Fight The Depression Online

Slow and steady wins the race

admin — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 10:19:46 +0000

A few months ago, there was an interesting piece of research published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Before I start to explain the research, I should make it clear that it’s not a full scientific study. But it is, as you might say, certainly food for thought. Most people who want to lose weight play around with their diet, talk about exercising and buy phentermine to use as an appetite suppressants.

When you were young, you probably remember your mother telling you to eat more slowly. In my family, there were standing jokes about how many times you were supposed to chew each mouthful before swallowing it. We agreed a different number of chews depending on whether it was toast in the morning or meat for dinner. But it now seems we were ahead of our time - unscientifically speaking. The most recent research was carried out by the University of Rhode Island. On two separate occasions, it invited thirty young people who notoriously eat large quantities, and gave them a meal of pasta, cheese and tomatoes.

On the first occasion, they were asked to eat the meal as quickly as they could. On the second occasion, the participants were encouraged to socialize as much as possible during the meal and to eat slowly. Although they were not given an actual number of chews for each mouthful, they were told to make sure that the food was thoroughly chewed before they swallowed it. When you buy phentermine, it works by using the brain’s messaging system to send a signal that the stomach is full. People stop eating when they feel full. Without the aid of phentermine, it takes about thirty minutes for the stomach to send that message to the brain indicating fullness. The researchers also speculate that the more you savor and enjoy the food, the more you will be satisfied by eating fewer calories. If the natural approach takes too long to work, there’s always phentermine to fall back on.

Who was that bacteria I saw you with last night?

admin — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:47:39 +0000

It’s really strange how some lines stay with you. Not that I am old enough to remember the original version of the words, “Who was that lady I saw you with last night?” - it was first used in 1887 by Joseph Weber and Lew Fields in a vaudeville routine - but it just seems to be something I grew up with. Rather like acne. Along with some four-fifths of all teenagers, I had some acne. Today, everyone on the planet seems to go through severe emotional and psychological traumas when their faces light up with a few zits. It seems to be the norm for the spotless teenagers to torture those who have the spots on each day. There are many different remedies for dealing with acne. The first starts with the idea that people grow out of the problem so you don’t need to do anything, rising to the administration of accutane which is the final nuclear deterrent when all else has failed. In between, scientists are working on identifying the cause of acne. We all get the theory that when your body is growing, the hormonal balance gets out of whack and causes your hair follicles to get blocked up with dead skin cells. When a spot is forming, there seems to be an average of fifteen different bacteria involved including P. acnes, Staphylococcus epidermidis and other well-known species. If the bacteria most closely connected with the infection can be identified, a more specific remedy can be produced. Until then, people will have to make do with the existing treatments. If all the standard medications fail, that leaves accutane which is almost always effective. Young men may use this drug without undue risks, but we remind all young women not to use this drug unless they take the iPledge and all appropriate measures to prevent pregnancy.

Alternative Treatment of Otitis Media

admin — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:24:42 +0000

A new study on the ways of treating otitis media which has taken place in one of medical institutions of New Orleans has compared two popular medications for treating the condition and has found some interesting results. The results of the study have already been submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for further investigation and approval, and if the results are positive a new drug may be added to the list of recommended medications used for treating otitis media in children.

A repeated examination in two weeks after the initial course has shown that about 75% of children were completely cured with a few cases of reclusion. In what concerns side-effects, the new drug has shown better results with 17% compared to the standard medication with 23% of children having symptoms such as diarrhea and rash. The first drug has caused only diarrhea as a side-effect.

The children taking part in the study have had no history of antibiotic intolerance or failed treatment with antibiotics and were generally in a better condition than the patients who are subjected to tympanocentesis. Researches have thus concluded that both Azithromycin and amoxicillin/clavulanate have approximately the same level of effectiveness in the long run, with the first on being more effective in the initial stage of the disease. Azithromycin is better absorbed by the tissue and has longer half-life of about 60 hours. This makes a single dose of the drug as effective as a 10-day course of amoxicillin/clavulanate.

Bipolar Disorder

admin — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:35:07 +0000

The mean age of onset for bipolar disorder is the early twenties. It affects men and women equally; over the course of their lifetime, between 0.4 and 1.2 percent of men and women will develop bipolar disorder. At any given time, between o. 1 and 0.6 percent of the population are suffering from an episode. There is a high genetic correlation; first-degree relatives of bipolar patients have a 12 percent lifetime incidence, while another 12 percent will experience major depression.
Untreated, a manic episode will last an average of six months, and a major depressive episode eight to ten months. The interval between episodes decreases as time goes on. There is a high mortality rate, due to suicide (15 percent of untreated patients), accidental death due to risky behavior, and concurrent illness.
Many people with untreated bipolar disorder will die from alcoholism, lung cancer, accidents, or sexually transmitted disease; feeling so invulnerable during an episode, they simply do not take the precautions that most of us have come to accept as part of a sensible lifestyle.
Bipolar disorder seems to be a different kettle of fish from other kinds of depression, though the depressive episodes may look and feel the same as major depression. Bipolar disorder has such a high degree of genetic transmission, the manic episodes are so distinctive and limited to the disease, and the disease itself has such a unique response to a specific medication (lithium) that it makes sense to think of it as primarily a biogenetic disease that causes a chemical imbalance in the brain. This is not to say that the bipolar patient also doesn’t have to change his lifestyle to help his recovery.

