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Pain Relief-Muscle Relaxers
The anti-gravitational force created by posture-controlling muscles and general muscle tone is the most important factor for back health. Trauma, nutritional deficiencies, birth defects (like spina bifida), osteoarthritis, polymyalgia rheumatica etc appear in a relatively rare number of cases. Scientific medicine claims that the majority of backache cases originate from the discs and joints of the spine. Muscular and ligament sprains or inflammation form the second largest group of backache. If the anti-gravitational force in the living body is what determines the state of delicate spinal structures like joints, discs etc, the lack of it leading to backache and other related problems, then why haven’t we looked at this over the centuries? Why did medicine go in the direction of treating symptoms only (pain, inflammation, nerve damage, scoliosis etc)? A branch called ‘orthopaedics’ (which someone once suggested to me translated as ‘bone setting’) was created, aimed at treating bones, joints and related hard tissues, which actually have hardly any primary role to play in the genesis of back-related problems. The bones and nerves are the final sufferers or victims of the weakening of another system, namely the muscular system, part of which, in a conscious state, produces an upward thrust that maintains the erect posture. This part of the muscular system is less voluntary and more involuntary, like the diaphragm muscles. Therefore, exercising it requires special skills as these muscles are under dual control, unlike skeletal muscles which are controlled entirely by the conscious brain.
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Pain Relief-Muscle Relaxers Opium is a herbal remedy with an even longer history than willow bark. Like aspirin, it has spawned hundreds of descendants, so aspirin and opium together are responsible for at least 95 per cent of the analgesic medicines used today. Unfortunately, unlike aspirin, opium has gathered a disgraceful public image since Victorian times. For three thousand years, opium was used to produce sleep and dreams, the origin of the phrase ‘pipe dreams’. Although opium and its derivatives, morphine and heroin, have become associated in the puritanical mind with misuse by social drop-outs, opium was used for centuries as a means of relaxation. Robert Clive, who conquered and organized India for the British, adopted the local custom and used opium regularly for the rest of his life. Where the harried New York businessman may drink his evening Martini to relax, his equally powerful Chinese rival in Singapore smokes his evening opium pipe for the same purpose.
By the nineteenth century, physicians had begun to realize that opium was not just a way of knocking out patients into a nearly unconscious state. By this century, it was finally realized that low doses had a purely analgesic action while leaving the patient thinking in a clear fashion. The advance can be attributed to Dame Cicely Saunders, who invented the hospice movement for the care of terminally ill patients. She and her colleague Robert Twycross decided to combine the best of modern medicine with age-old tender loving care to bring comfort to cancer patients who became dominated by their pains in the anxious shambles of their last weeks.
Doctors up to that time had joined the generally held opinion that narcotics were dangerous and that comfort was brought at the price of addiction to rapidly escalating doses, which led to killing the patient. A cool, calm analysis of the effect of narcotics demolished this view and showed that doses carefully titrated to bring down pain to a bearable level led instead to a patient in comfort with clear thinking. The success of carefully controlled and monitored narcotics for the benefit of cancer patients in pain spread to other problems, such as the control of postoperative pain and pain in childbirth.
The variable herbal mixture of opium was analyzed into its constituent components in the nineteenth century. The most powerful fraction was found to be morphine, which was synthesized, while a weaker component, codeine, was also found to be effective against less severe pains. This discovery set off the expected search for related compounds in the hope that one could be found which was a pure analgesic, which could not be misused as an addictive social toy, and which would not stop the patient breathing when high doses were given. The 150-year search for this pure analgesic has failed, but that has not stopped the drug companies from trying. If you enjoy black humour, you may be interested in the late nineteenth-century discovery by the Bayer Company of a morphine derivative which they named ‘heroine’ as a particularly powerful narcotic that they claimed was free of an addiction potential. How wrong can you be!
