Health and Shopping Blog

Yes we understand the shocking value of this headline. Ever since the “Man bites dog” story, we’ve had every kind of animal story. The cat and the killer squirrels would have been more accurate. But we don’t do sensationalism for its own sake here. We kept it simple. One day, Richie cut her finger but thought nothing of it as she tended to the cat. So you have to travel over to Smith Valley in Nevada. Richie Simmons’ cat was sick. She had visited with the local veterinarian to get drugs. A few days later, she was flat on her back with a high fever. It took a month for the lab to identify the problem. One thing - it was highly contagious between humans and animals. How did the cat come to be infected? We can never know it. She had tularemia. Huh? Well, back in 1911 there was a disease that almost wiped out the squirrel population in Tulare, California so they called it tularemia. Did the cat travel back in time or just visit with some squirrel or even mole cousins in California? Who knows. It died before we could ask. The good news Doxycycline was an almost instant treatment. Just goes to show. Once you know which bacteria are making you sick, you get the right antibiotic and get better fast.

Most men never seem to talk about diet. You never see them in a huddle comparing the results of only eating grapefruits as against cabbage soup. If they do get worried about their weight, they tend to do it behind closed doors. But now there’s a whole new way of telling if they’re serious about losing weight. Most of my friends walk in the house, open the refrigerator and pick out a cold bottle of beer. The ritual inspired by mass-culture of XX century. But now men are giving up beer. They’ve done the math. They know how many calories are in each bottle or can. If that fails, there’s always a cold Acomplia.

If you see women get together, they almost always talk food. Too much of it, too little of it. When we eat too much, we put on weight and that ain’t flattering. For every extra food we get some extra pounds. To reverse weight gain couldn’t be easier. Eat less. Except it isn’t easy which is why there’s a whole industry out there to sell us diets. And if the diets don’t work, there’s always the pills like Acomplia. All the clinical trials have shown this top European drug shaves an average 10% of your body weight and slims down those waistlines.

Maybe the coin of summer has even several sides. And just so you can keep calling global warming a myth, poison ivy is one of the plants responding well to the increases in temperature, humidity and the level of carbon dioxide. You can see it spreading along hedgerows and into your back yard. Only a very few people are immune. For light exposure - you realized the danger immediately and washed the affected area of skin with warm water and plain soap or a solvent like rubbing alcohol - an over-the-counter topical steroid cream will usually be sufficient. This plant is bursting with an oily resin called urushiol. If this penetrates your skin, you’ll almost certainly get blisters and, in due course, a rash. For more serious exposure, you’re going to need the cream plus Prednisone. Two final thoughts on removing a patch of poison ivy from your yard. Lay in a supply of Prednisone and, wearing gloves, cut the vine and throw it on a bonfire. But watch out. Heat and smoke can lift urushiol particles into the atmosphere so don’t stand down wind of the fire. And if all else has failed, get a goat. Goats love to eat poison ivy.

Every year, Xanax has been winning the prize in the “most prescribed” category. Naturally, Pfizer loves these annual headlines. They want customer thing that it is so popular because it does really work. Well, that’s true to some extent. If you take xanax for the right reasons and under proper medical supervision, it does reduce levels of panic and anxiety. But you can’t change the fact that it’s one of the benzodiazepines. That means it’s habit-forming. If you take to big dose, you’ll probably won’t like an effect. You only have to go into the emergency departments of hospitals to see the truth of this. In 2005, there were more than 2 million admissions caused by the non-medical use of drugs. Add in the continuous barrage of advertisements for drugs, and people are persuaded to take FDA-approved medications without worrying about the consequences. The way the world works today, people do need help. Drugs like xanax really do help them to cope with the stress. But it’s not helpful to see drugs as the only solution. Yes, xanax relieves anxiety, but you don’t want to become an addict. You need to change yourself. This drug gives you a breathing space. In the medium to long term, psychological support is the way to learn how to control your fear and worry. Live life the natural way, don’t pay endlessly for “help” through a bottle of tablets. Use that opportunity to get counseling and therapy.

Once upon a time, long long ago, there were five young ladies who were called the Spice Girls. One of them, born Victoria, was given the kind nick of Posh (a word meaning classy and elegant which she was until she opened her mouth and spoke). Now, her claim to fame is that she’s married to a footballer who can’t kick the ball in a straight line. Anyway, Posh is prone to get acne - not quite what you would expect of someone so, well, Posh. But she’s finally found the cure. While the rest of the world fights acne with Accutane, the footballer’s wife is mainlining natto. This is a favorite of the Japanese who make the stuff by fermenting soy beans. Guess what? It’s full of essential vitamins that fix scarred skin. Now, I gotta tell you. Natto has a taste that’s best not described and it’s best approached from up wind because it’s not overflowing with natural perfume. Back in the good old days when people really were posh, they used to go to spa towns to take the waters. That also tasted vile and smelled worse, but the classiest could make it look like they were sipping champagne. We’re all waiting for pictures of Posh downing her beans. For those of you not into has-beens, there’s still Accutane for acne. No smell and swallowed whole so no taste problem but, hey, you can’t have everything unless you’re either rich or Japanese (or both).

