Health News. Lots of resources and information

Are there physical and chemical imbalances that predispose us toward anorexia or bulimia? Many researchers think so.The Zinc Link. The relationship between eating disorders and zinc deficiency was initially discovered in the 1930s, when animals experimentally placed on diets missing only this mineral developed anorexia (a word that, by itself, simply means lack of appetite). More recently, zinc deficiencies have been associated with three types of eating disorders in humans: morbid obesity, anorexia nervosa, and bulimia. In the first instance, an inverse relationship has been noted between obesity and zinc.In other words, on average, the more overweight the obese individual, the less zinc he or she has in his system. Anorexics and bulimics are almost always zinc-deficient as well. Zinc is one of the most important minerals for overall good health, and is essential for a healthy immune system.Zinc deficiency seems to be both symptomatic and causative of eating disorders, which means that a vicious cycle of increasing zinc deficiency can result. Individuals prone to eating disorders are often anxiety ridden, and zinc diminishes during periods of psychological stress. Once lost, it is hard to replace sufficient amounts of this essential nutrient. Add to that a lack of nutrients from purging or starvation and you see the magnitude of the problem.Once zinc is lost, various symptoms arise as a result of the body’s attempt to replace it. For example, in the anorexic individual, the body will leach zinc from muscle tissue in its struggle to survive. This results in a devastating symptom of the illness—muscle wasting. If die heart muscle is attacked, any number of heart conditions, and even death, can result. It is also important to note that research studies correlate low zinc levels in eating-disorder patients with lowered rates of treatment success. The crucial relationship between zinc and eating disorders also may explain why more women suffer from these disorders than men. As this nutrient is essential to sperm development, males have high concentrations of zinc in their prostate gland.*61\233\8*

The question the reader will ask at this point is ‘Given all this epidemiological study, do we know the causes of cancer?’ Broadly the answer is ‘yes’ in many circumstances and for many cancers, and the opportunities for prevention that this understanding generates are there to be taken. We do not always know how the factors that have been identified by the epidemiological studies discussed in this chapter link up to what is being learned in the laboratories of the molecular biologists. This connection is being made rapidly and will be increasingly clear by the end of the century. Epidemiology has been very successful in discovering or confirming which features of our lives in the Western world can be now identified as causes of cancer. Most cancers are not inherited. Environmental influences are far more important. However, we must consider genetics in relation to cancer in three ways. First, we have already mentioned that when cells within the body undergo malignant change and then divide to form two daughter cells, these daughter cells will retain the genetic features of the parent cells. In this sense cancer is a genetic disease between the cells. When we use the term ‘daughter’ in this context, this is simply scientific jargon for cells within one person. We are not implying that parents pass on generic risks to daughters. The second role of genetics lies in the genetic make-up of the person at risk. It may be the case that the genetic make-up of individuals makes them more or less susceptible to cancer-causing agents in the environment. A good example is that of skin cancer. Some individuals and races inherit dark pigmentation which is capable of preventing the cancer-causing effects of ultraviolet sunlight. Black people very rarely get the kind of skin cancer called melanoma. Other races are born with complexions which mean they are at risk from the effects of environmental cancer-causing agents. Fair-skinned people are at risk from melanoma if they get sunburn. This is the second sense in which we can consider cancer in relation to genes.*36\194\4*

