Health News and Information

If your child can see distant objects clearly, but has trouble seeing things from up close, he may be long-sighted. This is one of the commonest problems that children have with their eyesight.

Cause

Long-sightedness is due to the length of the eyeball from front to back being shorter than usual. This interferes with the way light is reflected from the back of the eye, distorting the image transferred to the brain.

Clinical features

Long-sightedness does not usually become apparent until the child is a toddler. It is often associated with a squint. Because the child strains his eyes to see close up, he may complain of sore eyes, headache or fatigue. He may be uninterested in reading because of the eye strain it causes him.

Treatment

If you suspect that your child is long-sighted, see your doctor who will arrange referral to an eye specialist for tests.

When to see your doctor

See your doctor if your child has any of the symptoms described above.

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I don’t need to discuss this stuff. I don’t know why my mom and

dad wanted me to come here. It’s just natural stuff. You don’t have

to learn what comes naturally.

FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL

You’re half right and half wrong. Being sexual is natural. You inherit that by being human. But making love, relating to another person sexually, must be learned. Even animals have to be taught, have to be helped to be able to copulate, to have sex together. If you see them doing it, they learned it by watching other animals.

What separates us from other animals is how much and how well we can learn things, and that includes sexual things. That means we can learn to do much more than copulate. We can learn to love, to touch, to treat each other with respect. If you ever have a sexual) problem, it will really be a learning problem, so you will have to ask your parents or the person you love to help you learn more.

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I try to deprive myself. I don’t masturbate and I stop even asking for sex. I thought that maybe a few weeks of celibacy-would prime the pump. Maybe I need a new pump.

HUSBAND

The energy concept of sexuality continues to dominate sex in marriage. It is simply not true that by holding back your sexual expression, you will build up a ‘ ’sex-drive bank.” As a matter of fact, the less sex you have, the less sexual you tend to feel and think.

One of my medical students was very critical of this material as I presented it. “I’m sure that the less sex I have, the more I want it.” He came back three months later to report, “You’re right. I got so busy in this medical school curriculum that I forgot all about sex. Then I had sex with my girlfriend last night. Now I can’t get it off my mind.”

Sexual activity leading to more sexual interest is why it is important to schedule sex, even though you have been taught that sex ought to be spontaneous. Super marital sex requires making time for sex, not counting on some inner drive to perpetuate sexual interest. Nothing about our health is automatic. Diet, exercise, dental care must be scheduled. Sex is no different. Spontaneity is more likely if regular sex is taking place, because the opportunity for spontaneity is created.

Not all sex can be mutual. If we over-romanticize our sexuality, see it exclusively as a mutually pleasing interaction in every instance, we burden our relationship. The emphasis on doing everything right, putting everything together, completing the shift, is another mechanistic approach to sex left over from the first three perspectives. Sexual frequency and style is a matter under our control. All motivation is preceded by behavior. You will feel sexier if you behave sexily. Saving it up, trying to create a sexual savings account, trying to make sure all account holders are pleased every time only results in loss of interest.

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1-st day of fasting

Your mind-body system has been working all night, preparing the most urgent deposits for disposal. Your bowel should be full, despite the fact, that you cleansed it thoroughly only a few hours ago and that you have not eaten anything that night at all.

Go to the toilet and let your bowel empty itself. If you have difficulties, make a quick “single cycle” enema.

Go to work as usual. Do not eat anything at all. Drink as much water as you wish. Never let the water bottle out of your sight. It should be everywhere with you.

You can go to the sauna and spend 3 sessions of 10-15 minutes there, drying the sweat after each session with a towel. Do not go to a spa, unless the water there is ozonised and chlorine/fluoride free.

In the evening perform another enema.

2-6 day of fasting

No food. Water only. You should feel great. Your body just got rid of the huge amount of the most urgent waste deposit during the previous days. Your natural instincts and healing have been awakened.

If you feel that lack of food is indeed making you quite uncomfortable, you can add a teaspoon of natural honey into your water two or three times a day. Do not add honey to hot water. Lukewarm water is best.

Go to sauna if you feel like it. Do not do enemas every day, only when you feel that your bowel is full and your assistance is required. Do enema also when you feel sick. Your body tells you that it has some extra toxins ready to dispose, and some of them are being absorbed back, making you feel sick. Listen to your body and trust your instincts.

Go to work as normal. If you are physically active – do your jogging, squash or tennis as usual, but watch what your body is saying. You may have to adjust the intensity of your exercise.

Note how sharp your mind is, and how easily it is for you to solve problems. Use this. Study and read books, which you thought were too difficult for you. Engage in creative activities. Notice how many ideas spring to your mind.

