Health and Shopping Blog

Warning to all who watches their weight. Except that he’s talking about Antarctic minke whales. OK, so when did you last see a minke whale on your bathroom weighing scales? So if you’re holidaying in the north regions this Fall and see a Japanese researcher coming towards you with one of those big samurai swords, you may decide that you don’t want to be a part of the research.

It’s hard to get a whale to stay still long enough to get an accurate reading. And then there are those caliper things, the “fat pinchers”. The Japanese have just published a scientific report in Polar Biology - another of those must-read journals. Kenji Konishi, who works out of the Institute of Cetacean Research in Tokyo, said August 27 that killing was the only way to accurately measure factors such as body weight or fat thickness! Take these Acomplia tablets for six months and then we’ll kill you to find out how much adipose fat you’ve lost. Can’t they just guess? Actually, when it comes to human clinical trials, they use advanced science like tape measures for waists. Acomplia has done well. Participants lose an average 10% of their body weight and an average 3 inches (8 cm) from their waists. Perhaps the minke whales are buying Acomplia online. Let’s not kill them to find out.

Headlines are the life of newspapers. They are often developing people-animal stories. Now this is the ultimate cat story because the headline misses out the vital reference to squirrels. Yes, it was a double attack. But we don’t do sensationalism for its own sake here. We kept it simple. So you have to travel over to Smith Valley in Nevada. Richie’s cat was sick. She had visited with the local veterinarian to get drugs. One day, Richie cut her finger but thought nothing of it as she tended to the cat. Several days later, she was flat on her back with a high fever. It took a month for the lab to identify the problem. Well, back in 1911 (so long time ago?) there was a disease that almost wiped out the squirrel population in Tulare, California so they called it tularemia. Yes, very creative name. One thing - it was highly contagious between humans and animals. How did the cat come to be infected? It’s going to remain a mystery. Hey, do you want to say cat travelled back to visit squirrel relatives? Who knows. It died before we could ask. The good news Doxycycline was an almost instant cure. Just goes to show. Once you know which bacteria are making you sick, you get the right antibiotic and get better fast.

Every year, Xanax has been winning the prize in the “most bought” category. Naturally, Pfizer, likes these annual headlines. They help customers believe this drug is so popular because it really works. The US Government now accepts that prescription medications are routinely abused. You only have to go into the emergency departments of hospitals to see the truth of this. In 2005, there were more than 2 million admissions caused by the non-medical use of drugs. Well, that’s true to some extent. If you take xanax for the right reasons and under proper medical supervision, it does reduce levels of panic and anxiety. Take it for too long or at too high a dose and you’re likely to get hooked. So before you go down this path, think carefully. One of the reasons for this is the easy availability of drugs that can give you a “high” both over-the-counter and through the internet. Add in the longing barrage of advertisements for drugs, and people are persuaded to take FDA-approved medications without worrying about the consequences.

This medication gives you a breathing space. Use that opportunity to get counseling and therapy. In the medium to long term, psychological support is the way to learn how to control your fear and worry. Live life the natural way, don’t pay endlessly for help through a bottle of tablets. The way the world works today, people do need help. Drugs like xanax really do help them to cope with the stress. But it’s not helpful to see drugs as the only solution. Yes, xanax relieves anxiety, but you mustn’t become an addict. You need to change yourself.

And just so you can keep calling global warming a myth, poison ivy is one of the plants responding well to the increases in temperature, humidity and the level of carbon dioxide. You can see it spreading along hedgerows and into your back yard. It’s a misfortune to touch this plant or to touch something that has touched this plant - did you know your pet can pass through a thicket and bring its richness back to you on its fur? This plant is bursting with an oily resin called urushiol. If this penetrates your skin, you’ll almost certainly get blisters and, in due course, a rash. Only a very few people have an immunity from this. For light exposure - you realized the danger immediately and washed the affected area of skin with warm water and plain soap or a solvent like rubbing alcohol - an over-the-counter topical steroid cream will usually be sufficient. If you want to get more serious effect, use Prednisone. Two final thoughts on removing a patch of poison ivy from your yard. Lay in a supply of Prednisone and, wearing gloves, cut the vine and throw it on a bonfire. But watch out. Heat and smoke can lift urushiol particles into the atmosphere so don’t stand down wind of the fire. And if all else has failed, get a goat.

