The Health Blog

Of course, there’s a catch. In this case, two manly traits interfere with spiritual development. First, we are raised to ignore and discount intuition—our inner voice. Second, we are taught to suppress our emotions. On both counts we need to do some unlearning, says Dr. Kurth. Here’s how.

Pause and listen. Don’t listen only to your reasoning mind. Listen to your inner urges, nudges, leanings, voices. And give yourself permission to act on them, says Dr. Kurth.

Also, make time to just put the world on “pause,” Dr. Kurth says. “We get very caught up with all the events of our lives. And in order to have an intimate connection with some transcendent reality, we have to take time to stop and listen.”

Get emotional. “Listen to your emotions and let your emotions and passions inform what you do,” Dr. Kurth says. One definition of enthusiasm is “being infused with the spirit of God,” she says. Often when we are impassioned, we are connecting with our spiritual essence, she says.

Meditate. Okay, break out those orange robes. Nahhh, we’re kidding. The simplest, most basic meditation, says Dr. Kurth, is simply to pause for five minutes and focus attention on nothing but your breathing. Breathe comfortably, deeply, naturally. Don’t force it. Just relax and watch your breathing for a few moments.

Meet Mother Nature. Take quiet walks in natural settings outdoors, says Dr. Kurth. The beauty, vastness, complexity, and seeming omnipresence of nature can be both awe-inspiring and relaxing.

Pray tell. Talking over problems in prayer, turning them over to a higher power, taking decisions into prayerful consideration, is obviously an effort to connect with the Divine. Throughout history many people have found this a helpful spiritual practice, says Dr. Kurth. You might, too.

Make beautiful music. Singing, playing, or listening to inspirational music opens doors to greater spiritual realization, says Dr. Kurth.

Be creative. “Working in any of the creative arts can help one discover and develop his spiritual nature. The key here is work that involves inspiration. Spirit, says Dr. Kurth, comes from the Latin word meaning “breath,” as in “the breath of life.” And the word inspire comes from the words “in spirit.”

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Most of us know people who exhibit what seem to be peculiar eating patterns, from self-professed “chocoholics” to the college student on a macrobiotic diet. Yet these unusual habits seldom represent a true eating disorder. Understanding just what qualifies as an eating disorder begins with basic definitions of the terms.

Anorexia-self-starvation-was first described as a clinical syndrome three hundred years ago. Yet only within the past few decades have eating disorders been widely recognized, not just by the public but by physicians themselves. Even as I write, controversy rages, here and abroad, over the exact nature of these disorders. This debate is more than mere medical hairsplitting; a precise understanding is crucial so that therapy can be developed and applied.

Anorexia and bulimia may appear to be different illnesses with different symptoms. Anorexia is characterized by starvation; bulimia is notorious for its cycle of bingeing and purging. While there are distinctions between the two conditions, it is also true that they have certain features in common.

Both anorexics and bulimics overvalue bodily thinness. The flip side of this attitude, and of equal importance, is an exaggerated fear of fatness. These highly prized but basically unhealthy concepts are constantly reinforced by social pressures and cultural signals.

Both disorders also involve an obsession with food. As the disease progresses, patients get caught up in the rituals of acquiring, preparing, and consuming meals. In time, thoughts of food come to dominate every aspect of their lives, at the expense of family, friends, careers, and, of course, health.

Eating disorders are “spectrum” disorders. Like the spectrum of light in a rainbow, anorexia and bulimia appear in a range of intensities. Think of anorexics as occupying the red end of the spectrum, with bulimics at the violet end. Both “colors” are highly intense but are of different hues. In between are many variations of the illness, each with a distinctive “color,” or pattern of symptoms. There are several types of patients with eating disorders, especially among those with bulimia. The main difference between them may be simply the severity of their symptoms.

Looking at a rainbow, it is difficult to tell exactly where one color ends and another one begins. The colors seem to slide into each other, overlapping at certain critical points.

The same can be said of eating disorders. Women who start off with anorexia find it difficult to maintain constant starvation. So they eat. They then often adopt such measures as self-induced vomiting in order to keep their weight down. Conversely, patients who begin by bingeing and purging may eventually try starvation as their only means of restricting food intake. This passage from one kind of eating strategy to another affects the treatment they require. Anorexic patients, for example, fear that learning how to eat normally may result in urges to binge.

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Sandra Hameroff was having a hard time losing 40 postpregnancy pounds—until she started taking time off from her diet.

Shortly after the birth of her son, Noah, Sandra got serious about shaping up, determined to return to her prepregnancy weight of 100 pounds. She started using her cross-country ski machine four times a week. She also went on a strict diet, allowing herself no more than 1,300 calories a day and denying herself a lot of her favorite foods, especially pizza and french fries. As a result, she found herself on the brink of a full-scale binge more than once.

When a sympathetic friend learned of Sandra’s efforts—and her list of forbidden foods—she made a suggestion: “Why not give yourself a break from your eating program once a week? You’ll tame those cravings before they permanently undo your diet.”

