Antidepressants Blog

Tears flow from the eye to the nose via a narrow tube called the nasolachrymal duct or tear duct. About 1 in 50 babies are born with some degree of blockage in one or both of these ducts.

Cause

The cause for a blocked tear duct is uncertain although it is thought to be due to a retained plug of mucus or cells. The blockage is usually present at birth, but may not become obvious until your baby is around 1 month old.

Clinical features

If your baby has a blocked tear duct, his eye will be constantly watering. The eye is otherwise perfectly normal.

Treatment

Massaging the inner lower corner of the eye several times a day can encourage the duct to open, but only do this under guidance from your doctor. Make sure your hands are clean and using your little finger massage in a downward direction starting from the tear sac in the corner of the eye. If despite this treatment the tear duct remains blocked after your child has reached 6 months of age, your doctor may refer you to a specialist, who may suggest passing a fine probe under general anaesthetic to open up the duct.

When to see your doctor

• if there is a greenish discharge from the eye, which may mean the eye has become infected. It is important to stop massaging as soon as you suspect that your child has an eye infection;

• if the tear duct is still blocked after your child has reached 6 months of age.

Cataracts are a clouding over of the lens of the eye and are rare in children. Certain conditions are associated with cataract formation in children, such as the mother contracting rubella during her pregnancy. In most cases the cause is unknown. If left untreated, cataracts can lead to blindness. Surgery is usually indicated.

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    You should never let a boy touch you down there. If you get it

touched, then you will want more touching, and then you just get

more and more, like you just have to have it.

THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL

That’s right. You should never let a boy, or anybody, ever touch your genitals or any part of your body except for two purposes. One is for health, when a doctor or nurse or some professional person is trying to help you. The other is for love, for loving for a long long time. You should decide if you will let someone touch you or whether or not you will touch someone based on whether or not you love that person. It’s that simple. When someone wants to touch you, it should be to help or to love, and in both cases the person should have earned your trust so you believe that he or she is giving the real reason for touching. One more important thing to know about this is that even if someone does touch you, it is not like you jumped off a cliff and can’t stop. You can stop anytime, and you can, if you want to, just touch and touch without going any further. Touching someone you love, letting that someone touch the one thing that God gave you that you can see, your body, is the most special act in the world.

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I have tried holding back, gritting my teeth, thinking terrible thoughts, even biting my own cheek. Nothing works. I cannot control it. 1 just come too quick for her, probably for anybody.

HUSBAND

One of the major paradoxes of clinical sex therapy is that the more men try to control themselves, the less control they have. There is absolutely no reason to control ejaculation, to time the sex act, to work toward simultaneous fulfillment and punctual penile performance.

Masters and Johnson originally defined’ ‘premature ejaculation” as a situation in which a man ejaculated too soon for his partner to be orgasmic. A corollary to this definition is “If you finish your meal before me, you are a premature eater.” Men do not ejaculate for women. There is no such thing as a “mature ejaculation” any more than there can be tardy female orgasm. Like sneezes, ejaculations happen as a natural human reflex. We respond as a system. We cannot be late for each other because we are happening with each other.

Sex manuals and clinics have focused considerable attention on techniques to control ejaculation. The well-publicized “squeeze technique” through which the partner grabs the end of the penis and squeezes hard before the man ejaculates, has been used to “train” men to last longer. This approach has been around for decades, and we now have quick-treatment programs for quick ejaculators.

One of the couples in my clinic described their sexual encounters as similar to a fire drill. The wife reported, “As soon as I sense he is getting ready to ejaculate, we hurry up and change postures.” The husband added, “Yeah, and when I sense it, too, I start to yell or scream to distract myself. We have to do something to hold back the floodgates.”

To illustrate the absurdity of this couple’s sex life, I asked then to put their favorite piece of music on the tape player. I told them to hold back any emotional reaction, not to tap their fingers or toes, not to enjoy the music. “That’s ridiculous,” reported the wife. “It’s automatic.” This automatic nature of the ejaculation is just the point. Ejaculation is a procreative reflex. It feels good, but it is not one and the same with male response and has little to do with female response.