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Because of the different behavior of melanomas at different ages it is believed some hormonal influence may play a part. Any change in a mole should arouse suspicion. The changes to watch for are if the mole enlarges, or itches, or bleeds, or ulcerates or if changes in its pigment get darker or even lighter.

Experts do differ about the correct initial treatment of the suspicious mole, and even when dealing with an established melanoma.

Some doctors would initially remove the suspicious mole leaving a normal area of skin around it then close the wound.

Should examination of the mole reveal it is malignant then a second operation is performed where a large section of skin is removed.

Some surgeons go further and remove the mole, a large area of skin and the skin which leads to the nearest draining lymph glands.

Because the common spread of melanoma is by the draining lymph channels to the lymph glands, these glands are removed as well.

Some surgeons believe this should be done in the one operation. Because the wide separation between the skin cannot be joined together by stitches, a skin graft is necessary.

Other surgeons believe their results to be as good by carrying out the primary removal of the melanoma and only the lymph glands if they show evidence of involvement such as by enlargement.

The difference in opinion arises because of the unpredictable behavior of melanomas.

It has now become common to use the cytotoxic drugs as well. These are drugs which kill the cancer cells present at a distance from the original site.

Treatment in the past was unsatisfactory and the outlook for melanomas poor. But, as with most cancers, the treatment has dramatically improved over recent years.

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Other factors in the environment are exposures to viruses. The hepatitis  virus may cause cancer of the liver in Africans exposed both to this virus and to another toxin. The Epstein-Barr virus may cause a cancer of the lymphoid tissue in Africans and cancer of the nose and throat in Chinese.

There are some cancers which may be due only to environmental factors. In this second group are tumors of the stomach and large bowel, the prostate, ovary, breast, womb and cervix and some tumors of the kidney and bladder.

This group forms about 40 per cent of male cancers and 60 to 70 per cent of female cancers. Some believe most of these cancers are due to exposure to industrial chemicals, others think they are mainly due to lifestyle.

Perhaps only about 6 per cent of cancers can be shown definitely to be due to work exposure.

The third group is mainly cancers of children and no association can be found with external factors, not that they may not exist.

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Symptoms: eyes are not parallel; the pupil of one eye is a different color from the other; child has trouble judging distance; child cocks head or moves face in effort to see clearly.

Home care

Home care cannot be undertaken until a doctor has diagnosed the condition.

Precautions

-    A child under seven whose eyes are not parallel all or most of the time should be seen by -    If lazy eye is not diagnosed and treated, the condition can become permanent.

-    Have your child’s eyes checked every year after the age of three or four.

A “lazy eye” is one in which the vision is poor because the child has suppressed the image received by that eye. Basically it’s loss of vision from lack of use and is known technically as amblyopia ex anopsia. Most cases of lazy eye result from weakness of one or more of the six small muscles that move the eyeball. Eye muscle weaknesses can cause the eyes to turn in or out in relation to each other. This can lead to the child’s seeing double. If a young child learns to ignore one of the double images, a loss of vision in the unused eye results. On the other hand, if the eye muscles are normal but the vision is poor in one eye, the young child may ignore the poor image received. This can result from marked near- or farsightedness, astigmatism, or other interference with vision in one eye. Such interference might be caused by congenital cataracts (clouding of the lens of the eye) or scars on the cornea (the transparent front part of the eye).

Signs and symptoms

Lazy eye should be suspected when the eyes are not parallel all or most of the time, or are parallel less and less often in a child under seven years of age. See your doctor if: your child’s eyes aren’t parallel; the pupil of one eye is a different color from the other; your child is over two years old and has trouble seeing or judging distances when reaching for an object; or your child cocks his or her head to one side or turns his or her face to see better (the child may be compensating for double vision).

Home care

No home treatment for lazy eye is advised until a doctor has diagnosed the condition.

Precautions

• You should understand lazy eye so that if the condition occurs in your child you can catch it in time for treatment to be successful.

• Have your child’s vision checked each year after age three or four. Lazy eye can be treated successfully in children up to age seven. If it’s left untreated the condition may become permanent.

Medical treatment

Your doctor will inspect the insides and outsides of both eyes and test their movements in all directions. If the child is old enough to understand directions, the doctor can check the vision. Vision will be checked with a letter or picture chart. A younger child’s vision should be checked by an ophthalmologist who can use a system that does not require the child to follow instructions.

Lazy eye is corrected either by patching the good eye or hindering the vision in the good eye with eye drops or glasses. By blocking the good eye, the child is forced to use the lazy eye. As a final resort, surgery is sometimes necessary to correct the weak eye muscles.

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Pain in the head from any cause. Migraine is a very specific type of headache and is relatively uncommon, whereas headaches are extremely common-one of the most familiar of everyday pains.

