Posted: June 2nd, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Cardio & Blood- Сholesterol | Tags: Cardio & Blood | No Comments »
Well, if cigarettes are so bad, what about pipes and cigars? For cigarette smokers, especially, switching is just fooling yourself. You’ll inhale the smoke to get the nicotine effect. Besides, pipe and cigar smokers have their own health problems, including cancer of the lip, tongue, throat and oesophagus.
How about smokeless tobacco such as snuff or chewing tobacco? These provide “satisfaction” by giving a shot of nicotine. It just takes a bit longer to get the hit, but then if one keeps the stuff in the mouth, there’s a constant flow to the brain. And the nicotine, regardless of the source, still has the effects on the cardiovascular system that can kill. Moreover, smokeless tobacco has been well established as a deadly cause of cancer of the mouth, and it also leads to gum disease that can mean tooth loss.
There are other things that can substitute for the oral satisfaction you’ll crave, and for the fiddling around that you do with the cigarette in your hand. I’ll detail a number of options.
*92\85\2*
Cardio & Blood/ Cholesterol
Posted: June 2nd, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Cardio & Blood- Сholesterol | Tags: Cardio & Blood | No Comments »
COMMENT- THE SECOND HISTORY
Case History: RC, (Male – upper middle age) My first heart attack must have occurred when I was on holiday staying in France in 1987. I kept getting this severe pain in the upper back. Thought I’d slipped a disc. But I would wake up in the night with it and any exertion like packing up the car made it worse. I discussed with my wife whether the coffee and French pastries might be contributing to the pain and I stopped them and through cutting out tea, coffee and pastries I did improve but not much.
On my return to England I had to go to the bank -I wanted a business loan so I had to have a medical checkup. The doctor there discovered I had high blood pressure, 190/90 but apart from that he said I was fine. I decided to cut out fats and transform my diet and my blood pressure dropped to 130/70 and has stayed there ever since.
But I still had angina. I decided to have a checkup with a cardiologist associated with a leading London hospital. In October 1988 I had a treadmill test and was told ‘there is nothing you can do really’. I asked about diet and was told ‘eat what you like’. I was mad about this because I knew diet had helped me before. He [the specialist] also told me I didn’t need to exercise – a warm bath was all I needed.
I began to have more problems. I spoke to a friend who worked in another London hospital, she arranged for me to see the Professor of Cardiology there. That was June 1989. He diagnosed a 90 per cent blockage in my coronary arteries and suggested angioplasty. I went in on Wednesday, was done on Thursday, came out Saturday with drug treatment.
In the following year, I was carrying a bag of waste to the dustbin when I felt queer. I went to my GP who confirmed I was having a heart attack and must be conducted urgently to hospital. It had to be the original London hospital in my area. Once there, a doctor looked at me and said I could go home: ‘you look perfectly all right to me’. My wife refused. If she had not been so adamant I would not be here now because I had a severe heart attack that night.
It was a horrendous experience. I was put in a room with three other patients on life support machines, two of which died, one had his family screaming around him. There they were, screaming and shouting right next to the intensive care unit for heart patients.
My attack started at 9.00 p.m. and I was in agony. They tried to find the registrar. At midnight they got hold of him and he gave me a streptokinase injection and immediately the pain started to ease. Apparently that dissolves blood clots.
The next day the original consultant cardiologist turned up. He said, ‘that shot we gave you cost 750. We only had two in the hospital and you got one.’
I later found out that up in Scotland doctors carry this around normally. I was truly shocked that a major hospital in London only had two shots.
After three sleepless nights, following transferral to a general ward through which ambulance crews were trundling people all night with doors crashing, and the TV on all night, I started another heart attack. I insisted my wife help move me out and I did move to a second hospital. They gave me another balloon angioplasty at 3.00 a.m. As I was being wheeled out of the theatre the surgeon said, ‘It was a great success.’
Great success? I thought. I am still lying here in such terrible pain I can’t move and you tell me that?
After I was discharged on three drugs, I felt better for about two months. Then I started to feel unwell again, so unwell I was spending two to three days in bed each week.
One day my wife said, ‘Get out of bed, you are fading away. I won’t let this happen. We have heard about this treatment [chelation] and you are having it.’
In April ’91 I went to see Wayne [Dr Perry]. It was the best day’s work I ever did. I had a Doppler. One carotid artery [leading to the head] was 70 per cent blocked. On one artery they couldn’t get a reading because there was too much disturbance.
