Health Blog

Throat cultures

A throat culture is done to find out if a throat infection is being caused by bacteria and, if so, to identify the specific bacteria. This can provide the doctor with important information. If the infection is due to a virus rather than to a bacterium, the doctor will know not to prescribe antibiotics because viruses don’t respond to antibiotics; if a bacterium is the cause, knowing which one it is will enable the doctor to prescribe the correct antibiotic to treat that particular type of bacteria.

To collect material for the culture the doctor uses a swab tipped with cotton to scrape cells and discharge from the throat. This material is put into a growth medium, a solution that encourages bacteria to grow. The specimen is watched carefully, and the bacteria are identified. A throat culture is often sent to a laboratory for testing, so it may take 48 hours to get the results.

Other cultures

Although throat cultures are the most common cultures, bacteria from other sites can be identified by the same method. Cultures can be made from blood, discharge from an infected eye or ear, discharge coughed up from the lungs, bowel movements, urine, or discharge from infected cuts or wounds. As with a throat culture, material from the site is sent to a laboratory, and then placed in a growth medium to see what types of bacteria grow and how many there are of each type.

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Boils are local infections that occur beneath the skin. They are almost always caused by a bacterium called hemolytic Staphylococcus aureus – called “staph,” for short. Boils are identified by redness, pain, and the formation of pus in the center, which tends to “point” (come to a head) and drain through the skin. Pus is a mixture of live and dead white blood cells, liquefied dead tissue, and live and dead staph germs. Pus is therefore infectious; it can spread boils to other areas and to other persons.

A small superficial boil is a pimple or pustule. (An acne pimple is not a true boil.) A large boil with several heads is a carbuncle. A boil on the edge of the eyelid is a sty. When many boils are present at one time the condition is called furunculosis. Abscesses are collections of pus in parts of the body other than the skin, as in muscles, brain, bone, and internal organs. Abscesses are like boils, but often they are caused by germs other than staph.

Staph germs are often harmlessly present in the nose and throat or on the skin of healthy people. Staph germs on the skin cause no problems unless there is a cut or break in the skin. If the germs enter the body through a break in the skin, they cause infections.

Signs and symptoms

Boils are easily recognized by their redness, pain, and the formation of pus in the center.

Home care

Boils are treated with frequent or constant soaks with warm Epsom salts solutions (one-half cup per liter of water). When a boil comes to a head and drains, the drainage must be caught on a sterile bandage to avoid spreading the infection. The surrounding skin should be cleansed frequently with soap and water to avoid additional boils.

Precautions

• Be careful with boils on the face and forehead, including the nose and lips. The lymph and blood vessel drainage from these areas is partly internal. Be especially careful that drainage from a boil does not come in contact with the eyes. See your doctor if boils develop on the face.

• Never squeeze a boil. Squeezing breaks down the wall surrounding the boil. When this wall is broken down, the infection rapidly spreads outward.

• Treat all minor wounds and insect bites properly to lessen the likelihood of infections and the forming of boils.

Medical treatment

Your doctor may open and drain the boil, culture the pus, and order sensitivity studies on the staph germs found. These studies will help your doctor identify the antibiotic that will most effectively fight the infection. The doctor may prescribe antibiotics to be taken by mouth. Many staph infections have become resistant to penicillin. Other antibiotics that may be used include erythromycin, oxacillin, cloxacillin, methicillin, and cephalosporin. For repeated attacks of boils, your doctor may recommend nose and throat cultures of the patient and the entire family to identify carriers of the staph germs. Antibiotic ointments applied in the nose and antiseptic baths may be prescribed.

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The following guidelines may be helpful when your young child goes to a party.

1. Inform host parents that your child has diabetes. Explain which of the foods that are planned for the party will be suitable for your child and the approximate quantities. Do not be too exact about carbohydrate exchanges. Remember to allow for extra excitement. Some of the carbohydrate exchanges from the next meal could also be used.

2. Offer to provide diet soft drinks.

3. Host parents should also be aware of hypoglycemia. Excited children may often forget to eat or only have a few mouthfuls.

4. For younger children you may feel that you should also attend the party.

5. As your child becomes older discuss with him/her the types and amounts of foods that will be suitable.

6. On the day give the normal carbohydrate exchanges up until the time of the party.

7. The birthday cake brought home is often forgotten but if your child wants it, allow a small piece. Perhaps include it as part of the carbohydrate allowance at a later meal of snack.

