Archive for the 'General health' Category
Many children attend playgroup before they start a more formal preschool such as kindergarten. Playgroups are sometimes organised by the maternal and child health or community nurse, or the local council or community. Sometimes they are organised on a more informal basis by neighbours or friends, usually in someone’s house.
Generally playgroups are a good idea. They allow youngsters the opportunity to play together and provide them with important socialisation experiences. Parents can benefit too from talking, swapping notes, and generally supporting each other. Many parents find that talking to other parents who have children the same age gives them confidence, as they realise that there are child-rearing issues and difficulties that seem common to all parents. Sometimes playgroups are organised to give the parents in turn a few hours to themselves. This can also be invaluable.
Parents must also be prepared for the hassles that are inevitable in playgroups. Often the children are at an age where they are still learning to play with other children. Some may resent no longer being the centre of attention, while many have not yet learned the idea of sharing. There will usually be arguments about possessions.
Some parents are competitive about the achievements of their offspring, and this can undermine the confidence of other parents. Be aware of this, and do not hesitate to seek the reassurance of your nurse or doctor if you have any concerns. It is important to remember that all young children are individuals and unique in their superior intelligence or accelerated development — it often just indicates a bragging parent. If you cannot tone down a parent’s boastful comments by discussion and gentle feedback, and if this continues to undermine your confidence, you may wish to switch to a different playgroup.
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The reason for starting with the mechanical question is to get it out of the way so that you can look at the more important relationship issues, for these are the areas where disease and handicap have their most profound influence. If we keep taking our banged-up cars into body shops for repair without looking at how we drive in traffic, we will end up with more and more banged-up cars. So it is with disease that, as one paraplegic man stated, “The system is more important than the thing.”
“I just sort of became the chicken-soup type. I mean, I turned over my life to everyone else. My wife became a caretaker, and caretakers are not supposed to screw their patients.” This statement from a husband with multiple sclerosis illustrates the importance of sexual self-concept. Try to answer question two not in terms of skill or attractiveness but on the basis of “how” you are as a person when you are trying to be intimate. If you are experiencing disease, what has the disease process done to your relationship skills. Have you become more dependent, more aggressive, less assertive, more or less withdrawn? What has been the major impact of your illness on you as a person? How people experience disease and illness tells more about how they really are as persons than how they experience health.
I have my patients who are experiencing disease calculate their “N/S Quotient.” This is the balance between nurturance—taking care of someone else—and succorance—being taken care of by another person—that I discussed in Chapter Four. One of the most healing of human experiences, one of the healthiest things you can do, is to help somebody else. When you are sick, you must continue at some level to help others. How would you say your balance is? Do you still profit, even if you are sick, from all the good healing internal chemicals that come from the joy of supporting and helping someone else?
There have been research articles (not many) describing the impact of disease on sexuality. There have been very few articles about the impact of sexuality on disease, on sex as healer, on sexual shamanism. Maintaining and enhancing intimacy throughout the challenge of disease is not only possible but necessary for getting better. Remaining sexually active can actually slow some aging orocesses, protect the genitals to some degree from aging changes, and possibly offer a boost to your immune system. Research has clearly shown that immunoefficiency increases when you love and are loved.
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Masters and Johnson presented a sexual problem-solving book that quickly became the spark for an entirely new form of couples therapy. In Human Sexual Inadequacy and in The Pleasure Bond, they suggest techniques for slowing men down and speeding women up in their sexual response. They present sensate focus, a technique for learning to touch and be touched, and describe the “tease technique” and the “squeeze technique” to help with impotence and premature ejaculation respectively. Their diagnostic categories are based on time, on coming too soon, taking too long, or not spending enough time. Women may have problems having orgasm, but men are always orgasmic if they ejaculate, preferably “on time” for the female. For the first time, we had individual diagnosis based on two people; men were premature, but women were never postmature. Sex clinics proliferated following their work, as Masters and Johnson gave unwilling birth to the Arthur Murray “sex” studios of the seventies. While Masters and Johnson trained only a few teams, their educational programs were offered to hundreds who in turn felt themselves to be “Masters and Johnson” qualified, franchised sexperts. Unlike the first and second perspectives, this third perspective was being directly interpreted for us on talk shows and in popular magazines, each preaching the same “time-frame sex” of this third view of sexuality. Perhaps a society that now had more time to recreate and less need to procreate was more than ready for a perspective on sex that stressed efficient, effective use of our sex time.
There is no question that Masters and Johnson made a significant and lasting contribution to “democratizing” sex. Their treatment program was for couples, and even though their sexual-response model was based on the individual, they treated couples with treatment teams, and saw marriage as much more than a natural state or convenience. They saw it as a challenge, a potential for pleasure and sexual satisfaction as well as companionship, a place where time could be better controlled. In my view, the most significant contribution of Masters and Johnson was not their flawed sexual-response model, which modified the original Ellis model. Their contribution was to focus on a system, an interaction. They were a team, a man-and-woman team, and that allowed the feminist balance so lacking in the first two perspectives. They started the systerns approach to sex that I emphasize in the super marital sex perspective.
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It has not been shown that we marry to make up for a personal deficit, or that we pick partners who balance for some personally perceived deficiency. It is true, however, that our most remarkable (at least in our own eyes) personality deficit influences our bonding.
“I’ve never seen myself as particularly smart, I guess. Just about average,” said a husband. “I’d steer away from real bright people, people with book knowledge. I know my wife is much smarter than I am, but I offer her other things, like steadiness, reliability.”
Our selection of partner may not be determined by our perceived deficits, but you can see in this man’s description that specific areas of experienced inferiority can act themselves out within our relationships.
“I’m not beautiful, but I am smart,” reported one wife. “My husband is beautiful but not too bright. Together, we make a beautifully intelligent marriage.”