Work in the past century has generated hundreds of compounds with slightly varying properties but hugely varying potency. One, called etorphine, is 10,000 times more potent than morphine. This is the drug used in darts by wildlife experts to immobilize big game. I have made it a personal rule never to remember drug doses because it was always safest to look up the dose. However, I make an exception for etorphine, for which the dose for elephants is one milligram per ton. A large elephant gently lies down if shot with a syringe containing 3.5 milligrams of etorphine. Once the veterinarians have done their job, the same dose of an antagonist is injected and within minutes the elephant stands up and wanders off with a puzzled expression.
Not surprisingly, a drug effective as a narcotic always has unwanted effects even if it is used as an analgesic. Narcotics produce constipation, and opium has been used for centuries to control diarrhoea by taking advantage of this side effect of gut paralysis. High doses of narcotics depress respiration, so weak narcotics such as codeine are included in most cough mixtures. When pain fails to respond to one of the aspirin-like drugs, it is common to move the treatment to a mixture combining an aspirin-like component with a weak narcotic. The widely advertised strong painkillers which are available over the counter contain these mixtures. Much commercial and scientific ingenuity has gone into inventing mixtures that will optimize the desired effect and reduce the unwanted ones.
Only in the past twenty years has the rationale for the use of narcotics against pain become apparent. This was revealed in a series of very surprising steps. First, Tony Yaksh in the United States searched the brain by giving small, localized injections to discover where morphine was acting to reduce pain. He found two areas, one in the midbrain, the other in the spinal cord where sensory messages were arriving from the tissues. Next, Kosterlitz in Aberdeen, as described before, ended a fifty-year search by discovering that the brain was itself producing its own narcotic-like substances. These endorphins, as they are known, were made by nerve cells which were particularly concentrated in the two target areas discovered by Yaksh. Finally, Snyder found that the brain also made special protein receptors which snapped up narcotic molecules and changed the excitability of the nerve cells on which they resided.
With this series of discoveries, it was possible to put together a most curious story. In the first place, the brain contains its own system for controlling the arrival of pain-producing messages. One part of this system exists as a barrier zone in the spinal cord where the sensory nerve fibres enter. The other part exists in the midbrain, from which region control orders descend into the spinal cord and further reduce the incoming message. When narcotics are given as a medicine, they penetrate the brain and stimulate the very system which the brain uses to control its own sensory input. There was an immediate practical consequence of the discovery of the location of the pain control systems. Because the spinal cord was one site of action, and because it is simple to make a needle penetrate to the surface of the spinal cord, it was possible to apply morphine precisely to the site where it is carrying out its useful action. This has grown into the widespread use of epidural narcotics, where a strong analgesia can be produced in an area of the body with a dose ten times smaller than that needed if the whole body is treated by tablets or injections. Because this targeted dose is small, the side effects, produced by the effect of narcotics on distant parts of the body, do not occur.
Cannabis is another herbal remedy with a terrible social reputation. It is going through a surprising revival as a therapeutic analgesic, which repeats with a gap of twenty years the story just described of the emergence of narcotics from being drugs of social menace to ones of therapeutic value with rational understanding. Cannabis has been used for millennia as folk medicine for poorly defined problems and for social entertainment. Queen Victoria used tincture of cannabis for her period pains. In this century, patients began to report beneficial effects of low doses of cannabis in very specific conditions including nausea and pain in multiple sclerosis. In the hostile social atmosphere, where the use of cannabis and narcotics were equated with abuse by inadequate people, these reports were dismissed or ignored.
In the meantime, scientists were at work with the traditional series of investigations like those into opium. Cannabis was purified by Meshulam in Jerusalem and found to contain a series of active compounds called cannabinoids. It was found that the brain itself was normally producing cannabis-like compounds. Finally, to round off the progress which imitates the investigation of narcotics, special receptors tuned to react specifically to natural and synthetic cannabinoids were found to be widespread in the brain and body tissues. While cannabinoids are at present only used in legal practice to control certain types of vomiting, it seems highly likely that they will also emerge to control some pains.
