Information on popular complementary and alternative medical topics

Ant bites

Some types of ants (e.g. bull ants) are highly aggressive.

Clinical features

If your child has been stung by an ant, he may develop pain and swelling at the site of the sting. Ants can inject a type of venom via their sting, and they are able to sting several times.

Some children may be allergic to ant venom, and may develop a widespread rash, or difficulty in breathing. Some children have even been known to collapse.

Treatment

If your child only has mild pain and swelling, paracetamol may be given in recommended doses to ease the pain. If your child has a severe reaction to the sting, take him to your doctor immediately, or to the nearest children’s hospital. Make sure you remove the insect carefully first and if it is dead keep it for later identification by your doctor.

Bee stings

Bee stings have barbs on the end of them and they stay in the skin together with the venom gland (the bee dies after injecting the sting).

Clinical features

Your child will complain of severe pain at the site of the sting, and usually marked swelling develops rapidly. Children who are allergic to bee venom are at great risk of severe reaction to bee stings, and may develop a widespread rash, difficulty in breathing and may even collapse.

Treatment

Remove the insect carefully and if it is dead keep it for later identification by your doctor. Do not try to squeeze a bee sting out, as this will inject more venom into the wound. Scrape it off if possible. If your child has a severe reaction to the sting, see your doctor immediately, or go to the nearest children’s hospital.

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“They wouldn’t let us if we wanted to.”

Now you are talking basic freedoms. You have the right to privacy, to do in private what you will with whom you will. If you feel inhibited by someone else’s encroachment on your life, you should act on that or ask for help to act on that. If any group of people deserves and has earned privacy, the dignity of continued personal and sexual development, it certainly is you. You have earned it much more than some thirteen-year-old in a parked car. Stand up for your sexual rights and the sexual rights of everyone in this room. Even if you don’t want to exercise those rights, they are yours for the choosing. Protect them.

“How can you have sex if you don’t feel good?”

How can you feel good if you don’t have sex? How can you feel good if you never touch and get touched, hold and get held? We have to stop thinking about aging as meaning not feeling good. Being sick is not automatically related to being older, and feeling active, alert, happy, and energetic depends much on behaving that way, and the same applies to sex. You will feel sexier if you keep on being sexual, and that in turn will help you feel generally better.

“Maybe you just don’t want to face it. Getting old means

getting high blood pressure, losing your memory, your ability to

get around and move around. It’s just a fact that you are trying to

romanticize away.”

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Turning on Your Sex Lights

I don’t know why we fell into the habit of making love in the dark. We aren’t shy or anything. Maybe we’re too lazy to turn the lights on and

off.

Husband

You will not to be reading in bed in this new program, so candles or soft, full-spectrum lighting is recommended. James Ott, in his book HEALTH AND LIGHT, states, “we have finally learned that light it is a nutrient much like food, and, like food, the wrong kind can make us ill the right kind can help keep us well.” The reason for ” healthy lighting in your place for intimacy is not just so you can the beauty of your sexual interaction. Making love exclusively ^ the dark or with artificial incandescent lighting deprives us a natural sexual stimulant to the brain, to the pineal and pituitary “lands. Try to create natural, soft full-spectrum lighting for your room. Let your sexual life see the light.

Sexual Soundproofing

The only soundproofing that would work in our house would be a gag for each of us and lots of oil for the squeaky bed.

HUSBAND

Just as we suffer from lack of natural lighting, so we suffer from the constant pollution of noise. Listen now as you read this paragraph and you will detect constant humming, clicking, rattling house noises and outside noises of traffic and day-to-day living. Ask any parents and they will tell you that the one thing they want more than anything else in their house is quiet.

It is as important to keep noise out of your private place as it is to keep your intimate communication private. The only approach that seemed to meet both of these needs was to suggest to my couples a music system. Pick a system that is of sufficient quality to reproduce the full range of sounds from your favorite music. The couples reported that music free of a strong theme, vocals, and changes in beat or rhythm was the most pleasing. Your own tapes are much better than the radio, because they are free of commercials and tailored exactly to your tastes. Make your own set of super sex tapes together.