Another mini-myth is that men are not multiply orgasmic because they have a refractory period. Men, not women, are viewed as being unable to continue sexual response beyond the contraction phase. They may be able to struggle to hold back ejaculation, but once they come, they go. You have already learned in Chapter Five that men and women both have neurological limits to physical response, but emotions and thoughts are not determined by the body. Sexual response is not a one-directional cycle, but a reverberating system.

Super marital sex depends on reassessment of the early sex perspectives. If men or women are in training to learn control, then they will never learn surrender, a surrender to a more natural mind/body interaction allowing for equality of sexual response beyond nonexistent gender-dependent limitations.

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The natural detoxification processes performed by our body can be greatly accelerated with your conscious help, thereby providing the basis for spectacular recovery and healing of your body.

Notice, that many toxins accumulate in your body over your entire lifespan, and it may take a considerable amount of time to purify your body. However, when you actively assist your body in the detoxification process, using techniques described in this chapter, you should notice significant health improvement almost immediately.

Some of the most effective natural detoxification techniques are described below. Please read the information below with careful attention, making sure that you understand everything thoroughly without a doubt. Your complete understanding is necessary for your own safety and comfort.

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Some strains of the parasite are now showing resistance to the drugs used to prevent its development and travellers may not have the protection they think they have.

The parasite lives in the salivary gland of the female mosquito, and, when she bites man, can enter the bloodstream. The parasites move to the liver and begin maturing. This process may take six to 11 days and produces no symptoms.

The high fever associated with malaria is due to the release of parasites into the blood. The fever recurs every second or third day, depending on the type of parasite.

The Spanish Jesuits in Peru, some 400 years ago, noted that the native Indians used an extract from the bark of the cinchona tree to treat the fever of malaria and brought this treatment back to Europe. The extract responsible for this effect is quinine and this drug is still used.

In endemic areas, most children acquire the infection early and are subject to recurrent bouts of illness.

Those who survive seem to develop a partial immunity and come to terms with the chronic infection. Bouts of acute fever then become rare although persistent infection can lead to chronic anaemia, liver damage and enlargement of the spleen.

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Some cancers are slow growing and also spread slowly. They are still often confined to the site from which they arose when they are first detected. On the other hand, some cancers spread early and may be widespread throughout the body before the diagnosis is made. These latter cancers are difficult to treat.

If there are too many cancer cells they may overwhelm the body’s defences. Once treatment has been used and most of the cancer cells removed by surgery or other means, the body’s natural defences may then overcome the remaining cancer cells and so lead to cure.

The treatment of cancer is usually a team approach.

Surgery remains the most often employed method of treatment. The primary growth is removed, sometimes along with the draining lymph glands to which the cancer may have spread. Some cancer cells are sensitive to radiation and so the tumor or the lymph glands may be irradiated before or after surgery. Chemotherapy is rather a non-specific method of killing cancer cells using drugs. These drugs are not specific and kill normal body cells as well as cancer cells. However, they act on those cells which are reproducing themselves at the greatest rate which is why they kill more cancer cells than normal cells.

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One schoolchild in every seven suffers from recurrent abdominal pain yet, in most cases, no specific disease can be found.

Many of these children were in the past, suspected of suffering from appendicitis and had their appendices removed. It was often embarrassing for the doctor when, after an interval, the pains recurred.

A significant number of these children have mothers who suffer from migraine and who have suffered from recurrent abdominal pains in their own childhood. Singling out mothers is not sexist, as migraine is much more common in women than men.

Many of these children will later go on to develop migraine themselves. Food allergy is also a popular diagnosis to account for these episodes of pain. As it is now realised that food allergy is a common cause of migraine, the link between the two becomes more obvious.

Recurrent abdominal pains in childhood or the periodic syndrome may respond to a variety of treatments, reassurance, elimination diets, sedatives and anti-migraine drugs.

Surgery should be reserved for cases of definite appendicitis.