After 20 treatments I felt great. I had bought a complete kitchen which I was going to fit, but I delayed when I started feeling ill. After the treatment my wife said you couldn’t knock me down. I laid the ceramic tiled floor, my wife mixed the cement. I was so fit I dug the garden over. The difference was unbelievable. My carotid blockage was reduced by 30 per cent.
Through all this I kept my GP informed. He was in accord with my trying the treatment. When I later had a checkup with the senior cardiologist at the hospital (he has some post in Europe too), I asked him about chelation to see what he’d say and he said, ‘Don’t touch it, it doesn’t work.’
I have now had 30 treatments and, after meeting a patient in the clinic who was having the treatment on the National Health [a pioneering step], I asked my doctor to write to the heart specialist to see if I could have it too. When I next saw him I knew he’d received the letter but he had six senior doctors around him and he never raised it and neither did I, to spare his feelings.
He did tell me I was down for a triple bypass and I asked him what protection it gave me from further heart attacks. ‘Oh it won’t stop you from having another heart attack,’ he said. ‘How reassuring,’ I thought. ‘Here I am about to have another heart operation and I’m told it mightn’t work.’
It reminded me of a remark I’d heard in the arterial clinic. Three farmers had come in from Kenya. They did have a chelation clinic in Kenya, but local medicos got it closed down. One very fit man had gone to his doctor and the doctor had said, ‘Why don’t you have a bypass?’ ‘Do I need it?’ he had asked. ‘No,’ the doctor said, ‘but it would give you another ten years of life.’ He said he then decided to hot foot it to the UK to have chelation therapy instead.
RC is now fit and active. His wife and he both follow a carefully controlled diet low in fat, meat and dairy foods and high in fibre and fresh fruit and vegetable content. His wife once followed a diet consisting entirely of grapes for a month. She had so much energy she used to spring out of bed singing in the mornings, to such an extent her husband begged her to ‘tone it down’.
What seems disturbing about this case history is the picture it paints about lack of peace and quiet in intensive care in a leading London teaching hospital. As RC says: ‘How do they expect patients to get better if they can’t sleep for noise and commotion?’ Also disrupting to patient welfare were the battles RC and his wife had to fight on his account to get the treatment he wanted at the very time when he should have been surrendering to recovery.
The general criticism of chelation therapy – it doesn’t work was again in evidence.
*91\104\2*
Cardio & Blood/ Cholesterol
Posted: May 21st, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: General health | Tags: General health | No Comments »
Parents will often be worried that their baby is not well. The most common cause of a baby being ‘off colour’ is a cold or simple viral infection. These are very common in childhood, and in most cases no specific treatment is necessary. Your child may be a little irritable and clingy. A slight fever may be present on and off, and he may be snuffly. It is often difficult for parents to see their child not wanting to eat or drink very much but in the majority of cases all these symptoms will pass after a few days. Young children have viral infections frequently during the winter months, especially when they begin to attend daycare or kindergarten where they are in regular contact with other children.
While most simple viral infections are mild and a full recovery is assured with no treatment, a baby or young child can sometimes have a more serious illness. Sometimes, especially during the early stages of an illness, it is difficult even for doctors to pick up the signs of something more serious. Yet it is important to realise that the earlier the signs of a serious illness are detected, the sooner treatment can be started. This is particularly important for babies and very young children. Younger children can go downhill quite quickly, and early detection of serious illness is vital.
How do parents know when an illness is minor and when it might be more serious? Recent research has pointed to signs which might indicate that the baby or young child should be seen immediately by a doctor. You should watch out for:
• drowsiness
• decreased activity/lethargy
• breathing difficulty
• poor circulation
• poor feeding
• poor urine output.
*200\90\8*
Posted: May 19th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: General health | Tags: General health | No Comments »
SWEAT TEST
This is a test which is used to confirm the diagnosis of a genetically inherited disorder called cystic fibrosis (see p. 200). The concentration of salts in the sweat is measured. In children with cystic fibrosis, the level is much higher than normal.
THROAT SWAB
If your child has a sore throat, your doctor may suggest doing a throat swab. This is a brushing of the back of the throat with a sterile long cotton bud, which is then placed in a special container and sent to the laboratory. The sample is checked under a microscope and some is brushed onto a special culture medium and incubated for 48 hours, in an attempt to grow the germ causing the infection. Many throat infections are due to viruses but certain germs, such as Streptococcus, can also be the cause. It is definitely advisable to do a throat swab if your child has pus on his tonsils. The procedure also helps to determine which antibiotic will be effective against the specific germ found.
