21 May 09 YOUR CHILD’S CARE/TEETH: DEVELOPMENT AND TEETH
Children usually cut their first tooth between 6 and 9 months of age; from then on, teeth erupt rapidly. A good rule of thumb is to calculate 7 months plus one month for each tooth. For example a child of 10 months would be expected to have three teeth (7 plus 3 months = 3 teeth). By the age of 3 years, the average child will have twenty primary or ‘milk’ teeth.
As the teeth push through the gums, children can become irritable, drool a lot and sleep poorly. The gums may become sore, reddened and tender. A blister will sometimes appear over the gum to herald the arrival of a new tooth. Contrary to popular opinion, teething in infants and young children is not responsible for fever, ear infections, diarrhoea, or other ailments.
A child experiencing the discomfort of teething may be helped by teething rings or rusks. The pressure of these against the gum may be soothing. The same effect may be achieved by the parent gently rubbing the affected gum with a finger. Sometimes paracetamol given according to directions may ease the pain, and very occasionally a local anaesthetic cream will be of help, though it will tend to wear off quickly.
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18 May 09 DEFINITIONS OF SOME EXPRESSIONS YOUR DOCTOR MAY USE – SOME FACTS ABOUT PAINKILLERS (PART 1)
Here is a table telling you some facts you will need to know about painkillers.
In the first column I have listed their chemical names. If the name of your painkiller is not on this list, it is most likely because you have been given the proprietary (drug company) name and/or because it is a mixture. Ask for the chemical name(s) of your painkiller(s).
In the second column is the dose which, if taken by mouth, is likely to relieve the pain of a person who is just starting on painkillers. These doses are all of about equal strength, so you can work out what dose of another painkiller will have about the same effect if you switch from one to another. Injections are two to four times stronger than tablets or syrup of the same drug.
The third column shows how long each dose usually lasts. Remember, everybody is different. These figures are average, just to give you the general idea.
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18 May 09 VITAMINS – GENERAL INFORMATION
However, it is worth noting that certain foods such as potatoes, which are rich in Vitamin C, also contain an enzyme, ascorbic acid oxidase.
When vegetables are heated slowly, the enzyme becomes active and destroys the ascorbic acid. But if the vegetables are rapidly blanched by immersing in boiling water, then the enzyme does not render the Vitamin Ñ inactive.
The  group vitamins have been claimed to be of use in nervous disorders and as a good pick-me-up for debility, nervous exhaustion and that run-down feeling.
Vitamin Bl, or thiamine, is found in cereals, meat and eggs. A lack of thiamine produces the disease known as beri-beri, a condition seen in World War 2 in prisoners of war fed on a diet of white rice and little else.
Some people can develop an allergy to the synthetic Vitamin Bl tablets or injections.
Vitamin B2, or riboflavin, is found in dairy products and green vegetables, but is widely distributed throughout most natural foodstuffs.
A lack of riboflavin affects the skin and mucous membranes.
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15 May 09 EXERCISE RISK
The idea that participation is better than watching seems to have taken hold in Australia as well as other developed countries and the Western world is on a fitness kick.
Not only the young, but the middle-aged and even the elderly are walking, jogging, swimming and playing tennis and squash.
We have been told that it is all good for our health and likely to reduce the risk of having a heart attack.
When a jogger drops dead, this receives great publicity and can make those of us who are pushing our ageing bodies harder than we have for many years, just a little anxious about whether we are doing the right thing.
People still have heart attacks and some die while sleeping or making love. That shouldn’t keep us awake or make us choose celibacy.
Regular sustained physical exercise, tailored to the needs of age, present fitness and state of health is good for one and may protect from the development of a heart attack. Nothing is absolute in medicine.
The trend back to active exercise for many can only be good for the majority even if, for a few, their exertions are foolhardy or even dangerous.
While exercise may not increase the quantity of life it does seem to increase its quality. Those who take up exercise usually take other steps to improve health such as stopping smoking and improving their diet.
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15 May 09 CANCER OF THE WOMB – GENERAL INFORMATION
Cervical cancer may occur in young women, but its peak incidence is in the late Forties. It is more common in women who have had many pregnancies, in those who have had regular sexual intercourse from an early age and in those who have had many sexual partners. It is also more common in those with a lower socio-economic status.
The herpes virus and the human papilloma virus which causes genital warts are thought to be causes of cancer of the cervix.