Most trials are comparisons of one drug versus no drugs, one drug versus another drug, or one drug given in different doses. Participants in a clinical trial usually have to meet a specified requirement—they must have a certain CD4 count, for instance, or a certain opportunistic infection.     These requirements are adhered to strictly. Though such strictness is frustrating to both the investigator and the potential participant, it is necessary for the trial to be a valid test of a drug and for the FDA to approve the drug.     Once in the trial, participants are assigned to groups called treatment arms. What the treatment arms are depend on what the trial is testing: one treatment arm might be high doses of a drug and another arm low doses; one arm might be one drug and the other arm another drug; one arm might be one drug and another arm no drug at all. In trials involving two or more arms, the participant is assigned to a treatment arm randomly, like flipping a coin. Random assignment is a process over which neither the participant nor the investigator has any control. This is necessary if the trial is to be scientifically credible.     The purpose of a trial is to compare one treatment arm against another. Some trials, called placebo control trials, compare a drug to a placebo, a pill that has no effect on the body. Placebo trials are done because people taking any pill, including a placebo, feel better not necessarily because of the physiological effect of the drug, but because of the psychological effect of taking a drug that might help. For example, 60 percent of the people treated with any drug, placebo or not, for arthritis claim that it improves their symptoms. The necessity for a placebo trial is less when the effects being evaluated are objective: weight, blood counts, tests for the virus, or frequency of opportunistic infections. Some effects, however, are more subjective and cannot easily be measured by scientific yardsticks: the sense of well-being, the level of fatigue, the number of headaches. For these more subjective effects, a placebo control trial is more important. In most trials, the results of a trial are evaluated in terms of both subjective and objective effects.     It should be emphasized that the rule of clinical trials is that, if a drug is known to work, no treatment can be a placebo; in that case, the drug known to work becomes the standard for comparison. Furthermore, once the trial shows a clear benefit, the trial must stop. Thus, in the AZT trials, when the analysis of data in September 1986 showed nineteen deaths in the placebo arm and only one death in the arm receiving AZT, the trial was promptly stopped and everyone was given AZT. Assurance on this point is a matter of medical ethics.     The best way to make the comparison in any trial is to double-blind. Double-blinding means that neither investigator nor participant knows which drug or which dose the participant is receiving. Since both investigator and participant are likely to have biases, double-blinding ensures that results will be evaluated objectively.     Although double-blinding is preferred, in some instances it is simply not realistic. For example, when the trial is to find out which way to administer the drug, by pill or by vein, proper double-blinding would have one treatment arm receive the drug by vein and a placebo by pill, and the other treatment arm receive the drug by pill and placebo by vein. But receiving a drug intravenously is inconvenient and can be risky, and it might be inappropriate for participants to receive placebo by vein simply to maintain the blind.     Not all trials are comparisons: some trials, called pilot trials (like pilot TV shows), simply gather enough background information to see if a larger trial would be justified. Other trials compare a new drug to an old drug tested previously—called a historical control. Many times, in an effort to gather additional information, the drug is just given with no second arm for comparison.*185\191\2*

