Healthpharmablog. About Health & Medicine

The first step to appropriate treatment is accurate diagnosis. If you suspect that your baby has visual problems, first see your doctor who will refer him to an eye specialist for thorough eye tests. Most causes of visual impairment cannot be cured, the exception being surgical repair of a cataract. However, much can be done to meet your child’s specific needs.

Make sure that you provide a safe environment for a child who is blind or cannot see well, by checking around your home for things which could cause accidents. As the child gets older, it is important to provide a suitable educational setting for him. This may involve a special school for the visually impaired. Parents should always be involved in helping to develop an appropriate program, which makes maximum use of other senses, such as hearing and touch, for learning. Some children who are visually impaired are able to read large print books; others need to learn braille, or learn from audio tapes and ‘talking books’.

A child who is blind or visually impaired needs to become as independent as possible. At a later stage the use of a special cane or a seeing-eye dog may afford him maximum independence.

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The young couple in the parked car struggled so not only because they didn’t have a place for sex or a way to be safely comfortable and communicate sexually, but also because they had learned well the wrong lessons of sex. Ironically, this young couple’s struggle was similar in many ways to sexual struggles within marriage. They didn’t have their own place, they couldn’t find privacy, they didn’t talk about sex, they didn’t work as a team. They were trying to do sex to each other or for each other, not with each other, and they were victims of the same genital focus I have discussed throughout this book.

Here is a list of the twelve erotic errors that have served as the sexual lesson plan for the first three perspectives of sexuality.

1. Sex is an impulse. It is the strongest, the most difficult to control of all human impulses.

2. If you start touching erotic zones, it is difficult to turn back, to control the “sexual impulse,” the gravity of sexual drive pulling us helplessly toward intercourse.

3. “Foreplay” is a preset collection of guaranteed sexual maneuvers that must be learned primarily by boys to get girls ready for sex.

4. Boys are always ready for sex, always want it, will do it with almost any girl if they have the chance. Anything less than constant sexual urgency is less than manly. A quote by Emo Philips illustrates this focus. “My schoolmates would make love to anything that moved, but I never saw any reason to limit myself.” So goes the “folk myth” of sex in the school years.

5. Good girls don’t want sex. Bad girls may want it, so boys should have it with them and then find a good girl to marry. Good girls need a lot of “foreplay,” so boys, who are never bad for wanting sex and are “queer” if they don’t, should practice their technique on bad girls.

6. Everything you do sexually is for intercourse. Intercourse is the best, most adult thing in the whole world.

7. “Playing around” with hugging and kissing is fun, but if you don’t finally “go all the way,” you aren’t grown up and you may end up hurting yourself.

8. Sex is natural and simple. Anybody can do it. You don’t have to learn how to “make out,” you just have to let yourself go.

9. You had better use contraception and always have it ready. It takes away I from the “real thing,” but you have to have it ready, because once you I start “playing around,” you will lose control and always want to “go all I the way.”

10. If you are really deeply in love, you will want to have intercourse. If you I are a girl, intercourse means love, so if you have done “it,” you are I probably in love. If you are a bad girl, and just like sex for fun, feelings, I and closeness, you can have a lot of sex and never been in love. Intercourse I is something good girls try to save and give later as a marital gift. Bad I girls might trade intercourse too soon and for too little.

11. If you are a boy and in love, you will know just what to do to please your I girlfriend. You will magically know, through love, every secret turn-on. I Love is so strong that it makes sex remarkable.

12. Your parents would never understand about your sexual feelings. They are f older, times were different for them, and they just want to tell you about [ not doing it or contraception, sperm, and eggs. Nobody tells their parents what they really do or would want to do sexually. Old people don’t have the same sex feelings as young people, if they have any left at all.

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You can’t tell me that ejaculation isn’t orgasm. This is just a bunch of crap, some type of psychobabble. You come or you don’t. I don’t want to hear any more about this stuff. It is just crap.