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Men's Health-Erectile Dysfunction By fundamental equality is meant not deadening uniformity, but agreement in those traits of character which ordinarily form the basis of friendship. In other words, in order for a marriage to be happy, a pair must not be merely lovers but also friends, in the deepest sense. There is a popular saying that opposites attract one another. In the first place, this is generally not true. In the second place, if it should happen to be true in a particular case, the person who feels such an attraction is foolish to heed it. While one cannot deny that a certain amount of diversity is stimulating and pleasant, yet the fact remains that most friendships, especially durable ones, are based on a community of interests, tastes and ideals. The same is true of successful marriages.
One cannot despise the taste, deplore the ideals or be bored by the interests of a wife or a husband without finding that this lack of communion is carried over into the romantic relationship also. Before marriage the overwhelming urge toward unity, which is the sublimation of the inhibited sex impulse, makes all differences sink into insignificance. But after marriage, when sexual inhibitions and the consequent illusion of unity are removed, the differences assert themselves and eventually may destroy all the love which temporarily submerged them. As Dr. Joseph Collins says, a young woman who likes poetry and music should beware of a young man to whom these have never appealed, but who, under the spell of love, says that he knows he would enjoy them with her. After they are married, he will read the sport page, as before, not poetry, and when she wants to go to a concert, he will prefer to stay home and play poker. And this divergence in taste may in time alienate them from one another—literally make them strangers to one another, though living under the same roof.
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HIV What about the chronic disease that sparked the cur-rent concern over emerging diseases? The conventional wisdom is that AIDS arose from a secluded area in Africa where a virus was transmitted to humans from another primate, spread locally, and then spread globally within a decade or so. If this interpretation is correct, the AIDS pandemic, together with the lack of similar novel pandemics throughout the past two centuries, gives some perspective on the threat of new pandemics over the next few centuries. The threat would be real over the long run but probably not imminent over the short run. Yet according to a different hypothesis for the origin of AIDS, most thoroughly presented by Edward Hooper in his book The River, the pandemic may have been more controllable than is generally believed. The control in this case would not have been generated from a surveillance system or an ability to combat the pathogen after it was globally embedded. Rather, the control could have been generated by better safeguards of medical procedures.
Resolving the question of the origin of AIDS bears on the broader theme of where the future threats to human health will come from. AIDS is a chronic malady. The arrival of the AIDS pandemic therefore accords with the idea that the stealth infections are the modern threats for the most prosperous countries; but the various explanations for the origin of AIDS implicate different social, geographic, and biological sources of the AIDS pandemic. AIDS is the only twentieth-century example of a new kind of pandemic plague; its emergence therefore provides the only hard evidence of how a pathogen has emerged—and therefore can emerge—in modern times from a local source to cause a fundamentally new kind of pandemic plague. If we ignore this bit of hard evidence, we risk our future.
Hooper argues that the contamination of polio vaccines used during the late 1950s in sub-Saharan Africa is the source of the AIDS pandemic. This idea has surfaced in several places since the early 1990s. It has been dismissed by many experts, often with ridicule. But ridicule from experts is not necessarily a good reason for rejecting an idea. To move toward the truth, we need to assess the evidence.
Viruses need to grow in host cells. So to generate polioviruses in sufficient abundance for use in polio vaccines, virologists grew the viruses in cells taken from other primates, such as green monkeys. The cells and viruses were grown together in flasks containing media suitable for cell growth. After the viruses had replicated to high densities, they were separated from the monkey cells, media, and cellular debris left in the media by the viral feast. The viruses were then used in the next phase of vaccine preparation, and everything else was discarded. Ideally only the poliovirus would be isolated during this step, but the laboratory procedures that separate polioviruses at this stage often fail to exclude other viruses that might have been living in the cells that were taken from the monkeys and that reproduced in the cell culture right along with the poliovirus. Without adequate safeguards, these viruses could inadvertently be harvested with the polioviruses and included in the vaccine as contaminants.
