Acupuncture is a tradition in Chinese medicine now available from licensed acupuncturists in the United States. According to acupuncturists, HIV infection is a condition caused by the blockage of the flow of the life force, called chi. In addition, HIV infection might also be interpreted as a deficiency in a masculine, active quality called yang, as well as a deficiency in a feminine, passive quality called yin. Treatment is the insertion of needles at any of the 365 points along twelve body lines, which is said to permit the flow of chi. The needles are left in place for twenty to thirty minutes; treatment may continue to several days to several months. Acupuncture is poorly understood according to the criteria of traditional medicine, although it clearly has profound biologic effects: it can, in fact, be used in place of general anesthesia for some major operations. The usefulness of acupuncture as a treatment for HIV infection has not been tested with a clinical trial, so the benefits are not established. There are essentially no risks.*192\191\2*
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“I always look at other peoples’ noses—mostly their pores—comparing myself to them to reassure myself,” Bill said. “I see other people have pores and they’re doing okay, so I should. But I can’t reassure myself. I just get more down on myself.” Another man compared himself with others and thought, “Why can’t I have regular skin like that? Why can’t I have normal skin?” “I compare to reassure myself by seeing someone else with the same problems,” he said, “but I never see anyone else with the same problems.”Comparing is the most common BDD behavior of all. More than ninety percent of people with BDD do this. They frequently and silently compare their “ugly” body part with the same body part on others, thinking such things as “Do I look okay compared to her?” They seem to have built-in radar for the body part of concern, quickly focusing on it. As Mike described it, “I zero in on other peoples’ ears and compare them to mine.”One woman frequently compared herself to other women and also contrasted young people with old people to see if they had lines on their face. “I know every line and wrinkle on every person’s face,” she said. She usually felt that she looked worse than other people, which triggered panic attacks. “I say to myself, ‘I wish I could have that baby-smooth skin.’ I think how lucky any older woman is who has no wrinkles.” Another woman, who thought her breasts were too small, compared her breasts with those of every woman she saw. She said, “I panic when I see cleavage!” BDD sufferers generally don’t feel much better when they compare. In fact, they often feel worse. Aaron, who worried about his slightly receding hairline, told me, “I check out everyone’s hair. And everyone looks better than me, even bald guys. At least other bald guys have a little hair left that looks good. Mine looks terrible—thin and stringy. I’m the one guy who can’t lose his hair and keep any of his looks.” He then added, “It’s okay if other people are bald. They can look handsome, but I don’t because I have a long face.”Aaron experienced the typical no-win situation. People with BDD generally think that other people look better than they do, which reinforces their feelings of defectiveness. A handsome young man told me, “I constantly stare at other people’s noses and compare their’s to mine—I’m an expert on noses. I think how bad I look and how good they look. I’m envious of good-looking people.” “Do you ever see anyone who looks as bad as you think you do?” I asked him. “Occasionally I see people who look as bad as me, and I feel sorry for them,” he replied. “I don’t want people to feel sorry for me.”*105\204\8*
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CLASSIFYING THE IRRITABLE BOWEL SYNDROME: TRYING THE COMMON-SENSE APPROACH – CASTOR OIL BATH
No CommentsThis has the same benefits as the whole-body treatment but can be even more effective for painful joints and muscles.
J Put soap, a sponge and two towels (one an old towel) near the bath, on a chair.
2 Run a comfortably warm bath and mix in a 3-oz bottle of castor oil.
3 Get in the bath, making sure the water is up to your neck and that the oil is dispersed. Lie there for 30 minutes.
4 Using the fresh towel at the edge of the bath, wash your hands and feet free of oil before you attempt to stand. Take great care because the bath will be very slippery. Use a bath mat and do not attempt to stand up until you have drained the bath, washed and dried it. You can then add clean water to remove oil from your body or you can take a shower.
5 If you are going to bed you can just towel-dry leaving a slight film of oil on. This should not feel sticky. If you use soap or shower gel, the oil can be completely removed.
6 If it is not bedtime, have a rest for at least half an hour in a warm bed or by the fire.
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Marion’s first seizure occurred when she was 14. She was at school, and had just been enjoying a quiet smoke with a few friends in a secluded corner of the playground, which was unfortunately not quite secluded enough. A sharp-eyed maths mistress with a keen sense of smell spotted a curl of smoke. As she was marching them off to see the Headmaster, Marion saved the day (or so her friends described it later) by having a seizure right there in the middle of the playground.
Marion never smoked again, because she always had a feeling that the cigarette must have somehow triggered her seizure. But she did continue to have seizures, and unfortunately they proved difficult to control. Eventually, some years later, she was referred to me. I questioned her closely about what happened when she had a seizure. When Marion thought about this she discovered that there was a pattern, though she had never realized it. She had had a seizure that morning, just after her husband had drawn her attention to the fact that he had no clean shirts. She had had a seizure a few days ago at work, soon after she had mislaid an important document. She remembered a seizure she’d had some weeks back, when she had just bought a dress which cost approximately twice what she had intended to spend. And it was then that she remembered her first seizure of all. That fitted the pattern too; it wasn’t the cigarette that had triggered the seizure, it was simply a strong feeling of guilt.