HUSBAND AT SESSION ONE

I never would have thought it. It seems so obvious now. How could I ever have thought that ejaculating was the same as really enjoying sex? This is remarkable. I can see that psychasm is not a gimmick. It’s real. You have orgasms and psychasms, it’s just obvious. But I can’t convince my friends. Now they think I’m crazy, like I bought some new sexual mantra.

SAME HUSBAND AT FIVE-YEAR POLLOW-UP

The danger in discussing the difference between ejaculation and orgasm is that the earlier perspectives on sexuality are so firmly established in our society. The mere suggestion of psychasm sounds like the worst of pop psychology, like some strange throwback to a psychology of the past. The Masters and Johnson position is clear and dominates our thinking. They write, “Orgasm refers specifically to the sudden rhythmic muscular contractions in the pelvic region and elsewhere in the body that effectively release accumulated sexual tension.” Kinsey reported orgasms without ejaculation, but was referring to the same contraction concept, and he reported it only in young boys, sexually immature persons. Masters and Johnson state, “Ejaculation without orgasm . . . can occur in certain cases of neurological illness.” They clearly feel that ejaculation is orgasm in the male.

I suggest that ejaculation and pelvic muscular contractions are “orgasm,” organ-based, and that more generalized emotional, cognitive, and body response is “psychasm.” Men are capable of both, separately and simultaneously, and understanding this capacity in men is important not only for super marital sex but for other health-related issues.

Women can emit a fluid during sexual response that may come from the Skene’s glands along the urethra. Women do not typically define their orgasmic experience by this fluid release, but for men, “the fluid is the fun.” Fear, anxiety, and joy can all result in ejaculation, so it is a response that is typically but not exclusively related to sexual stimulation.

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We will discuss only natural detoxification methods here. By natural I mean methods of assisting and/or enhancing the natural cleansing mechanisms the body already uses every day .

Let us consider some of the organs which are responsible for the excretion of the toxic waste from our body, and see how we can assist in this process.,

Lungs. All our blood passes through the net of blood vessels in the lungs and is oxygenated. This process provides oxygen, necessary to the process of extracting energy from our food. Using this oxygen our body is able to oxygenate (burn) food as well as toxins. Excretion is achieved by exhaling carbon dioxide together with other (sometimes quite aromatic) gases. How can we assist ? Surely lots of clean fresh air would make a difference. Improved breathing techniques could also help. According to the teachings of yoga our breathing should be quite slow and contain four distinct phases: slow inhaling, a wait period, slow exhaling and another wait period. For some people it happens so naturally, that they do not pay attention to it. However it is possible to acquire bad habits, in which case some breathing exercises may help. For instructions regarding breathing technique, look up the books “The oxygen breakthrough” or

“Oxygen therapies” or read a book about yoga.

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There are some scholars who believe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was not due to moral decadence but to the debilitating effects of malaria.

Malaria was once widespread through Europe but is not longer endemic there.

The Romans believed the disease was due to the effects of the bad air, or “mal aria” arising from the swamps outside Rome. These swamps were the breeding ground of the anopheles mosquito, which spreads the disease to man.

A protazoa, or small one-celled animal, Plasmodium, causes the disease. There are four types of Plasmodium, P. ovale, P. falciparum, P. vivax and P. malariae, which can affect man and the falciparum is the most dangerous.

Until a few years ago, there was great hope that public health measures might lead to almost total eradication of this most ancient plague.

Unfortunately, this optimism was misplaced and the world situation is rapidly becoming worse. The control of malaria lies mainly in getting rid of the vector which is the anopheles mosquito.

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Bunions may be due to narrow-pointed shoes — too narrow for the feet that occupy them.

But I don’t think scientific opinion will stand against fashion.

The main deformity in this condition is the displacement of the big toe toward the other toes.

This is known as hallux valgus and this disrupts the joint between the toe and the long bone of the foot, or metatarsal.