Just this kind of contamination of polio vaccines occurred during the 1950s and early 1960s. A particularly worrisome contaminant, a virus called SV40 (for simian virus number 40), was inoculated into children along with the killed polio vaccine virus. The procedure used for killing the poliovirus during the preparation of the Salk vaccine did not kill all of the SV40s. The concerns over contamination of oral polio vaccines have generally been even greater because oral polio vaccines introduce live viruses and so were not subjected to treatments that inactivate poliovirus and might similarly inactivate other stowaway viruses. Indeed, some viruses have been found in live polio vaccines, including at least one retrovirus, the family of viruses to which HIV belongs.
The transmission of SV40 in polio vaccines lends some credibility to the possibility that a precursor of HIV could have similarly contaminated cells used for the production of polioviruses. This “contaminated vaccine” hypothesis offers a mechanism for what looks like a simultaneous transfer of different immunodeficiency viruses to humans from simians (nonhuman primates such as monkeys and chimpanzees). The names used for these viruses can be confusing. When one of them is isolated from humans it is called HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). When one is isolated from a simian (a monkey or chimpanzee) it is called SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus). HIV experts believe that different HIVs have arisen from the transfer of different SIVs from simians to humans. The pandemic HIVs belong to one half of the HIV evolutionary tree and are referred to as HIV-Is. The pandemic HIVs make up the main cluster of viruses in the HIV-1 tree and are referred to as group M, M being short for “main.” Most of the other HIV-Is are found in West Central Africa, particularly Cameroon and Gabon; they are collected into a group called O, for “outgroup.” The other half of the HIVs arose in West Africa and are referred to as HIV-2s. The HIV-Is are most similar to a group of SIVs found in chimpanzees; the HIV-2s are most similar to a group of SIVs found in sooty mangabeys.
Evolutionary relationships among the different HIVs and SIVs can be deduced by comparing the sequences of building blocks that make up the genes of the different viruses. All else being equal, the more similar the genetic sequences of the viruses, the more recent is the last common ancestor shared by the two viruses. These evolutionary trees allow researchers to visualize branching points between different genealogical lineages of viruses. When these family lineages are combined with information about the species from which the viruses were isolated, researchers can speculate about when viruses may have moved from one species to another. The more complete the evolutionary tree, the more reliable the interpretation. Some researchers using this method suggest that several viruses recently entered humans from simians over a short period of time, perhaps a decade or even less.
If this interpretation is true, it raises a perplexing question. Why would immunodeficiency viruses stay put in simians for thousands of years and then suddenly, within a decade, be transferred several times into humans? The contaminated-vaccine hypothesis offers an explanation: cells used for oral polio vaccines were contaminated with several different SIVs that were transmitted to humans during the first decade of the oral polio vaccination program, thus generating several different lineages of HIVs.
Some incarnations of the contaminated-vaccine hypothesis can be dismissed on the basis of available information. Because monkey kidney cells were the standard for growing polioviruses, and SIVs were present in green monkeys, early attention, prompted by New Hampshire attorney Walter Kyle, focused on this possible source of HIV. Critics rightly pointed out that the SIVs found in green monkeys were not the viruses implicated in the origin of HIV. The genealogical trees instead implicated SIVs found in sooty mangabeys for the origin of HIV-2, and SIVs found in chimpanzees for HIV-1. Hooper and other defenders of the contaminated-vaccine hypothesis pointed out that many different primates may have been used as sources for cells, perhaps even chimpanzees and sooty mangabeys. Vaccine researchers in sub-Saharan Africa may have used locally available primates—chimpanzees in one area, green monkeys in another, and mangabeys in still another. This potential for local use confounds explanations of natural origin, which often assume that the presence of similar viruses in humans and nonhuman primates of a given area implies transmission from the primates to the humans by natural means. The contaminated-vaccine hypothesis suggests that the same pattern may arise from artificial transmission because cells from indigenous animals were used to prepare the vaccines of a particular region.
Critics also pointed out that kidney cells were not the right kind of cells for primate immunodeficiency viruses, but defenders responded that the right kind of cells—white blood cells—are often present in cultures of kidney cells that are used in vaccine preparation. White blood cells containing the SIVs could therefore contaminate vaccine stocks made from kidney cells.
