Information on popular complementary and alternative medical topics
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Archive for April, 2009
VAGINISMUS
Author: admin
Vaginismus is a sexual problem in which the lower muscles of the vagina tighten or spasm involuntarily so as to make penetration difficult or impossible. At the same time other involuntary muscular reactions sometimes occur: the adductor muscles of the legs draw the thighs together, the back arches and the hands come down in a protective manner to shield the vagina.
The causes of vaginismus may be physical but it is most often a psychosomatic problem, induced by a fear of penetration, despite the fact that in many cases the woman desires to have sexual intercourse. Poor sex education, adherence to religious beliefs which frown on sexual freedom, traumatic experiences such as incest or rape, painful gynaecological examinations, can all be factors. Years of unsatisfying sex may cause a woman to eventually lose all interest and vaginismus may result.
Dryness, ulceration or inflammation of the vagina resulting in pain may also cause an avoidance response to penetration. If vaginismus persists after the physical problem clears up, it may be that an association has developed between intercourse and pain.
Sexual counselling or therapy is often successful in overcoming this problem. Learning relaxation techniques or using natural therapies such as Bach Flower Remedies may be of assistance.
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A recent study reported the annual cost of depression in the US to be approximately $43 billion a year. This amount includes the cost of treating the condition and the loss of productivity and positive contribution to the economy resulting from the illness. Even without taking into account the human suffering involved in the condition, depression is considered to be one of the ten costliest conditions to any nation’s economy.
While depression is costly, its treatment is lucrative. Thus, the anti-depressants such as Prozac and Lustral are among the best-selling medications, representing billions in revenue for their manufacturers. While these medications can literally be life-savers, those who offer these commodities have a marked vested interest in maintaining their share of the market. They might be understandably concerned by the advent of an effective, off-prescription alternative treatment for depression. While some concerns about this new way of treating depression are warranted, others may be suspect, motivated by an attempt to protect economic turf.
In all cases, arguments against the self-administration of St John’s Wort need to be considered on their merits. For example, a leading psychiatrist was quoted in a recent article in the Washington Post on St John’s Wort as saying, ‘If a drug has enough activity to actually treat something that is real and substantial, then it ought to be administered under somebody’s supervision.’ If you consider the many active drugs available without prescription, which are routinely self-administered to treat real and substantial problems, such as aspirin for arthritis or antihistamines for allergies, it is clear that this argument is not universally applied in other areas of medicine. Nor, in my opinion, does it necessarily apply in psychiatry either. Perhaps the psychiatric establishment has yet to get used to the novelty of an over-the-counter treatment for depression.
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The Ecology Unit (sometimes referred to as the Environmental Control Unit) plays an indispensable role in the diagnosis and treatment of allergies. This unit was established after many years of development.
I first started hospitalizing patients for the diagnosis of food allergy in 1950. I chose complicated patients, whose problems could not be worked out simply by testing with one food at a time in the office. (In those days I employed feedings of whole foods in the office, rather than provocative tests, as today.) These patients rarely ever achieved a “base line” of good health before any particular test against which their reaction could be measured. It was therefore impossible to tell to what extent a particular food, or other environmental exposure, was responsible for their symptoms.
At this same time, I had occasion to present some of my earliest patients with “mental” symptoms to the psychiatrists at the Milwaukee Sanitorium. Dr. Josef Kindwall, chief of staff at this well-respected institution, listened to my presentation and then suggested that I fast such patients, in order to clear the board, so to speak, of all preexisting symptoms.
Six patients were therefore hospitalized in separate rooms and fasted. Each patient soon complained of heightened symptoms and, being inexperienced, I was disturbed by their worsened condition and decided to cancel the tests. In fact, these heightened symptoms in the early part of a fast are now known to be normal withdrawal reactions to addicting foods. Thus the initial attempt to fast patients ended in failure.