The head of the first metatarsal moves towards the centre of the body, that is, in the opposite direction from the toe, and as a result of pressure between this bone and the toe a bursa, or bag of fluid, forms in the tissues.

This is the bunion. The bursa becomes inflamed and painful and may even become infected.

Pressure on this bunion causes considerable pain.

As well, osteoarthrosis develops in the joint and causes further pain.

As the big toe moves across, the second toe, especially if it is longer than the first, has no room and then tends to bend upwards at the first joint.

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Home care

In most instances, insect bites can be treated by applying ice for a few minutes and then applying calamine lotion. À non-prescription antihistamine taken by mouth should relieve the itching and reduce the swelling. For a tick, the still-hot tip of a burned-out match touched to the protruding tip of the biting insect will usually cause the tick to fall off the skin without leaving the head in the wound.

Precautions

• Protect children with proper clothing, mosquito netting, and insect repellents.

• Learn to recognize the insects in your locale and to know their characteristics.

• If your child develops hives or difficulty with breathing, speaking, or swallowing after being bitten by a scorpion or spider or stung by a bee, a wasp or a hornet, take the child immediately to the nearest hospital.

Medical treatment

If the child has an allergic reaction to an insect bite or sting, the doctor will probably prescribe epinephrine, antihistamines, or steroids to inhibit the reaction. The doctor may advise that the allergic child be given a series of injections to reduce his or her sensitivity to the insect in question. The doctor may also teach you or the child how to treat a bite or sting at home.

Among diseases transmitted by insect bites in Australia are the following. Mosquito: dengue fever, viral encephalitis, epidemic arthritis. Larval mites: scrub typhus. Bush ticks: Q-fever. Flies: hepatitis, diarrhea, trachoma.

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What are they?

Bile is a fluid produced by the liver and stored in the gall-bladder ready to be squirted into the duodenum (the first part of the intestine) to aid the digestion of fats. After a meal, unused bile is stored in the gall-bladder for some time.

Gall-stones arise when the cholesterol in bile starts to crystallize out. The stones slowly increase in size until eventually they are so large that they can’t escape with the bile into the intestine. They then start to cause infections in the gall-bladder and other symptoms. Most gall-stones are made of cholesterol.

Gall-stones appear to be a disease of western culture and are seen only rarely in traditional-living peoples around the world.

What causes them?

We still don’t know the exact answer to this question but modern research is getting very close to the heart of the matter.

Under normal circumstances nature’s own bile acid, chenodeoxycholic acid, dissolves any stones formed in this way, and synthetic versions of this natural chemical are now used to dissolve gall-stones. Clearly the answer should be to try to raise the level of this normal protective substance. This can be done by eating fewer fats and refined carbohydrates and by increasing the amount of fibre and complex carbohydrates. According to one study, people eating like this and taking chenodeoxycholic acid dissolved their gall-stones in a third of the time taken by a group using the drug alone.

Interestingly, gall-stones are often associated with certain other diseases, especially hiatus hernia and diverticular disease. Obesity is the factor common to all three diseases and obesity is also linked to diabetes and high blood-fat levels. The link between all of these conditions is the overconsumption of refined foods and fats, leading to a surplus of energy.

It is said that gall-stones are commonest in women who are fat, fertile, flatulent, fair and forty, but they can occur in anyone of any age and are increasingly common in children.

Wild animals very rarely have gall-stones but they can be induced to do so if they are fed artificial diets such as we eat in the West. A lack of dietary fibre seems to be especially potent in this respect.

Prevention

• Eat fewer refined foods, less fat, and more dietary fibre. Eat less sugar. A study in Italy comparing 160 gall-stone patients with a group of healthy subjects found that the stone patients ate much less fruit and vegetable fibre and significantly more sugar and refined foods generally. Eating sensibly will tend to reduce your weight which is the best preventive against gall-stones. Even being 20 per cent overweight doubles your chances of having gall-stones. Don’t worry about reducing your cholesterol intake, though, as there is no real evidence that it matters. The important point here is to eat more dietary fibre as this provably reduces the amount of cholesterol in bile and puts out more in the stools. A recent study of French women who skipped breakfast, having only a cup of coffee, found that they had a much greater risk of gall-stones than would be expected.

