Doctorweblog. About Health & Medicine

If you are one of the unwilling ones, concentrate on getting to meetings, getting involved and getting a sponsor to help you through the daily difficulties. If God and the Twelve Steps make you worried, you can shelve them for the first few weeks.
Regular attendance at meetings and keeping clear of drugs are the essentials. Practise doing the little things that people suggest, because many of the small practical suggestions of how to stay away from drugs, how to deal with drinking situations, what to do about old using and abusing friends, and so forth are easy to accept.
You will notice that recovering addicts often do not give advice directly. Instead they talk about what they did, and what parts of the programme worked for them. It’s impossible to take offence at this. After all, they are only reporting the facts.
The facts of their experience can help you, if you let them. Of course everybody is different, and what works for one individual may not work for another if circumstances are very different. For instance, the experience of a single person may not be able to help others with their marriage problems.
But when people have the same kind of trouble, then usually the experience of a longstanding member will have something that you can learn from it. A married member will be able to tell you about the strain on his marriage during the first few weeks of recovery. If you are undergoing the same strain, you will probably be able to learn something from his experience.
The other mental trick that sometimes helps unwilling people do what is suggested is to use the 24-hour plan. Just for one day you might be willing to do something which otherwise you would reject. Looked at in this way, you do not need quite as much willingness.
Trust in NA and AA-Getting clean and sober is rather like a leap in the dark. You are bound to be dismayed and frightened about the future. You are at the beginning of a big change in life. And in the first few weeks you may well have fears and doubts about it.
Trust in NA and AA. Of course, the future seems scary at the moment, but when so many addicts have stayed clean thanks to doing what the programme suggests, it is overwhelmingly likely that it will work for you too. Remind yourself of all the happy recovering addicts who used to feel like you do but who are now making it. All you have to do is give it a try today.
Unwillingness can and does change to willingness, just as long as newcomers are in close contact with NA or AA. As long as you stay away from drugs or drink and keep going to the meetings, you will recover.

*103\116\2*

There is no doubt that X-ray, diathermy, and ultra-violet rays are somewhat beneficial in treating arthritis of the hip and spine. This is known as the baking treatment. When pain goes beyond the aspirin stage, someone may turn the heat on you. Before heat is applied, though, a careful investigation of the patient’s eating habits should be made. Because this kind of treatment, to be successful, must have help from your diet.
Any radiologist, orthopaedist or X-ray technician who employs heat therapy should first check the patient’s diet. Several weeks before undergoing any “baking,” arthritics need a daily intake of cod-liver oil to give these powerful rays something to work on. X-rays bleed oil from tissues and they require added oil from the diet.
In physical medicine departments of hospitals and clinics, deformed arthritics sometimes go through another form of heat treatment, the paraffin-wax routine. Any arthritic who does not also change his dietary habits before undergoing this “wax bath” is wasting his time. Paraffin-wax heat in itself does not restore vitality to the blood vessels. This type of therapy, we predict, will decline in the years to come.
Frequently, after an arthritic has been subjected to hit-and-miss heat techniques for a long period of time, the whirlpool is suggested. Again, no appreciable improvement will be registered without a change of diet.
*64\146\2*

If you want to stay clean, you will eventually find that you have to change the way you
live – because the way a drug-using addict lives is not a good way for a recovering addict to live. In exactly the same way, a drinker’s lifestyle is no good for a recovering alcoholic.
One of the secrets of staying stopped is to alter your attitudes about things. Indeed, AA members say that the initials of their fellowship stand not just for Alcoholics Anonymous but for      Altered Attitudes. In the same way, NA could stand for New Attitudes. If you think about it, you will see it makes sense. In fact, if you are successfully staying off drugs and drink you are probably already practising this in small ways.
For example, you are probably already changing the way you think about drugs and drink.   Instead of thinking about the pleasures of drug-taking or drinking, you are thinking about the bad times. You have altered your attitude towards drugs or drink and that new attitude is helping you stay away from them.
But this is just the beginning. There are many other attitudes which in the long run are going to need changing. Using drugs has affected your life and the way you think and feel in all kinds of ways. You may not yet know the full extent of what your addiction has done to you.