Some couples added extra sound insulation for the bedroom and others tried “white noise,” a system that creates a background that masks noise. A little creativity and effort can help you to keep your own natural sex sounds in and distracting noises out. Super sex requires sound nutrition to match your natural lighting nutrition.

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Super Marital Sex Rule: Marital partners will never be at the same stage of development together. Super marital sex depends on learning to enjoy one another’s development, both partners’ valiant struggle to adjust and to grow.

Just when I got established in my career, he wants to change his. When he first talked about women’s liberation, I knew he was getting ready to quit his job. Now he wants to work, I want to work, neither of us wants to parent. When I want to do something, he does. We just don’t match up right.

WIFE

We assume that life’s passages will be encountered by each of us in our marriages at the same time with the same ease. It just does not work out that way. There is really no such thing as a mid-life crisis, only a lifelong set of crises we are just now paying attention to. So it is with marriage. We assume that things will just “develop,” but they will not. We will enter phases of life differently, putting stresses on our marriages through our lack of understanding and tolerance of individuality.

Marriage vows sometimes say “until death do us part.” They should day something like “as we struggle together to renegotiate through the hundreds of changes we will each encounter together and separately.” Our vows of intimacy should reflect the assumption of constant change, learning a marital dance in which leader and follower are forever changing.

I tell my couples “never divorce someone you don’t know.” Many couples will not listen. They see divorce as an adjustment rather than an end. Sometimes therapists teach them that. They are wrong. Divorce often relates to marital inability to work through differences in developmental challenges, changes in readiness to parent, to work, to play, to rest, to love. Until American marriage sees that it is as cyclical as individual development, reflection, directing, and responding to our changes as people, it will tend to end “too soon” too often.

All marriages struggle with the individual differences of their partners as they go through their individual lives. You will learn that sex can be one of the best aids to carry us through differences in development. In fact, super marital sex can save marriage by teaching its partners to flourish in the changes and growth of both spouses.

We must learn to remarry a different and changing person several times during our marriage. We can choose to divorce and seek out dozens of transitional partners to match our changes, or use change to sculpt the marriage as an ever-changing artwork. Good marriages depend much more on being the right person than finding the right person. Experiencing developmental changes with someone else can be as exciting as it is difficult.

In a pre-fab, pre-developed, ready-made culture, we learn to look for pre-developed partners, already formed to match our own developmental stage at a given time. If our house is too small, we move. When we get too much stuff, we look for bigger and better places to keep it. We must also learn ways to get rid of some stuff, particularly psychological stuff, yet stay in the same house.

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There are some medical conditions which produce typical changes in the body and can be recognised at a glance. One of these is a disorder of bone known as Paget’s disease or osteitis deformans.

Sir James Paget, a London surgeon, first described the condition which bears his name in 1877. Its cause is unknown.

It is rare before the age of 40 but then increases in frequency with age. By the age of 90 at least 10 per cent who have reached this age will have developed this condition in their bones.

Any bone of the body may be affected but it is more common in the skull, in the spine, in the pelvis and the leg bones.

The bones are thickened and yet are softer than normal. And when they bear weight the leg bones may bow outwards. Bone is not a stable tissue.

New bone is continually being laid down and old bone is being continually absorbed or removed by other cells.

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With the potent and effective drugs we now have, most of the chronic disorders of mankind can be controlled, if not cured.

Yet there are large numbers of people who do not comply with their doctor’s instructions.

Surveys have shown that more than half of patients with high blood pressure and tuberculosis no longer attend their doctors a year after starting treatment. Of those who continue, less than a third take proper dosages as ordered.

Most patients who drop out are not convinced of the value of continuing. This may be partly the fault of doctors who do not explain fully the nature of an illness or the need for continued treatment. Sometimes it’s because the price the patient has to pay may be too high: not in money terms but in comfort.

Usually, high blood pressure produces no symptoms. But most drugs to control blood pressure have side-effects. It takes a convincing doctor to persuade a patient without symptoms to take a drug which may make him feel uncomfortable.

