Fish, too, have oil which can prove helpful to lubricate the dry linings of an arthritic person.
Not enough fish is eaten by the American people. We are known as a nation of meat-eaters. But it is fish, not meat, which contain more of the oil soluble vitamins.
Ask those who eat fish why they do so. You’ll receive a variety of answers:
They like fish.
It is inexpensive.
Their husbands go fishing. Someone has to eat it.
Because fish is “brain” food.
Because it is Friday.
Whatever your reason for being a sea-food fan, remember that there are all kinds of fish. . . . Some better for us than others. Not every fish has the vitamins-is-oil which are best suited for arthritics.
If you have arthritis, you may choose either salt or fresh water fish. Grilled fish has all the advantages over other styles of preparation. Why boil or fry your fish . . . you’ll lose the vitamins.
Where facilities are available, it would be even better to broil your food instead of grilling it. In America, the ovens of the stoves usually come equipped with two sets of heating elements. One is at the bottom of the oven for baking purposes, the other is at the top of the oven for broiling. To broil food, the meat or fish is put in a pan and placed on a rack. It is then exposed to the heated broiler coil, two or three inches away from it. Therefore the food is cooked quickly, and does not cook in its own or any other grease. An arthritic should avoid meat fats and any supplemental greases.
When choosing fish, make your selection from those types which contain the most vitamins A or D. Recommended as the very best are:
Mackerel.
Halibut steaks.
Salmon steaks.
Sardines.
If you don’t like to eat the skin of the fish, you are losing many health essentials this food has to offer.
When you don’t consume the skin, you can make up for some of the loss by eating the dark brown meat near the skin. It is in the brownish meat that goodly quantities of fish iodine are trapped. Iodised oil is very beneficial to arthritics. It is the right kind of oil.
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there are several pencil-and-paper tests that can provide a fairly good idea of whether a person suffers from OCD. Taking these tests requires only sitting down and answering a number of multiple choice questions to determine whether common obsessions and compulsions are present. Although these tests do not take the place of diagnosis by a competent psychiatrist or psychologist, they can be effective screening devices.
Below is the questionnaire that I find the most useful, the Padua
Inventory, which was developed in Italy in 1987 and has been standardized on thousands of people here and abroad. I suggest you take this test. Apart from diagnostic considerations, reflecting on the questions contained in the Padua Inventory will increase your understanding of OCD, as these represent a fairly comprehensive list of the most common obsessions and compulsions. In them you will recognize the problems of Raymond, Sherry, Jeff, and Melissa. The test requires only about ten minutes of your time.
To score the Padua Inventory, add up your ratings (o to 4) for the sixty questions.
The average result for unscreened groups of people (usually hospital employees and university students) is about 40. The average result for people in treatment for OCD is about 80. I took this test remembering back to when I suffered OCD in medical training and got a 72. Taking it now, I get about a 50.
There are several other questionnaires worth mentioning. The Maudsley Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory, developed in 1977 in England, has been used more than any other test. Unfortunately, in light of our current knowledge of OCD, it is clear that the present version concentrates excessively on checking and washing compulsions. (A new, improved version of the Maudsley Inventory will be released soon.) The Leyton Obsessional Inventory and the Compulsive Activity Checklist are also excellent screening tests but are, perhaps, not quite as comprehensive as the Padua Inventory.
The Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS), developed in 1989 by Yale and Brown universities, asks ten questions that assess the strength of a person’s obsessions and compulsions. It is a very useful and widely used test, but it was designed mainly to follow people’s progress in treatment, not to diagnose OCD.
If you think that you might possibly have obsessive-compulsive disorder, please do take the Padua Inventory. OCD sufferers tend to walk through life in a sort of numb confusion, approaching their obsessions and compulsions like bad weather—to be lived through and then forgotten as soon as possible. They never come to grips with the fact that they have a real psychiatric disorder. This is a major mistake.
Anyone who scores well above average on the Padua Inventory should consider that they may have obsessive-compulsive disorder. If you have it, you should treat it. There is no shame to having OCD.
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Sometimes third stage stress breakdown can cause the switching off of large groups of brain cells in the cerebral cortex. As a result, the patient may experience a sudden loss of function of a limb, loss of a sensory modality or loss of some mental function, such as memory. This sudden loss of function, which can be proven by medical tests not to be due to any disease process, used to be called hysterical, an ancient term which associated strange symptoms with the womb or uterus. Presumably the ancient Greeks thought the uterus used to wander round the body bumping into things, so presumably only women could suffer in this way. The word ‘hysteria’ is derived from the same word root as is ‘hysterectomy’ (removal of the uterus).
The patterns of disturbed function formerly described as hysterical disorders are these days labeled conversion or dissociative disorders. The word ‘conversion’ is derived from the theories of Sigmund Freud, whose concept was that a forgotten conflict deeply buried in the unconscious mind is ‘converted’ into a body symptom. The theory is that when the patient can be helped to solve the deep inner conflict, the symptom which symbolizes this conflict will disappear. When the loss of function involves a mental function like memory, or where reality perception is impaired under stress, the term dissociative state is usually employed.
Because conversion symptoms are caused by switching-off mechanisms trying to protect the over-stimulated, over-stressed cerebral cortex, these symptoms will therefore be limited to loss of function, and will include paralysis, numbness, blindness, deafness and loss of memory, which can be shown by medical tests not to be caused by any disease process.
To prove medically that the sometimes bizarre symptoms of a conversion disorder are reversible under certain conditions and are therefore not due to structural damage or disease of the brain, the patient may be hypnotized or given an injection with a ‘truth drug’ under which conditions the lost functions may return.
The ‘truth drug’ or ‘truth serum’, so beloved of the writers of fiction, is simply a general anesthetic agent given slowly intravenously. A not uncommon example would be a case of hysterical or dissociative amnesia. Here the patient may be found somewhere wandering perplexed, unable to remember anything about the details of his personal life for some period in the immediate past. Under the influence of the sedative, the patient with a dissociative state may be able to reveal the forgotten facts. However, when the drug wears off, he tends to forget everything again.
Presumably the drug interferes with the function of the inhibitory cell circuits in the cerebral cortex, which have been operating as circuit breakers to switch off response capability of large groups of cells.
In planning treatment for a conversion symptom, the therapist must be sensitive to the fact that gross conversion symptoms under relatively low stress levels can indicate that the nervous system’s function is impaired. Thus the paradox arises that the occurrence of conversion symptoms which can be proven to be reversible might nevertheless be a sign of brain disease. Sometimes a brain tumour or some other disease process may so affect brain function as to predispose the person to develop conversion symptoms under stress before the behavioural changes of the three stages of stress breakdown have become apparent.
However, people with perfectly normal brains can develop conversion symptoms under high levels of stress. For example, conversion symptoms are common in soldiers with combat fatigue (another name for stress breakdown).*70/129/5*