Eating in restaurants

Ordering from a menu will be easier if you have a good knowledge of your diet. Experience at calculating your own recipes will increase your skills in estimating the carbohydrate content of restaurant dishes. The waiter may be able to assist you by describing the cooking method. Restaurants specializing in meals of a particular culture eg. Chinese, Greek, Mexican, Lebanese should not be a problem. Your dietitian can assist you in describing the types of foods that would be suitable. It is important that you consider the whole meal before ordering. Avoid ordering high carbohydrate dishes for all courses. It would be preferable to balance the meal by having a lower carbohydrate entree followed by a higher carbohydrate main course or vice versa. Bread can be used to adjust the carbohydrate content of the meal if required.

Low carbohydrate entrees/main courses

Avocado – 1/2 small

Seafood – sauces could add to carbohydrate exchanges

Pate – toast or biscuit served would add to carbohydrate exchanges.

Clear Soups

Plain Cooked Meats – sauce may contribute to carbohydrate exchanges.

Higher carbohydrate entrees/main courses

Crepes – savory filling

Crumbed Meats

Pastry Dishes

Desserts are most difficult to estimate as the amount of sugar used will be quite variable. Fresh fruits and ice-creams are easier to estimate. Cheese and greens may be a better choice.

Beverages

Natural mineral water, diet soft drinks are suitable. Fruit juices must be included in the carbohydrate exchanges. Alcoholic beverages can be included in moderation.

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Fancy cars, flowers, and expensive dinners are pretty normal parts of human courting behavior that are well-known for cutting a hunk out of a man’s paycheck, if not occasionally his ego. But does all of this courting also take a slice off his life? One British geneticist thinks so.

“It’s well-established in many species that in absence of mating behavior, males live much longer,” says David Gems, Ph.D., researcher in the department of biology at University College London. “Castration increases longevity in a variety of vertebrates. Neutering tomcats has an enormous impact on their life expectancy.”

Dr. Gems himself found that male worms lived up to twice as long when kept by themselves, as opposed to living with other males or with females. That’s because they spent so much energy mating or attempting to mate that it shortened their lives, Dr. Gems says.

In humans, the problem may be part behavioral and part physiological, notes Dr. Gems, who admits that many questions remain unanswered. “One theory is that testosterone raises metabolism, so men burn energy faster and thereby lower their life spans,” he says.

The upside is that if all this is true, men probably have a stronger propensity for longevity than women, Dr. Gems says. “If males had the same genetic constitution as women and had all these odds stacked against them, they’d be genetically unfit,” he says. It’s this stronger innate constitution that also likely explains why men who live to their eighties and nineties are in better shape than women of the same age, Dr. Gems says. “The trick is getting out there,” he says.

Preferably with all appendages still attached.

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Just as negative emotions impair heart function, pleasant, relaxing emotions have a positive effect on the heart. It is very important to take time out of your day, even if it is only ten minutes to do something that makes you happy. Our lives can be busy and stressful, leaving no time for fun and relaxation. Many studies have shown meditation, yoga and breathing exercises to have very positive effects on overall health. By slowing down your breathing you can lower your blood pressure.

Laughter and love can help to keep our heart strong and healthy. Dr Michael Miller, of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, USA showed two movies to 20 healthy volunteers; one stressful and one humorous. He specifically looked at the endothelium, or inner lining of the arteries of the volunteers. Dr Miller found that blood flow decreased 35 percent during the stressful movie, and increased 22 percent during laughter. He concluded that “Laughter might be almost as helpful as exercise” to our heart, and recommended 15 minutes of laughter each day.

Several studies have shown that feeling love helps people to live longer, healthier lives. A 2002 National Heart Foundation study showed that social isolation and lack of group support are as important as high cholesterol, high blood pressure and smoking in people with heart disease. A study of 1000 Israeli men with heart disease found that men who felt loved by their wives were 50 percent less likely to experience angina and heart attacks than those with problematic relationships. According to Professor Marc Cohen, who spoke at the International Conference on Health, Ageing and Longevity in Brisbane in 2005, it is not just romantic love that helps to keep us healthy. It can be love for anyone or anything that makes you feel as though time has stopped. Even hobbies that we love, and become totally immersed in are beneficial.