Think about your own deficit area on your love map and consider how this may influence your interaction with your spouse.
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Following this, there is a stage of exhaustion where the person goes into a deep sleep for seconds, minutes, or rarely, hours. Sometimes a state of confusion exists for a short time and while conscious he is unaware of his surroundings. He then recovers and can carry on with his normal activities.
The brain is a hive of electrical activity as the cells communicate with each other. An epileptic fit is like an electrical explosion, which sets off a chain of uncontrolled electrical activity. The triggering mechanism may arise in a scar in the brain tissue from an injury or an operation.
Almost all epileptics can have their disorder brought under control and most can lead normal lives, studying, working, marrying and having children. The greatest problem faced by most epileptics is the ignorance and fears of society.
A generalised fit is a frightening thing when seen for the first time. Few people know how to handle such an emergency and their ignorance and fear leads them to shun the sufferer.
Old prejudices die hard and epileptics are often thought to be mentally dull, unduly violent or anti-social. These generalisations are not true.
Many employers are hesitant to give jobs to those who have this disorder, yet their accident or absentee rate is no higher than others.
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Many children develop a habit, spasm or tic which involves movements which are fast, sudden, unexpected and serve no purpose. The child appears to have no control over them.
The movements can include blinking, twitching of the nose or shrugging of the shoulders. Most of these habits spasms are minor and seem to disappear after several months.
However, in some children these tics are both severe and prolonged. They can involve grunting, throat-clearing and occasionally, uttering obscene words. Sometimes these children repeatedly touch themselves or others in the genital area or on the breast.
This bizarre behavior is extremely distressing to the child suffering from the problem and also to his parents. It is called the Tourette syndrome.
The cause is unknown, it is three times more common in boys than girls and there is some family tendency to it. Onset is usually before the age of 15.
Not all cases of mild habit spasms or tics can properly be labelled the Tourette syndrome, but those who have verbal spasms, particularly the uttering of obscene words, are diagnosed under this classification.
Sometimes children grow out of this, sometimes it persists. Fortunately one of the major tranquillising drugs, haloperidol, has proved of great value in treating this disorder.
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Dark signs—grey to dark wisps, clouds or lines—also testify to an under-function or weakness of the affected sexual organs. Small black points, or grey-black indented marks, are signs for sclerosis, i.e. enlargement. These signs are especially found in the area for prostate gland.
Iris signs in conditions of the female sexual organs: One finds:
i. Ovary: right iris 35′ and left iris 25′—in the third major zone,
ii. Uterus: right iris 25′—in the second major zone,
iii. Vagina: right iris 25′-28′—in the third major zone.
The ovaries, as with the testicles in man, have close connections with the fore-brain. In case of inflammation-signs in the area for ovary (white signs), one often finds similar signs in the opposite brain area. The same may occur with the dark signs of under-activity, where we often find the so-called Brain-Ovary line. The appearance of this line always indicates disturbance of the sex life with effects upon the cerebrum and mind. Patients with such signs are depressed and oppressed.
In this connection, one should refer to the hypotrophic state and deficient development of the internal and external sex organs in both sexes. This condition may be presumed when one finds a patient with short flat finger-nails. In such cases, the deficient development of the ovary affects the nerve life of the fore-brain, giving rise to the following symptoms:
Frontal headache, giddiness, disturbance from exposure to the sun, travel sickness, sense of pressure from headwear, bitten finger-nails and enuresis in children.
All these symptoms can be confirmed, either singly or in association, in persons with flat short finger-nails. Short nails frequently recede behind the fingertips, especially when they are continuously bitten off or torn off. This is pathological, and no child should be punished for the condition. Headaches cease after the menopause. Furthermore, it is found with especially small nails that there are small dimunitive nipples with deficient lactation in childbirth. On the other hand, nature makes up for these deficiencies by giving an easy normal digestion, so that these persons are seldom thin. Usually, they are of a simple homely disposition, a probable consequence of the influenced cerebral function.
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Signs and symptoms
A urinary tract infection may produce either no symptoms at all (silent UTI), or any combination of the following: urgency or frequency of urination; painful urination; dribbling of urine; bedwetting; daytime incontinence (inability to control urination); foul-smelling, cloudy, or bloody urine; fever; abdominal or back pain; vomiting; chronic diarrhea; or redness of the external genitals. If the infection is untreated, the symptoms generally disappear in a few days of weeks, but often return later.
The diagnosis of UTI depends upon a careful physical examination, plus urine tests. In boys, the diagnosis involves a search for an obstruction in the urinary tract. In girls, the search for an obstruction is undertaken only after two or three bouts of UTI or one bout with an infection that is resistant to treatment. In an infant, whether boy or girl, investigation for the underlying cause is always undertaken immediately.
Home care
Any attempt at home treatment is potentially dangerous and may result in a low-grade, destructive infection with no outward symptoms.
• A urinary tract infection, particularly one of a series of infections, commonly produces fever, but few or no other symptoms; the doctor’s physical examination reveals nothing unusual.
• To obtain a urine specimen for analysis or culture, cleanse the genitals and collect the portion at the midpoint of urination. In this way, the urine sample will not be contaminated.
Medical treatment
Your doctor will conduct a complete physical examination, including taking your child’s blood pressure and ordering urine tests. If the urine specimen shows an infection, the doctor will put the child on antibiotics for ten to 14 days. Urine samples will be retested during and after the course of antibiotics.
After your child has recovered from a urinary tract infection, your doctor may recommend X rays to determine if there is a physical abnormality. Sometimes, further X rays and direct examination of the urethra and bladder are necessary. To treat recurrent UTIs that are not due to obstruction, your doctor may prescribe the use of antibiotics constantly or on and off for months or years. To correct an obstruction, your doctor may perform surgery.
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