*33\90\8*
Posted: May 18th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: General health | Tags: General health | No Comments »
Here are some suggestions for improving recreational time together.
1. Select an entirely new activity that neither one of you has ever done before, even in childhood. There are hundreds of possibilities.
2. Decide what type of recreation suits your “unit.” If one of you is very athletic and the other more artistic, the activity will have to stress other skills, leaving these for individual enjoyment.
3. Start the activity together and develop it together. If one or the other partner tends to “get ahead” in most things, make sure you leam together. This one activity is only for the two of you. You can still have your golf, tennis, running, or whatever other activity you may enjoy as an individual.
One wife reported, “We came up with something. It’s sailing. We both can’t swim, have never been on a boat, and don’t like the water. We couldn’t come up with anything, so we picked the one thing most unlike both of us. It’s working out slowly. He tried to be the captain and make me crew, but I think we worked that out after he fell off the boat while trying to tell me to be careful. There he was, mouth full of water, his captain’s hat floating beside him, and trying to tell me how to save him.”
4 Remember that individual activities are still important. One husband stated, “We have spouse activities that include tennis and walking. Then we have what we call ‘sperson’ activities, individual things we do with other people. She golfs, I golf, but we’re at drastically different levels of ability there. I will never be the golfer she is, so we each enjoy it to our own level with other people more at our level.”
The marriage that plays together and plays separately is most likely to find super marital sex, for the joy and energizing aspects of fulfilling play can enter into the sexual relationship. As you consider this possibility, remember that a mutual involvement in a “mini-career” could also be a form of play. Noel Coward said, “Work is much more fun than fun.”
*224\97\8*
Posted: May 18th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Cancer | Tags: Cancer | No Comments »
Say you do have a cancer which is in a part of the body that can be safely removed. How can you be as sure as possible, before the operation, that complete removal of the cancer is feasible? Firstly, you should understand that if only the visible cancer growth is removed, without a margin of apparently normal tissue, it is most unlikely that you will be cured. This is because of the ability of cancer cells to grow into the surrounding tissues. They do this in small columns or clumps which are much too tiny to be seen other than through a microscope. Before the operation, then, it is important to know just where the borders of your primary cancer growth appear to be. Your surgeon will then know whether or not it will be possible to remove an adequate margin of the apparently normal tissues surrounding it. Your doctor should check the apparent extent of your primary cancer growth by taking a careful history of your symptoms, examining you clinically and arranging, with your agreement, whatever tests—X-rays, scans, blood tests and so on—are necessary to provide a complete picture.
*239/40/1*
Posted: May 15th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: General health | Tags: General health | No Comments »
An uncommon hereditary disorder, which can have disastrous effects not only on the sufferer but also on the whole family, is known as Huntington’s chorea.
It is caused by a dominant gene, so the children of a sufferer have a one in two chance of inheriting the disease. Unfortunately, it may not appear until a person is in his forties, so the sufferer has usually married and reproduced before being aware that he has it. It affects men and women equally.
Once the disease declares itself, the sufferer shows involuntary muscular movements, incoordination and mental degeneration.
Although it occurs in most countries of the world, it has its greatest incidence in closed communities where there is a degree of inbreeding.
Tasmania has one of the highest prevalences of Huntington’s disease in the world and this has been traced to the arrival in the last century of an affected Somerset woman who had nine affected children.
Unfortunately, there is no treatment.
Considerable research is under way to improve the outlook for sufferers. Proper genetic counselling for those who have a family history of this disorder can help a couple to decide about having a family.
*427/71/1*
Posted: May 15th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: General health | Tags: General health | No Comments »
A doctor will insist that the mother lies down during the day. If she is still working then he will insist on her giving up her job.
If the blood pressure continues to rise bed rest at home or admission to hospital may be necessary.
Hypotensive drugs that lower the blood pressure may also be necessary. Once pre-eclampsia has developed it does not go away, until the baby is delivered.
It can be controlled and its effects minimised until the baby is spontaneously delivered or the pregnancy is terminated by induction of labor before the due date.
If untreated pre-eclampsia may go on to the condition of eclampsia, where the blood pressure is out of control. The mother develops fits and the baby usually dies. Eclampsia is rare only because pre-eclampsia is so well managed.
An instrument called an echograph can measure the size of the baby and see its progress. This uses ultrasonic waves in the same way as sonar is used to track submarines. The placenta produces a hormone, oestriol, and this is excreted in the mother’s urine.