Magnesium is a mineral with many benefits to the cardiovascular system. It is very important for helping to maintain a normal heart rhythm and normal blood pressure. Magnesium has a relaxing effect on the muscles and nerves of the body thus can relax the coronary arteries and reduce the chance of spasms. Magnesium is excellent for highly stressed people, as it helps the body to cope with stress, and helps you to feel calmer. If there is a lot of stress in your life that is unavoidable, you need to take supplemental magnesium. When we are stressed, our body uses up greater amounts of magnesium, so we can easily become deficient in this mineral. A high dietary intake of fat and calcium make you more likely to become magnesium deficient. Interestingly, magnesium deficiency increases the release of the stress hormones adrenaline and noradrenalin, making you feel even more wound up. A lack of magnesium makes you more susceptible to high blood pressure and irregular heart rhythms called arrhythmias. Those who are magnesium deficient are at increased risk of sudden cardiac death, coronary artery spasm and arrhythmia.

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Every day for the final three weeks of his life, the ailing King Charles V of Germany and Spain demanded to have a funeral service and to be carried around in the coffin that would eventually be used for his burial. After all, funerals are for the living, right?

Though you won’t likely be able to persuade friends and family to go that extra mile during your last days, one of the perks of prearranging your funeral is that you can have things the way you’d like them.

“Most men who come in to prearrange their funerals are cost-motivated,” says John H. Brubaker, a funeral director in Catasauqua, Pennsylvania. “But then some find that they like being able to personalize the service.”

Brubaker has seen his share of funerals “American-style.” “People are buried with all sorts of things,” he says. “Golf clubs, cigars in their pockets-you name it.” The music is another place where folks like to add a personal touch. “One man loved Elvis, and that’s what they played,” recalls Brubaker. “Another was a member of a polka band, so we had some polka music playing softly in the background. It’s a celebration of a life well-lived.”

The potential to have it your way aside the biggest benefit of prearranging your fu is saving your wife and kids the enormous burden and expense at a time when they’ll ready be carrying a heavy load.

When you consider the professional vices such as burial preparation, transports and facilities as well as the casket, vault, church expenses, flowers, and other funeral merchandise, the average cost of a funeral and burial is between 5,000 and 6,000 dollars plus the cost for the grave site, Brubaker says. And prices m; vary depending on where in the country you live (and die). Even a simple cremation service runs between 1,000 and 4,000 dollars. And that’s without having your ashes spread over Wrigley Field.

“What we do is take the exact figure ñ what a funeral would cost today and invest ii an interest-bearing account-like a CD (certificate of deposit), a master trust fund, or life insurance-which makes up for inflation,” explains Brubaker. “Generally, there’s more money in the fund at the time of death than is needed. In that case, the family gets the difference. In the rare event that there isn’t enough money, we pay the difference.” Not all companies work this way, Brubaker adds, so make sure that you find out whether yours does before signing on the dotted line.

The best part is that once it’s done, it’s done, says Brubaker. “Once you make the arrangements, it’s all taken care of. And you and your family never have to worry about it again.”

That said, with the rise in funeral pre-arrangements has come a rise in people getting ripped off, says Brubaker. Keep the following ii mind when you’re prearranging those final touches.

Get it itemized. In 1678, the funeral bill for a Hartford, Connecticut, man who had drowned included a pint of liquor for the men who dived for him; a quart for those who brought him home and more than eight gallons of wine and a barrel of cider for the funeral.

Not what you had in mind? Then get an itemized bill. It’ll keep you from paying for what you don’t want-or get.

Fill in the family. The idea of prearranging your funeral is to give your family peace of mind. So once you’ve made arrangements, let everyone close to you know that you’ve made your plans and outline what they are, Brubaker says. Better yet, include them in the arrangement-making. It sounds a tad morbid, but if you’re already planning your funeral, it might not hurt to ask their feelings on the matter. After all, funerals are as much for the living as they are for the dead.

Update as necessary. Playing (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction during your wake may have seemed like a good idea 10 years ago, but now you’re thinking more along the lines of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. No problem. You can rearrange your prearrangements as you see fit, says Brubaker. Just let the funeral director in charge know, and make sure that the change is put in writing. “It’s also a good idea to let your family know about any changes you make,” Brubaker adds.

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How can one go about changing personal health behaviour, especially among those whose motivation is low? One way is to control everything by law. Although many of us would resist this idea, our lives are already controlled far more than we often realize. Laws already control certain health behaviours, but where legal regulation is not possible or advisable progress will depend on individuals altering their behaviour and the provision of skills to enable them to do so. Beliefs, however well founded, are not enough in health care and prevention. The individual needs to be motivated or he or she will not be able to make anything happen. The classical gag is that of the man who is so convinced that his smoking will kill him that he continues to smoke to relax him when he thinks about it. Studies on persuasion show that beliefs usually precede motivation in the change process and that it is important to know the stage of knowledge any target group has reached before trying to persuade them to do something. Almost everyone knows that smoking is harmful to health yet millions are not sufficiently motivated to stop. Such people need to be convinced that the future health reward is worth the short-term pain of stopping smoking; that the unpleasant consequences of stopping smoking are not as bad as they think; and that there are advantages in the present to stopping smoking that they had not even thought of. Once such people realize these things they become motivated to do something about their smoking.