Depressive Disorder Not Otherwise Specified

admin — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:32:50 +0000

Someone who self-reports feeling depressed, has suicidal impulses, has lost pleasure in life, and is not sleeping well, is seriously depressed, but because he does not have four of the secondary criteria cannot be diagnosed as having “major” depression. Likewise someone who suffers all the symptoms of dysthymia, but for a period which has not lasted two years. Such people are usually classified as Depressive Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (DDNOS), a catchall term that may include some people who are quite seriously depressed, others who aren’t.
This grouping is used for all patients who show some symptoms of depression but do not meet the criteria for one of the more restrictive diagnoses. Their symptoms may be less severe, or of shorter duration, or they may meet most of the criteria, but not all, for major depression or dysthymia. This category also includes women suffering from depression associated with the menstrual cycle and people with schizophrenia or other psychotic disorder with an associated depression. But it still ex-cludes people who are grieving, who are depressed as a result of a loss or change in their lives, who are dealing with a medical problem and depressed as a result. In other words, the diagnosis includes a wide variety of people who suffer from depression that has no clear external cause, but is serious enough to interfere with their ability to function.
Estimates are that, at any given time, 11 percent of the population meets the criteria for DDNOS. This is truly an astounding number, making DDNOS easily the single most common disease in the United States. The combined incidence of major depression, dysthymia, and DDNOS approaches 20 percent at any given time. This does not mean that 20 percent of the population will have depression at some time in their lives, but that 20 percent have it right now. One in five of your friends, family members, coworkers. There is just no other disease that approaches this kind of prevalence.

Major Depression

admin — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:29:20 +0000

In the case of depression, the phenomenological approach has led to some hair-splitting in diagnosis that emphasizes artificial and unimportant distinctions, minimizing commonalities and contributing to the trivialization of research. Currendy, the DSM-IV recognizes several distinct depression-related diagnoses, which we will describe together with their reported epidemiological data. The caveat is that the formal requirements for a diagnosis are often rather arbitrary and the distinctions between the diagnoses may be more apparent than real. The most important of these diagnoses are Major Depression, Dysthymic Disorder, and Bipolar Disorder.
Major depression is a very serious condition. Usually the patient and family recognize that something is gravely wrong, but exactly what it is is not so easy to tell. In the simplest case, the patient feels, looks, and acts depressed, and tells people about it.
Nancy has major depression. Although she is able to hold down a responsible job and has raised a family successfully, most of the time she is miserable. She looks tense and sad. She is thin, shy, and worried. She’s hesitant to say what’s on her mind, though she is caring and intelligent. She constantly puts herself down. She believes she can’t handle any stress; in fact, she copes very well, but constantly fears that she’s messing up. She has recurrent migraines that force her to bed several times a month. She has to take a medication for these that costs $80 a dose, and her antidepressant medication costs $8 a day. Her family is on a tight budget, and her insurance doesn’t pay for
medication, so she blames herself for having to spend so much money on treatment.
Nancy describes her depression as a well. When it’s at its worst, she is stuck down in the mud at the bottom of the well. The mud is full of worms and rats, and it’s all she can do to keep from being eaten alive. When she’s feeling good, she’s out of the well, able to look around at life and see opportunities and joy. Most of the time, she’s partway down the well. Her view of life is restricted; she can see it’s there, and she remembers what it’s like to feel good, but she can’t quite reach it.

Diagnosis: Depression

admin — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:24:47 +0000

Depression as a diagnosis has not pushed quite so many of society’s hot buttons, but it is subject to the same controversies. For instance, until the third DSM came out in the seventies, many psychiatric diagnoses were strongly influenced by Freudian theory. Because the theory held that depression was caused primarily by a harsh, strict superego, and because a superego was not thought to be developed until the resolution of the Oedipal conflict, it was assumed that children could not be depressed. DSM-IH addressed that, and many other blind spots in the diagnosis business, by taking a phenomenological approach that DSM-IV has followed: if a symptom cluster was observed commonly enough to be a problem perhaps worth addressing, and if observers with the same training could reliably identify the same symptom cluster with the same patients, that symptom cluster was given a name. There might or might not be a good explanation, a theory, for why that particular group of symptoms seemed to occur reliably together. Certainly it was the hope of the compilers of the new DSM that a reliable classifica-tion system, in which we could all be sure we were counting and observing the same things, might lead to better explanations for the underlying mechanisms beneath the symptoms, and improvements in treatment.
But this approach has also had its drawbacks. It has certainly contributed to the medicalization of complex emotional/behavioral states, like alcoholism, depression, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It led insurance companies to go along with the idea that an expensive course of hospital-based treatment was appropriate for these conditions, contributing to our current backlash of attempts to overcontrol behavioral health care costs. It has led to absurd legal strategies by defendants who eschew respon-sibility for their actions. It can lead to patients hoping that the
cure for their condition will come about from a new pill, and that until the pill comes along there is nothing they can do to help themselves.

Recognizing a problem

admin — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:22:51 +0000

RECOGNIZING AN emotional problem and giving it a psychiatric diagnosis are very different processes. At what point does the depressed mood that everyone experiences from time to time become an illness that requires intervention?
Diagnosis in psychiatry is currently based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, commonly known as DSM-IV.1 The process of arriving at a standard nomenclature for emotional conditions and mental disorders has been complex, partly because so many of the conditions are themselves controversial topics in contemporary culture: Is alcoholism a disease, a habit, or a weakness? Is bulimia a disease, or a symptom of oppression? Is homosexuality a disease, or a lifestyle? Why do Vietnam vets apparently suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder at such higher rates than soldiers in previous wars? Should rebellious adolescents be hospitalized against their will because they can’t get along with their parents? Should people with chronic substance abuse problems be considered disabled, and thus entitled to Social Security benefits? These questions require answers that make us question our deepest values - do we have the ability to make our own decisions in life, or are our decisions programmed by our hered-
ity, nervous system, or early childhood experience? If our decisions are determined, what happens to the social contract, guilt, crime, and punishment?