Antidepressants Blog

When it’s colder than you think
In hypothermia your body temperature drops below normal when body heat is lost faster than it can be produced. Frostbite is the freezing of the skin or tissue near the skin surface. These conditions can actually occur when the weather is windy or wet, yet still above freezing. Frail, inactive people, the elderly and small children are particularly susceptible.

Note your symptoms
Hypothermia
This condition can develop quickly and become a serious problem with little warning. Early symptoms include severe shivering, slurred speech, apathy, impaired judgment and cold, pale skin. As the body temperature continues to drop, shivering may stop; the abdomen and chest become cold, and there is slowing of the pulse and breathing. Weakness, drowsiness and confusion may quickly lead to unconsciousness.

Frostbite
Initially the skin feels soft to the touch but numb and tingly and may turn white. As the skin freezes and becomes hard, blisters may develop. In third-degree frostbite the skin may look blue or blotchy and the underlying tissue is hard and very cold.
What you can do
Treat for hypothermia before treating frostbite.
hypothermia
Get to warm, dry shelter.
Rewarm slowly. Keep person awake.
Replace wet clothing with dry clothes, sleeping bags or blankets, and apply body heat from another person, if possible.
Give warm liquids and high-calorie food. Do not give alcohol.
What you can do
Frostbite
Rewarm only if refreezing will not occur.
Rewarm as quickly as possible.
Warm small areas with breath or by placing them inside clothing and next to bare skin.
Immerse body parts in warm (not hot) water of 104° F to 108° F for 15 to 20 minutes.
Elevate and protect warmed part.
Do not rub or massage frozen area — rubbing may cause further damage.
Protect blisters. Do not break them.
Aspirin or acetaminophen (Tylenol) may ease painful burning. NEVER give aspirin to children/teenagers. It can cause Reye’s syndrome, a rare but often fatal condition.
Watch for signs of infection.
Prevention
Dress warmly in layers with wool and polypropylene for insulation and an outer layer that is windproof and waterproof.
Wear a warm hat with ear protection. Wear mittens rather than gloves.
Pace activities. Do not become exhausted or sweaty.
Never touch cold metal with bare skin.
Avoid alcohol and smoking before spending time in the cold.
Eat well and carry extra food.
Plan ahead and carry provisions in case of emergency or sudden weather changes.
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The Rickettsiae are minute infectious agents, smaller than most germs and larger than most viruses. Most classifications put them midway between the bacteria and the viruses. Rickettsia are too large to pass through a bacterial filter and are visible with an ordinary microscope. Like the viruses, they multiply only in the presence of living cells and many of them live inside living cells. They usually are transferred from animals to men by ticks, mites, fleas, or lice. Many of the rickettsial diseases of men have been identified as such only during the last fifty years. The word “Rickettsia” comes from the name of Howard Taylor Ricketts, a physician in Chicago who was one of the first to observe these organisms and determine their nature.
A form of typhus fever called “murine typhus” is an acute infectious disease caused by an organism of the rickettsia. The disease usually begins with a sudden fever that lasts two or three weeks; the rash is located mostly on the trunk. The disease was first described in the United States by James Paullin of Georgia in 1913. The chief mammalian carrier of murine typhus is the rat. The infection is transmitted from rat to rat by fleas. The rat louse will not feed on man but the flea will if given opportunity. The flea bite is not infectious but when the flea bites a man, the flea may deposit its excretions; then the human being scratches himself and thus may force these excretions of the flea into his skin.
About six to fourteen days after such infection has taken place, illness begins with a chill and muscular aching, headache, fever, loss of appetite, and cough; with this comes a feeling of severe illness. A skin eruption helps make the diagnosis. This eruption is present in 90 per cent of white patients, but of course is difficult to see on patients with a colored skin. The lesions of the skin are not hemorrhagic. In many patients the spleen is enlarged. Usually after eight to ten days the symptoms lessen and diminish – the condition clearing up in about three weeks.
Fortunately, two of the new antibiotic drugs – aureomycin and Chloromycetin – have been established as valuable in controlling the symptoms of this virus infection. Most of those with murine typhus need lots of fluids while they are ill; if they cannot drink water, it is put into the body in other ways.
About one out of every one hundred people with the disease may be so severely sick as to die of it. The ones who die are usually the very old or sick people.
The extremely severe epidemic typhus that is seen in Russia is exceedingly rare in the United States. A form of typhus which occurred to our soldiers in the Far East is called “scrub typhus” and known to the Japanese as tsutsugamushi disease. In these conditions modern treatment involves the use of aureomycin, Chloromycetin and sometimes para-amino benzoic acid which is effective in interfering with the nutrition of the virus in the body.
*12/318/5*