It is generally agreed that people usually eat more than their requirements. This leads to obesity, which is one of the most important causes of diseases of modern civilization and most degenerative diseases, including cancer. Studies on animals conducted by Dr. Issels indicate that those animals that were allowed to eat as much as they wished had 5.3 times more spontaneous cancer tumours than those animals that fasted every second day. During both the World Wars and immediately thereafter, when there was scarcity of food, cancer and other degenerative diseases virtually disappeared. The incidence of cancer again increased when food rationing was withdrawn. Even the National Cancer Institute in the United States acknowledges the relationship between overeating and cancer.
For the same reasons, it has generally been observed that a high calorie diet and consequent increase in body weight beyond the optimum, increase the chances of developing cancer, especially in elderly men.
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Usually, the person wants reassurance from the doctor, but if he or she isn’t available, the office staff may be asked instead. One person was certain all the staff in her surgeon’s office thought she was “crazy.” “I go there all the time to ask if I look okay. They look the other way when they see me coming. I know I’m driving them out of their minds.”
Dwayne had seen 5 dentists, 4 dermatologists, and 16 plastic surgeons. He disliked “everything” about his appearance, which he described in the following way: “I must be an alien from another planet because I look so strange. I was totally obsessed with getting surgery. It’s all I talked about. My girlfriend threatened to leave me if I got it. None of the doctors wanted to treat me. The dentists said braces wouldn’t help me. One of the dermatologists said I should just wash my hair more. Fifteen surgeons refused to treat me because they said I looked fine. One of the surgeons said it was a good thing I didn’t have much money, because I’d be mutilated if I did. I finally got a nose job from one surgeon, but it didn’t make me look any better.”
Dwayne was so desperate for more surgery that he was thinking of going to another country where it would be easier to get it, or threatening suicide if a surgeon didn’t agree to do it. He was also considering getting into a car accident so he could destroy his face and have it completely reconstructed. “That way,” he said, “insurance would pay for it.”
Mac had been turned down for surgery many times because the surgeons said he looked fine. “But I kept going back to them, and going to new surgeons, trying to find one who would do it. I know when they saw me, they said, ‘Oh no, it’s him again!’” Finally, in desperation, Mac tried to break his nose with a hammer so a surgeon would agree to operate. As he explained, “That way, something would have to be done.”
A Japanese psychiatrist has referred to people with BDD who obtain repeated surgery as “polysurgery addicts.” This description fit a 52-year-old homemaker, who’d had 23 different surgical procedures. “I kept trying to make mvself look okay,” she told me. “I had surgery after surgery, but I was never really happy with the results. My solution was to get more! I was addicted to plastic surgery.”
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When we are tense we tighten up the sternomastoid muscle, which runs down the side of the neck, and this causes us to pull back our heads and jut the chin forward. This unnatural position causes a ripple of tension to go down the spine, through the pelvis, and even continue to the feet. This is why very tense people complain of jelly legs’. Imagine a column of dominoes set up; when the first one (the head) is tilted, the rest fall over. The importance of what you do with your head and shoulders cannot be overemphasized; after all, the head is such a heavy organ – about 14-21 lbs – that if it is not balanced, there is bound to be trouble.
How to Balance the Head
Sit on a chair with the spine straight, but not tensed. Look a few feet in front of you at the floor, (if your eyes are down you cannot shorten the muscles at the side of the neck), keeping your shoulders down, and raise your eyes enough to look comfortably around the room – this is the balanced position for your head. The chin is pointing downwards, not poking out in front. Whoever taught us to have our backs straight, heads up, shoulders back and chins up did us a great disservice; this is an unnatural position for the head and spine.
The Alexander Technique is one of the most successful methods of learning correct posture and how to move without tension. If you have a teacher near you it would be money well spent. Yoga is also very helpful.
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An amazing number of people come saying, ‘My doctor says I have low blood sugar and need to take frequent drinks with sugar.’ This chapter will show that in fact the opposite is true and that taking sugar makes the symptoms worse by making the pancreas work even harder. Hypoglycaemia could be said to be the opposite to diabetes. In diabetes the pancreas fails to produce the chemical called insulin which enables us to burn the food we eat to produce energy. In hypoglycaemia the situation is the reverse; the pancreas is over-stimulated, usually because of nervous exhaustion, and produces too much insulin. This causes the food we eat to be burned up too quickly and we cannot maintain the levels of blood glucose necessary to function normally.
The results are unpleasant physical effects such as a rapid heartbeat and feeling faint; because the brain cannot store glucose there are also unpleasant brain effects such as anxiety, depression, panic attacks and neurotic behaviour. If you eat sugary foods, particularly when you are very hungry, the pancreas – which is already jittery and in top gear – pushes out more insulin than is necessary to cope with the sugar. The result is a rapid drop in blood sugar levels, and as we have seen the result is a flood of adrenalin.
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We measure blood levels about two to three weeks after we start a new drug or change a dose to assure that we have the drug level in the range we had expected and that the child is not near the toxic range. If there are signs of toxicity, especially if the child is on more than one drug, we use the blood level to determine if the toxicity is caused by the drug and which drug should be decreased. We measure the level if the child is continuing to have seizures to see where in the “range” we are and to determine how much we should increase the dose. If the child is doing well, with seizures under control and without toxicity, we measure the level once or twice a year to assure that nothing has changed and that the child is taking the drug regularly. The medical community calls this consistency in taking medication “compliance.” Lack of compliance, “non-compliance,” is a major factor in recurrent seizures. Measuring the level occasionally when the child is doing well enables us to know what level is effective for controlling seizures in that child.
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Pills which reduce the blood glucose level are commonly used in Britain but less frequently in North America, although they are now becoming more widely available there. They are of two main types: sulphonylurea drugs such as chlorpropamide, glibenclamide, gliclazide glipizide, glucuronide; and the biguanides of which the only form in current use is metformin. Sulphonylureas act by increasing both pancreatic insulin production and the use of glucose in tissues. Metformin has no effect on insulin production but reduces glucose absorption from the gut and improves its utilization at tissue level. Therefore, pills are only useful for people with diabetes who are still producing their own insulin, even though in insufficient quantities. Sometimes a sulphonylurea is combined with metformin. Different sulphonylurea drugs act for different lengths of time, for example, chlorpropamide is very long-acting and taken once a day, whereas glipizide and tolbutamide are short-acting and are taken one to three times a day. Other sulphonylureas are taken once or twice a day. Adjustment of the dose of pills is possible, although to a lesser extent than for insulin injection. While there is no upper limit to the dose of insulin and it can be increased as necessary according to blood glucose measurements, there are maximum safe doses of pills. It is important that you know what these are before considering adjusting your own dose. Each agent will also have its own dose range and practical way of altering the dose (for example, it may be difficult to break some pills in half). It may take several days before you notice any effect from a change in your pill dose (chlorpropamide takes about a week). Ask your doctor about the characteristics of your particular oral hypoglycemic drug and how you could adjust the dose yourself. It is more common to need an increase in dose than a decrease, but people on oral agents can develop hypoglycemia and any suspicion of this should lead to an immediate dose reduction and a prompt discussion with your adviser. One in three people taking glibenclamide experience hypoglycemia.
In order to use your pills effectively consider how they work. The pill has to be swallowed, its covering is digested away and then it dissolves in digestive juices. It is gradually absorbed through the intestinal wall into the blood stream. It then has to travel to where it acts. On the way from the intestine it will pass through the liver and some of it may be removed and broken down at this point. The blood drug levels may not peak for one or two hours (or longer in the case of chlorpropamide) after you have swallowed it. Gradually over the next day or so, the drug will be broken down and cleared from the body. Most sulphonylureas are cleared by the kidney and so levels will build up in the blood stream if your kidneys are not working properly. This increases the risk of hypoglycemia. Gliquidone and gliclazide are primarily cleared by the liver and these, and the shorter-acting tolbutamides are better for people with kidney disease (although caution is still necessary). Older people are at higher risk of hypoglycemia and chlorpropamide and glibenclamide are usually avoided in the elderly. Gliclazide, glipizide or tolbutamide may be better.