In April, 1951, the chemical-susceptibility problem was first described, and so, in the winter of 1953, were the effects of natural gas on susceptible individuals. Considering these unexpected sources of reactions, it became even more obvious that in order to achieve a “base line” of health, it would be necessary to remove a patient to a sheltered environment, in which food and chemical exposures could be thoroughly controlled. This belief was reinforced by seeing an occasional patient who felt distinctly better in the chemically less contaminated environment of a hospital. Some doctors referred to this phenomenon as “hospitalitis,” an alleged “disease” in which an individual craves a protective environment, but I believed the reason lay in the effects of the nonpersonal environment on the patient’s health. In the meantime, I told Dr. Donald S. Mitchell of Montreal about my difficulties in fasting patients and about the need to do so, given the complexity of their problems. Dr. Mitchell, on his own initiative, attempted to confirm this and was able to fast patients for longer periods of time. He discovered that the withdrawal symptoms subsided by the third or fourth day and that after that, the patients generally felt better than they had in a long while.
In 1956, I therefore decided to attempt a hospital fasting program again. This time the experiment was a success, and certain food and chemical allergies were diagnosed which simply could not have been found through any of the office procedures used at that time.
This experience led to a new approach to the diagnosis of allergy-caused illnesses. Since that time, I have hospitalized, fasted, and tested over 10,000 individuals in this manner. Until 1975, such testing was done in separate hospital rooms of a general hospital. Patients did reasonably well in this environment. One problem, however, was that chemically susceptible patients were still exposed to tobacco smoke, perfumes, and other hospital fumes and odors, which interfered with the accuracy and validity of the testing. Sometimes night nurses might smoke in the nursing stations. At other times rooms were chemically disinfected and residues of such agents made certain rooms unavailable for use.
Since 1975, therefore, a separate Ecology Unit has been maintained as a section of a hospital in a Chicago suburb, and it is far more controlled than any ordinary hospital room or ward could be.1
The procedures in the Ecology Unit are an indispensable part of the treatment for allergy. Traditional diagnostic techniques are like a table with three legs. The first leg is the patient’s history, the second his physical examination, and the third his diagnostic tests. In the Ecology Unit, all three of these standard methods are employed, but in addition there is a fourth leg. Often it is this fourth diagnostic leg which provides the sound basis for an answer. Its value has been confirmed by many physicians, and about a dozen are now using this sort of hospitalization in their daily practice. Indeed, in the combined experience of clinical ecologists using these techniques in a hospital or environmentally controlled setting, approximately 20,000 patients have been observed under controlled conditions during the past three decades (see Appendix B for a list of clinical ecologists practicing in a controlled environmental hospital setting).
The basic idea of the Ecology Unit is control. For several weeks, all aspects of the patient’s physical environment are scientifically managed. The air he breathes, the food and water he consumes, and everything that might come into contact with, or enter, his body, is subjected to prior scrutiny.
This technique, in effect, borrows a page from the experimental scientist’s book. “It is a controlled clinical experiment,” Dr. Lawrence Dickey once wrote of the Ecology Unit, “using an individual patient, and has all the validity of a controlled laboratory experiment. Both require control of as many variables as possible.”
This may seem like a big job, and indeed it is. First of all, one must control what the patient brings into the hospital. Plastic suitcases, synthetic fabrics, cosmetics, and so forth must all be left behind. Patients can only wear garments made from natural fabrics, such as wool or cotton, and only those which have been washed many times or which were not originally treated with chemicals.
Patients are allowed visitors during their stay, which averages three weeks. But the visitors are warned at the door not to enter if they are wearing cosmetics or scent of any kind and not to bring in flowers, candies, or other substances that might make some patients sick or destroy the validity of the test reactions. Staff members, like patients and their visitors, are not allowed to wear any perfumes or scents.
Patients are then fasted on spring water for an average of five days. The purpose of the fast is to completely clear the digestive tract of all food, a process which is often facilitated by the use of milk of magnesia or alkali salts.