When we have to deal with unremitting stress and suffer anxiety symptoms as a result, we can prevent further stress breakdown by taking little holidays. I think it is better in the long run for an over-worked person with a responsible job to take the occasional day off work when feeling over-stressed. Even if at the time the person knows he or she really isn’t sick enough to warrant a day off, occasional time off may prevent a breakdown which could well result in weeks or months away from work. Sensible people in business know that occasional time off may be necessary to keep an employee working at full capacity.
The office worker should, if possible, get away from the job during the lunch hour and do something different. Sometimes that little break can be very helpful. A sleep during the lunch hour is even better, if it is possible.
Whatever one’s religious beliefs, at least one day off work each week, a day of total rest, is essential to good mental health.
It is always a good idea for a person with a demanding job to do something at weekends that doesn’t resemble his or her work. The intellectual ought to do something requiring physical exercise; the manual worker might do something which is intellectually stimulating.

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Andy suffered from hay fever every spring. He sneezed every few seconds during attacks. One day, after a severe bout of sneezing, he started to wheeze and experience breathing difficulties. He was told he had asthma. He was found to be allergic to a number of grasses, house dust, dust mites and moulds, including the yeast variety. He was given desensitising injections for his allergies and he improved out of sight.
He started to take medications and, after a couple of years with hardly a breathing problem, he shifted almost exclusively to his bronchodilator puffer, which he needed only occasionally.
Unbeknown to him, his wife was suffering from recurrent vaginal thrush which she treated with topical creams. It hardly bothered her.
Then he decided to take a European holiday with his family. One day, while travelling by car through Belgium, he had a glass of the local beer. Within a minute he was hardly able to breathe. His wife called an ambulance and he was promptly treated at the nearest hospital. From that day on he had to take medications daily and use his puffer as often as six times each day.
When I saw him I decided to run a test for Candida albicans on Andy and his wife. They were both positive, with very high infection parameters (called ‘titers’). Andy was also highly allergic to Candida albicans.
I treated both with anti-fungals and anti-allergy measures such as yeast- and mould-free diets and desensitising allergy drops. After a month Andy was able to stop all medication except the very occasional use of Ventolin.
His wife, too, felt a lot better. ‘I didn’t realise how unwell I was,’ she told me, ‘Only now that I feel so much more energy, have no skin rashes and good digestion, do I realise I was not as healthy as I thought!’
*16\145\2*

The flu spreads much more readily than a cold, primarily moving directly from person to person via virus-contaminated airborne droplets released by coughs and sneezes and even normal conversation. The illness also can be spread through hands and inanimate objects. Like cold viruses, flu viruses can live for a brief time— about one to three hours—on an infected person’s hands and on objects handled by contaminated hands.
Also like colds, flu can be transmitted by people who have not yet developed symptoms. The incubation period—the time between becoming infected with the virus and knowing you are ill—is one to three days, and during that time you can spread the virus to someone else. So trying to contain the illness by isolating flu victims is rarely a successful strategy. Once flu symptoms develop, you remain contagious for another three to five days. All told, then, you can be a vector for flu virus for about one week.
*11\296\2*

When the brain has to begin switching off overloaded circuits to protect itself, the law of strength which I mentioned before, fails to operate. This is because strong stimuli cause switching off responses while weak stimuli do not. Therefore, the person with stage three stress breakdown symptoms begins to respond inappropriately, making little or no response to big problems while responding normally to little problems. Not unexpectedly, while the over-stressed person is ignoring those problems that normally worry him the most, attending instead to trivial details, his behaviour quite mystifies his workmates and relatives.
After all, our personalities are often defined on the basis of our priorities. Obsessive people are pre-occupied with lists and procedures; narcissistic people place a lot of emphasis on appearances, and so on. In third stage stress breakdown, problems that bother us most may begin to evoke the least response, which is actually the opposite to the way we usually behave.
Because the behaviour of a person exhibiting third stage stress breakdown symptoms can be so out of character for that person, others find it difficult to describe the over-stressed person’s behaviour adequately. Thus members of the family or workmates of the over-stressed person may sometimes resort to extravagant psychiatric diagnoses or accusations of moral degeneration, because the over-stressed person’s behaviour has become incomprehensible on the basis of his previous personality.