As if you already noticed, summer has arrived. That means we have to get interested in Lyme disease all over again. So let’s get the bad news out of the way first. What does it mean? The number of cases has been increasing dramatically and the infections are getting more virulent. Why is this happening? Because more people are building their houses out in the countryside where there are deer and other animals that carry the ticks. Now add in climate change (yes, global warming is here as well). It’s influencing tick feeding behavior. The result is a surge in the number of serious cases of infection. The good news is that treatment continues to be a steady performer. If you take the pills at least two weeks, ifnfection’ll go away. But over the next two years, there likely to be a change. The Center for Disease Control has begun development of a slow release version of Doxycycline. This may be by injection or by patch for those who are needle-shy. The aim is to replace the tablets with a single therapy active over a two week period. Until this comes out of the lab, you’ll just have to pop the tablets, but life may soon improve. Start taking doxy today, don’t wait!

One of the world’s leading scientists specialising in sports drugs, Dr Robin Parisotto, has gone on the record. It’s official. There are now new uses for existing and some new drugs that will fly under the radar of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s tests. Perhaps some of the better informed athletes have been using these techniques at the Olympics at Beijing. If so, we’ll never know. So what are these new techniques? So, you get the same effect with one-sixteenth of the dose and that makes the dose so much harder to detect. But the most interesting ideas are the use of Cialis and nitrous oxide gas. Yes, friends, inhaling laughing gas makes you go faster, jump higher, and so on. The point is that both operate as vascular dilators - they open up your blood vessels. Blood flows increase and bring more oxygen to those working muscles faster. The advantage of Cialis is that it stays in the body for longer - it’s not called the “weekend” pill for nothing. So the next time you see a runner coming down the street towards you covered in tattoos, popping pills and breathing from a gas canister, this is your next Olympian in training.

I want to talk about the new book about ambien. Gayle Greene has the distinction of being a non-professional member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM). She wins this prize even though not a medical researcher because she is the “patient representative” on the board of the American Insomnia Association, which operates within the AASM’s umbrella. In her spare time (sic), she labours at the Scripps College, Claremont California as Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies. This latest tome (quite heavy at 520 pages) adds to her impressive resume of academic publications. This is a highly personal account by an articulate and intelligent woman who has been afflicted by insomnia for most of her adult life. In one sense, the only person who can really tell you what it is like in a foreign country is one who has been there. For those of us who have always been able to sleep without difficulty, insomnia is like a foreign country, and the idea of having to use a medication like Ambien as the passport to get into sleep is alien. Conventional wisdom always says that insomnia is somehow related to anxiety or stress levels, perhaps aggravated by drinking too many cups of real coffee. Greene comes up with a simple and practical explanation of what insomnia is. Insomnia means nothing more than you cannot get the number of hours of sleep you need to feel good about yourself and function efficiently. There is no reason for this. It is nothing more than a failure to sleep. There should be no pejorative implication. To use stress as an excuse is to blame the person for being weak or neurotic when there is no reason to blame yourself or anyone else. Instead of looking for some psychological explanation or a less judgemental physical cause, we should just accept that it happens to about 20% of the population at one time or another during their lives. Why bother to spend Government money on researching the cause of a condition when private capital has already invented Ambien as a cure for it? She debates what we really understand about cause and effect. It is so easy to get the cart before the horse, or should that be the other way round? Perhaps conventional wisdom has also got things back-to-front. Instead of stress and anxiety being the cause of insomnia, perhaps living with insomnia makes you stressed and anxious. Who is to say in these more modern times, that we did not have disturbed sleep patterns in past times living on the land? Folk tales may tell us that we went to sleep when dusk fell and waited for the cock to crow before waking. But was that actually the case?Such a vast number of people yet so little is spent on researching the condition and its causes. Greene comments that the National Institutes of Health in the United States spent less than $20m in 2005, whereas Sanofi-Aventis spent more than $120m promoting Ambien in the same year. This is neither to praise nor condemn Ambien. It is all a question of priorities. Who can say what the real biological norms were before electricity came along and gave everyone the chance to live through the darkness. As it stands, no researcher can actually explain why we have to sleep nor why some people sleep more than others. Greene describes everything she has tried over the years from relaxation therapies to medication like Ambien, but concludes that, like any intimate relationship, how we relate to sleep is always personal. She is a passionate advocate for greater patient power to persuade disinterested bodies to research insomnia.