But many people are well-motivated yet haven’t the behavioural skills to do anything about it. They need to learn skills to bring their smoking behaviour under conscious control.

Wherever we look around the world, and whatever the health practices we look at, the diffusion of information, ideas, beliefs and behaviour follows a predictable pattern that is roughly S-shaped. At first only a few people take up the new beliefs or practice while those around them discuss them and look out for the consequences. Soon others take them up at an increasing rate. Perhaps the major factor that determines this acceleration is the intensity of communication within the population. Self-help groups and other consumer networks are very powerful agents of change and research has found that people who make a public commitment to a health goal are far more likely to make the change required than those who don’t. This is because we live within social networks in which we share beliefs, attitudes and behaviour patterns, and once groups become at all formalized people’s loyalty to the group overrides almost any other consideration. The evidence that this is so has come from stop-smoking and weight-loss groups that have disbanded. Members backslide very quickly. Viewed this way, it seems that few of us act truly independently.

Whether in groups or in individual cases, fear is often used as a way of changing people’s attitudes, motivation and behaviour. Making people afraid of certain consequences of their actions is cruel, though, unless at the same time they are told how to protect themselves from the feared result. Some so-called sex education, especially in schools, has in the past done little more than induce in the recipients a terror of VD. This sort of scare tactic alone obviously isn’t enough-it does nothing to tell youngsters about how to handle their emerging sexuality, being limited to stressing the horrors of what might happen if they do have sex. Similarly, showing people pictures of lung cancers has only the most temporary effect on smoking habits.

Persuasion methods, whether they are face-to-face or through the mass media, are really only successful if they are accompanied by specific opportunities for putting more beneficial behaviour into action. Various studies have shown that mass media campaigns can alter beliefs and to some extent motivation but changing behaviour involves building up skills in people, and this can be difficult whatever their social class or level of education.

So far we have looked mainly at rational and conscious behaviour. It is in this context that we can understand, for example, why for many of us turning on the TV is a signal to eat and drink. The relaxing behaviour of the TV watching triggers another relaxing (self-pleasuring) activity-eating-and the two are seen as enhancing each other.

However, there is another whole side to human behaviour-the unconscious mind. And this plays a vital role in understanding the prevention of illness. Much of my description of illness behaviour lower down the social scale arises from the study of unconscious attitudes. Few people, in any socio-economic group, rationally argue through such things-they are simply an intrinsic part of their behaviour handed down from the unconscious minds of their parents. All of us are far more controlled by our unconscious minds than we realize. A good example I shall use to illustrate this point is the one of unwanted pregnancy.

To the logical, rational thinker there is no reason why, in the 1980s, any baby should be born unwanted, but the Family Planning Association estimates that about 200,000 of the 648,000 babies born in the UK in 1984 were ‘unwanted’, or at least unplanned. Contraception is available to all so why and how does this major preventive health programme fail so dismally? Surely someone who doesn’t want a baby, doesn’t have to have one, and can take steps to ensure that he or she doesn’t? It is true that no method of contraception is absolutely 100 per cent successful (though the combined pill, properly used, is virtually so), but it is quite wrong to think of the majority of unwanted pregnancies as simply due to bad luck.

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A routine visit to the doctor totally changed Tammy Munson’s life.

Tammy, a 33-year-old resident of Jamestown, New York, admits that she knew very little about good nutrition when she was younger. Even though she routinely ate high-fat foods such as Buffalo wings, pepperoni pizza, and french fries, she couldn’t understand why she kept packing on the pounds. “I just didn’t know any better,” she says. By age 21, she weighed 253 pounds.

Then, during a routine checkup, Tammy found out that she had alarmingly high blood pressure. The news jolted Tammy into action. Determined to slim down, she began paying more attention to her diet. She switched from 2 percent milk and regular sodas to skim milk and diet sodas—and lost 30 pounds. She had never considered how her beverage choices contributed to calorie intake. This surprised her so much that she decided to learn everything she could about healthy eating.

“I went to the library and signed out every nutrition book I could find,” she says. “I was determined to make better food choices so that I could lose more weight.” She also read dozens of cook-books and discovered how to turn fat-laden recipes into nutritious meals with a few simple ingredient substitutions.

