Health And Pharmacy Blog

Although some heart attacks occur without any symptoms at all, any one of the following symptoms is a strong warning that you are probably having a heart attack:

• Uncomfortable pressure - not necessarily pain- in the chest, most often experienced as a deep central discomfort (or feeling of fullness or squeezing) below the breastbone.  This kind of crushing pain or heaviness in the middle of the chest is the most common symptom of a heart attack (about a quarter of patients however will not experience this sensation). If it lasts more than a few minutes, or if it subsides when you rest but increases with activity, that increases the likelihood that what you are experiencing is a restriction of blood flow to heart muscle.
• Chest pain that radiates to the jaw, neck, back, shoulder or arm. In some patients, the pain is experienced primarily, or even exclusively, on other locations.
• Chest discomfort that is accompanied by light-headedness, nausea, sweating or shortness of breadth.

It should be noted very carefully that youth is no guarantee against a heart attack. Even if someone is in 20s, a long episode of chest pressure needs to be promptly evaluated by an expert to exclude the possibility of a hearth problem, even a heart attack.
Many heart attacks occur in those without any of the traditional risk factors for heart disease. So even if you have no history of high blood cholesterol or hypertension, do not ignore prolonged episode of chest discomfort.
Some heart attacks are signalled by atypical symptoms, which may run the gamut from heartburn to sudden recurrent vomiting. Complaints that arise with activity and subside with rest often also serve as early warning signs of a heart attack.

On the other hand chest pain is unlikely to be a heart attack if it is -

• “Stabbing” pain that can be localized to one small spot on the chest (about the size of a coin). For instance, a feeling as if a pencil is being poked into the chest for an instant.
• Pain/discomfort that lasts for less than 30 seconds.
• Pain that is felt exclusively in the region of the heart itself (that is the left side of the chest).

Millions of people participate in yoga classes to enhance their muscle strength and flexibility. But yoga may also be used as a complimentary treatment for depression, according to David Shapiro, PhD, a professor on the Department of Psychiatry and. Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA).

“Yoga appears to be a promising intervention for depression. It is cost-effective and easy to implement. Yoga produces many beneficial, emotional, psychological, behavioral and biological effects.”

Yoga offers multiple health benefits, including stress reduction. It also requires sustained attention and concentration, which can help improve brain function. In addition, yoga is beneficial for older adults because some asanas improve muscle strength and balance, which can prevent falls.

Yoga can also help alleviate pain and stiffness, as well as normalize body weight and improve energy levels. And although it is not considered an aerobic exercise, yoga does appear to regulate heart rate and improve circulation, studies reveal. Dr. Shapiro and other UCLA researchers have been studying the effects of lyenger yoga on mood. ”

In lyenger yoga, an attentional focus and emphasis is on increasing awareness through movements, and the activities of muscles and joints and their coordination”

he says. Participants, who were diagnosed with depression and taking antidepressant medication, took a total of 20 lyenger yoga classes over an eight-week period. Results showed that the yoga classes imparted an additional improvement in their depression symptoms and also in measures of anxiety, expression of anger, neurotic symptoms, lack of motivation caused by emotional difficulties and low-frequency heart rate variability.

“Thus, participation in yoga did not, in effect, target depression only, but also affected psychological and biological processes indicative of improved mental health and more effective social behavior”

says Dr. Shapiro.

Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, an allopath, is the father of Homoeopathy, one of the epoch making medical discoveries in the world. Actually it was a new system of attending to the disease or to be more exact the patient, or attending to the curable in the disease. This discovery is often is called “Hahnemannian art of healing”. He explained his principles in a book called “Organon of Medicine”. The main principles are:-
The aim of the homoeopath physician is to cure the patient rapidly, gently and personally. He must bear in mind that he is treating a “patient” not a “disease”. To achieve his aim, he must find out what is curable in the disease and what is curative in medicine. In a diseased fellow, the vital force in him is deranged and this derangement expresses itself by abnormal sensations and functions of the organism. These sensations are called disease’s symptoms. For the Homoeopath physician, the disease means the totally of its symptoms. He must need only to take away this totality of symptoms for the entire disease.
In a word, in Homoeopathy there is no disease name like cholera, typhoid, but the sum total of the symptoms of a disease, the name of the disease notwithstanding. The physician thus has to consider the patient with all the related symptoms, not a particular ‘disease’.