It is now licensed for the control of neuropathic pain in adults suffering from cancer and multiple sclerosis. So medical science has been able to strip away the “unwanted” psychoactive symptoms and use the cannabinoid components to target the specific diseases. Science is now designing medications that focus on the parts of the body affected by disease and not the central nervous system. So, for example, when the body is injured cannabinoids are naturally released in the affected area and reduce pain. Unfortunately, the effect is very short-lived. Thus, research is now aiming to produce more medications that maintain cannabinoid levels in the affected areas for pain relief and for the control of anxiety and depression. The converse treatments are also working well for dealing with nicotine addiction and obesity. So, medications like acomplia that block the cannabinoid receptors help to reduce addictive behavior and reduce appetite. Acomplia is now a front line treatment for obesity in Europe, second in effectiveness only to the use of gastric bands or surgical bypasses (which reduce weight by an average of 30%). Possibly because of the prejudice that cannabis is a drug that should be banned. It is a shame society cannot see beyond a name to the good results science can produce. By coincidence, the French health authority Afssaps also released new statistics confirming the safety profile of acomplia in relation to depression. People with no history of depression show no adverse symptoms. Others only show an increase in depression at the beginning of a course of treatment.

If you’re fifty-aged manager, you probably’ve met problems with ED. Some 10% of you will have a complete failure of erections - more often, this affects older men. Alongside this news is the equally significant evidence of depressive illnesses. Researchers estimate that about a quarter of men will suffer some degree of anxiety or depression at some point during their lives. When this happens, the symptoms may not appear too serious and you will probably not seek treatment. Many of you will leave the depression, if such it is, untreated and buy Viagra, Cialis or Levitra online. This is an entirely understandable reaction. But it is always better to get a professional opinion before self-medicating.

This creates real problems for the physicians trying to balance treatments for both the depressive illnesses and the ED. Because there may be adverse reactions between the different medications, you should not take Viagra, Cialis or Levitra on your own initiative if you are already taking any other medications. Your physician has a number of options:

• The first and most obvious possibility is to change to another antidepressant with fewer side effects. In a number of clinical double-blind studies, Serzone (Nefazodone) and Wellbutrin (bupropion) were shown to cause fewer problems on sexual function than SSRIs. If you respond well to either of these, you may find that you feel less depressed and your sexual performance improves. Wellbutrin is also less likely to cause weight gain which may aid your choice of medication.
• With some drugs, e.g. Zoloft (sertraline) and Anafranil (clomipramine), it may be possible to change the medication regime. If you have a fairly consistent time when you engage in sexual activity, this should be timed when the drug’s level in your body would be at its lowest, i.e. you would take your daily dose after sexual intercourse.
• Then your physician may authorise you to take one of the specific ED medications such as Viagra, Cialis or Levitra. In a 2003 randomised study of ninety men suffering from antidepressant-induced ED, 54% of those treated with Viagra (sildenafil citrate) as against the placebo showed improvement. Note that only slightly over half the sample showed improvement. There are limits to the effectiveness of Viagra, Cialis and Levitra.
• If you are taking Zoloft (sertraline) and Paxil (paroxetine), it may be possible to change your schedule to include a two-day break each week. During this time, your sexual function should return without losing the effectiveness of the antidepressant.

All this has assumed that the ED was in fact caused by the depression or the medication to treat that depression. If there are alternative explanations for the ED, those should also be thoroughly investigated. It would compound the irony if the true cause of your ED should prove not to be the antidepressants but a condition requiring a different treatment.
If you do seek advice and a depressive illness is confirmed, your physician will offer treatment. In such cases, the issue of cause and effect can become complicated. The ED may have been caused by the anxiety or depression itself, or there may have been an independent cause. Not surprisingly, this prompts many patients to stop taking the medication. Thus, although treatment using one or more antidepressants is usually successful in 90% of all cases, less than one third of patients complete the course of medication, and the incidence of relapse is high.

It is obvious that it is extremely hard to talk about complicated problems in a few words of an article paper. This is a fascinating historical survey of cultural attitudes towards impotence through the ages. To some extent, it retreads the same ground as the History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault (in three volumes) but without the same depth of philosophical postmodernism to inform it. Some readers may prefer McLaren because he is more descriptive than analytical.

This simplistic view of gender, distinguishing purely between the functioning male and female, ignores all the shades of sexuality that may manifest in bisexuality, homosexuality, transgender behaviour, etc. By defining maleness by a single criterion of physical performance, it marginalises all the other factors of affection, love and commitment which may affect sexual desire. Worse, it overlooks all the treatable physical conditions that may cause impotence.

