Lifestyle Choices

Tularemia Diseases

Tularemia is a disease that is carried by many wild animals. Human infections occur most frequently through contact with rabbits and hares. Sportsmen and hunters would be wise to use rubber gloves while skinning and dressing wild game.

Many different animals are found to be infected with tularemia. The disease is sometimes transmitted by insects which bite these animals and then bite human beings shortly afterward.

Mountain streams are sometimes contaminated with these germs as well. Those who drink the polluted water may contract the disease. But the chief source of human infection is through the handling of rabbits. The germs may enter through cuts on the hands and other parts of the body. Improperly cooked rabbit meat is another way the disease spreads among the public in general. (more…)

Diseases Carried by Rats and Other Rodents

Of all the enemies that man must contend with in the animal kingdom, the worst is the rat. Not only do these animals carry harmful germs, but if given a chance, they will also destroy our food supply. Rats invade stores, destroying fruits, vegetables, meats, grains, carpets, clothing, and innumerable other things.

Rats destroy ten times more by pollution than by what they eat. They burrow under houses and buildings, weakening foundations. On the farm they destroy more eggs and chickens than all the wild animals combined. (more…)

It is equally important that every home be provided with adequate facilities for the proper disposal of wastes. Those who live in large cities usually have this provided for them unless some emergency intervenes. But people who live in more isolated areas may have to provide their own facilities. How they handle this problem may determine in a large measure the kind of health they and their families will enjoy.

Proper sanitary disposal of body wastes is one of the first laws of health. Wherever human beings live, there are flies. And flies flourish on waste materials. They often carry dangerous germs and bring misery into many homes because of the diseases they continually spread around.

In large modern cities there are usually adequate facilities to meet these needs. In villages and smaller towns, whatever system is available may be woefully inadequate. People living on farms and those who own mountain cabins and beach cottages are often in need of advice as to how to meet these particular needs. The same is true on campgrounds and other places where people may stay for a few days or weeks at a time. Usually, the more isolated the area, the greater the need. (more…)

Persistent bed-wetting, sleep enuresis, is considered a disorder after the age of five. It occurs in all sleep stages, and daytime bladder control can be normal. While the prevalence of bed-wetting in childhood decreases with age, about 3 per cent of adolescents between the ages of twelve and eighteen continue to wet their beds.”

Bed-wetting has a hereditary component. Approximately 77 per cent of children whose parents both wet their beds as children are bed wetters themselves.’ A congenitally small bladder, bladder infections, allergies, obstructive sleep apnoea or metabolic or endocrinologic disorders may be predisposing factors. Contrary to popular belief, bed-wetting is almost never emotionally or psychologically caused; less than 1 per cent of bed^-wetting has an emotional source.” (more…)

I’ve read a lot about women who serenely cope with the three roles of full-time working woman, wife, and mother. However, I’ve never actually met one. All the ones that I know feel inadequate.

Going back to work after having children is a practical and emotional problem and both are interdependent. You risk worrying about them when you’re at work and about work when you’re at home, and end up being happy in neither situation.

Two requisites for a working mother are stamina and an understanding family Sympathetic they may be until it comes to your interests versus theirs, but they still want their evening meal on time and they don’t want to hear about the bus queue which made you late. (more…)

By ’single’, I mean a woman who is unmarried, divorced, separated, or whose husband is temporarily absent.

Sexual aggression from a stranger may take the form of:

1. Obscene telephone calls.
2. Frottism (such as being rubbed up against in a crowded train or bus).
3. Indecent exposure (such as showing genitals to little girls in a park).
4. Letter threats to rape, maim, or kill.
5. Odd burglaries involving violation (such as urinating on the bed) or the theft of fetish objects such as frilly knickers or black suspender belts.
6. Peeping Toms.
7. Unintentional rape (sometimes called ‘going too far’).
8. Attempted rape.
9.  Rape.
10. Child molestation.

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If a magnet is going to work for you, it can happen within hours when quality magnets are placed over the damaged area. Normally weexpect to see improvements within 1 -7 days, when you are directly treating the site of pain.

A wristband or sufficiently strong bracelet is fine if you have hand or wrist pain, or if you want tomaximise your general healthand detox you body. You will keep it there, as it is easy to wear there. But there is little point in relaxing and promoting blood flow to your wrist if your problem is your lower back! (more…)