All of that reading transformed Tammy’s eating habits. Within about a year, she lost a total of 147 pounds. And she has stayed at era’

106 pounds ever since, thanks to 12 years of healthy eating. ”

WINNING ACTION

Find out what you’re really eating. For one day, write down everything that you eat and drink, along with the fat and calorie content of each item. At the end of the day, add up your numbers. Surprise! You’re probably eating more than you realized.

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Could the minute amounts of pesticide that we eat with our food ever be injurious to health ? The answer to this question really depends on how dangerous those pesticides are – and this is something that cannot easily be answered. All new pesticides are tested very rigorously, and the risk posed by eating small amounts are assessed. Unfortunately, many of the pesticides that are widely used today were developed before adequate testing procedures were introduced, and there is concern that some of these may be toxic or carcinogenic, even in minute doses. A government programme is underway to retest such pesticides, but there are only four scientists involved in the testing, and at the present rate of progress it will be at least 50 years before all those now in use have been properly tested.

Even with the newer pesticides, there is some cause for concern. Some were tested by the discredited commercial laboratory mentioned on p306, in connection with food additives. Despite the doubts that this casts over their safety, these are still in use. More seriously, pesticides are never tested in combination, for any possible ‘cocktail effects’. Such effects are not unlikely. It is known that some insecticides affect

the liver, for example, making it less able to detoxify other chemicals. The safety data on pesticides, like that on food additives, are not open to public inspection because they are covered by the Official Secrets Act. After many years of assuring the public that pesticide residues were insignificant and harmless, the Ministry of Agriculture has recently admitted that there are serious problems. A confidential report, leaked to the press in August 1988 states ‘ consumers may be exposed to higher dosages of these chemicals than has hitherto been suspected. These residues could present a health hazard to man and it is plainly desirable that appropriate statutory controls are enacted to limit human exposure to pesticide residues from food.’ The report adds that even the ‘inert substances’ used to dilute the active ingredients of pesticides may be damaging to health.

In addition to pesticide residues, some foods contain hormones and antibiotics that are routinely fed to farm animals. Meat, poultry, milk, cheese and eggs are the main sources of these chemicals, but fish from fish farms may also contain some antibiotics. Some individuals are allergic to minute amounts of certain antibiotics, and they may react to traces of antibiotic in food.

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Test wheat before other cereals. Do not test it as bread, because this contains various other ingredients as well. Certain breakfast cereals are pure wheat, notably Puffed Wheat and Shredded Wheat, and these are good for testing – they can be moistened with fruit juice if you are not able to have milk. Alternatively, use bulgur wheat, or pasta (checking first for other ingredients), or mix flour into a pancake batter with eggs (assuming you have tested eggs already and they are safe). If using flour, start with wholemeal flour, preferably untreated and organically grown, as you can be sure that it contains no other ingredients. You can test white flour later. Some people are intolerant of the part of the wheatgrain that is lost during the production of white flour, so they only react to wholemeal flour and bread. Others are sensitive to white flour only, probably because of the additives in white flour, or the chemical processes, such as bleaching, that are used in its production.

If you react to wheat, allow at least a week to pass before testing any more cereals – test something else in the meantime. Rye can be tested as rye crisp-bread, but make sure it is pure rye, because some contain wheat bran. (Also bear in mind that some people who react to yeast also react to malt, which is a common ingredient in crispbreads and cereals.) Oats can be tested as porridge, and maize as sweetcorn or cornflour. Barley can be tested by eating pearl barley – boil about two or three tablespoons of it in plain water or homemade stock. It may seem rather pointless testing a food such as barley if you never eat it normally, but you could have become sensitive to it if you drink beer regularly, or if you are sensitive to wheat. Rye, barley and oats are all quite closely related to wheat and cross-reactions are not uncommon.

Other items to be tested are: eggs, beef, chicken and anything else that you decided to avoid, such as rice or peanuts.

The reintroduction phase should take about seven or eight weeks. If it takes any longer than this, there is a risk of lost sensitivity: the food-intolerant person becomes less reactive after avoiding the culprit food for a time. For some people, it may take many months or years to lose their intolerance, but for others the process can happen within two to three months.

If you have still not tested all foods eight weeks after starting the exclusion phase, then you should reintroduce all those which you have not yet tested. Eat all of them (in normal portions) every day for a week. If, after a week, there is no reaction, then you can consider them all safe. If there is a reaction, cut them all out again, and avoid them for five days, or until your symptoms clear up, if this takes longer. Then retest each of those foods in turn, using the same procedure as before.

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