As McLaren takes us through history, we see every excuse for failure come into and pass out of fashion. More distressingly, we are told of all the treatments sold by the medical profession over the centuries, many of which are extraordinary by modern standards. Now instead of all the guesswork of the past, we are offered the “truth”. This is erectile dysfunction - a plumbing problem that can be solved by taking cialis. Look around and you will see the hard sell of adverts (pun intended) for these pills. Yet, the implication of these adverts is no more true than Freudian notions that performance weakens when childhood memories interfere with adult lives. Although cialis does effectively restore erectile function, it is a “magic” fig leaf to cover the lack of understanding about the real causes of the problem.

The difficulty for men can be stated simply. Rather than being judged by their ability to write a book, men are conditioned to judge themselves by their ability to have penetrative sex. If this fails, men are told that there is some shameful defect in their masculinity. Most respond by casting around to find someone else to blame. The conventional response is that women have failed to excite them. So, for example, the mythology of witches in Europe and the early American settlements was based, in part, on the proposition that spells can rob men of their virility.

More realistically, McLaren argues that actually impotence isn’t a disorder at all. It is more a collection of concepts and ideas that have been used to define gender roles and expectations. If we take the word “orgasm” and try to explain what it means, we are immediately lost in a world of subjective impressions. It is always easy to fall back on physical explanations of the mechanics of arousal and consummation. But actually listing the main sensations and emotions in a way that captures their universal significance is a serious challenge. Then trying to place the definition in a context of social relationships, some acceptable, others less so, turns the entire exercise into a minefield of taboo issues.

The book is the best choice you can make. Having read it, it would not be unfair to conclude that our attitudes today are little different to those that defined men in Ancient Rome and Greece. The only difference, I suppose, is that rather than having to eat something disgusting or soak your penis in something potentially dangerous, we can now simply take cialis while reading the last few pages of the book and then be ready to enjoy sexual activity for the rest of the night without having to work about philosophical niceties.

In November, 2007 the British Medical Journal published a new piece of meta-research into the relative effectiveness of Orlistat, Meridia and Acomplia. The difficulty with conventional research is that each individual study usually only involves a few hundred volunteers. Although these studies have to be “statistically significant”, i.e. it must be reasonable to scale up the results so that they will offer a reasonable chance of being replicated in the community at large, one study cannot be anything more than an indicator. To get the best results, you need to take a number of published clinical trials and reanalyse the data to determine whether there are trends. This is what a meta-researcher does.

In this instance, the team analysed the data from thirty clinical trials representing 19,619 participants. To be included in the reanalysis, each trial had to last at least one year, the treatment with the medication had to be in conjunction with lifestyle changes to diet and encourage physical exercise, and follow the best practice methods of being randomised, double blind and placebo-controlled. Thus, the data covers a reasonable period of time (the longer the period of time, the more people are likely to drop out of trials - in this instance, an average of about 35% of the participants dropped out), and a more significant number of people.

The participants taking Acomplia had the highest range of weight loss at 4.1kg to 5.3kg. It also reduced the levels of high density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides, improved blood pressure, and in patients with diabetes, gave better glycaemic control. But Acomplia was associated with a risk of anxiety, irritability and depression in about 6% of participants.

One of the factors that can affect the reliability of this meta-analysis process is that research journals may prefer to publish research with positive outcomes or only reports with positive outcomes are referred to journals for publication. This is called the funnel plot. Some pharmaceutical companies are accused of suppressing the publication of reports in which the outcomes are unfavourable to their products. In this instance, this did not appear to be a problem with the Acomplia findings. However, almost all thirty trials were funded by pharmaceutical companies. This may indicate the possibility of bias when the results prove positive. Secondly, the majority of the participants were relatively young and caucasian. This makes more general extrapolation of the results to other population groups more unreliable.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has recently changed its recommendation to accept Acomplia as being within National Health Service guidelines. The relevant rule for acceptance as an anti-obesity medication is that patients should consistently be able to lose at least 5% of their initial body weight after three months. That Acomplia has now satisfied this performance criterion is an endorsement of the medication’s effectiveness.

Let us be clear - a 5% average may include people who failed completely and put weight on because they resisted change to their diet and refused exercise. If people cannot reduce some weight through their own efforts, giving them a pill like Acomplia is not going to help. A 5% average may therefore include some people who have lost between 10% and 20%. Given that some 35% of participants in the clinical trials lacked the motivation to continue, that means that 65% were sufficiently encouraged by the performance of their medication to continue to the end of the agreed period. Add in the significant improvement among diabetics, and Acomplia begins to look even better. However, given the risk of psychological side effects, it is perhaps always wise to take Acomplia when you are in a family environment or you have friends who can be relied on to monitor your mood.

So the moral of the research alongside NICE’s change of policy is that if you are sufficiently motivated to lose weight by changing your diet and exercising more, Acomplia will significantly improve your chances of losing weight and maintaining that reduction over time.