Newpharmablog. Health News

You can minimise the amount of distress at separation in a number of ways. First, you should acknowledge that for toddlers in particular, some initial and usually transient distress is developmentally normal and appropriate. In fact, we would be a bit concerned if the young child did not exhibit some feelings at initial separation. Second, you can prepare youngsters for separation by introducing them slowly to the new situation. For example, it is a good idea to have a new babysitter come to the house a few days beforehand and interact with the child in your presence. Similarly, the child should be taken to a new daycare or kindergarten ahead of the actual starting time, so that he has the opportunity to slowly become accustomed to the new situation while the parents are present. Sometimes it is helpful for you to stay at the kindergarten for a few hours on the first day. In most instances, the daycare or kindergarten teacher is very experienced at such separations, and her advice should be followed. Third, it is also common and perfectly normal for the child to be angry with the parent(s) at the end of the day, or when they return after having left the child. You should expect this and take it in your stride rather than see this behaviour as evidence that the child is not coping with the separation.

It is best to deflect any expressed anger or sulking by being positive about and showing a genuine interest in the child’s day. Ask lots of questions, tell the child how interesting his experiences during the day must have been, and remind the child what a good time he must be having with all of these new and different things to do.

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This is a very important point. Many people do not give their recovery priority. Although everyone wants to recover, there can seem a million more important things to be done first. Our recovery has to become the most important thing in our life.

Our loyalty has to be to ourselves. This can be very difficult for many of us because we feel we are being selfish in putting our own needs first. How can working towards our recovery be selfish? In the working-through process, especially at the beginning, we need all of our energies for ourselves.

The lack of understanding by those close to us can create extra stress. All of us are extremely sensitive and vulnerable to other people’s suggestions or ideas, even if it means doing the opposite to what we feel is right for us. Part of the recovery process means accepting that we don’t have to go along with what other people expect from us. We don’t have to do, or accept, anything we know is going to be detrimental to ourselves and/or our recovery. Like everyone else, we have the right to do what is right for us.

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Sleep disturbances are common with babies. They are so common that ma parents are reluctant to define their situation as a “problem.”

A baby seems to change every day; as she grows and learns, parents expect that she will learn to sleep when she is able. Some babies learn on their own. Some do not. The advantage of working on sleep problems with infants is that their habits are not as ingrained. Sometimes by making a small change a parent can bring about a real improvement. Things may improve on their own if you wait long enough, but you may not be able to wait. Or things could get worse and harder to change. If your infant is six months or older, now is a good time to begin.

Will feeding solid food early help my child sleep better? Research does not support this idea. Sleeping a long stretch at night has more to do w neurological than with digestive functioning. The current medical recommendation is to start solid food at four to six months of age. Your child’s doctor can help you determine the best time for your child according to his si birth weight, and health.

It probably will not hurt to try offering solids, but do not hope for instant success. Also, remember that over-feeding at bedtime will only lead to disrupted sleep. Try to avoid “stuffing” him right before bed.

There are ways that feeding can be used to affect sleep. Mealtime is one of the factors that helps to re-set the internal time clock. Making meals regular as possible during the day helps give rhythm to a child’s day and night. When working to change a skewed schedule, moving the mealtime helps establish a new beginning or ending to the day. Solid food at predictable, longer intervals during the day can help lengthen time between meals at day and night. Offering a solid food snack after the last nursing can help prevent falling asleep at the bottle or breast.

In summary, food will not necessarily “keep him full” through the night, it can be used to cue him for sleep.

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Things that are nothing to do with cancer such as nervous tension, migraines and sinus problems can of course cause headaches in people with cancer, just as they can in anyone. However, the cause we will discuss here is the one that is likely to worry you the most—cancer in the brain or cerebro-spinal fluid (the fluid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord—CSF for short).

Cancer in these places causes headaches by increasing the pressure on the brain. These headaches are often accompanied by nausea, vomiting, and blurred vision. They tend to be worst when you have been lying down for a while and better when you are up and about. Cancer in the brain is a likely reason for headaches that are accompanied by double vision, pins and needles or numbness down one side or weakness in one side. Cancer in the CSF may be accompanied by a stiff back and neck, pains shooting into the arms and legs, and pins and needles, numbness or weakness in any or all limbs.