In fasting, the patient may experience withdrawal reactions in which his accustomed symptoms get worse for a few days before they get better. The arthritic patient’s joints may flare up. The person with a chronic headache problem may suffer a particularly bad attack. The moderately depressed may get a bad attack of the doldrums.
When the worst of the withdrawal reaction is over, however, the patient is tested blindly with several different waters. One of these is the local tap water, and the others are commercially available bottled water (only in glass bottles, never plastic). A new water is tested every three hours, if there has been no adverse reaction to the previous test sample. The patient rates the waters on a scale of zero to ten, without knowing which water he is receiving. He keeps a record of his reactions to the water samples, and the one he tolerates the best will be his compatible water for the remainder of his stay in the hospital. The compatible water is continued on first returning home.
After four or five days, the patient usually feels better; in fact, he may feel healthier than he has in months or years. For example, some patients who have been prostrated by fatigue are able to get up and bustle about. Others who have had pain find that they are virtually pain-free. If the symptoms do not go away, and sometimes they do not, then the fast is prolonged. There is ordinarily no hazard in this, provided that the patient does not have a medical condition which makes fasting dangerous. At all times, of course, the fast is carefully monitored by the medical and nursing staff.
Some fasts have lasted ten days or more. Of course, there are patients whose symptoms are apparently not the result of environmental exposure or for whom even the minimal exposures of the Ecology Unit are disturbing. Such patients may not improve. In the great majority of cases, however, the fast will eventually bring about a cessation of old, disturbing symptoms, and a new sense of well-being, sometimes bordering on the euphoric, will set in. Fasting breaks the addictive cycle of the sick person to the foods and other environmental substances making him ill.
The chemical environment in the Ecology Unit is particularly controlled. Just as there is an attempt to prevent the entry of potentially harmful materials from outside, so too-everything inside the unit is kept as innocuous as can be. This gives the unit a somewhat old-fashioned appearance. The couch in the lounge, for instance, is made of well-worn leather, and the chairs are fashioned from wood and metal, upholstered with cotton or felt, and covered with natural fabrics. All of the bedding is made of simple, untreated cotton, and such things as sponge-rubber pillows or mattresses, draw sheets, upholstered furniture, rug pads, or even tubing made with rubber, are forbidden.
Plastics have also been banished from the Ecology Unit. There are no mattresses with plasticized surfaces, no plastic covers on the pillows, no plastic furniture, shower curtains, drapes, slippers, or handbags.
Initially, there was a problem with the floors. Some of the patients simply did not lose their symptoms, even after a prolonged fast. We finally learned that before the Ecology Unit had taken over this particular space in the hospital, the baseboards had been sprayed with a chemical pesticide. It is virtually impossible to entirely eliminate such sprays. The baseboards and the old floor, therefore, had to go and new tile baseboards and flooring were put down. Since then, far fewer patients have failed to get rid of their symptoms on the fast.
In addition, the Ecology Unit has its own broom closet, and the cleaning personnel use only soap and water. Since there are odors and fumes emanating from other parts of the hospital, it has been necessary to seal off the stairwells, elevator shafts, laundry chutes, and ventilating systems to prevent leakage into the unit. Even the latch holes on the doors were plugged to keep out cigarette smoke. When it is time to paint, the entire floor is evacuated for a week. In addition, large and effective air purifiers are kept running most of the time, despite the fact that the Ecology Unit is located in one of Chicago’s least polluted suburbs.
Despite these precautions, chemical contaminants sometimes do get into the unit. Recently, for example, during the shooting of a film, a solvent-based marking pen was opened. Although the pen was not open for more than half a minute, at the next morning’s staff meeting one of the nurses reported that several chemically susceptible patients had gotten ill at the time of the shooting. The answer almost certainly lay in this marking pen. When the error was realized, the door and window of the room where the pen was had been foolishly thrown open, blowing the fumes across the hall and into the room opposite. The patients who had gotten ill were in this room. It is because of reactions such as this that great strictness is exercised in controlling chemical pollution of the Ecology Unit.
