Doctorweblog. About Health & Medicine

Headache is probably the commonest symptom from which we all suffer. It may be due to physical and emotional causes.

Some headaches can all be classified and singled out as having a specific name, such as migraine.

There is often an overlap between the different types and sometimes two or three different forms may be present in the one individual.

Many headaches are caused by stimulation of the pain-sensitive nerves in the wall of the blood vessels both inside the brain and in the scalp.

These are vascular headaches and include migraine, cluster headache, the headache due to a hangover and even that associated with toxic states, such as fever.

Some are due to muscle contraction and this includes the common tension headache and the very rare headache due to eye strain.

It also includes pains around the temple due to spasms of the masseter muscle which moves the jaw when we chew and is caused by an imbalance of the bite.

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Menstruation — that most intimate part of every woman’s life — is still, despite modern education, often misunderstood.

So let’s consider exactly what this function is, and the parts of the body involved.

The organs concerned with menstruation are the womb, the ovaries, and the fallopian tubes.

The womb, or uterus, is a pearshaped organ roughly 7.6 cm (3 inch) long and 3.8 cm (IVi inch) wide, and it lies low down in the pelvis.

The womb is mostly thick muscle, but it is lined with several layers of cells known as endometrium.

The ovaries are two almond-shaped organs lying either side of the womb about 5 cm (2 inch) away. The fallopian tubes connect to the top of the womb, and their open outer ends lie very close to and partly enclose the ovaries.

The womb thins down to a narrow neck, the cervix, and sits on top of and projects into the vagina.

The beginning of a woman’s menstrual cycle really begins at the end of menstruation, or bleeding.

A hormone, oestrogen, is produced by the ovaries and causes the lining of the womb to thicken, to become soft and spongy.

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