If you have headaches your doctor should examine you, including looking into your eyes to see whether the pressure on the brain is high. This is not a foolproof test—the back of the eye can look perfectly normal when the pressure on the brain is raised. A brain scan or CT scan will probably be needed in order to be sure of the reason for your headaches. A lumbar puncture will also be necessary if cancer in the CSF is suspected.

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Most diagnoses are made on the history alone but the majority of the others require a physical examination as well.

Few diagnoses require the use of special tests such as X-ray or blood tests, which are more often of use to confirm or deny a diagnosis already made or to establish the extent of the problem and rarely to find the diagnosis when the doctor is stumped.

Yet we have such a variety of special tests and they seem to get better all the time that both doctors and patients have come to place too great a reliance on them. Unfortunately they are all expensive and do add greatly to the costs of modern medicine.

Multiphasic health screening is a phenomenon of the availability of modern diagnostic testing which can make use of machines to test a number of blood levels at the one time.

The concept is that well people are screened for a number of different diseases in a one session effort. This usually involves a history taken by a machine where a number of questions appear on a screen and the answers are recorded by push button. A chest X-ray, ECG, breathing test, height and weight, urine analysis and a number of blood tests are also done. The results are fed into a computer and the printout forwarded to the referring doctor.

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Heavy bleeding, which has many causes, is NOT good for a woman — she may become anaemic from the repeated heavy losses of blood, and may not be able to replace this blood loss by the production of new red-blood cells.

The emotional upset of a girl changing jobs or having a tiff with her boyfriend — or even fear of pregnancy from intercourse — may cause her to miss a period.

Some prolonged emotional upsets may stop the periods for months, or even years.

I don’t want to sound patronising as a man, but periods are a normal part of being a woman, and although inconvenient, and, sometimes, uncomfortable, they are a normal function.

Pain or excess bleeding are NOT normal, and should be checked by a doctor.

Puberty — the time at which the sexual organs in both boys and girls reach maturity — begins in girls at about 12 or 14; and the menopause — the time at which a woman loses the ability to conceive a child — does not occur until about 50.

So periods are part of a woman’s life for some 37 years.

Men ought to be a little more understanding.

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Over the past ten years it has become apparent that a number of health problems which cause heart attacks are found together in many people. These include high blood sugar levels, high blood fat levels (especially triglycerides), overweight, high blood pressure and increased blood clotting. When these are found together they are referred to as Syndrome X.

The underlying problems in people with Syndrome X are that the body is insensitive to insulin and there are high levels of insulin in the blood. These high insulin levels are thought to cause many of the problems found in this syndrome. There are a number of ways that high insulin levels can cause high blood pressure.

High insulin levels in the blood after eating are the result of the carbohydrate in the food. As we have shown before, the high G.I. factor foods cause much higher insulin levels than low G.I. factor foods. One way of controlling the high insulin levels in the blood is to eat low G.I. factor foods. Such a diet will help correct many of the problems found in Syndrome X.

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Summary of main points.

• There are a number of critical periods throughout life where gains and losses in body fat and body weight are likely to occur.

• Some of these are due to physiological causes, others to behaviour and/or periods of high stress, crisis or grief.

• Restrained eaters may be likely to gain more fat during periods of chronic stress, crisis or grief.

• Awareness of critical stages and actions that can be taken to resolve these may help prevent or reduce increases in body fatness.

Although the causes of obesity and overfatness are multi-factorial, the problem may be exacerbated at certain critical’ periods in life. These are generally associated with change, either in lifestyle, as a result of crises or increased levels of stress, or due to the natural physiological changes that occur with ageing. As some psychologists have pointed out, change is often associated with increased stress levels, even in some cases where these changes are positive. Stress, in turn, can be crucial for either increasing or decreasing body fat depending on the circumstances. There are periods that predominantly affect either males or females and others that are less gender specific. Some are potentially avoidable and others are an unavoidable function of the ongoing processes of growth and change. An awareness of at least some of these critical periods and the potential means of alleviating their effects is crucial to an understanding of long term body fat maintenance. Although the scientific evidence on some of the periods is limited, practical suggestions based on experience are discussed for each period.