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FAILURE OF ORAL CONTRACEPTIVES
Author: admin
Women who use “the Pill” should be aware that other medicines can counteract the effect of oral contraceptives. Certain anti-arthritis drugs and pain relievers, sedatives, anticonvulsants, and sleeping pills commonly do this.
Anti-infectives (sulfa drugs and antibiotics) are the most widely used medications to have this effect, Modern Medicine (55#5:189) reports. Women who take Bactrim or Septra for bladder or kidney infections, for example, are more likely to become pregnant while on such medication and should employ an additional contraceptive method (such as abstinence or a diaphragm) for so long as they continue to take the anti-infective drug. Medications reduce an oral contraceptive’s efficiency either by interfering with its absorption or by increasing its rate of destruction by the liver.
Accordingly, if one is taking “the Pill,” and the doctor orders additional medication, ask him about this possible interaction.
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CHILDREN’S HEALTH: GYNECOMASTIA
Author: admin
Symptom:
Development of breasts in a boy
Home care:
Reassure the child that the condition will disappear.
Try to spare the child embarrassing situations, such as undressing or showering in front of other children.
Be sure that the child is not subjected to teasing or taunting by other children.
- Normal adolescent boys commonly develop small breasts that may persist for up to two years. It’s only necessary to consult a doctor if the condition persists for an unusually long time.
- Parents should be aware of, and sympathetic towards, the embarrassment gynaecomastia can cause a boy.
- Overweight boys may develop accumulations of fat that resemble breasts but contain no true breast tissue.
- If the boy tries to conceal breast development because he’s embarrassed, parents may not be aware of the condition.
Gynaecomastia is the name given to development of breasts in a boy. Normal males have undeveloped breast tissue that can become enlarged by oestrogens (female hormones) and, rarely, by androgens (male hormones). A boy with tumours of the testes or adrenal glands may develop breasts. Rarely, the breasts develop from mistakenly taking a medication that contains sex hormones or from eating poultry fattened by hormones.
Normal adolescent boys commonly develop small breasts on one or both side’s. These persist for two to 24 months. They may be tender and are often an embarrassment. The breasts may become quite pronounced and remain so for years, but this is very rare. Overweight boys may develop large accumulations of fat that resemble breasts but contain no true breast tissue. This condition is known as pseudogynaecomastia.
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CHOLESTEROL: DON’T BE FOOLED BY FOOD LABELS
Author: admin
The labels on a lot of foods in the supermarket are very deceiving, and help to maintain a lot of misconceptions the public have about what is a healthy food and what isn’t. No matter what the advertising on the label states you must always read the ingredients list at the back and look at the nutrition panel. This will give you a true representation of what is really in the food you are eating.
The ingredients list will tell you exactly what is in the food, arranged in order by weight from most to least. The nutrition information panel will give you specific details on the nutrient content of the food. This can be quite confusing because everything is measured in grams. Most people cannot relate to grams unless they are a nutritionist or cocaine dealer! It will be easier to remember that one teaspoon holds an average of five grams. Therefore, if a breakfast cereal contains 10 grams of sugars per 30 grams, you will know that there are two teaspoons of sugar in a 30 gram serve. Most people eat much more than the tiny serving sizes stated on the label. A sugary breakfast cereal like this may be extremely low in fat, but eating it will still make you fat and raise your risk of diabetes and heart disease significantly.
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CHECKING YOUR FERTILITY
Author: admin
Since the egg can only survive for up to 24 hours and the sperm can live for seven days in alkaline mucus, there is only a short window of time each month in which you can conceive.
Some women only produce fertile mucus for a day or two a month so it is vital to know when it is happening. It is all too easy to have intercourse at the wrong time of the month or not frequently enough at the right time. Here’s how you can identify your crucial fertile period for yourself:
Warning
Note that you will not be able to use this test if you have thrush or some other vaginal discharge because it will not be possible to see the changes in your cervical mucus. Any such problems should be treated before you try for a baby.