Disease and Medicine: - It is medicine that possesses the capacity to produce alterations in a healthy man’s healthy health. If a medicine can’t alter a healthy man’s health or can not produce abnormality, it can not cure any diseased person. This power can be ascertained by its effects on healthy persons. The morbid symptoms that medicines produce in healthy persons are the symptoms the medicines can cure.
Thus the creative power of medicine depends on the symptoms they have which are similar to the ‘disease’. The principle of Homeopathy is “Similia Similibus Curentur”- similar cures similar.
Actions of medicine: - Each medicine has two types of actions – primary and secondary. The primary action takes place under the influence of every medicine and the secondary action or reaction is effected in the living organism. To illustrate this – when a healthy man takes a medicine, its primary action produces disease symptoms is the healthy man. When a diseased person having the similar symptoms takes the same medicine then the secondary action is affected by the diseased organism and it is this secondary action that leads to cure.

Chronic and Acute Diseases:- Diseases has been classified in two headings – 1) Acute and 2) chronic.
Diseases what have a tendency to finish their course quickly but always in a moderate time, are known as acute diseases. Chronic diseases have often imperceptible beginnings. They derange the living organism and gradually cause it to deviate from its healthy condition in such a way that automatic life energy, the vital force, opposes such diseases only at the commencement, and during their progress offers helpless and useless resistance. Then the organism helplessly suffers from them. The diseases go on increasing their morbid influence upon the organism, destroying it in the end.

Chronic Miasma: - There is some morbid force between the curative power of the medicine and the curable in the disease which do not allow the action of the medicine to run its full cause. This force is called Miasma. There are three such distinct forces: - 1) Syphilis 2) Sycosis and 3) Psora.

Read the rest of “Homoeopathy: Milder Way to Treat a ‘Diseased’, not a ‘Disease’” »

The killer disease AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) is spreading with unprecedented speed all over the globe. It has emerged as a serious socio-economic and public health problem. AIDS seems to be the most dreaded disease in human history. The tragedy of AIDS in the worst affected countries of Africa and the West is likely to repeat itself in many countries over the world.

It is reported that cases of AIDS were first noted in African nationals seeking treatment in Europe only shortly after AIDS was realized in the United States. Later on, epidemiological studies found that AIDS was a widespread phenomenon throughout central Africa with most cases linked by heterosexual contact. Testing of stored blood documented HIV in African as early as 1965 and reviews of medical records found cases consistent with AIDS in Africans as early as 1975. A sample of stored blood collected in Africa in 1959 contained HIV, making it the oldest known isolate of the virus. In addition an English sailor who had been in central Africa in 1958 was found to have AIDS by analyzing preserved tissues for the presence of HIV. All of these findings indicate that HIV was probably spreading through parts of African continent before it arrived in the USA and in European countries. But here, we will only discuss about the current situations in Africa.

At the beginning of the present country, some 23.3 million Africans (mostly in the Sub-Saharan region) are estimated to have HIV infection or AIDS by UNAIDS/WHO. That is about 70% of the world’s total AIDS patients in a region that is home to just 10% of the world’s population. UNAIDS / WHO estimated in 1999 that nearly 90% of the half million children born with the virus or infected through breast feeding were living in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In many African countries antenatal estimates tend to underestimate the real levels of HIV infection in women. The reason is that, infected women progressively become less fertile and hence less likely they are to get pregnant. And because many HIV- infected women are no longer becoming pregnant, they are not showing up at antenatal clinics where blood samples for anonymous HIV testing are taken. The antenatal estimates thus fail to reflect the true extent of HIV infection in the female population as the whole.

So, not surprisingly, there are significantly more women than men living with HIV infection in Sub-Saharan Africa. The ratio of the women to men though is not the same everywhere. It changes over time and place. Current information suggests that more men than women have become infected in the early stages of the heterosexual epidemic especially in settings where a small number of sexual workers rapidly become infected and in turn spread HIV to a much larger number of men. Overtime the male-female gap has been closing; eventually the ratio will get reversed. On average, however, the 15 studies conducted in both rural and urban areas in different African countries suggested that between 12 and 13 African women are infected for every 10 African men. At the end of 1999, 12.2 million women and 10.1 million men aged 15-49 were living with the dreaded HIV in Sub-Saharan territory.

HIV passes more easily from men to women than women to men through sexual intercourse. It has been found that women get infected far earlier than men. Factors responsible for this may be both biological and cultural - as they are exposed to sex at much younger age compared to men. Girls aged 15-19 are around 5 or 6 times more likely to be HIV positive than boys of their own age in African population.

The tragedy is that there is no cure as yet for this disease despite all the research that has been going on for almost 4 decades now. So those suffering HIV have nothing to do but pray to God and wait for their slow demise. We can only sympathize with them and hope for a breakthrough in medicine.