The next Monday through Thursday, Sandra was a model of gastronomic self-control, amazing even herself. Then came Friday, and with it, her old favorites: pizza, ice cream, and a hearty dessert.

As radical as it sounds, indulgence was just what she needed. The next day, Sandra resumed her stricter eating plan with greater enthusiasm. Soon after, her husband got into the act by taking her to dinner on Friday nights, which only served to make her splurges seem even more special. “I looked forward to them,” she says. “They made my diet easier to stick with.”

Four months later, Sandra stepped on a scale and discovered that she had lost all 40 pounds without guilt or giving up the foods that she loved. As a gift to herself, she hired a personal trainer to help her get in the best shape ever. “She brought me to a new level of fitness,” Sandra says.

WINNING ACTION

Give yourself a break. As we all know, dieting is hard work, and temptation is everywhere. Instead of trying to fight the urge to splurge all the time, allow yourself a chance to indulge those fat fantasies every now and then. Just remember that you have to be on the wagon 6 days out of 7.

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Let us look at the so-called ’store-front window of the pain supermarket’ to see the range of individual treatments, their advantages, disadvantages and factors which would prevent their use as well as their approximate costs and where these treatments can be obtained.

Take for example, Mary, 33, an ex-kindergarten sister, who had exhaustively sought relief for a chronic back pain problem.

‘Mismanagement by the medical profession has made my life miserable with unbearable pain for the past five years!’ was how she angrily described her problem.

Mary had a long history of lower back pain which had involved two operations in which the individual vertebrae or spinal bones were fused together. Despite the operations on her lower back she was dissatisfied about the continuing level of pain and how it was disrupting her life.

She also complained of severe pain in the neck and shoulders. Her misery was made complete by deterioration of the cartilage at the back of both kneecaps known as chondromalacia patellae.

When admitted to hospital, her pain symptoms were related to her long-term orthopaedic problems and what she described as ‘the lousy cards life’s dealt me’.

After her surgery things had gone spectacularly wrong, with numerous post-operative complications including wound infection. When her knees began to fail, she began swimming to relieve the-pain. But the swimming brought on a painful condition of both shoulders — ‘frozen shoulder’.

She was then re-admitted to hospital where she was told that her original fusion operation was a failure. The second fusion operation was carried out in an attempt to correct the pain in her lower back.

This was as unsuccessful as the first operation in relieving her pain and she was then referred to a psychiatrist. Shortly after this she became acutely suicidal with homicidal thoughts towards her child.

Mary was transferred from a private hospital to the in-patient pain programme with a three-month history of depressive symptoms including persistent lowering of mood, tearfulness, difficulty in getting to sleep, waking early, loss of energy, poor appetite, a weight loss of seven kilos and loss of interest in everything, including physical activity. She had also ‘frightened off her treating psychiatrists — so difficult was she to

manage. b

Initially, Mary was very prickly, with a caustic tongue, very difficult to manage and very defensive, suspicious and hostile towards doctors after her past experiences.

After her first week in the pain program she was still difficult but coming around to the viewpoint that she might as well try any last resort to climb out of the depths that she had fallen into due to her chronic pain experience.

The breakthrough for Mary came with one of the main features of the pain program — patients being given the opportunity to experience a number of different techniques including laser acupuncture.

Within the first few sessions she noticed an improvement in her pain levels. She reported that her pain was becoming more and more acceptable and within the four weeks of the pain program she had minimal levels of pain.

Now, instead of depressing everyone, Mary was a general inspiration for new in-patients. On discharge, she was having weekly treatment. After six months, she had progressed to having treatment monthly.

Today she has continued to improve. Her previous constant demands for pain medication and treatment became far less and her relationship with her husband and son are greatly improved.

She is still taking medication but it has fallen to controllable levels. She is very happy with the results of the treatment and has now gone back to being involved in a kindergarten part-time.

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Migraine headaches are classically described as ‘excruciating’. In many cases, these are thought to be an allergic reaction to some types of food such as citrus fruit, cheeses, peanuts and red wine.

Acute migraines are sometimes accompanied by nausea and double vision and are usually described as being ‘a high intensity, throbbing sensation’.

They are normally experienced on one side of the head, usually the same side during each attack. Some experience what is known as ‘prodromal symptoms’. That is, flashing lights, nausea and sometimes tingling in parts of the body before the beginning of the actual head pain.

Commonly these headaches last from one to several hours and respond to sleep and appropriate and early treatment.

Less common variants can last for up to several days at a time. In some sufferers the headache can be experienced on both sides of the head. The headache may be accompanied by severe disturbances of bodily sensation — numbness and tingling — and even paralysis.

Parts of the vision of the affected eye may be lost causing partial vision in the affected patient. In some the nausea can be extreme with nothing able to be held down.