• After passing urine, blot your vaginal mucus with white toilet paper.
• If it feels slippery, like raw egg white, and can stretch between your thumb and first finger up to several inches before it breaks, then it is fertile mucus. If it is sticky or crumbly (a bit like ‘school glue’) then it is the more acid, infertile mucus. As the mucus changes to fertile mucus, this is a sign that ovulation is about to take place.
• Meanwhile, your cervix is also changing. To feel these changes, empty your bladder and wash your hands. Then place your right index finger in your vagina until you can feel your cervix.
• As your period ends, your cervix is located low in your vaginal canal and the opening is closed, giving the feeling of touching the tip of a nose or a small rubber ball. As ovulation approaches and oestrogen levels increase, the cervix moves higher into the vaginal opening, making it more difficult to reach. It also begins to soften and opens, resembling parted lips. This opening and rising helps the sperm to travel into the womb. After ovulation, the cervix lowers again and closes and is blocked with mucus to stop sperm entering.
The best way to take advantage of this window of time is to have intercourse on the first day when you feel wet vaginally and notice that the discharge is stretchy. Intercourse should continue every other day while the mucus stays wet and stretchy. Taking a break of 48 hours between intercourses allows time to maximize sperm volume. This is very important.
However, it is also important that this method or the use of ovulation kits (described below) does not take over your lives. For example, I know of a man who was phoned at work by his wife because she had found fertile mucus and wanted him to come home straight away! In situations like this, spontaneity can be lost, the man can feel that he is just viewed as a breeding stud, and both partners can lose the enjoyment of love-making.
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ACCIDENTAL DEATHS
Author: admin
Fortunately, we’re finally beginning to get smarter about safety, says Jeffrey Sacks, M.D., medical epidemiologist at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, division of unintentional injury prevention, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “There has been a proliferation of safety devices in our lives,” Dr. Sacks says. “But honestly, we can still be pretty dumb about using them. And way, way too often, alcohol and drugs are a factor in our lack of judgment.”
It’ll be of little surprise to anyone that one place we exercise the worst judgment and pay for it the most is on the road, where more fatal accidents happen than anywhere else. But we also do quite a number on ourselves at the workplace and-even worse-in our own homes. Here are the top types of fatal accidents and steps that safety experts say you can take to avoid bumping into your maker before your time.
Motor-vehicle crashes. “About 85 percent of fatal traffic crashes are caused by human error and could have been avoided had the person been driving defensively,” says Tim Kennedy, program manager for Highway Traffic Safety at the National Safety Council in Itasca, Illinois. “People can lower their chances of being involved in a car crash dramatically by not speeding, by not driving after drinking, and by leaving appropriate space between themselves and other cars,” Kennedy says.
Falls. Each year more than a million folks get a trip to the hospital for a trip down the stairs. Aside from exercising caution, experts say that regular exercise-especially exercises that emphasize balance, such as tai chi-can help you maintain your coordination and stay on your feet throughout your life.
Poisonings -solids and liquids. We tend to think of poisoning as something that happens when little kids get into medicine cabinets, but people ages 25 to 44 are actually six feet under everyone else when it come to this brand of accidental death-with twice the death rate of toddlers. If you suspect that you or someone else has “overdosed” on drugs or medication or has swallowed something poisonous, call your local poison control center. More than 70 percent of poisonings can be treated through instructions taken over the phone, says Alton Thygerson, Ed.D., professor of health science at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and technical consultant to the National Safety Council’s First-Aid Institute in Itasca, Illinois.
Drowning. About 85 percent of all drowning victims are men, says Dr. Thygerson. Drowning kills about 4,500 people a year. When the victims are adult men, alcohol is a factor most of the time, Dr. Thygerson says. “We can’t seem to get it through to people that drinking and boating and swimming are deadly combinations. Save it for the shore.”
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BULEMIA NERVOSA: SPLITTING HAIRS
Author: admin
As with anorexia nervosa, the symptoms of bulimia nervosa might appear in a number of other physical and psychiatric conditions.