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Genetic Factors
In order for you to develop allergic rhinitis, you must have inherited the ability to form allergic antibodies, called IgE antibodies, to things like pollen, mites, animals, etc. This ability runs in families, but the exact manner of its transmission from generation to generation has been difficult to define. Recent work suggests that a small fraction of chromosome number six carries this ability.
What is clear about the inheritance of allergic illness is that one’s chances of developing allergic rhinitis are increased when one parent suffers from it and further increased when both parents are afflicted. Only a small percentage of people born into families in which neither parent has allergic rhinitis will ever develop allergic rhinitis.

Exposure
One thing is for certain about allergic rhinitis: you must be exposed to the things to which you have the inherited ability to make IgE antibodies, or you cannot become allergic.
INHERITANCE + EXPOSURE = ALLERGY

Geographic Location
The effects of geographic location are largely those of exposure. If you change geography-local, regional, national, or international – your exposure may be altered for either better or worse.

Pollution
Pollutants in the outdoor or indoor air mainly function as irritants, stimulating nerve endings in already-irritated allergic noses and causing symptom-producing reflexes to occur. To date there is no evidence that natural exposure to outdoor pollutants plays a causative role in the development of allergic rhinitis.
Such is not true for indoor pollutants, however, specifically cigarette smoke and the fumes of natural gas. Maternal cigarette smoking has been shown to increase the likelihood of developing allergic respiratory disease in nonsmoking children. Chronic exposure to maternal cigarette smoking and natural gas fumes have been associated with increased upper and lower respiratory infections in children. (In these studies mothers were the primary caretakers of the children; thus, their smoking affected the children adversely. If the situation was reversed and the father was the primary caretaker at home, his smoking would have an adverse effect on the children.

Age
It is estimated that 80 percent of the people who suffer from allergic rhinitis have their first symptoms prior to twenty years of age, with many at less than ten years of age. Allergic rhinitis tends to begin early in life, gradually worsen over many years, then decline in old age. Its decline during old age is likely due to a decline in the ability of our immune systems to mount allergic responses. Spontaneous remission of symptoms sometimes occurs in early to mid-life, but only in 15 to 25 percent of patients with seasonal allergic rhinitis. Sufferers of perennial allergic rhinitis are much less likely to undergo spontaneous remission.

Nationality
The incidence of various allergic disorders does vary between countries, but the factors responsible for this have not yet been defined.

Sex
During childhood, about twice as many boys as girls suffer from allergic rhinitis. During late childhood and adolescence this sexual difference equalizes. During the midlife years, more men are affected than women, but this difference disappears as people pass into their 50s. The reasons for these sexual differences are not known.

Infection
The ubiquitous nature of upper respiratory infections precludes any definitive statement about their role in the causation of allergic rhinitis. But the fact that the spring and fall pollen seasons coincide with a time of increased viral upper respiratory illnesses and the fact that infections can alter immune responses (increasing certain ones and decreasing others) invites further research into the relationship of infectious illnesses and the development of allergic illnesses.
*6/322/5*