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Knowledge gaps about pain sensation, and its severity, existed until only recently. To a large extent, this was because most of the research was done on experimental animals rather than on actual chronic pain patients. There was thus no deep understanding of the difference between acute and chronic pain. (See Chapter 3 for a more detailed explanation.) There was also an over emphasis on pain’s physical and mechanical causes based on the widespread, but wrong, assumption that pain is purely a sensory experience. The emotional and psychological factors involved in pain were relegated to secondary importance.

Different definitions

Even specialists from different fields of pain management and research define pain in different ways. A recent international conference of pain specialists provided a fascinating range of definitions of the word ‘pain’.

1. Neurophysiologists understand ‘pain’ as being the appropriate response of specific pathways within a nervous system.

2. To experimental psychologists ‘pain’ is a behaviourial response to a stimulus.

3. Neurologists understand that ‘pain’ means the patient has perceived just that experience.

4. Clinical psychologists believe that an individual may complain of pain whether or not a physiological stimulus is identified.

5. Psychiatrists understand that ‘pain’ means a patient is in distress, which is expressed as a disagreeable somatic (body) sensation.

6. Acupuncturists usually define ‘pain’ as a complaint of a disagreeable sensation. The word pain is used to describe a subjective perception of distress. It is not a simple sensation like a primary sensation. Accompanied by a greater emotional response than any of these, pain is complex and subject to individual interpretation.

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T he word pain comes from the Latin word poena or the French word peine. It is important to realise there are many different types of pain. For example:

Jill’s trigeminal neuralgia

Jill had trigeminal neuralgia a lightning-like pain in the face and mouth, which is so severe that it makes some sufferers feel as though they want to kill themselves. ‘My pain feels like someone is jabbing my face with a red-hot electric needle. The worst thing about the pain is that it’s so unpredictable. I never know what’s going to set it off— swallowing, laughing, or talking. Even the smallest thing can set it off. I try to stay home and go out as little as possible.’I don’t use make-up. I don’t wash my face. I don’t even brush my teeth. Sometimes I don’t have any pain for days.Then I find myself starting to worry about when it may start up again.’

Mary’s post-operative pain

‘After surgery to remove the gallstones, I felt miserable. The pain near the incision was sharp. It seemed to spread all over my body. The nurses gave me some pills which took the edge off the pain and by about three days after the operation, the pain was mostly gone.’

Rudl with terminal cancer

‘At first, I didn’t mind the thought of dying, so long as it wasn’t too painful. But, then I began to worry about all those drugs they were giving me. They were making me groggy and confused. I couldn’t think properly or even feel like I was alive. There were times when I didn’t take the pills because I wanted to be alert for whatever was left of my life.’

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Because the mechanism behind true or ‘classical’ allergies is well understood, the potential for treating them with drugs is very good. The preparations used include corticosteroids (sometimes referred to simply as steroids, although they are not the same as the steroid drugs used by athletes) which have a general suppressive effect on inflammation, antihistamines which counteract the effect of the mediator histamine, and bronchodilators for use in asthma.

Although at one time there were serious side-effects associated with many anti-allergy drugs, the modern formulations have overcome most of these problems. The drug treatments now available are both safe and effective.

Before embarking on any other form of treatment, such as an elimination diet, it is important to weigh up the costs and benefits of that treatment as compared with using drugs to combat the symptoms. In cases where the symptoms are relatively mild, it may be better to rely on drugs alone. The decision involves a great many personal considerations, including, for example, the relative importance of food to the person concerned, their perseverance and will-power, and the number of meals that have to be eaten away from home. Nutritional needs also have to be taken into account. It is a decision that can only be made by the individual patient (or by the parents in the case of a small child) in consultation with the doctor concerned.

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This woodland plant with elegant sword-shaped leaves and delicate white flower bells not only brings joy to our hearts in the spring when we come across it on our walks, but also strengthens and stimulates this organ, albeit that few people are aware of it. As long ago as the Middle Ages, lily of the valley was held in high esteem as a heart medicine. Later, however, when the more potent digitalis, or foxglove, was discovered, lily of the valley fell into disuse. An English doctor, by the name of Withering, found digitalis in the tea mixture of an old woman herbalist who used it to cure dropsy. This happened in the year 1785 and digitalis has been used ever since.

However, in recent times, we are beginning to realise that we have wrongfully neglected lily of the valley and that the plant that produces the most dramatic effect is not necessarily the best one. After many years of using digitalis as a heart medicine we have come to know some of its side effects. For example, we know now that digitalis is cumulative, which means that it remains in the heart muscle for quite some time and so prolonged treatment may seriously damage the heart. Lily of the valley, however, does not pose the same danger, since within four hours the glycoside, the active substance, is broken down by the body, although its medicinal effect continues for much longer.

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The whole, dried plant can also be made into a powder, which in turn can be used to produce tablets. The advantage of a powder and tablets is the fact that they retain all the plant’s substances, including the ashes. On the negative side, sensitive ingredients are lost in the drying process, although the minerals, oils and resins remain fully effective. Remedies taken in powder and tablet form are ideal for use as laxatives and to stop diarrhoea, as well as to aid the digestion and eliminate worms. Papaya preparations are a good example in this respect.

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