Take, for example, the problem of overeating, technically known as hyperphagia. The urge to consume excessive quantities of food can arise when the hypothalamus becomes damaged due to a head injury, tumor, or some other cause.
Endocrine disorders, such as diabetes or hyperthyroidism, can disrupt metabolism, causing the patient to burn energy at an abnormally high rate. When energy stores are depleted, the body, in a kind of metabolic panic, turns on the hunger drive to compensate.
Prescribed medications and illicit drugs also affect eating behavior. Some antidepressants and antipsychotic medications may increase appetite and lead to weight gain. Marijuana is a well-known cause of binge eating. In some patients, frequent abuse of marijuana contributes heavily to the bulimic cycle.
The congenital defect known as Prader-Willi syndrome causes ravenous appetite with poor ability to feel full; the eating thus continues unabated and leads to massive obesity. Abnormal eating occurs in the Kleine-Levin syndrome, which is also marked by periods of extreme sleepiness.
In most of these cases, it’s easy to spot the cause of overeating. Sometimes, though, the cause is more subtle. One of my patients, a sixteen-year-old named Sarah, suffered from a form of epilepsy that produced certain kinds of brain seizures. Two years before, she had started dieting to become thin. She developed anorexia and later became bulimic as well. During a seizure she flew into a rage at any object that happened to be in sight at that moment-a lipstick container, a telephone, whatever.
Sometimes the focus of her rage was the food on her plate. Because food enraged her so much, she stopped eating, eventually losing so much weight that she had to be hospitalized. Specialized brain-wave recordings revealed that her seizures occurred in the part of the brain that controls emotional states, rather than in the part responsible for muscle activity. In Sarah’s case, an anticonvulsant drug played a vital part in treating her eating disorder.
As in anorexia, the distorted attitudes and bizarre behavior caused by bulimia may be confused with other psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia. In rare cases, a patient may indeed have both an eating disorder and schizophrenia. Recognizing the presence of both conditions is crucial, since therapy designed to correct one problem may have no effect-or an adverse effect- on the other.
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As an attorney for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Sarah Yerger’s day is jam-packed with meetings and other appointments. But she always saves her final appointment for herself: She heads for the gym. Scheduling her workout time in this way has enabled her to melt 55 pounds off her 5-foot-4-inch frame.
Like everyone else in her family Sarah had always been over- t weight. “I believed that I was destined to be that way so I didn’t pay much attention to my food choices or exercise as much as I should,” explains the 31 -year-old Elizabefhtown, Pennsylvania, resident. And it showed: Over the years, her weight crept toward 200 pounds. j
Then Sarah’s mother developed health problems because of her excess weight. Shaken by her mom’s poor health, Sarah felt that her own weight might put her at risk for illness in later years. So she decided to do something about it.
Her first step was to join a local gym. But with her hectic work schedule, she had a hard time keeping her promise to go every day. That’s when she came up with the idea of adding her workouts to her appointment calendar.
Keeping those exercise appointments isn’t always easy. “But even on the busiest days, I make every effort to get to the gym,” Sarah says.
Sometimes, special occasions—like a party for a friend’s birthday or a coworker’s promotion—coincide with Sarah’s scheduled workout time. On those days, she simply plans her workouts for the morning. She arrives at the celebrations feeling good that she didn’t shortchange her health.
But when she receives a spur-of-the-moment invitation to join her coworkers for an after-work happy hour, Sarah politely declines. “I always say no without feeling guilty,” she says.
Her commitment to exercise, combined with a healthy diet, has paid off: Sarah lost 55 pounds within about a year, and she has maintained her weight at a trim and toned 145 pounds for more than 2 years. She has even won gym-sponsored fitness contests for the most pounds and inches lost.
S WINNING ACTION
Schedule your exercise as you would a meeting. If you’re busy like Sarah, pencil your exercise on your calendar just like other important things you must do. And don’t cancel!
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