Archive for 'General health'
MORE ABOUT JUICES: GREEN AND LACTIC ACID JUICES
Posted on June 16, 2010, under General health.
IMMUNE SYSTEM: CAN WE STOP TUBERCULOSIS?
Posted on June 16, 2010, under General health.
CHILD’S HEALTH/BOWEL DISORDERS: GASTROENTERITIS
Posted on May 21, 2009, under General health.
Gastroenteritis is a common condition in children of all ages. It causes diarrhea and occasionally vomiting. The entire illness may last for up to 10 days. In most cases it is of limited duration and no medication is required.
Cause
Gastroenteritis is caused by a virus that infects the bowel and causes inflammation which leads to diarrhoea and vomiting.
Clinical features
Gastroenteritis is common in babies and toddlers, and is characterised by the sudden onset of diarrhoea, accompanied by vomiting and abdominal cramps. If adequate fluid intake is not kept up, there is a risk rhat the child will become dehydrated.
Treatment
Do not give medicines to stop diarrhoea and vomiting — they do not help at all and can have significant side effects in children. Similarly, do not give antibiotics of any kind — the commonest cause of gastroenteritis is a virus, which does not respond to antibiotics.
When to see your doctor
• if your child has a lot of diarrhoea (8-10 watery stools, or 2-3 very large stools per day);
• if vomiting is frequent and your child seems unable to keep any fluids down;
• if your child appears to be dehydrated — not passing urine, pale and thin, sunken eyes, cold hands and feet, drowsiness • if your child develops severe abdominal pain.
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COLIC: TREATMENT
Posted on May 19, 2009, under General health.
Remember that all babies cry some of the time, and that there is considerable variation in the amount, duration and intensity of crying. Parents have differing levels of tolerance to their baby’s crying. The crying will inevitably affect you, and make you tense and sometimes anxious. These feelings are perfectly normal. There are two important things to do in relation to your baby’s crying:
1. Have a nurse or doctor examine the baby to make sure that there is nothing physically wrong. This will reassure you and make it easier to implement some of the strategies listed below.
2. Make sure that you get enough rest and sleep and time for yourself. It is easy to feel that you have to try to be ‘superwoman’ — that somehow you should be able to manage every aspect of the baby’s care, all of the time and then still try to keep a spotless household, and to continue shopping, cooking, and doing all the things you did before the baby came along. This is just impossible. It is vitally important that you organise things in such a way as to have time for yourself, as well as sufficient rest. Everybody — you, your family and especially your baby — suffers if you are stressed from trying to do too much.
There is also one very important thing to know in relation to your baby’s crying. You cannot spoil a baby by picking him up too often, or by cuddling or talking to him. Similarly, the notion of trying to ‘train’ babies to a 4-hourly schedule is simply nonsense. Feed your baby whenever you think he is hungry — trust your instincts instead of watching the clock!
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OUR MARITAL HEALTH/SEX AND PROBLEMS OF DAILY LIVING: PARENTING PARENTS AND PLEASING PARTNERS
Posted on May 18, 2009, under General health.
He had better make up his mind. He is either my husband or her son. He can’t be both anymore.
WIFE
She is making a love triangle out of this whole thing. She is making me choose between her and my mother. Screw them both!
HUSBAND OF ABOVE WIFE
Even though the elderly are living longer, we have done little to improve their health. They tend to be malnourished, overmedicated, and neglected. We view them as a new national obligation rather than a treasure and a part of our life.
Sexuality remains throughout the life process. There are some physiological changes in the form of slower, sometimes less firm erections and decreased lubrication and some changes in stamina and orgasmic contractions, but sexuality in aging remains intact. The fact that our parents remain sexual and have needs to be touched, loved, visited, talked to, and taken care of spiritually as well as physically has caused problems for some of the couples. Here are some of the responses to attempts to parent parents.
The Caretaker: This spouse assumes the role of medical specialist, advising the parent on all health issues and focusing on the survival rather than the thriving of the parent. Caretakers want to avoid guilt later for not having done enough now, vigilantly monitoring the parents’ health at the expense of the intimacy of their own relationship and the intimacy needs of the parent. The Caretaker seems to be attempting to preserve parents more than love them.
The Surrogate: This adult, whose parent is widowed, serves in the role of the lost partner, attempting to meet the parent’s emotional and survival needs at the expense of the adult’s spouse. The spouse tends to become angry and jealous. Intimacy can be directly affected, with verbal, even physical, battles resulting.
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SUPER LOVE FOR SUPER SEX: LOVE-MAP LANDMARKS
Posted on May 18, 2009, under General health.
I discussed earlier the concept of love maps, guides for our loving determined in our early development that predispose us to select certain partners to love and determine our own unique ways of loving. To study super marital sex, I designed and administered a twenty-item questionnaire about the ways in which the husbands and wives “drew” their love maps. I found that their responses to these questions were important for understanding their marriage and their sex, for understanding why sexual problems developed, and for learning how to chart new courses for love.