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There are numerous factors which play a role in the development of a cancer, but the prime cause of cancer is not known. Certain cancer-causing substances, known as carcinogens, however, increase the chances of getting the disease. About 80 per cent of cancers are caused by environmental factors. Many cancers are caused by habits, customs and usages.

Smoking
The most important cause of cancer is excessive smoking. This has been firmly established by various research studies conducted all over the world. These studies have shown that excessive smoking causes cancer of the lungs, stomach, respiratory organs, lips and mouth.
Approximately 40 per cent of male cancers are linked with tobacco, a known cancer-causing agent. The consumption tobacco and slaked lime has been linked with cancer of the tongue, lips, mouth and throat. Cigarettes are linked with lung and throat cancers.

Alcohol
Alcohol is injurious to health. Its excessive use can lead to development of cancer and many other serious diseases.
It can increase the risk of cancers of the upper and lower digestive tract, liver, prostate and breast. Those who consume excessive alcohol are particularly prone to colon cancer.
Smoking and drinking together makes matters worse. According to a study of European men by the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, the combination of heavy smoking and drinking can make persons 43 times more likely to develop throat cancer and 135 times more apt to get nasal cancer. Heavy beer drinking is especially linked to rectal cancer. Usually, the more alcohol consumed, the greater the risk of various cancers.
Moreover, new research suggests that drinking a lot of alcohol at one time can stimulate cancer to spread, by depressing the immune system. According to Gayle Page of the University of California at Los Angeles, even a few incidences of intoxication at feasts are considered sufficient to promote tumour progression. She says that in animals, the equivalent of four to five drinks in an hour, doubled the number of new lung tumours that had spread from the breast. Persons who are already suffering from cancer should be especially careful and avoid the consumption of alcohol completely.
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