an event that is just one of the few ways that the brain has of reacting to untoward internal processes. The continuation of such reactions constitutes epilepsy. As to the causes of epilepsy, it is the doctor’s task to disentangle, if at all possible, the factors that result in seizures.
We have had some difficulty in deciding what to call the child or person with epilepsy. There are some who instinctively dislike the word—or label—’epileptic’. It is of course an adjective, and one does not talk about those with heart disease or multiple sclerosis as ‘cardiacs’ or ‘multiple sclerotics’. We admit, however, that those with diabetes seem quite happy to be known as ‘diabetics’. We find the word person too impersonal, but to write and read ‘a man, woman, or child with epilepsy’ takes too long, and to write each time ‘those with epilepsy’ seems archaic. We have avoided the use of the word patient, except in a medical context, as people with epilepsy should only become patients for brief moments in their lives. We therefore use whatever phrase seems most appropriate in the context.
*5\188\2*
Categories: Epilepsy
April 28th, 2009
Warts are local accumulations of skin cells which have become abnormally large and adherent to one another as the result of infection with one of nine possible wart viruses. In people whose warts have become widespread and unusually persistent (warts normally disappear in about nine months), an additional factor — decreased immunity — is also at work.
Treatment of common warts on the hands and fingers, according to the Resident and Staff Physician (26:58), need not be traumatic to be effective. Even applications of relatively mild lotions, such as salicylic acid, may disturb the walls of the wart cells sufficiently to let some wart virus escape into the patient’s bloodstream. This boosts production of antibodies against the virus which eventually attack the warts and destroy them.
So, if you have warts on your fingers, it is better to let your own body deal with them. If you rush to have them burned off, your immunity never gets stimulated and they may quickly come back again.
*195\143\2*
Categories: General health
April 28th, 2009
Symptoms: Most often there are no symptoms.
Possible symptoms: Headaches, pounding heartbeat, shortness of breath during exercise, flushed face.
Home care: High blood pressure must be diagnosed and treated by a doctor.
Precautions
- Your child should have regular checkups, and the doctor should measure the child’s blood pressure during each examination.
- High blood pressure can be dangerous if left untreated.
Although it has been known for decades that high blood pressure (hypertension) occurs in infants and children as well as in adults, many people are not aware of this fact. A baby’s normal blood pressure at birth is about 80/40 systolic pressure over diastolic pressure. Systolic pressure is the pressure the heart pumps out with; diastolic pressure is the pressure required to fill the heart with blood. The blood pressure then rises gradually until, by the time the child is a teenager, it is about 120/80. If the blood pressure is substantially higher than that, a child is considered to have high blood pressure.
The most common cause of transient (temporary) high blood pressure in children is emotion -fear or worry, for example. Persistent high blood pressure can be caused by kidney disease (tumours, obstructions, infections, nephritis); adrenal and testicle tumours; defects of the heart or a major artery; overactive thyroid; medications such as steroids or ephedrine; extreme overweight; and, eating too much licorice. “Essential hypertension,” the most common cause in adults, may be hereditary and has no known cause.
*112/84/5*
Categories: General health
April 23rd, 2009
After a meal, glucose produced by the breakdown of food (digestion) is absorbed through the wall of the intestine into the bloodstream. At this point, there is, quite naturally, a high level of glucose in the blood. Your body takes what it immediately needs for energy and then produces insulin from the pancreas in an attempt to reduce the excess. Glucose that is not used immediately for energy is changed into glycogen and stored in the liver and muscles to be used later. It’s this finely tuned system that usually keeps the glucose level in your blood at a healthy well-balanced norm.
To maintain this balance, your body works in a similar way to the thermostat on a central heating system. Just as the thermostat clicks into action as temperatures rise or fall, so your natural ‘thermostat’ clicks into action as glucose levels rise and fall. When your ‘thermostat’ recognizes that there is too much or too little, your body takes action:
• When the glucose level falls too low adrenalin is released by the adrenal glands and glucagon is produced by the pancreas. Glucagon works in the opposite way to insulin and increases blood glucose by encouraging the liver to turn some of its glycogen stores into glucose to give us quick energy.
• If the blood glucose level stays low for a period of time, hypoglycemia – low blood sugar – can occur. Symptoms include irritability, aggressive outbursts, palpitations, forgetfulness, lack of sex drive, crying spells, dizziness, fears and anxiety, confusion, inability to concentrate, fatigue, insomnia, headaches, muscle cramps, excessive sweating and excessive thirst.
• Alternatively, when the glucose level rises too high, insulin is produced by the pancreas to lower it. If the blood sugar level remains too high, this causes the symptoms of hyperglycemia – high blood sugar level. The extreme form of this is diabetes. With this condition, insulin is supplied from outside the body by injection to bring the level down. The greater your weight, the higher your risk of developing diabetes. Obese people have a 77 times higher chance of developing it.
During a normal day, the amount by which your blood sugar level rises and falls depends on two main factors: what and when you eat or drink.
*35/73/5*
Categories: Women's Health
April 23rd, 2009
Though Vietnam, the war most commonly associated with today’s cases of PTSD, was more than 20 years ago, that doesn’t mean that you should expect that all these wounds are healed. “You can learn to live with PTSD, but it never fully goes away,” says Mendel. In fact, when researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center surveyed World War II prisoners of war and concentration camp survivors a few years back, they found that about one-third of them still suffered from nightmares and depression more than 45 years later.
What may be more disturbing is that many veterans who seemed to have escaped the worst of PTSD from the Vietnam War are just now beginning to surface with symptoms two decades later. “Many of these men and women came back from the war and completely immersed themselves in their careers, working until they were exhausted every day to numb the pain,” says Weber. “But now that they’re hitting their fifties, they can’t work like they used to and they’re losing this coping mechanism. I’m seeing lawyers, physicians, and people from all walks of life who have been extremely functional who are just now breaking down.”
