Of course! How silly of us all not to have realised that I was simply putting on an act and causing myself
Posted in General on 03. Sep, 2010
Of course! How silly of us all not to have realised that I was simply putting on an act and causing myself physical pain, embarrassment, exhaustion and alienation.The luxury of being able to brand myself came when I was 21, on deciding, now as an adult, to start seeking some answers. It came in the form of a verdict that was to label me for 14 years: bad nerves – attention seeking. I simply developed a head-shaking tic, one that, as the weeks progressed, greedily seemed to recruit other symptoms to join it on its course of taking over my life and turning me from a confident boy into a confused, gyrating, ticcing and verbalising freak.My parents carted me from family doctor to hospital specialist in the hope of some enlightenment. The doctor prescribed Valium, and I trundled back home fingering the bottle of little white pills while praying they would hold the miracle cure.
It had all come on so suddenly There was no obvious cause. The doctor, a paediatric neurologist, looked at me with a suspicion verging on scorn, and I returned his look with a pleading one of my own: Please help me Please just make it stop
I was seven and my little world had turned upside down. It was conducted by Edzard Ernst, the world’s first professor of complementary medicine, at the Peninsula Medical School, Exeter, and a colleague, Peter Canter.. I sat bare-chested in the plastic hospital chair and shook my head violently from side to side; my eyes rolled back hard in their sockets as I painfully jerked my head towards my right shoulder; a forceful nodding of my head accompanied some forearm flexing that made my lower arms rise a little; I yelped loudly several times, not in pain, but because my brain commanded me to do so, and a final flourish saw me punch myself viciously in the stomach.
“That such coverage was whipped up by the Royal Society of Medicine is incomprehensible,” Mr Dixon wrote.The disputed research paper was a systematic review of 16 previous systematic reviews conducted between 2000 and 2005, incorporating 239 studies. It failed to specify the risks or establish that spinal manipulation was the cause and amounted to “simple scaremongering”. Mr Dixon wrote: “There is a greater likelihood of suffering an adverse event as a result of getting into and out of the bath than there is in undergoing spinal manipulation.”The RSM compounded the matter by issuing an “inaccurate, sensationalist” press release which “confused and scared” patients and the public. But in an unprecedented move, the acting chairman of the General Chiropractic Council, Peter Dixon, has written to the Royal Society of Medicine demanding that it remedies “the damage done”.In the letter to Sir John Lilleyman, the president of the RSM, seen by The Independent, Mr Dixon says the research was “flawed” and lacked “coherent analysis”. It said chiropractic is a holistic treatment that involves much more than back cracking, has been approved for use on the NHS for more than a decade and its 2,200 practitioners in Britain are registered to guarantee professional standards.Scientific spats are nothing new and are usually settled in the pages of the medical journals.
Chiropractors and osteopaths use spinal manipulation and massage to treat the misalignment of vertebrae and other bones.
Now the General Chiropractic Council has accused the Royal Society of Medicine of “distortion, sensationalism and scaremongering” over the publication of a research paper suggesting the treatment provided to tens of thousands of people with bad backs every year is useless.The research was published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and claimed there was no evidence that spinal manipulation was more effective than other remedies, such as exercise, but carried a risk of dangerous side-effects, including stroke.The General Chiropractic Council said the study findings were bunkum and based on flawed research. Recent research has shown that the diet may contribute to the health of the unborn child in the womb and that it helps in cutting cholesterol levels.. The doctors and the back crackers are at war. After years of skirmishes, practitioners of the art of spinal manipulation are taking on one of Britain’s most venerable medical institutions. As we get older, eating a healthy diet including fresh fruit and vegetables, getting our blood pressure and cholesterol checked regularly, taking exercise and watching our weight may all turn out to be important ways of reducing our risk of developing dementia in later life.”The Mediterranean diet has been recommended by nutritionists for over 20 years and is credited with many health benefits. It is thought that fruit and vegetables can help to lower blood pressure and that the anti-oxidants found in them, including vitamins C and E, could prevent heart disease, lessening the risk of dementia as well as directly affecting potentially brain-damaging free radicals.
