Information on popular complementary and alternative medical topics

If you or your children have a chronically stuffy nose, you may have one of the five disorders listed below. All are correctable using modern surgical procedures.

Deviated Nasal Septum
The wall that divides the inside of our nose into right and left sides is called the nasal septum (septum means a partition). If this wall is crooked, i.e., if it encroaches on one side of the nose or the other, it is called a deviated (off course) septum. If the septum deviates too much, it can actually block the flow of air through one side of the nose. On rare occasions, it can deviate in both directions, causing symptoms of stuffiness on both sides of the nose.

Cleft Palate
The palate is the roof of your mouth. When it does not develop properly, it leaves a large opening in the roof of the mouth. This causes the nose and the mouth to connect abnormally, and results in many different problems for someone so affected.

Choanal Atresia (Bilateral)
The term choanal (funnel) refers to the shape of each side of the nose from the outside toward the throat. The term atresia (no hole) refers to the lack of an opening at the end of this funnel. Someone with bilateral choanal atresia has no opening into the throat for either of the nasal passageways, and no air can pass through the nose to the lungs. Choanal Atresia is a life-threatening situation for an infant.

Pharyngeal Stenosis
This is a very uncommon disorder in which the pharynx, located at the back of the nose and the top of the throat, is abnormally narrowed. Just as in a pinched pipe, such narrowing does not permit normal flow of air or fluid through the nose.

Benign Tumors
There are a variety of abnormal but not cancerous (benign) growths that can occur in the nasal passageways. These may block the flow of air through the nose on the side in which they occur. Nasal Polyps, balloon like swellings of the lining of the nose, are the most common of these.
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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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There are two types of epileptic fit. In grand vial epilepsy, the sufferer falls to the ground unconscious, goes very stiff, and then jerks and twitches uncontrollably. In petit mal epilepsy, die sufferer does not usually fall, but simply stares blankly for a few seconds, and is unaware of external events. It is mostly children who suffer from petit mal epilepsy, and they usually grow out of it by their teens. Epilepsy is a disorder of the brain, in which one group of brain cells becomes over-active and sends out strong electrical signals that overwhelm other parts of the brain.

Children with severe migraine sometimes suffer from seizures, probably epileptic in nature. Studies at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London have shown that eliminating certain foods can help these children, and the seizures often clear up along with the migraine. So it is probably worth investigating the role of food in epileptic children, but only if they also have migraines, or some well-recognized allergic condition, such as asthma, allergic rhinitis or eczema. How foods might provoke a seizure is a mystery, but they may affect the blood vessels supplying the brain, as they are thought to do in migraine.

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