But this doesn’t fully explain why large numbers opt out and it is irrational for patients to complain that a drug failed to help them when they either didn’t take it or took it in an inadequate dose.

Many of these patients then turn to alternative therapies; they probably are just as lax in following instructions and become just as critical as they are of orthodox medicine.

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Babies under three to six months usually have protection gained from the mother if she has previously had the disease.

The rash starts on thw trunk but soon spreads to the face, the scalp and the upper parts of the limbs.

It may also involve mucous membranes and pock marks may develop in the mouth, the eyes and in the vagina.

The individual pock mark starts as a red spot which becomes raised, then a blister forms containing clear fluid. This breaks leaving a scab.

Sometimes the blister may be filled with pus.

Successive crops of pocks develop over several days or a week or two.

Chickenpox is infectious for one to two days before the onset of the rash and continues to be highly contagious until no new pock marks develop.

Sometimes the lesions develop secondary infection with bacteria and may then require treatment with antibiotics.

Occasionally, pneumonia may develop.

Another complication is encephalitis or inflammation of the brain. This may also occur with the virus infection of measles.

Shingles or herpes zoster appears to be due to reactivation of the virus lying in the tissues. It affects the sensory nerve cells in the spinal cord.

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Another problem that can arise when practitioners become preoccupied with ‘treating’ the cancer is that they may not pay enough attention to your other needs. You should expect and demand attention to your symptoms, and social and emotional problems. If you have pain, a cough, bowel or bladder problems, nausea or any other uncomfortable symptom, tell your practitioner. Whether or not the cancer itself can be controlled, the symptoms it produces can be treated separately. I’m not saying that you should expect your practitioner to completely rid you of all discomforts by the wave of a magic wand. I am saying that there are ways of reducing and dealing with many of these discomforts.

I know one symptom that many people do not expect to be controlled is pain. This is not something that everyone with cancer gets by any means, but if it does occur it can be treated. Don’t just put up with uncontrolled pain. Ways of tackling it include radiation treatment, nerve blocks and many different painkillers. Your practitioner should be prepared to persevere in finding the right dose and type of painkiller for you.

Some patients don’t think it ‘right’ to ‘trouble’ their practitioner with family, emotional, financial and other such problems. You have a right to help and support in these areas. Your practitioner will be interested if he or she is treating you as a person, and not just a cancer. Don’t hesitate to ask. If your practitioner is not approachable and sympathetic, you may have to look elsewhere. Consider your local doctor, priest, social workers (through a public hospital, local council, or community welfare) or community organisations and self-help groups.

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If you are at risk of developing osteoporosis you should start within about five years of the menopause for maximum effect, as these are the years of greatest bone loss; catch it then and your risks of a fractured hip or vertebra of the spine are greatly reduced. However, even starting much later will still give some benefit, and there are plenty of women who start after the age of 70 and still gain great benefit. There really is no time at which you are too old to start.

Much more research is needed into the effectiveness of HRT in older women, as most doctors in the UK seem reluctant to prescribe it to a woman over 65. This is a pity, as it can be of great benefit to them. The risk of developing osteoporosis and heart disease is much greater over the age of 65, so this would seem a good time of life to be taking HRT. Obviously, women with a uterus do not like the idea of returning to a monthly bleed, which may be heavy or painful, and they may also experience breast tenderness and leg cramps. An increase in sexuality can be quite disturbing after several years without it. This is balanced against an increased sense of wellbeing, less stiffness in joints and muscles, and more energy. Once again, it is a question of balancing the advantages to you against the disadvantages, and when no-bleed HRT is in general use this may greatly affect how older women feel about it.

How long you stay on HRT will depend on you, your symptoms and your long-term risks. For most women, two years is about average for hot flushes, etc, but if they return when you stop the HRT, then you will probably want to keep it on for a while longer. You may be one of those women who need HRT for five years, or even much longer, to keep flushes at bay.

