Nausea is best treated with simple measures, such as avoiding fatty foods or heavy meals, and encouraging the intake of frequent small quantities of fluids and bland foods.

Medicines and injections to prevent nausea should never be used in young children. They are rarely effective and can have very unpleasant neurological side effects.

CARE OF THE SICK CHILD

As parents, it is our role and responsibility to care for and nurture our children. Children are especially vulnerable during times of illness, and in constant need of our support and reassurance at such times. Knowing that you care for him and that you are there to help him through the rough patch goes a long way towards putting your child back on the road to recovery.

We do not believe that medications alone are the answer to illness; TLC (tender loving care) also plays a vital role. A child who is given the attention he deserves while he is ill will have a better chance of a quick and complete recovery. As to whether or not chicken soup is effective in the treatment of illness, well… it can’t hurt! It is undoubtedly the love and devotion stirred into the pot that do the trick.

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Parents are human, and have needs too. Some parents are so concerned for and involved with their children that they neglect their own needs — for rest, relaxation and stimulation. Becoming a parent for the first time brings about an enormous and often stressful change in lifestyle for most people, and many fears and anxieties are experienced during the pregnancy and the first few months after birth. Parenting is hard work most of the time, but the rewards are many. Do not try to be a martyr. The best gift you can give to your children is to be a relaxed, fulfilled parent. Here are some thoughts on what may help you get through the day and still enjoy your child. These are in no particular order of importance. Trust your instincts You can listen to advice from family, friends and professionals, and read what all the experts write, but in the end you should rely on your own intuition as fo what to do in relation to your child.

All children are different Try not to compare one with the other, and respect individual differences.

Keep a sense of humour This may be the most important piece of advice to heed as we go through life, especially as a parent. The ability to laugh at a situation, and at oneself, is the very best form of therapy we can receive.

Relate to your children in a warm, gentle, sensitive way Ultimately this is always more successful than verbal threats or physical punishment.

Above all, love and enjoy your children The years fly past all too rapidly.

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You have already learned to read your love map and I have discussed these adolescent concerns, but reconsider now your own ability to unite sex with love. Would you say, would your children say, that love and sex are the same? They are, but our society teaches that they are different because our society seems stuck at this developmental phase itself, continuing to separate doing from feeling.

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Although the mortality for such surgery is low, the morbidity is high. This means there is a high rate of complications and recovery may be slow. The decision to operate on a patient with hydatid disease is not always straightforward.

Healthy patients with cysts in the liver should be operated on, as there are few risks.

Those with cysts in the brain, the bones and the spine may demand operation because of the risk to life or proper functioning.

Elderly, unfit patients, especially if the cysts show evidence of calcification, indicating the contents may not contain living parasites, are usually best left alone.

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The resulting damage may be so severe as to cause an early abortion or the death of the foetus during later pregnancy or during or shortly after birth. Some infants are born blind or mentally retarded. The infection can affect the brain, the liver.the eye or other foetal tissues.

Infections acquired late in the pregnancy may not show up for several months after birth and, while not all such infections are severe, varying grades of disability may be present.

The child may be born, appear normal and then, in the first few weeks of life, show signs of infection. Involvement of the brain may lead to convulsions or muscular twitchings. Obstruction to the flow of cerebrospinal fluid through the brain can result in the condition of hydrocephalus, where there is enlargement of the head.

Treatment of this condition is effective in acquired cases but gives poorer results when damage to various tissues has occurred where the infection has developed in the womb.

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Although not widely available in shops, tinctures are favoured by professional herbalists because they are highly concentrated and long lasting, being made with a base of alcohol. The chopped herb is placed in a 40-50% alcoholic spirit and left in a warm place to steep. After a couple of weeks, the alcohol containing the herbal extract is decanted and stored in dark glass.

The required doses and dilutions of tinctures vary greatly from as little as a few drops to 20 mls at a time. Because of the concentrations involved, great care should be taken to follow the herbalist’s instructions which are usually written on the bottle.

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This is not only because of a difference in the person’s sleeping pattern, but also because it changes the time of day when the hormones in the body, such as adrenalin and thyroid, are most plentiful. Hormone production cannot change suddenly and can only adjust by about one hour a day, as we pointed out in the article “Shift Work and Hormones” under the heading Hormones. Since hormone blood levels can’t peak in synchrony with the changed hours of the traveler, the person experiences jet lag.