Stress during labour

Childbirth can be a time of intimacy, excitement, wonder and openness. It can also be a time of fear and pain, sometimes in a place that is forbidding and lacking in warmth. There may be all kinds of left-over feelings, which are usually repressed. First of all, the birth hurts you — it is quite natural for some women to be angry about this. Secondly, you may resent the way your delivery was handled. Unfortunately, the case history above is not an isolated example. I have heard of so many similar and worse cases that it sometimes makes me feel ashamed of my profession as a doctor. The resentment is usually related to lack of consultation on decisions. Medical interventions are sometimes carried out (for instance, routine episiotomies, injections to speed up the birth of the placenta) without any explanation of side-effects. If the side-effects occur, the natural reaction is anger, but this is often repressed, with the explanation that the doctor knows what is best. It is this attitude of the patient handing over authority to the doctor and the doctor taking assumed authority over another’s life that may lead to later feelings of resentment. Some women have told me they felt like a nonentity, going through a process that was designed by the hospital to maximize speed and efficiency. Others have told me that it felt like being taken over by machines and fingers. The residue of resentment may go very deep and is usually repressed, with a resultant depression of spirits in general. (more…)

Depression is very common in a mother after the birth of her child. Some mothers notice depression only at this time and at no other time in their lives. The reasons why depression is so much more common soon after giving birth are bothcomplex and conjectural, but can be conveniently divided into two groups: physical stress and emotional/psychological stress. Depression after childbirth generally takes one of three forms: maternity blues, postnatal depression, or post-natal psychosis.

These usually start two or three days after birth. You may quite suddenly get weepy and irritable, and then just as suddenly, you are out of them. They are very common and do not usually lead on to any longer-lasting depression.

This occurs after about 10 per cent of births. It may start soon after birth or it may start after an initial few weeks of happiness and high spirits. It is a common experience to feel more emotionally vulnerable for four to six weeks after giving birth —you feel more open and sensitive to everything. This period of greater openness is often remembered with pleasure, but sometimes, after four to six weeks, the physical and emotional demands of looking after a child twenty-four hours a day begin to get a mother down, and you may feel grey and exhausted for many months or even a year or more. A minority of mothers will go into a more severe depressive process which occasionally lasts years. (more…)

When you experience the death of someone close to you, or when you have lost somebody who has gone away or whom you have left, it is natural to grieve. In fact, a process of mourning is necessary in order for you to come to terms with the loss and adjust yourself to a life without the dead person.

GRIEF

Grieving openly is an acutely painful process which is not usually encouraged in western cultures. Even when people believe that grieving and openly demonstrating your feelings are good for you, their fear of the sheer power of the feeling of grief often makes them try to stop you or calm you down. The commonest alternative to grief is the prolonged numbness of depression which, unfortunately, can last years. Although the expression of grief differs in different individuals, there is a pattern to grief that is fairly common, consisting of three basic stages: numbness, despair and detachment. (more…)

Depression is about twice as common in women as it is inmen. There are probably many reasons for this, and some of them are connected with marriage. Recent research points out that married women more likely than married men to feel unhappy; to have are feelings of inadequacy; to have difficulty in sleeping; to fee apathetic or inert and to behave in a passive way; to have bouts of depression, and to have symptoms of mental ill- health in general. Unmarried women, on the contrary, tend to have better mental and physical health than both unmarried men and married women.

Men, on the other hand, tend to have better mental health when married than when not married. Unmarried men in the United States have a suicide rate twice as high as married men. Men who lose their wives are usually more prone to depression than women who lose their husbands, and men tend to remarry as soon as possible. Though it may not seem like it on the surface, the man may be more dependent than the woman, even though he may not play an obviously dependent role. He is more likely to get depressed when the marriage is over or when his conventional role as sole or main bread-winner is upturned. He may feel inadequate and helpless if he realizes that his spouse can and does manage well without him. (more…)

Moving is invariably a time of stress. Whatever the reasons for the move, such as a marital problem or a change of job, which may cause depression in themselves, the upheaval involved may cause physical tiredness and emotional strain. Selling a house may take months, during which you have to put up with strangers traipsing through your private life, and there may be weeks of uncertainty while financial transactions succeed or fail.

A house is almost always a home, invested with feelings and memories. Part of you will always be there. You may even have built it or part of it yourself. However_ much bigger and better or more exciting the new house may be, there is inevitably a feeling of loss about what you are leaving behind. Unless you are moving locally, you will be leaving familiar faces and places, probably good friends, and you will be facing the unknown where you may initially feel isolated and lonely.

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PHYSICAL CHANGES Age 40 to 60

There comes the inevitable time when your body does not work quite as well as it used to. Perhaps it starts when you find you require reading glasses or, if you play sports, when you find yourself slower and more tired. Your body is more likely to ache and your joints tend to be less supple. None of these changes is particularly debilitating, but together they form a discomforting sign that you really are getting older.

The menopause

For a woman there is the much more dramatic change of the gradual or sudden loss of periods. The menopause usually occurs between the ages of 40 and 60 and the average age is around 50. The loss of periods may sometimes be accompanied by hot flushes, night sweating, and vaginal dryness as well as a number of non-specific symptoms, such as dizziness, headaches, insomnia, digestive troubles, and breathlessness which may be related more to the stress of emotional change than to the hormonal changes of the menopause. (more…)

Lack of stimulation in life, with day following day in endless repetition, eventually leads towards apathy, a feeling of pointlessness and, ultimately, a desire to give up. A boring job or a boring home environment often lead to a feeling of hopelessness. On top of this, loneliness may create despair. Although it can be tempting to stick to the security of a well-known path, endlessly retreading that path creates a rut; the rut can sometimes become so deep you can no longer see over the edges or believe you can get out of it.