The contaminated-vaccine hypothesis was given added weight when the great evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton emphasized the need to evaluate it more rigorously in the foreword to Hooper’s book. The mild-mannered Hamilton had a long track record of putting forward groundbreaking ideas without fanfare, being overlooked, and then, over the ensuing decade or so, being borne out by the evidence. Evolutionary biologists have learned to listen carefully to his soft-spoken assertions. Hamilton did not claim that contaminated vaccine lots introduced a simian virus into humans to create HIV. Rather, in keeping with principled guidelines of scientific inquiry, he suggested that this idea was being too eagerly dismissed without adequate evidence.
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Herbal If you’re like many people, you have probably heard of the reported “miracle memory-enhancing” qualities of ginkgo biloba. Ginkgo biloba is actually an extract from the leaves of a deciduous tree that lives up to 1,000 years, making it the world’s oldest living tree species, one that can be traced back more than 200 million years. The ginkgo was almost destroyed during the last ice age in all regions of the world except China, where it is considered a sacred tree with medicinal properties. Today, ginkgo leaf extracts are among the leading prescription medicines in both Germany and France, where they account for nearly 2 percent of total prescription sales.
Purported benefits are many, and ginkgo biloba is used to treat depression; impotence; premenstrual syndrome; diseases of the eye, such as retinopathy and macular degeneration; and general vascular disease. In particular, it has been shown to improve short-term memory and concentration for individuals with impaired blood flow to the brain due to narrowing of vessels or clogging of key arteries. A Harvard-based study of 202 men and women with mild to moderately severe dementia caused by stroke or Alzheimer’s disease was among the first to promote ginkgo in the United States. After 1 year, the group receiving ginkgo experienced significant improvement in cognitive performance (memory, learning, reading) and had better social functioning (carrying on conversations, recognizing familiar faces) than those in the placebo (non-ginkgo) group. Much of this improvement was believed to be due to the antioxidant properties of the herb, as well as to the blood-thinning properties that seem to improve blood and oxygen flow to clogged blood vessels. Whether this herb works for people with normal blood flow remains largely unexplored. Claims that ginkgo will improve short- and long-term memory in the typical person are not scientifically based.
Most nutritional experts and physicians recommend that people who are considering using this herb take a 40-milligram tablet three times a day for a month or so to determine whether there is any improvement. If there is none, continuing to take this supplement is largely unwarranted.
Also, remember that disturbing memory loss or difficulty thinking, regardless of age, should be checked by a doctor to determine underlying causes.
Because the main action of ginkgo appears to be as a blood thinner, it should not be taken with other blood-thinning agents, such as aspirin, vitamin E, garlic, ginger, the prescription drug warfarin (trade name: Coumadin), or any other medications that list thinning of the blood as a potential side effect. Doing so could increase risk of severe hemorrhage in case of accidents or emergency surgeries or in the event of a stroke or aneurysm. Other reported side effects among a very small number of patients include stomach upset, headache, and dizziness, as well as allergic reactions.
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Gastrointestinal Frustration
The effects of this can be similar to anger. The tension produced upsets the digestion, sleeping patterns and mood. It is useless to treat the bowel and take supplements if you are unwilling to face the cause of your frustration. If the cause is not one that you can turn your back on or tackle with real communication (no matter how scary that might be), then seek counselling for help in adapting to the circumstances before your health, the health of those around you and your relationships with people worsen.
Jealousy
People who have not suffered from this distressing emotion or have been on the receiving end of it often see it as a brief twinge of envy. It can be a great deal more serious than that. It can be a threat to physical and mental health, a common reason for the breakdown of relationships and even a cause of violence. It often comes from deep feelings of insecurity and low self-worth. If this emotion is affecting your life see your doctor and ask for referral to a psychologist for long-term counselling. Do not be ashamed or think this is a trivial reason to seek help. It is not a moral issue. A person would not choose to experience this emotion. It is not your fault but you do have a duty to yourself (your health and happiness are important too) and to those around you to learn how to cope with this.