Think of your own love map as a transparent sheet with light trails and dark highways marked on the sheet, each mark placed there by the experiences of childhood and adolescence. Think of your love map placed over the map of your spouse, both held to the light. Look for the roads and paths that overlap, comparisons between the dark and light trails, the more and less frequently traveled roads, the detours and roads under construction or in need of repair. Conceptualizing loving in this way provides a mental set for learning to love together, for traveling down new and familiar roads, major and minor byways.
Remember that the term “sexual preference” is not an accurate way of understanding the final arrival point on your love map. There is more we do not know about our sexual living and loving style, what John Money calls our sexual status or orientation, than we actually do know, and to use the word “preferences” implies a decision that we never really make about our loving style. Our loving style is no more a preference than a mountain “prefers” to be by the sea.
The prenatal determinants of our sexual style are sometimes seen as primarily biological, and what happens postnatally as learned or sociological. You will be better able to understand your own love map and make intentional changes in that map if you remember that learning and socialization have biological implications, too. Again the lesson of love as a system, an infinitely complex socio-biological “dance” among the brain, the body, and the world, is clear. Your love map is always changing, because all systems are constantly changing. There is as much biology in learning as there is learning in biology, so to look for the psychological, sociological, or neurohormonal answer to our sexual orientation, our love system, is to attempt to read and interpret our love map in the dark. The question is not what causes us to love as we do, but how we are loving and how that loving is changing. Everything you do and experience makes marks on your love map, and when you are married, those maps change together. It is impossible to mark one map without marking the other.
To help you understand the evolution of your loving system, answer each of these questions about your own love map before reading what a husband or wife had to say. Unless you understand love-mapping, you may find, as suggested by Gertrude Stein, that when you do get there, there will be no there there.
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ULCERS — PEPTIC – SYMPTOMS AND TREATMENT
Posted on May 15, 2009, under General health.
The lining of the stomach or the duodenum is eroded and an ulcer results. There is some difference in the causes, the symptoms and in the treatment of ulcers in the stomach compared with ulcers in the duodenum, or first part of the small bowel.
In the past, much of the doctor’s time was taken up trying to find where a peptic ulcer was. While these distinctions exist we are less certain that there is really a great deal of difference in either the cause, the symptoms or the treatment.
Ulcers in the stomach, gastric ulcers, may not be peptic ulcers, but may be cancers which ulcerate and mimic a peptic ulceration.
This pain comes and goes throughout the day, and may vary from day to day.
It tends to be easier in the morning, gets worse as the day progresses and may wake the sufferer from sleep.
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DOCTOR — BEDSIDE – NATURAL APTITUDE AND CONSTANT PRACTICE
Posted on May 15, 2009, under General health.
To be able to empathise with each patient, yet to remain unaffected by his worries is a great skill requiring natural aptitude and constant practice.
Many doctors can only cope by always remaining detached. We choose our medical students because they are good at exams. It would be too hard to try to choose them because they were caring and sensitive to others’ feelings.
How to choose medical students is a problem that has worried many senior doctors and most medical faculties. Exams may be a bad way of assessing a student’s capabilites but there doesn’t appear to be a better way.
Anton Chekhov, the Russian author and poet who was also a doctor, expressed it this way. “Doctors whose attitude to human suffering is strictly official and professional become so callous in the course of time from force of habit that they cannot treat their clients in any but a formal way.”
Dr Anthony Moore, senior lecturer in the Department of Surgery at the University of Melbourne, writing in the Medical Journal of Australia had this to say: “Have you ever wondered about the sort of complaints received by the Medical Disciplinary Board?
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OBESITY AND OSGOOD SCHLATTER’S DISEASE – GENERAL INFORMATION
Posted on May 12, 2009, under General health.
The real problem may be that the individual may be exercising too little for the amount of food taken and this could be not merely a sign of laziness but because of an inherited disposition to be less active.
The authors of the study raise one caution which, they say, they have not been able to determine. This is whether or not the overweight babies had learned to satisfy other needs by eating when they were not hungry.
The diagnosis is usually obvious from the signs but can be confirmed by X-ray.
The only treatment necessary is rest, either by wearing a bandage or a plaster cast to prevent movement of the knee. The inflammation usually subsides after six weeks’ rest and the teenager can resume sport without any after-effects.
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THYROID DISORDERS IN CHILDREN
Posted on April 28, 2009, under General health.
Symptoms
Underactive thyroid: excessive sleepiness; choking while nursing; severe constipation; noisy breathing; retarded growth; protruding tongue; hoarse cry; thick, dry skin; goitre (in some cases)
Overactive thyroid: irritability; restlessness; behavior problems; hand tremors; increased appetite without weight gain; excessive sweating; protruding eyeballs; goitre (in some cases)
Home care:
Take your child for regular checkups. Be aware of signs that might indicate thyroid malfunction.
Precautions:
- Some symptoms of underactive thyroid may appear in older children whose thyroid is normal. Only a doctor can diagnose thyroid malfunction.
- A cyst on the neck should be seen by a doctor; it could be an abnormally « positioned thyroid gland.
The thyroid gland is located in the neck just below the Adam’s apple; it produces hormones that control the body’s temperature, energy production, growth, and fertility. The thyroid gland may become underactive (resulting in hypothyroidism) or overactive (hyperthyroidism). Either condition can occur in infancy or at any age thereafter.
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