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ACE inhibitors

Angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, such as captopril (Capoten) and enalapril (Vasotec), along with many others, are a recent class of drugs used in the treatment of coronary heart disease. Research shows they extend life and reduce the chances of heart failure after heart attack. They act by preventing angiotensin from causing constriction of smaller arteries, which reduces “afterload” and allows the heart to work less hard. They also treat hypertension as do beta-blockers and calcium antagonists. Side effects include low blood pressure, kidney dysfunction, and more minor problems such as persistent cough, taste alterations, and rash.

Aspirin

No review of drugs used for angina would be complete without a mention of aspirin. In these circumstances, aspirin is not being prescribed for its well-known effect on pain, but for its effect on the platelets in the bloodstream. In low doses—half a standard aspirin tablet per day—aspirin prevents platelets from sticking together or from adhering to the surface of atheromatous plaques.

As this is the first step to thrombosis at the site of a plaque, aspirin should, in theory, prevent the thromboses within the coronary arteries at stenotic sites that are thought to be the main cause of heart attacks. The whole medical world now accepts, after many trials have shown its effects, that one aspirin should be given at the time of an acute heart attack to minimize the damage, and thereafter to prevent a further attack.

It is a very small step from giving such a low dose of aspirin during a heart attack to its use to prevent one in people with angina. I advise all my patients with angina to take half an aspirin a day. The very .few who cannot tolerate this dose of the drug because it gives them indigestion may have to do without it, but it is possibly a lifesaver for the rest. It has no obvious effect on the angina, but it may well prevent the angina from becoming a full-blown heart attack.

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Five years ago, I was advising people that they had a choice in stopping: they could stop suddenly or gradually. Now I’m convinced that the first is the only way, and I advise the “General de Gaulle” method.

General de Gaulle announced to the whole French nation, on television, that he had stopped smoking. After that, he could hardly light up in case a member of the press caught him and exposed him as a fraud or backslider! Most people could do something similar, in front of friends. Today’s antismoking climate will ensure their sympathy and support, rather than sneers or sniggers.

I advise people to take all the cigarettes they possess, in pockets, handbags, at home, or anywhere else, to scrunch them up, and throw them in the trash. They should then resolve never to buy another cigarette, and always say “no” immediately, without even thinking about it, to anyone who offers them one. If they do not wish to argue with smoking friends, a nonsmoking sticker in the car and on the front window of the home can help.

People contemplating suddenly stopping smoking often fear withdrawal symptoms. These symptoms can include agitation, irritability, sleeplessness, and nervousness, but such things may be completely absent. I have found that people who have to give up for serious medical reasons, such as angina, hardly ever have withdrawal symptoms. If you have decided to stop because of your angina, odds are that you will have no bother with withdrawal. You may still have a desire to smoke, but that will subside in a week or two, as your new feeling of well-being, caused by the elimination from the bloodstream of carbon monoxide, nicotine, and tar-linked chemicals takes over. People suffering from depression should be treated before cigarette cessation.

If you must do something else to take your mind off cigarettes, then chew low-calorie gum or, better still, eat pieces of carrot or celery. Get a friend to support you in the effort.

If you find you cannot stop the first time, don’t despair. Try again. Many people find that they have to stop several times before they can do it permanently. You can try acupuncture or hypnosis if you wish, but they do not have any magical properties. They only support your own determination, and cannot overrule weak willpower. If you have angina, you should not use nicotine chewing gum or patches. They work by supplying nicotine to your bloodstream, on the principle that it will stop any craving for tobacco. However, that nicotine can still narrow your arteries, and may even promote a heart attack if you backslide and start smoking again. The combination of nicotine from the cigarettes and from the gum or patches may be too much for your heart.

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