Most people still associate cancer with pain but this is usually a late symptom. The earliest symptoms of cancer of the cervix are bleeding and discharge. The bleeding may occur between the periods and may follow intercourse. The discharge is initially clear but later becomes blood-stained and offensive.
In 1933, Dr George Papanicolaou showed that a simple test of placing a scraping from the cervix on a slide and examining it under the microscope could detect cancer in its earliest stage.
This test has been widely used since the late Fifties but, unfortunately, many women fail to take advantage of it.
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15 May 09 WHY YOU ARE THE BEST PERSON TO MAKE DECISIONS ABOUT YOUR OWN TREATMENT – IMPORTANCE OF THINGS
However good and caring your practitioner is, he or she can only consider the medical side of things when recommending treatment. You are the only person who can combine the facts about possible treatments with your own ‘inside’ knowledge in order to arrive at the best decision for you. You know whether it is important for you to live as long as possible whatever the cost. You know how important the changes in lifestyle likely to result from your disease or treatment are to you. You know how important your body image is to you and what things about it are most important for you. Provided you can get the necessary ‘outside’ information, this all makes you, without question, the best person to make the decisions.
I’ll just mention one thing that makes these decisions difficult for anyone, not just for you. Nobody can look into the future and predict definitely what will happen to you, as an individual, if you take a particular course of action. Your practitioner should be able to tell you what is average or likely, what is possible but unlikely and what is so unlikely as to be a miracle if it happens. To start with you should base your decision on what is likely. All patients hope they’ll be the exception—the one who makes a miraculous recovery. By all means keep hoping for this, but base your decisions realistically on what is likely or average. Say your practitioner tells you that one in ten patients get a remission on a particular treatment— that means that nine in ten patients do not. If you have this treatment, you are not likely to get a remission.
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08 May 09 THE POWERFUL EFFECT OF ACID ON G.I. (VINEGAR, LEMON JUICE, SOURDOUGH BREADS)
Within the last few years, several reports in the scientific literature have indicated that a realistic amount of vinegar or lemon juice in the form of a salad dressing consumed with a mixed meal has significant blood sugar lowering effects.
As little as 20 ml of vinegar in a vinaigrette dressing (20 ml vinegar and 10 ml oil) taken with an average meal lowered blood sugar by as much as 30 per cent. These findings have important implications for people with diabetes or individuals at risk of diabetes, coronary heart disease or the metabolic syndrome (impaired glucose tolerance, hypertension and high blood lipid levels).
The effect appears to be related to the acidity because other organic acids (such as lactic acid and propionic acid) also have a blood sugar lowering effect but the degree of reduction varies with the type of acid. Our findings show that amongst the various types of vinegar, red wine vinegar was the best. And lemon juice was just as powerful. It is well known that acidity in food pulls the brake on stomach emptying slowing the delivery of food to the small intestine. Digestion of the carbohydrate in the food is therefore slowed and the final result is that blood sugar levels are significantly lower. Good news for people with diabetes! The take home message is that a side salad with your meal, especially a high G.L meal, will help to keep blood sugar levels under control.
Sourdough breads in which lactic acid and propionic acid are produced by the natural fermentation of starch and sugars by the yeast starter culture, also produce reduced levels of blood sugar and insulin compared with normal bread. The area under the plasma insulin curve was 22 per cent lower with the sourdough product. In addition, there was higher satiety associated with breads having decreased rates of digestion and absorption. Thus there is significant potential to lower blood sugar and insulin and increase satiety with sourdough bread formulations.
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08 May 09 FAT LOSS: ACTIVITY AND FAT LEVELS
Obviously, all of this is good news for the fat, unfit person wanting to decrease body fatness. Long duration, low intensity regular exercise, such as walking, is obviously less painful and more rewarding than that type of exercise which most fat people regard as masochism. It is also more able to be built into a person’s daily life and become part of a total lifestyle program which is vital for long term fat loss maintenance. The low intensity-long duration approach therefore would be welcomed by the unfit. However, it does signal a change in the traditional approach to dealing with overfatness through commercial health and fitness centres. Many of these centre around providing an institutionalised service of 30-40 minutes daily, 3-4 days a week, based on the standard PITT model for improvements in fitness. Little attention is given to other aspects of spontaneous physical activity, or indeed, activity patterns outside the gymnasium setting.