Surprisingly, more time is needed to overcome jet lag after an eastward journey than after an equally long journey westward. This “directional asymmetry,” according to the British Medical Journal (284:144), is due to the fact that traveling westwards results in a longer day than usual during the journey, whereas traveling eastwards shortens the day. The human body, research has shown, prefers a long day to a short one. People living without clocks and in a building without windows naturally adopt a sleep-wake cycle of 25 hours or longer in preference to the 24-hour day.

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Symptoms: Swelling and tenderness of lymph glands (a sign of illness); unusual swelling, pain, and redness of the skin (a sign of infected glands).

Home care: In the case of mild swelling, identify and treat the disease or infection responsible.

Infected glands require medical attention.

Precautions

-    Infants have limited immunity to disease; swollen glands in an infant should be examined by a doctor.

-    Consult the doctor if a lymph node continues to increase in size and tenderness, or if the overlying skin becomes red.

-    When your child turns his or her head, you may notice lymph nodes the size of a pea or smaller in the sides of the neck; these nodes are normal.

-    Swollen lymph nodes in many areas of the body usually indicate a general illness or widespread infection.

The term swollen glands is often used to refer to swelling of the lymph nodes. Lymph nodes are sometimes called lymph glands, although they are not true glands. Lymph nodes are widely distributed throughout the body, and in their normal state are 2 to 4 millimeters in size.

Many lymph nodes lie just beneath the skin. These lymph nodes are located in front of the ears, behind the ears, at the base of the skull, under the chin, down the sides of the neck, in the armpits, in the folds of the elbows, and above and below the creases in the groin. Lymph nodes are also found within the chest and abdomen, but these lie too deeply within the body to be felt.

All lymph nodes lie along thin-walled tubes called lymphatic vessels. These vessels resemble and roughly follow the course of the veins in the body. They do not contain blood, however. These vessels carry thin, clear, slightly sticky liquid called lymph, which resembles the clear, watery fluid that oozes from a scrape or that forms within a blister caused by rubbing.

Lymph nodes are important in helping the body fight infections and disease. When lymph nodes become swollen and mildly tender, it is a sign that they are fighting an illness or infection. The lymph nodes of the entire body may be swollen, or nodes may be swollen only in one area of the body.

When all the lymph nodes or the nodes in many areas are swollen, this usually indicates a general illness or widespread infection affecting the body.

When nodes are swollen only in one location, this is a sign of an infection in the area of the body guarded by those nodes. Swollen glands in one area might be caused by a variety of local infections. The appearance of red streaks under the skin (which typically precede blood poisoning) is caused by infection traveling along the lymphatic vessels in that area.

In some cases an infection may become too severe for the lymph nodes to handle. In such a case, the lymph node itself may become infected.

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Taking it seriously is a good first step. If you’ve written off pneumonia as a has-been of a disease, write it back on. Granted, the advent of antibiotics dethroned it from its pre-1936 status as the nation’s top cause of death. But there’s a lot of fight left in this old killer. Teaming up with influenza, it’s still the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. And the number of pneumonia-caused deaths has actually been on the rise, from less than 55,000 in 1980 to more than 80,000 in 1995.

Pneumonia usually swoops in for the kill after some other disease-say, diabetes, chemotherapy-treated cancer, or heart disease-has weakened you. “Even many who die from ‘old age’ really die of pneumonia,” says Ronald Greeno, M.D., co-director of respiratory therapy and pulmonary function at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles.

Pneumonia is what they call an infectious pulmonary disease, caused usually either by viruses or (much more seriously) bacteria that overpower your lung’s defenses and take over. Pretty soon, oxygen isn’t getting to your blood the way it should and your cells aren’t working right. That can be fatal.

And while the majority of deaths from flu-derived pneumonia in our antibiotic era are in people over 65, that’s by no means all of them. “The most common bacterial pneumonia- pneumococcal pneumonia, also known as Streptococcus pneumoniae – very often follows a bout of influenza at any age,” says Alfred Munzer, M.D., a pulmonologist at Washington Adventist Hospital in Takoma Park, Maryland, and past president of the American Lung Association. “It is much more likely to be fatal in people who are debilitated or elderly, but it certainly can also be fatal in younger people.”