Everydays the millions of dollars are being spent on what we cass social medical advertisement. In other countries, such advertising is often banned. Advertising to the medical profession is, however, universal - companies need to inform doctors of the products and their use.

It is easy to dismiss advertising as having little effect on consumer behaviour which is, of course, why companies spend so much on advertising campaigns. In the medical field, the adverts are intended to achieve specific goals:

• to increase brand name awareness;
• to accept links between everyday experiences and medical accidents;
• to understand that the branded medications will remove the causes and return you to normal (whatever that is).

The first adverts appeared in eighties the FDA made a ban to research the effect of the adverts on the public. In 1985, the moratorium was lifted because of fears that it was interfering with freedom of speech. Nowadays we have very balanced ads. The FDA monitors compliance and can instruct a company to withdraw any advertisement it feels does not comply. Interestingly, some pharmaceutical companies now spend more on direct-to-consumer advertising than doctor advertising. Their view is that consumers can affect doctor behaviour.

These simple statements are often combined with personal testimonials and confirmation that use of the medication avoids the feared outcome, in this case, a failure to penetrate or maintain the erection after penetration. This tends to be the core appeal. If erectile dysfunction is the problem, cialis helps you to function normally again. The medication is packaged as a means of emotional security. Trust the pills to get you back to normal. People are praised because they cared about themselves and the effect their condition was having on their partners. By introducing others as victims, guilt at not getting the “cure” is increased - cialis is life-enhancement for both partners. To support this, people are encouraged to begin the art of self-diagnosis and health management. In the advertisements you always see only several symptoms of the illness, bur you believe that illness in the ad is the same as yours. It is uncommon to find the price of the medication mentioned, or any information about whether it is available on health insurance plans.

There is obvious that this advertising educates the public about their options when faced by health problems and teaches them to believe that taking a pill is the best solution. When that medication is only available on prescription, it promotes business to the doctors. Add to this the fact that the word-of-mouth advertising for cialis has been and remains very strong, and it is easy to understand why this medication has taken so big a slice of the market so quickly.

In the area of ED, the advertising for cialis runs through a number of different forms. Like any prescription medication, it is aimed at relieving the symptoms of a medical condition. The wording proclaims, “It works!” as if that explains all the benefits of the medication.

There has been a wealth of research into what causes pain. Pain is a symptom that something in your body is wrong. Researchers can describe in detail how the sensation is transmitted from its source to the brain so we become aware of the problem and can take action to treat it. Unfortunately, despite our better understanding of what it is, actually relieving the pain remains a challenge. If we are dealing with a non-fatal physical injury, we can set the broken bones, stitch up the wounds and wait for the body to repair itself. If the pain becomes more acute due to a terminal condition, the issues of addiction and, to some extent, adverse side effects are less relevant. The humanitarian need is to make a person as comfortable as possible during the final period of life. But long-term neuropathic pain represents a completely different set of challenges.Neuropathic pain is not properly understood and, consequently, not routinely diagnosed. It is caused by a lesion or dysfunction to the peripheral or central nervous system, i.e. the nervous system itself is damaged. The cause may be a physical injury or a disease may affect the way it works. Consequently, the pain may be caused by the damage to the nervous system itself or the system may be sending out general distress symptoms or, in some cases, false pain messages. Physical injuries to the nervous system are very difficult to treat because nerve tissue does not easily regenerate. In other cases, researchers do not properly understand why an apparently undamaged system may malfunction. Because the system that transmits and controls pain sensations may be damaged or not working properly, people often react to treatment in a wide variety of unpredictable ways. For the same reason, many prove more vulnerable than usual to adverse side effects. But the consequences of not providing effective pain relief can be serious. People who experience pain over a longer period of time are more likely to become depressed and may find it difficult to remain in paid work.

But ultram is an atypical opioid and its ability to relieve pain of all kinds makes it one of the first-response medications on the online market for the treatment of neuropathic pain and any of its derivatives. Doctors must take care to avoid adverse interactions with other medications, particularly the two classes of antidepressants: the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) and Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors (MOIs). The other most common problem is that anyone with a history of seizures or who is being treated with medications that lower the seizure threshold may be at an increased risk of seizures if they are taking ultram. However, ultram is generally preferred in cases of neuropathic pain because there are fewer problems of dependence so long as people use the medication as prescribed. In the end, the main conclusion we can make from this is the fact that ultram has much more advantages than disadvantages.