Of the 30 known teratogens in the environment, alcohol is one of the most dangerous and common. Alcohol can have harmful effects on fetal development.
More than 10 percent of all children have been exposed to high levels of alcohol in utero. All will suffer varying degrees of effects, ranging from mild learning disabilities to major physical, mental, and intellectual impairment. It takes very little alcohol to cause serious damage. Research has shown that even a single exposure to high levels of alcohol can cause significant brain damage in the infant. A disorder called fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) is associated with alcohol consumption during pregnancy. Alcohol consumed during the first trimester poses the greatest threat to organ development; exposure during the last trimester, when the brain is developing rapidly, is most likely to affect CNS development. FAS is the third most common birth defect and the second leading cause of mental retardation in the United States. The incidence of FAS is estimated to be 1 to 2 of every 1,000 live births. It is the most common preventable cause of mental impairments in the Western world.
FAS occurs when alcohol ingested by the mother passes through the placenta into the infant’s bloodstream. Because the fetus is so small, its ВАС will be much higher than that of the mother. Thus, consumption of alcohol during pregnancy can affect the infant far more seriously than it does the mother. Among the symptoms of FAS are mental retardation, small head, tremors, and abnormalities of the face, limbs, heart, and brain. Problems that children with FAS experience may include the following:
-    Difficulty in structuring work time
-    Impaired rates of learning
-    Poor memory
-    Trouble in generalizing behaviors and information
-    Impulsive behaviors
-    Reduced attention span or distractible behavior
-    Fearlessness and unresponsive reactions to verbal cautions
-    Poor social judgment
-    Inability to handle money in an age-appropriate manner
-    Trouble with internalizing modeled behaviors
-    Differences in sensory awareness (hyposensitive or hypersensitive)
-    Language production higher than comprehension
-    Poor problem-solving strategies
Children with a history of prenatal alcohol exposure but with fewer than the full physical or behavioral symptoms of FAS may be categorized as having fetal alcohol effects (FAE). FAE is estimated to occur three to four times as often as FAS although it is much less recognized. The signs of FAE in new-borns are low birth-weight and irritability, and there may be permanent mental impairment. Infants whose mothers habitually consumed more than 3 ounces of alcohol (approximately six drinks) in a short time period when pregnant are at high risk for FAS. Risk levels for babies whose mothers consume smaller amounts are uncertain.
Alcohol can also be passed to a nursing baby through breast milk. For this reason, most doctors advise nursing mothers not to drink for at least four hours before nursing their babies and preferably to abstain altogether.
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Most of us think of the obsession with thinness as a phenomenon of recent years. Beginning with supermodel Twiggy in the 1960s and continuing with supermodel Kate Moss in the 1990s, the thin look has seemed to dominate fashion ads. And not only that: television, movies, and magazines constantly project images of lean, fit bodies. We have been led to believe that if we are thin, with shapely curves and well-defined muscles, we will be more desirable.
But the thin look has been around for a long time. Anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder, has been defined as a psychiatric disorder since 1873. During the Victorian era, corsets were used to achieve unrealistically tiny waists. By the 1920s, it was common knowledge that obesity was linked to poor health. The American Tobacco Company coined the phrase “reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet” to promote the idea that cigarettes dulled appetite. American Tobacco even formed the Moderation League to promote the virtues of moderation in, among other things, eating.
Today, beautiful female models in size 4 clothes and underweight Miss Americas exemplify desirability and success, delivering the subtle message that thin is in and fat is not where it’s at. In addition, public health warnings that being overweight increases risk for heart disease, certain cancers, and a number of other disorders can send a panic through people when their weight isn’t what they think it should be. Some of these distorted views of self-image arise from misinterpretation of height-weight charts, making some people strive for the lower readings stipulated for a light-boned person when determining their own normal weight. Most looked at the charts, looked in the mirror, and decided they were too fat. Even elementary school children diet routinely and indicate that if they could change one thing about themselves, it would be their weight. Sadly, increasing numbers of adolescents, teens, and adults have become so preoccupied with trying to be like the size 4 models that they make themselves sick trying to get to some magical weight or clothes size.
*1/277/5*

For really sensational-looking skin, you have to work from the inside out. The right nutrients are a necessity. They feed the nerves, tissues, and blood vessels, act as cleansing agents, and all in all keep your epidermis looking vital, smooth, and healthy. No cosmetic in the world can substitute for good nutrition!

Vitamin A
Preserves the skin’s elasticity and smoothness, helps delay wrinkles, aids in growth and repair of tissues, builds resistance to skin infections and blemishes. Too little vitamin A in your diet can result in flaky, itchy, or goose-bumped skin. As a supplement: Use the dry form. 25,000 IU, twice daily, a.m. and p.m., for five days a week, then stop for two.

Vitamin С
Vital for the production of collagen, which strengthens connective tissue, promotes healing of wounds, bruises, and scar tissue, aids in the prevention of capillary breakage (“spider lines”), protects skin from chemical pollutants, helps fight acne and other infections by stimulating the production of white blood cells.
As a supplement: Rose hips vitamin C, 1,000 mg. (with bioflavonoids), three times daily. (Take one with each meal and then at bedtime.)

Vitamin E
Maintains and preserves cell membranes, improves circulation in tiny capillaries on the face, aids in healing, and works with vitamin С to keep blood vessels healthy and less subject to blemishes, also keeps skin younger-looking by retarding cell aging.
As a supplement: Use the dry form, 200-400 IU, one to three times daily. Take after meals.
(Vitamin E oil, 28,000 IU, can be applied externally for healing burns, abrasions, and scar tissue.)

Vitamin В Complex
Essential for smooth and unblemished skin; vitamin B2 helps reduce oiliness and the formation of blackheads.
As a supplement: Vitamin В complex, 100 mg. (time release), one daily, taken after any meal.

Choline And Inositol
These help emulsify cholesterol and eliminate fatty deposits or bumps under the skin. They also act as cleansing agents by helping to purify the kidneys.
As a supplement: 1,000 mg., daily, taken after a large meal. (Lecithin granules, 2 tsp., daily, can be substituted for choline and inositol tabs.)
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