‘So now what you have to do,’ I said to her, ‘is to find some way to stop feeling guilty. Whenever you feel the guilt creeping on, why not try asking yourself “How much is this going to matter in 20 years’ time?” And if the answer’s, “Not at all,” then why feel guilty about it?’
When Marion tried this technique she found that she did indeed have fewer seizures. In fact, she described her new guilt-free attitude to life as the best anticonvulsant she had ever been prescribed!
Treatment with drugs is the best way to control seizures for nearly everyone. But it is not the only way. A new and less conventional approach to seizure control is called behavioural treatment, and it is based on the observation that by altering your behaviour you can often alter the pattern of your seizures.
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Diarrhea may have several causes, including chemotherapy, radiation therapy to the abdomen, infection, food sensitivity and emotional upset.
Long-term or severe diarrhea may cause other problems. During diarrhea, food passes quickly through the bowel before the body absorbs enough vitamins, minerals and water. This may cause dehydration and increase the risk of infection. Contact the doctor if the diarrhea is severe or lasts for more than a couple of days. Some ideas for coping with diarrhea are given here. The patient should:
1. Drink plenty of liquids during the day. Drinking fluids is important because the body may not get enough water when having diarrhea.
2. Eat small amounts of food throughout the day instead of three large meals.
3. Eat plenty of foods and liquids that contain sodium (salt) and potassium. These minerals are often lost during diarrhea. Good liquid choices include fat-free soup. Foods high in potassium that do not cause diarrhea include bananas, stewed peach and apricot, and boiled or mashed potatoes.
4. Try these nutritious low-fibre foods:
- Curd
- Rice or noodles
- Grape juice
- Porridge
- Eggs (cooked until the whites are solid, not tried)
- Ripe bananas
- Coconut water
- White bread
- Skinned chicken or fish (boiled or baked, not fried)
- Cottage cheese, cream cheese.
5. Eliminate foods such as:
- Greasy, fatty or fried
- Raw vegetables and fruits
- High-fibre vegetables such as corn, beans, cabbage, peas and cauliflower
- Strong spices, such as hot pepper, curry and chillies.6. Drink liquids that are at room temperature.
7. Avoid very hot or very cold foods and beverages.
8. Limit foods and beverages that contain caffeine, such as coffee, strong tea, some sodas and chocolate.
9. Be careful when using milk and milk products because diarrhea may be caused by lactose intolerance.
10. After sudden, short-term attacks of diarrhea (acute diarrhea), try a clear-liquid diet during the first 12 to 14 hours. This lets the bowel rest while replacing the important body fluids lost during diarrhea.
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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*
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According to one earlier view, asthma is mainly caused by constriction or spasm of the bronchial tubes, which in turn, is caused by the release of substances in the lungs.
Medical researchers however, no longer accept that asthma is caused by isolated episodes of bronchial tubes going into a spasm. Rather it is now medically established that asthma is a condition in which the bronchial tubes are chronically inflamed and supercharged. Bouts of coughing, wheezing, a feeling of tightness in the chest and difficulty in breathing, accompany this condition.
What causes the airways or bronchial tubes to become inflamed and therefore constricted? The explanation is given below.
The human immune system is composed of a complicated network of various organs, cells, and glands, which protect and provide immunity against viruses, bacteria and parasitic diseases. When the immune system fails to work properly, a person gets sick. This immunity is provided by two major types of blood cells, called:
B cells — these produce antibodies, also called immunoglobulins, and
T cells — these produce cytokines.
Together, antibodies and cytokines, provide protection against bacteria, viruses, and parasites which may invade our bodies, and also against threatening allergens.
During lifetime, our bodies produce thousands of antibodies. Most antibodies protect us from diseases, but one group of antibodies, called Immunoglobulin E, or the IgE antibody, is harmful.
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Eat the right sort of fat
A number of studies in respected journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine have looked at the connection between dietary fat and risk of breast cancer. In 1988, the US Surgeon General stated that the top priority in the prevention of chronic diseases, including cancer, was the reduction of dietary fat. By this he meant saturated fat in the form found in animals’ milk, cheese, red meat, not the unsaturated fats found in oils, nuts, seeds and fish which seem to have a protective effect especially against breast cancer. A study reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in 1995 showed that olive oil in the diet lowered the risk of breast cancer.Enjoy a healthy general diet
Cancer rates are lower in people who eat the most fruits and vegetables. Cruciferous vegetables such as cabbage, broccoli and Brussels sprouts help to guard against cancer because they contain the compound indol-3-carbinol which changes the way oestrogen is metabolized in the body.
The more antioxidant-rich foods we eat the more protection it seems to give. Diets high in beta-carotene – found in carrots, sweet potatoes and dark green leafy vegetables such as kale and Swiss chard – have been shown to protect against cancer. In a study conducted at Harvard University beta-carotene altered the proteins needed for tumors to grow. Citrus fruits with their powerful mix of natural substances, including carotenoids and flavonoids, have been shown to neutralize powerful chemical carcinogens in animals.
Anti-oxidants include vitamin A (in the form of beta-carotene), vitamin E, vitamin С and selenium. Low levels of selenium have been directly linked to higher rates of cancer.
Allium vegetables, which include garlic, onions and spring onions, have been found to contain certain cancer-inhibiting properties. Garlic’s sulphur compounds increase the activity of macrophages and T-lymphocytes, two components of the immune system that destroy tumor cells.*4/101/5*