Since PTSD increases your risk for suicide, it’s important that you seek treatment as soon as you notice symptoms, says Weber. “We can’t cure it, but we can make it much easier to live with.” Here’s what you should know.
Watch the triggers. If you’re diving for cover at the sound of a helicopter, that’s an obvious sign of PTSD. But some of the things that trigger the onset of the disorder are more subtle, says Mendel. “The losses you experience as you age can bring back all your old unresolved feelings of emotional trauma and trigger PTSD symptoms in the present.”
Know your strengths. “Don’t for a minute think that you’re less of a man if you’re having trouble dealing with your trauma,” says Weber. “PTSD isn’t a weakness; it’s a mental condition with physical components. And you owe it to yourself to get help for it.”
Walk the wall. A visit to the Vietnam Memorial wall can help, says Weber. “You can go and reconnect with your feelings. You can allow yourself to feel. That’s very important for men who have been disconnected from them for so long.”
Take yourself in context. “Don’t make the mistake of judging what you did in combat by current values,” says Weber. “Re-frame your actions in the realm of combat. What you did in the context of that situation was okay. You were doing your job.”
Find an open ear. You may have felt that you couldn’t talk to the people close to you because what you had seen or done seemed too horrible, says Mendel, but there is something very cathartic in finding someone who will listen. “It’s best to find someone trained in veteran counseling for that kind of discussion,” she notes, “since not just any counselor is prepared to deal with hearing the horrors of combat.”
Admit addictions. “Substance abuse and trauma go hand in hand,” says Mendel, “If you’re using alcohol or drugs to drown your pain, a group like Alcoholics Anonymous can help. But you’ll likely also need counseling to deal with the trauma you’ve been suppressing. The route of relapse in substance abuse is often a trigger of unresolved trauma. This is why counseling on the traumatic events is necessary to avoid relapse.”
Hang on. Right now, most therapists use a combination of medications to ease the symptoms of PTSD, says Weber. “But new drugs specific for the condition are being developed as we speak. We should have much better medications in the next few years.”
*123/36/5*
Categories: General health
April 23rd, 2009
There is one side-effect which is, in fact, advantageous and well worth mentioning. In almost all cases of the extract being used for the relief of symptoms of arthritis the patients concerned, whether human beings or animals, display a beneficial change in their overall condition. In human beings this is usually described by the person involved as ‘a feeling of well-being’ and a desire to be active. In animals a change in attitude and vigour is easily noticeable. Horses tend to become more vibrant, collected, and more anxious to be out doing something. Dogs and cats become active and fit, even if they are old and generally tired.
During some of the clinical trial work on human subjects being done in a hospital in Europe, the doctor in charge of the trials recorded that one of the most difficult aspects to quantify in regard to the mussel extract treatment was this feeling of well-being induced in the patients. This effect is quite valuable since it tends to help with the general recovery of the person by its psychological influence.
It is also reported that this feeling of vitality also occurs in arthritics who do not respond to the mussel extract treatment.
In all fairness it should be pointed out that this vitality effect may not be limited to the use of the mussel extract. Other preparations from sea organisms may also indicate this feature. The vitality effect of the mussel extract preparation in horses who were being treated for lameness was such that some racing stables and trainers began to use it as a condition booster for racing animals. Results of this type of use were good and some horses of only moderate racing form improved to the extent that they became top-rated animals on the New Zealand circuit. One was sold to owners in the U.S.A. where it recorded excellent speed trials.
Not for one moment is it being suggested that the mussel preparation or any other preparation from the seas, is going to make animals or people capable of doing things which they were not already capable of. However, if a preparation improves the condition of an animal or a human, and makes them feel vibrant and anxious to do things, and then they will make every effort to do their best in whatever sphere of activity they are involved. Thus, the racehorses, having been relieved of pain and stiffness in the legs, would tend to give their best performance quite naturally.
There are similar stories of cats, that after having to drag one or more limbs across the floor for months and showing reluctance to exercise, were once more outside catching birds; and of dogs, reluctant to be taken for a walk because of pain and immobile joints, that, after treatment for only one week, were bouncing about by the door waiting to go out.
There is nothing surprising in these reports if considered in the logical way. Take away pain and stiffness; induce a feeling of vitality, and what else can be expected but action!
*18/48/5*
Categories: Arthritis
April 23rd, 2009
Dealing with eating disorders would be easy if all we had to do was say, “Eat normal-sized, healthy meals at regular times and you’ll be fine.” While the prescription is basically correct, nothing is that simple.
Remember, anorexics often don’t think they are sick. Instead, their illness is their identity. Thinness makes them special. They are thus poorly motivated to accept treatment. Patients often agree to gain weight just so they can get out of the hospital. Once out, they may starve themselves all over again.
Also, although thinness makes them proud, many anorexics feel that at their core they are rotten, unlovable people. Therapy might mean exposing the horrible “truth” of their rottenness to an unsympathetic stranger. Given this fear, who wouldn’t resist treatment?
Bulimics are often more receptive. As Lisa’s story indicates, a bulimic’s loss of control often impels her to seek help. Many welcome the chance to learn how to restore control over themselves and their eating.
Resistance springs not just from poor mental attitudes but from the physical consequences of the disorder as well. In anorexia, for example, the starvation itself may cause disturbed thinking. And some bulimics are so uncomfortable with any amount of food in their stomachs that even a small meal triggers the urge to vomit. Therapy that requires her to eat can cause physical as well as emotional discomfort. It takes time to get used to eating correctly again.
You need to work through the problem of resistance with your daughter. You both need a lot of support to reduce your fears- fears that are very real for both of you.
*52/35/5*
Categories: Weight Loss