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Gastrointestinal Offending substances don’t always gain access to the body through the mouth; they can be inhaled or absorbed through the skin. Bearing this in mind perhaps it is time to consider what chemicals you are spraying on your head, under your arms, up your nose and on your skin. Use simple non-perfumed toilet preparations and don’t buy aerosol cans. You could try pure essential oils in the bath; many of them smell wonderful. They may not affect you the way synthetic perfumes do.
It is time also to throw out all the household cleaning agents and get back to simple soaps (non-biological washing powders) and old-fashioned wax furniture polish. The wood likes it better too. There is a whole range of ecological domestic cleaning products. The washing-up liquid has been particularly helpful for many people; a tight chest while washing up is very common in people with chemical allergies. A simple product called Chemico, a pink paste made from powdered rock which has been manufactured in Britain for about seventy years is gentle and safe and cleans everything, sinks, cookers, floors, even windows. It is very cheap here but is now being sold in America at $12 per tin!
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Diabetes Partial seizures have implications different from generalized seizures. Since they start in one particular area of the brain, they may require special evaluation; they may also require the use of particular medications or other therapy. To help the physician determine the proper course, it is important, as noted earlier, for you to focus carefully on the very onset of the seizure and its progression so you may be able to describe it precisely to him.
When seizures start focally in a particular area of the brain, and when they spread slowly enough, in seconds or minutes as in William’s seizure, so that their onset is experienced and witnessed or remembered, this onset is the “aura” or warning, the warning that bigger things are coming.
How do focal seizures spread to become generalized? Why don’t all focal seizures spread? What contains a focal seizure? If we knew the answers to these questions, we would understand far more about epilepsy and be better able to prevent or limit seizures than we are. But we have few answers at the present time. Generalized seizures that appear to start in all parts of the brain simultaneously have no identifiable focal onset. We do not understand their anatomy. It does not make sense for the whole brain spontaneously and suddenly to experience a disruption. Nevertheless, in generalized seizures this is what appears to occur, causing disruptions like staring, stiffening, or shaking.
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Diabetes The standard diet plans don’t work for carbohydrate addicts—and carbohydrate addicts blame themselves. We have now come to understand that they haw been trying to follow diets that are simply not suited to their physical needs.
When you’re shopping for shoes, yon don’t buy just any pair. If the salesman brings you a pair of shoes that don’t fit, you don’t blame yourself, do you? Maybe they’re too small, too large, or too narrow.
Say a friend or relative brings you a pair of shoes, and they don’t fit either. You won’t try to wear them anyway: you’ll find a pair that suits you. Right?
The same is true with eyeglasses, medical prescriptions, top hats, and false teeth. They are right for you or not. Period. You accept that.
But diets are different.
With diets, most of us forget common sense. We pick a diet at random, giving little thought to our needs, our preferences, our strengths, our weaknesses, or specific metabolic levels. We take what may (or may not) be appropriate for someone else, and assume that it should be correct for us. We don’t look at what we need.
Then we blame ourselves when, in the long run, it doesn’t work. The diet that fails us is interpreted as our own failure.
Maybe, just maybe, that’s because it wasn’t an appropriate plan in the first place.
And the Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet just might be.
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Cardio & Blood-Cholesterol Do you get a little breathless on climbing those extra floors, or carrying that extra weight? Has your energy diminished with age? Does your belly protrude a little too much, or do your muscles feel too flabby? If you have answered yes to any of these questions then you are a little unfit. Getting fit doesn’t mean changing your whole life. You don’t need to run 10 miles a day or swim 20 laps of the pool. You don’t need to join a gym, buy special shoes or weights, or become a member of an exclusive health club. The first step to getting fit is to feel the need to do so. Perhaps you have been thinking all along that it’s about time that you got a little exercise, but lacked the will power to start or were not sure about how to go about it. Whether you are young or old, in or out of shape, a heart patient or not, you should make exercise a part of your life, little by little. If you have trouble doing it all alone, exercise with a friend or your spouse. Start an activity that you enjoy, but do start. It’s never too late to take the crucial first step towards fitness!
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Medsblog. About health and medicine