This is the first study to examine the effect of general dietary patterns, the authors say.The Alzheimer’s Disease Society in the UK said the finding added to the growing weight of evidence that diet and lifestyle are important risk factors for the disease.Professor Clive Ballard, research director, said: “This study supports the idea that eating a combined diet of plenty of fruit, vegetables and fish might help to prevent dementia.”It is likely that the reason for this is a combination of factors. ants were scored on a scale from 0 to 9 for their adherence to the Mediterranean diet and the risk of Alzheimer’s fell around 10 per cent for every additional point they climbed up the scale.Nikolaos Scarmeas and colleagues from Columbia University Medical Centre, whose findings are published in Annals of Neurology today, say: “We conclude that higher adherence to the Mediterranean diet is associated with a reduction in the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.”There was a significant dose-response effect that remained even after correcting for age, gender, weight, smoking, education, and ethnicity, they say.Previous studies have examined the link between cognitive decline and individual foods such as fruits, vegetables or oily fish but the findings have been conflicting. Records of their diets during the study period showed that those who adhered most closely to the Mediterranean diet, eating lots of fruits, vegetables, pulses, some fish and alcohol with little dairy food and meat had the lowest risk of Alzheimer’s, down by 39 to 40 per cent.Those who only partially followed the diet had a reduced risk of 15 to 20 per cent compared to those who consumed the typical American diet of burgers and ice cream. Researchers monitored 2,258 healthy, elderly people in New York who were part of a research project into ageing. Their medical and neurological history was assessed, they had standard physical and neurological tests and their cognitive function was measured every 18 months.
After four years, 262 of the participants were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, more than one in ten of the total. The diet of southern France, Italy and Spain, rich in olive oil and red wine, is known to protect against heart disease and high blood pressure but this is the first time it has been shown to prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
One of the largest studies of the impact of food and drink on mental decline has found that eating a Mediterranean diet cuts the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by up to 40 per cent. It powerfully raised awareness on a national scale but Labour has failed to deliver any such sea change.”The Department of Health was not available for comment.. The Royal College of Nursing is to debate the issue at its annual conference next week.
The Department of Health has spent millions on advertising campaigns over the past five years to encourage people to stop smoking, eat more fruit and vegetables and practise safer sex.But a resolution tabled by the health visitors and public health forum of the RCN, entitled “Getting it wrong?”, suggested the money had been wasted.The resolution calls on the conference to discuss “whether resources allocated to some healthcare promotion campaigns could be better used in providing direct care to patients”.The Government spent £50m on a recent poster campaign about HIV and Aids, but, according to the RCN resolution, has “demonstrated limited evidence of success”.Despite the high profile of the campaign, UK cases of HIV rose by 50 per cent between 2000 and 2004 and the number of new diagnoses among heterosexuals now outstrips homosexual transmissions.Cases of sexually transmitted infections such as chlamydia, gonorrhoea and herpes have also continued to rise, particularly among young people.More than £30m will be spent this year alone on providing free fruit in schools, in addition to £700,000 in 2003 on a campaign encouraging people to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day.Despite this, consumption of healthy food has not increased dramatically, with only 18 per cent of men and 20 per cent of women in the most deprived areas of the UK eating the required five a day.The NHS smoking cessation service has a budget this year of £51m and has spent millions on hard-hitting attempts to hit its target of reducing smoking rates to under 21 per cent by 2010.Yet between 1998 and 2004, the proportion of adults who smoke fell by just three per cent to 25 per cent and rates among younger age-groups, considered to be more susceptible to advertising, have risen.Nurses are to debate whether expensive promotional campaigns should be scrapped in favour of passing the financial cost on to companies responsible for specific health problems, such as food manufacturers, to inform consumers.Andrew Lansley, the shadow Health Secretary, said: “We have consistently criticised the Government on their limited campaigns at target audiences.”The key to our successful HIV awareness campaign in the 1980s was that it had a significant impact on the public at large. Funds would be better spent on treating patients and targeting the most at-risk groups rather than running high-profile advertising pushes, they say. Multimillion-pound health promotion campaigns by the Government are a waste of money and do not change people’s behaviour, according to nurses.