What hits younger and middle-age men a lot more often than bacterial pneumonia is either viral pneumonia or pneumonia caused by mycoplasmas, which are bugs falling somewhere in between a virus and bacterium. Since these types are rarely lethal and usually won’t land you in the hospital, you hear them referred to as walking pneumonia. Walking is about as much as you’ll feel like doing if you have it.

“You can recognize somebody with viral pneumonia because they usually have a dry, hacking, nonproductive cough combined with a fever,” says Dr. Munzer.

So if you don’t want to be the guy doing the coughing, do your best to follow these tips.

Know the symptoms. Doctors can usually knock out bacterial pneumonia with antibiotics, but hot if you don’t seek treatment. The problem is that the symptoms are often a lot like flu symptoms-fever, cough, chest pains, phlegm.

Another red flag is a cough that comes in violent attacks, which can signal mycoplasma pneumonia. And, says Dr. Munzer, “if you’re bringing up a lot of phlegm and you have a fever, with chest pains that are aggravated by breathing, then you have to start thinking seriously about pneumonia.”

Seek treatment pronto. As with most diseases, early diagnosis and treatment speed your recovery of pneumonia. Getting doctor-shy because you simply assume that you have a bad flu-or the more common and less dangerous viral pneumonia-is a dubious piece of self-diagnosis, according to Dr. Greeno.

Besides, adds Steven Mostow, M.D., professor of medicine at the University of Colorado in Denver and chairman of the American Thoracic Society’s Committee on the Prevention of Pneumonia and Influenza, in New York City, “there are therapies with any number of compounds that will shorten mycoplasma disease dramatically. And you’ll feel a hell of a lot better much more quickly.”

Get vaccinated. Yes, there’s a pneumonia vaccine. And while it won’t fend off every type of pneumonia in existence, it will protect you from the most common bacterial pneumonia, pneumococcal. It’s relatively cheap, it’s covered by Medicare, it’s side effect-free, and it will last you at least 10 years, perhaps a lifetime. And still, sighs Dr. Munzer, “it’s probably the most underutilized of all the vaccines.”

Dr. Munzer adds: “There’s no harm in anybody who’s interested in preventive medicine asking his doctor about taking the vaccine. If you want to take it, you should be encouraged to do so.”

Get a flu shot. The logic is simple. Influenza can lead to pneumonia. So don’t get influenza. “There’s one way to avoid the flu, and that’s to get an annual flu shot,” Dr. Mostow says. “I recommend it even for young, healthy men.”

Take your time. If you rush your recovery, you run the risk of a relapse. Remember, it takes longer to recover at age 45 than it does at age 25. And some walking pneumonias, such as mycoplasma, leave you weak for many weeks. Rest, after all, is the cure for walking pneumonia, says Dr. Munzer. So stop walking. Take a load off.

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The study, which continued for two months, revealed that of the 387 women who were involved, the women who took 60 milligrams of Prozac per day binged and purged 50 percent less than those women who were given a placebo. Prozac also seemed to reduce depression and the cravings for carbohydrates, resulting in a small weight loss. For most of the subjects, the side effects from the medication, such as nausea and insomnia, were relatively mild.

According to the researchers, antidepressants such as Prozac may help control bulimia and depression in some people because both disorders may be due to a deficiency of serotonin— a chemical in the brain.

While some bulimics are helped with antidepressants, experts say there is currently no specific drug treatment prescribed for general usage. However, researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) linked bulimia to excessive levels of a brain hormone called vasopressin. The new information may lead eventually to a specific effective medication for the disease.

Scientists say that vasopressin regulates the body’s balances of fluids and salt. It also affects some physical and mental functions including thirst, blood pressure, learning and memory. When under stress, some people produce an excessive amount of the hormone making themselves more vulnerable to illnesses such as bulimia.

According to researchers, continued study of vasopressin may also be of benefit to anorexics who literally starve themselves, and obsessive-compulsive patients who cannot control repetitive thoughts and activities

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