The low intensity approach suggests that where tat loss is the goal, the required change is to the individual’s lifestyle pattern of activity, including both ‘planned’ and ‘incidental’ activity. The role of the instructor in this framework should be one of empowering the individual to be able to incorporate this type of physical activity into their lifestyle. The mode of instruction required therefore is reflective, i.e. providing advice to fit the client’s perceived needs, rather than directive, i.e. providing instruction to fit a pre-set formula to the client.
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08 May 09 OBESITY IN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES
A more obvious, but still not statistically supported, association is the decline in physical activity levels. Although many people claim (from self reports) to be more physically active, the considered World Health Organisation view is that they could well be less active because any increase in leisure time activity may have been more than countered by the decrease in demand for physical labour as well as the decrease in incidental physical activity (the energy used to carry out day-to-day activities). Just getting from A to B requires less energy as technology and facilities improve by the year. Machine-power is replacing man-power and push-button technology is invading every part of daily life. Statistics on physical activity in most countries have not been kept to verify this assumption, but this hypothesis appears feasible. One finding, comparing the rise in obesity in the UK to the much lower rise in the Netherlands, who have a similar dietary composition, claims that the fact that 27 per cent of the Dutch use bicycles as a means of transport compared to only 3 per cent of the English may provide some explanation.
In the absence of evidence incriminating specific factors, it appears clear that increases in obesity are due to several changes in the recent human environment which allows the biological functions of fat to favour storage. Fatness obviously has an important survival function: it enables us to store energy to help get through the bad times. But like a lot of biological functions there is a range of healthy fat deposits, above and below which there is no longer any survival value, and illness occurs. It’s really only in the last three decades or less that overfatness has become so commonplace.
In Australia, since regular records have been kept from 1981, there has been a steady growth of around 0.7 per cent per year in the percentage of the population regarded as overweight or obese using a measure of BMI. This is similar to the increase in the US measured by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) carried out at regular intervals. There appears also to be a faster rate of growth in the extreme categories of fatness and in lower socioeconomic (SE) groups. Obesity in Australia for example, has doubled in the last decade with around 10 per cent of Australians now regarded as obese. The majority of these are from lower SE groups. The Australian Institute of Health estimates that around 5 million Australians are now overfat (including the more severe category of obesity). In North America and Europe the estimate is 50 and 100 million respectively. This has led National Heart Foundations in the Western world to be concerned about reversals of gains made in heart disease prevention through increases in obesity.
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08 May 09 HOW TO STAY YOUNGER LONGER WITH THE MIRACLE FOODS FROM THE BEES
You have seen in this chapter that foods from the bees—honey, pollen and royal jelly—do indeed have great potentials for health and longevity. It would be unwise to ignore these foods which have been used with so great a benefit by the ancients. In the terms of practical application of the information in this chapter you can do the following:
Pollen and pollen preparations are available in the United States in the better health food stores. So are the preparations containing royal jelly. It certainly would not hurt to try these—and you just may be surprised by the benefits. Specifically in conditions of intestinal sluggishness and putrefaction in the digestive tract, pollen has definitely proven to be exceedingly beneficial.
Honey, pollen, and royal jelly are definitely rejuvenating, age-retarding foods. They have a stimulating effect on all the vital processes of your body. Follow the example of Russian centenarians and use them liberally—and see yourself growing younger as the symptoms of old age gradually disappear.
Stop using white sugar! Replace it with health-giving honey. Honey can be used everywhere sugar is used: in beverages, in baking, in cooking, on cereals, etc. We have a double reason to use honey instead of sugar—honey is so inexpensive here! In most European countries honey costs two to three times more than it does here. And, in spite of the food industry’s efforts to “improve” on nature, honey is still one of the least-tampered-with natural foods you can buy.
Use only raw, unhealed and unstrained honey. Heating destroys both vitamins and enzymes. Refining, filtering and “clarifying” of honey removes many of the minerals and amino acids—yes, honey even contains amino acids, the essential forms of protein! And what is even worse, refining and filtering removes the pollen! Also, choose the dark varieties of honey in preference to the light; dark honey contains more vitamin and minerals than light-colored honey.
Remember: The miracle foods from the bees—honey, pollen and royal jelly—will give you many health benefits and will keep you younger longer. After all, they have been used for these purposes for many thousands of years!
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