*93\116\2*

As with heart attacks, most strokes are not illnesses. Rather, they’re the body’s response to something else, often the narrowing of arteries from a buildup of cholesterol.
There are two kinds of strokes. The first, called an ischemic stroke, occurs when a blood clot interrupts blood flow in the brain, or when blood flow to the brain is dramatically reduced because of the narrowing of an artery that feeds the brain. Ischemic strokes account for roughly 70 to 80 percent of all strokes.
The other type of stroke, a hemorrhagic stroke, occurs when a blood vessel in the brain ruptures. Hemorrhagic strokes are the more lethal of the two.
Symptoms for each are about the same: weakness; numbness in the face, hands, arms or legs; slurring of speech or inability to understand what people are saying to you; blindness in one eye; and dizziness.
Doctors say that when someone is diagnosed with a stroke, “time is brain.” This means that the faster the blood flow is restored or the hemorrhage stopped, the more brain function will survive. The more you know about stroke, the sooner you’ll seek help if you or someone else is having one.
“There’s a lot of optimism about strokes. You can identify the risk factors to see if you’re at risk for stroke,” says Patricia Grady, Ph.D., deputy director for the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland.
Moreover, many risk factors are in your control. “The brightest scientists in this country agree that up to 80 percent of all strokes can be prevented. We know what’s causing them and we know how to prevent many of them,” says Marjorie G. Anderson, Director of Communications for the National Stroke Association in Engle-wood, Colorado. “When it comes to strokes, the onus is on the individual. Knowing the risk factors and warning signs isn’t enough. You need to call 911 if you experience them, because it’s a medical emergency.”
*636\257\8*

Short tempered, impulsive, goaded to action by sudden impulse, not controlled by reason. Unbearable pains -physical or mental – when the patient thinks of even ending his life or do harm to others, and may do so on sudden impulse.
Uncontrollable anger, bordering on insanity when the person can beat his wife or even his infant child, or strike his own head against the wall in a fit of anger or may harm himself.
He may feel remorse afterwards. A grown-up person who wails and weeps in the presence of other persons when describing his painful condition in a doctor’s clinic, has evidently lost control of his mind over his actions.
A married man with wife and children trying to molest his maid servant in a fit of lasciviousness or sexual mania is no better.
The son of a Cabinet Minister of India was caught stealing in an American show-room and imprisoned there.
A heart patient was advised to take salt-less food. A chain smoker with bad throat was warned against smoking on pain of cancer of throat, a sugar patient knew full well the implication of eating sweets, and yet none of the above patients could stick to the doctors’ advice because their mind had lost control of their actions.
There is a stage prior to the mind actually losing control of oneself, when due to long-continued mental torture or physical agony, the patient is terribly depressed and cries out “Please leave me alone. I am crazy. I can bear no more. I fear, I am going insane”. Whether the man has actually lost control of the mind, or he is on the verge of nervous breakdown with fear and dread of the mind losing control, the remedy which can bail him out from the above state is CHERRY PLUM. Then there are cases of too frequent thirst in summer, which the patient must quench with cold drinks if water is not available and he may not be able to afford it— a Cherry Plum State: consider the plight of an examinee sitting in the examination hall having frequent urge of urination forcing him to leave the hall ever few minutes -again a Cherry Plum State. The case of a house-wife, who always over-spends whenever she goes on a shopping spree in the market, is a plain act of mind not keeping control over action.
*71\308\8*

A given paradigm determines the observational methods and treatments of the patients. Basic to medicine in all cultures, including ours, is the assumption that people who do not function in a given society are ill; they are not in order and require change. Thus, if we assume that people are sick, we shall find its cause and eradicate it. Our observations focus upon the symptoms which correspond to our definition of a given illness. Curing a patient means, then, eradicating his symptoms so that he corresponds to our definition of normalcy.
My conclusion from supervising psychiatrists and psychologists working with psychotic patients is that when the above paradigm does not produce the desired results, the reason for failure is not always due to a given therapist’s inability to apply the medical model. A core difficulty in dealing with psychotic states is frequently traceable to insufficient training in observing the actual details of the patient’s behavior. Thus, the detailed behavior of the individual patient is frequently glossed over. For example, a patient who is very passive and involved in his treatment is obviously going to be more responsive to medication than another patient who considers herself a revolutionary and finds it necessary to despise authority. In the process paradigm, to be presented briefly in the next chapter, the client is not considered, a priori, to be sick. We do not assume that his brain is functioning improperly, or that he is conscious or unconscious. Rather, the exact nature and content of his utterances and body signals are studied with the idea in mind that appreciating these details will help him best. We assume that if the signals and goals of altered and normal states are followed, life is going to be more worthwhile to him afterwards than if we only attempted to get him back on his feet and function again.
*2\227\8*