For relief of vaginal dryness, vaginitis and recurrent vaginal infections, you will probably want to stay on HRT for as long as you choose to remain sexually active. Sex doesn’t have to stop in your fifties! For conditions which simply become worse as the years go by, such as incontinence,

osteoporosis and arterial disease, you may decide to stay on HRT for years, perhaps for the whole of your life. If you don’t like the idea of taking it for so long, it is thought that even five years’ treatment in the years immediately after the menopause will considerably reduce your chances of an osteoporotic fracture.

In the end, you will continue for as long as the benefits to you appear to outweigh the disadvantages or risks. Sadly, the majority of women stop taking HRT after about six months, perhaps because of side-effects, or a return of monthly periods, or because of scare stories in the media. In reality, there is no reason why most women should not be able to remain on it indefinitely. Should you develop conditions such as a coronary thrombosis, blood clotting, gallbladder disease, cancer of the breast or uterus or ovary, fiver or kidney disease, or if you have a big operation like a hip replacement, your doctor will probably advise you to stop taking it. Some doctors, however, feel HRT may safely be continued even in these circumstances, especially if coming off it might reduce your quality of life significantly more than suffering these various other diseases would. As with everything medical, in the end when you start taking HRT, and how long you remain on it, should be a joint decision made between you and your doctor.

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The research team was surprised to find how strikingly beneficial hysterectomy was for symptom relief, and concluded that ‘hysterectomy was associated with more marked improvement in symptoms and quality of life than nonsurgical therapy’. The women who had hysterectomies reported significant relief from bleeding problems, pelvic and back pain, pain during intercourse, abdominal swelling and urinary problems. Those who felt they benefited most from the surgery were those who had been most impaired by their symptoms. This impairment took the form of persistent discomfort or limitations on activity.

The study also found much lower rates of adverse effects of hysterectomy than expected. Earlier studies had reported problems with passing urine in 20-30% of women after hysterectomy, but the Maine study found this occurred in only 4%. Other studies have reported diminished sexual function in 15-30%, but although 7% of the Maine women reported being bothered by less interest in sex after their hysterectomy, only 1% reported less enjoyment of sexual activity, and the majority reported increased interest in, and enjoyment of, sex. Persistence of pelvic pain after hysterectomy has been reported to occur in 22% of women, but in Maine the figure was 5%. Importantly, 82% of women in the Maine study felt they had a choice about having the hysterectomy and, for most, six or more months elapsed between the decision to have surgery and the actual operation.

As a check on possible biases that might explain these sorts of findings, the Maine study authors looked at eligible patients who were not referred by their doctors to participate in the trial. They found that patients not in the study were more likely to feel that they had no choice about having a hysterectomy, and their mental health assessments were less positive than those of the women who had participated. It is possible that doctors selectively referred patients to the trial who were more involved in the treatment strategy and in a better state of mental health. It is also possible that improvements in surgical techniques and post-operative care are responsible for the more positive results that seem to be occurring. In the light of these uncertainties, the authors recommended that their study be repeated in other parts of the US.

Recent Australian research on the outcomes of hysterectomy has also found high levels of satisfaction among women having the operation, although this was tempered by the belief that some new symptoms had arisen which were caused by the surgery itself. Research by an Australian team from the University of Newcastle and Macquarie University, published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in 1991, asked women who had had a hysterectomy between two and ten years earlier to describe the impact of their experience. Of 175 women interviewed, 97% said the hysterectomy was worth the trouble and 88% said they would recommend a hysterectomy to others with similar problems, given their experience of it. The single most important benefit for 32% of the women was relief from heavy periods; for 25% it was relief from pain or painful periods; and for 4% it was improved emotional well-being.

An earlier Australian study, in which over 800 women who had had a hysterectomy (abdominal or vaginal) in New South Wales in 1976 or 1977 responded to a questionnaire, found that only about half were enthusiastic or very pleased that they had undergone the procedure. About 11% were not satisfied with the outcome of the operation and almost 12% complained of poor doctor or nurse communication. Post-operative recovery was frequently longer than expected, with 70% requiring up to three months for a return to normal activities and 16% more than six months. One impact that favourably impressed many women was sexual function, one-third indicating that this had improved after hysterectomy, while 3% reported a deterioration.

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