Loneliness

For those who live with others but with little real contact, life can also become very meaningless. You may not be aware of being lonely and yet somehow you do not feel emotionally fed by those around you, so that you feel a sense of dissatisfaction and emptiness which may be with you most of the time. Others seem distant, or else they do not seem to really understand, or perhaps you feel they do not like you. The causes of this problem can lie either with you or with them. You may be a person who has difficulty making warm human contact, in which case you feel somewhat alone in any situation. Perhaps the person or people you live with are different from you and, through no fault of their own, relate to you on a level that simply does not satisfy you. (more…)

Many people lose their sense of purpose when they are angry or disappointed with something or somebody. For others the repetition of non-events deadens meaning. At such times it becomes hard to believe that there ever could be any point to life and you lose hope of finding any meaning. As your hope recedes, even the things that used to be important to you seem pointless. Often you cannot know the purpose of your life in the present. The meaning cannot be known in advance, but comes later from “doing it”— from living life fully. The problem sometimes comes when you have completed a stage in life that is important to you and you cannot yet know what the next stage is to be. You may have just completed your life’s work, retired, or your children may have just left home; suddenly you are in limbo, a transition period when you do not know what is coming next or even if there will be something coming next. During both world wars the suicide rate fell in Britain: people were kept busy and given a purpose. As soon as the wars stopped, the suicide rate rose again. (more…)

When pain is unavoidable, animals, children and adults learn to switch off. If a child is constantly hit, intimidated or punished with coldness, he makes the inner decision to repress the feeling of hurt. This decision is eminently sensible at the time because the child has no means of changing his environment. The problem is that the decision tends to become more or less permanent so that the adult too represses feelings of hurt, sometimes so successfully that he does not realize the need to change the hurtful environment. Instead, as a result of the repression of feelings, he tolerates a relatively depressed life, more depressed at times of greater threat or morehurt. The case history, below, illustrates the potentially damaging effect of learning to vanquish feeling. (more…)

Just as every home has different sets of patterns of what should be expressed and what repressed, so cultures and sub-cultures vary in the unwritten rules of what is, and what is not, permitted. It would be interesting to compare statistics of the incidence of depression in more or less repressed cultures. But this is not possible, firstly because definitions of depression are so variable, and secondly because the more repressive political regimes will not allow the publication of any statistic which might put the management in bad light. Thirdly, repression is qualitative as well as quantitative — what is repressed in one country may be freely expressed in another and vice versa. (more…)

The brain consists of about ten thousand million neurones, ornerve cells, each cell having the capacity to conduct a tinyelectric charge to others, via seven or eight thousand interconnections. The tail of each cell spreads into thousands offibres, each ending with a swelling called a terminal button.The electric charge passes from the head of the cell to the tail,and ends in the thousands of terminal buttons. Between theterminal buttons of one cell and the head of the next cell aremicroscopic gaps called synapses. The electric current can not jump the synapse, but instead causes a change in the chemicals within the synapse, this change then causing a current to start in the head of the next cell. These chemicals are called neurotransmitters because they effectively transmit electrical charge from one neurone to the next. A few neurotransmitters have been isolated. They are divided into two groups, called the monoamines and the catecholamines. (more…)

The most debilitating effect of unemployment and retirementcan be the feeling of uselessness. Such a feeling may prevent you getting another job and render you of less use than you need to be. If you feel like this, consider the following:

Do something useful. It does not matter how small it is. Choose a small, though useful task, such as putting the children to bed, cleaning something or repairing something in the house or garden. Any completed task will give you a better feeling about yourself (see Reasons for living, overleaf).

If you are unemployed, remember that an attitude of despondency will stop you getting another job. If you feel despondent when you go to a job interview, act. Muster all the enthusiasm you can, practise it on friends and act eager and interested at the interview. It quite often happens that the initial pretence breaks through a barrier to your genuine enthusiasm. Do as much research as possible on the job you are applying for and gather every bit of available information on potential jobs. Consider doing jobs that you would not normally consider, just to get yourself started and to regain some self-respect. (more…)

The support of family and friends can be of great importance in fat control.

In Concept 18, the importance of family and friends to successful exercise adherence was emphasized. Family and friends can also help you in changing and adhering to healthy eating practices. It is known that parents who overeat have children who eat more than normal. In these cases, it is important for the entire family to participate in a program to control fatness. Family and friends should provide support for the person trying to gain or lose fat by helping them follow the guidelines presented in this Concept, rather than tempting the person to eat improperly. (more…)