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There is some inter-conversion between nutrients such as protein being converted to glucose (gluconeogenesis) for release into the bloodstream, but under normal conditions, the capacity to convert one nutrient into another for storage is very limited. Also, humans have little capacity to ‘waste’ extra energy by burning it off. This process, which has been termed luxuskonsumption, is common in animals such as rats but is very limited in humans. Therefore, the examination of each macronutrient as a separate entity is necessary and is summarised below.

Fat. Fat is handled very differently by the body compared to the other nutrients. Body fat stores are large and not actively controlled and fat intake has no influence on its own use as a fuel (oxidation) and very little influence on appetite. Fat (from the diet or adipose tissue) is the energy buffer for the body in that it makes up the difference between what the body obtains from non-fat calories and what it needs to keep functioning. It is the last priority as a fuel. Fat is therefore not balanced at all and in a sense the body is ‘blind’ to fat, both in the diet and in the fat stores when it comes to balancing up its energy needs. Excess fat is therefore the most powerful dietary promoter of weight gain.

Energy balance and fat balance are essentially equivalent. This means that on a day when a person has eaten 200kcal more than they have burned, about 200kcal of dietary fat will be stored as body fat. If a person is 200kcal under, the body will pull about 200kcal of fat out of the fat stores to make up the deficit.

Table 5.1 shows how carbohydrate and protein intakes are fully balanced or regulated (suppress appetite and promote their own oxidation), alcohol intake is only half balanced (promotes its own oxidation only), and fat is not balanced at all. As originally proposed by Professor J-P. Flatt from the University of Massachusetts, a high-fat diet therefore tends to lead to a passive over-consumption of calories which may become chronic because of the weak or absent metabolic controls on fat balance.’

All this implies that a reduction of fat in the diet is all that is required for reducing body fat. There are certain advantages and disadvantages of this approach, as opposed to the old notion of calorie counting. Reducing fat, for example, doesn’t feel like ‘dieting’ and is therefore much easier than total food restriction. However, there is a perception that a low-carbohydrate diet is more effective because much of the weight lost is fluid which occurs relatively quickly. In a low-fat diet, the loss is slower but is more likely to come from fat than fluids. The low-fat approach also allows large volumes of food to be eaten with a minimum of restrictions, hence not resulting in the problems of hunger which occur with normal ‘diets’. In general, this whole approach leads us away from the traditional notion of calorie counting to one of ad libitum low-fat eating—a much more practical and effective approach to fat loss.

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Tuberculosis is a serious destructive infection of the lungs. In years past it was a significant cause of death in the community. But in recent times, with improved conditions and especially with improved forms of treatment, it is now rarely seen. However, it must never be dismissed, for it still exists in this country, and every year in recent times increasing numbers of cases have been diagnosed. Often cases may smoulder on for many weeks, months or years, undiagnosed simply because nobody ever thought to look for it.

The disease is transmitted from an individual with an active lesion in the lungs. It travels via droplets of moisture in the air, which are inhaled by another person; and the germ can then set up a slow insidious infection in the new victim. Most likely contact is an adult living in the same home, a parent, grandparent or domestic help. Many recent cases of migrants have been diagnosed, and they would appear to be particularly susceptible.

Early symptoms may be mild or often non-existent. Most cases are found by chance or when contacts of an adult patient are being checked out for possible spread of the disease. Vague general symptoms may be fatigue for no obvious reason, feeling generally off-colour, weight loss, lack of appetite. A cough, typical in adults, may be present in infants though is often absent in children.

Infections occurring in children under the age of three years may be serious. It may also be serious in adolescents, more so than at other periods of childhood.

Treatment

Frequently lesions heal and are not discovered for a long time afterwards (probably on a chance chest X-ray indicating that T.B. had occurred). However, once detected, full and complete medical treatment is essential. This must be under the supervision of a major clinic, usually attached to a big hospital, geared for this problem. Today drug therapy has completely changed the outlook for patients with tuberculosis. Once a common fatal disease, chemotherapy can now completely reverse the disease and the outlook for the future. Nevertheless, adhering exactly to the regimen outlined by the doctors is essential.

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