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A medical system all its own, homeopathy treats disease by administration of a minute dose of a remedy that would in a healthy person produce symptoms of the disease being treated. Although homeopaths do not believe in surgery and avoid prescribing prescription drugs, they are trained medical doctors who have also trained in herbalism and nutrition. (“Homeopathy” is practiced, in one way, within the traditional medical establishment. Vaccines against diseases like polio, measles, smallpox, and other contagious and potentially life-threatening diseases are actually comprised of minute qualities of active viruses.) Homeopathically, the body reacts by stimulating the immune system to fight the illness through self-healing. Homeopathic doctors give diluted doses of substances to stimulate the immune system, although vaccines are given to people when they are well, not ill with symptoms of the disease.

Homeopathy, then, uses the familiar technique of “like cures like”; that is, the cure is found within the system of the disorder. One remedy that homeopaths work with in some cases of endometriosis is a distillation of healthy human placenta. The placenta is boiled down, then dried and ground to powder form, it is given with other herbs to restore viral essence of the basic life force in the body. It is often given to women who suffer from infertility, excessive menstruation, or lack of menstruation. A homeopathic diagnosis would be necessary to determine the right quantity of placenta for you, or determine if it was right for you at all. In my opinion, homeopathy might work for some women, but would not be right for others. Bach case must be viewed individually.

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An itch is one of the commonest complaints relating to the skin. Frequently it is unaccompanied by any visible causative disease. Although everyone knows what an itch is, it is nevertheless difficult to define. The most widely accepted definition might be: ‘that unpleasant sensation which provokes the desire to scratch1. Itching is an important symptom of many diseases of the skin, and also of internal disorders. It also warrants attention because of the further damage to the skin that would be caused by continued scratching.

Although itching has been extensively studied, its causes are ill understood. However any discussion of itching must refer to the physiology, so that the limitations of treatment may be understood. Itching, then, is a disagreeable sensation produced by the action of stimuli of a harmful nature on the skin surface. It is a signal of actual or potential danger to the skin. The purpose of the reflex action of scratching is to remove the causative agent from the body surface.

It is thought that a wide variety of stimuli and noxious agents may liberate chemicals in the skin which then act on peripheral nerves, eliciting the itch sensation. These chemicals include histamine, bradykine, protease, and prostaglandins. Throughout the skin there are many itch receptors. On the forearm these points lie approximately one millimetre apart. However they are more closely set in areas about orifices such as the mouth or anus. The small skin nerves then carry the impulses to the spinal cord, from where they are transmitted via the pain fibres to the brain. It is not yet understood how scratching relieves itching, but possibly it disturbs the rhythm of the impulses travelling towards the spinal cord. Scratching may also simply damage the nerve fibres which are conveying the itch.

Inherent in the problem of itching is its subjective and elusive nature. Some people are Itchers, others are not. Some itch intensely, others not at all. Allowing for this variation, the absence or presence of an itch, as well as its severity, may be of great diagnostic value. Of importance, also, might be the intensity and location of the itch, as well as the time of occurrence and the factors which provoke or relieve it.

As with pain, there are always two aspects of itching—how it is perceived and a person’s reaction to it. The latter has many psychological components which influence it: such factors as anxiety, tension and fear, all of which will aggravate itching. In some individuals, itching is only relieved by the infliction of self-trauma, which replaces the itching with soreness, stinging or pain. In others, itching and rubbing is associated with pleasurable emotions, which have a sexual components; this reaction is termed orgasme cutane’.

It must be remembered that an itch is a symptom not a disease, and that there are a vast number of causes of itching. However, the vast majority of individuals who itch without visible evidence of skin disease, do so for some psychological reason.

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Adenomyosis refers to endometriosis growing within the thick muscular coat of the uterus, the myometrium. The symptoms include enlargement of the uterus, and heavy or painful bleeding, and the group of women affected is similar to that for endometriosis. Its presence may be suggested by vaginal ultrasound, biopsy of the myometrium or magnetic resonance imaging.

While it is sometimes possible to remove endometriosis by cutting or burning it out, this is more difficult where adenomyosis is concerned. Drug therapies can provide profound pain relief for both endometriosis and adenomyosis while in use, but there is no evidence that they eradicate the unwanted tissue. After therapy stops, the disease persists in more than three out of four women and pain often recurs within a few weeks or months. Many women consider hysterectomy when endometriosis or adenomyosis continues to cause severe and persistent problems despite other treatments.

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