Measurement of the levels of oestriol give a good indication of placental function and how well nourished is the baby.
*173/71/1*
Posted: May 8th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Skin Care | Tags: Skin Care | No Comments »
Itchiness. A severe or even mild itch, whether localized or generalized, is, in the absence of any prior external or internal disease, most likely to be psychogenic. Often this itch may occur in an area highly endowed with nerve endings, such as around the genitals or the anal area. Various possible psychological reasons and explanations have been given for this particular symptom. These include displaced sexual gratification; a need for self-inflicted injury to satisfy masochistic impulses; the relief of tension by the neuromuscular exercise of scratching, and the expression of shame, guilt, or exhibitionistic traits.
Eczema. There are three forms of eczema, all occurring in adults, which are thought to have a strong emotional basis. These are: the so-called discoid eczema, which occurs in coin-shaped spots, mainly on the limbs, and which is extremely itchy; dyshidrotic eczema, which occurs about the fingers and toes, as small, itchy bubbles under the skin; and lichen simplex, which is a well-localized thickened area of skin which is extremely itchy. Lichen simplex may occur on any area of the body, but always in an easily accessible place. Sufferers of these forms of eczema obviously require treatment to the skin and, in addition, an understanding doctor to help them sort out, or at least talk over, the underlying problems or anxieties.
Trichotillomania. This is not such a rare condition, but it is one which frequently goes unrecognized in its minor form. Principally, it occurs in children who seek neurotic satisfaction through pulling out their own hair. Usually they select the hair of the scalp, and less often the eyebrows. The principal element in the psychodynamic of children is the turning on oneself of unexpressed rage at rejecting parents. This is the transformation of a sadistic instinct into a masochistic one. Hair pulling may be missed if it is not considered in relation to patients thought to have ringworm, alopecia areata, etc.
Adults who inflict this condition on themselves are often deeply disturbed individuals, usually with sexual conflicts which, basically, resolve around the notion that sex is dirty, filthy, and repugnant; they contrive to ‘shed’ these feelings by pulling out their hair and making themselves less likely objects of sexual attention.
*23\44\4*
Posted: May 8th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Diabetes | Tags: Diabetes | No Comments »
This glossary describes of some of the key foods that can form part of a low G.I. diet.
BurgenTM Soy Lin, Soy and Unseed loaf (G.I. of 19) • A mixed grain bread from Tip Top Bakeries. Sydney. Available in supermarkets. It has the lowest G.I. of all mixed grain breads. Other varieties of Burgen™ bread also have a low G.I.
Cherries (G.I. of 22) • The G.I. for cherries is based on European cherries. Australian cherries which are 6.1 per cent glucose and 4.2 per cent fructose may have a higher G.L value.
Custard (G.I. of 43) • Made with milk, so provides calcium, protein and B vitamins plus a little sugar, vanilla flavouring and a starch thickener.
Doongara rice (G.I. of 59) • An Australian grown rice with a high amylose content and low G.I. Available in supermarkets and in bulk quantities from wholesalers and some Asian food stores. Fruit loaf (G.I. of 47) • Available in wholemeal and white varieties, but choose the heavy types. The G.I. of fruit loaf is probably lowered by part substitution of flour (high G.I.) with fruit (lower G.I.).
Grapefruit (G.I. of 25) • The low G.I. factor of grapefruit may be due to their high acid content which slows absorption from the stomach.
Grapes (G.I. of 46) • An equal mix of fructose and glucose and a high acid content are characteristics of fruits with a low G.I. Grapes are a good example.
Icecream (G.I. of 61) • Most dairy products have very low G.I. factors. When we eat dairy foods a protein curd forms in the stomach and slows down its emptying. This has the effect of slowing down absorption and lowering the G.I. factor.
Kiwifruit (G.I. of 52) • Kiwifruit contain equal proportions of glucose and fructose and high acidity giving a reasonably low G.I. They are also a wonderful source of vitamin C with one kiwifruit meeting the total recommended daily intake.
Legumes (G.I. range: 14 to 56) • Abo known as pulses. These include dried peas, beans and lentils, mostly have a G.L factor of 50 or less.
Canned varieties have a slightly higher G.I. than their home-cooked counterpart due to the higher temperature during processing. Soya beans (G.I. of 18) have one of the lowest G.I. values, possibly due to their higher protein and fat content. The viscous fibre in legumes reduces physical availability of starch to digestive enzymes.
*155\33\4*
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