Migraine is characteristically a one-sided headache and more than half of all sufferers have their first attack before the age of 20. Most people who have true migraine know when it is about to start. Often sufferers say that they feel exceptionally well a day or two before the attack. The senses are often generally sharpened at this time. Shortly before the headache itself begins there may be a sensation called an aura. This often takes the form of difficulty with or changes in vision. You might see flashing lights and you might even go blind for a while. There may also be peculiar smells, a feeling of nausea and you might even vomit. Some people lose their voice and have altered sensations of touch. The aura lasts for up to half an hour and then fades.

Next comes the headache, which can last from an hour up to a few days. It starts above or behind one eye and spreads to the back of the head on the same side. Many people feel nauseated and may even vomit. For many, sleep cures the headache but others wake with the headache still there.

Cluster headaches are not at all uncommon and are a sort of face-headache migraine. They come in bouts (clusters) with an attack every day for weeks and then nothing for months. This complaint is much less common than ordinary migraine and men have it more often than women. The individual attack starts at the same time each day (or more often, night) often in the spring or autumn. When an attack is at its peak it is very painful, usually being worst in the eye and the cheek. The eye on the affected side becomes red and watery and the nostril on that side blocked. Anti-migraine drugs can be useful but often the condition persists.

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Bypass surgery

When bypass surgery was first started, it was usual to take a vein from the leg (we have plenty to spare!) and insert it around the narrowed site in the coronary artery. The blood then flows through the vein, around the stenosis, to reach the myocardium beyond it. The immediate result is a much better flow of blood to the heart muscle, carrying much more oxygen and glucose to the starved area.

There has been a more recent trend to use a small segment of artery from inside the chest wall—the internal mammary artery—instead of the vein. Among the reasons for the change is that the artery is more readily available than a leg vein, and that an arterial graft is probably more appropriate than a vein graft for what, after all, is another artery. There have been reports that the internal mammary graft is more effective in the long term, but other comparisons between the two seem to suggest that there is little difference in the merits of the two types of graft.

Bypass grafts are, of course, done under general anaesthetic, and patients must stay in the hospital for several days afterwards. I was astonished to be called to a patient’s home on a Friday to see him, to be told that he had had his bypass just four days before, on the Monday! The pressure to remove patients from hospital care in today’s fast-paced health care climate is surely immense!

Bypass surgery appears to work best for those who have left-main or severe three-vessel blockages.

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That guidance may be based not just on the work of Professor Williams and Dr. Beevers, but also on the most recent results of the many studies of the possible links between alcohol and heart disease. Unfortunately, the results are far from clear, and many different conclusions have been drawn from them.

Probably the most reliable conclusions were drawn by Professor A. G. Shaper, of the British Regional Heart Study mentioned in the introduction/in 1994. This showed that moderate drinkers (sixteen to forty-two units a week) suffered 34 percent fewer deaths from heart attack, and 13 percent fewer deaths from other circulation disorders (mainly stroke) than nondrinkers.

This would seem to be encouraging for drinkers, but Professor Shaper stressed that it was not. First, the actual overall numbers of such deaths were so small that the differences could not be considered as reliable or statistically significant. Worse, there was no reduction in overall death rate among the moderate drinkers, so that they were more likely to die from other diseases at the same time.

Professor Shaper showed that the extra heart deaths among the teetotalers included several in people who had been diagnosed as having heart disease when they entered the study. They may well have been drinkers who had turned teetotal because they were already feeling ill, and this could account for the difference in death rates. He concluded that if moderate drinking does protect against heart attacks, the effect is relatively small, and is not accompanied by a reduction in deaths from all types of circulation disorders, or by a reduction in deaths over all.

He compared his results with those of studies in other countries. In Trinidad, the lowest mortality for all causes was in men labeled as abstemious, who did not usually drink, and had no history of drinking problems. In the large Kaiser Permanente Study, which used lifelong abstainers as a comparison, none of the drinking groups— ranging from occasional, through mild, moderate, and heavy—showed any benefit from their alcohol consumption, and those drinking more than six units a day were decidedly worse off.

In a study carried out by the American Cancer Society, in the data on deaths from all causes, only occasional drinkers and those taking one or two drinks a day had a significantly lower risk than nondrinkers. Here, too, the figures may be distorted by some people who gave up drinking because they were already unwell before they entered the study. Above the lowest alcohol intake level, death rates rose progressively with each step up in alcohol consumption.

In this same study, at the level of alcohol intake associated with the lowest risk of coronary heart disease death (four drinks per day), there was an increased risk for all-cause deaths, particularly from accidents and violence, cancer and stroke, which more than outweighed the apparent savings in heart deaths. This bleak statistic does not take into account the increased rates of illness that may stem from consuming much lower amounts of alcohol than four drinks a day.

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