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Pediatric

Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention

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Lead Poisoning Remains a Problem in the United States — But it is Preventable

Lead has no known value to the human body and can adversely affect nearly every body system. Because lead poisoning often occurs with no obvious symptoms, it frequently goes unrecognized. Therefore, many children with lead poisoning go undiagnosed and untreated.

Young children are particularly at risk for lead exposure because they have frequent hand-to-mouth activity and absorb lead more easily than do adults. Children’s nervous systems are still undergoing development and thus are more susceptible to the effects of toxic agents. Lead is also harmful to the developing fetuses of pregnant women.

Low levels of lead can cause reduced intelligence and attention span, learning disabilities, and behavioral problems. Very high lead levels (blood lead levels 70[micro]g/ dL or greater) can cause severe neurological problems such as coma, convulsions, and even death. Such levels are now rare in the United States.

No safe blood lead level in children has been determined. About 310,000 U.S. children aged 1-5 years have blood lead levels greater than 10[micro]g/dL, the level targeted for elimination by 2010.

What is Lead?
Lead is a naturally occurring, bluish-gray metal found in small amounts in the earth’s crust. Lead contamination is widespread in the modern environment. Much of it comes from human activities including burning leaded gasoline, mining, and manufacturing. Lead is still used in many products today. It is used in batteries, ammunition, metal products (solder and pipes), and devices to shield x-rays. However, lead in paint is the main high-dose source of lead exposure to U.S. children today.

Lead was widely used in paint through the 1940s. That use declined during the 1950s and 1960s, and lead was banned from paint for residential use in 1978. Even so, lead remains a hazard in homes built before the ban, especially in pre-1950 housing. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, nearly 38 million housing units contain lead-based paint.

The most common sources of lead exposure for children are chips and particles of deteriorated lead paint. Although children may be exposed to lead from paint directly by swallowing paint chips, they are more commonly exposed by ingesting house dust or soil contaminated by leaded paint. Lead paint chips become ground into tiny bits that become part of the dust and soil in and around homes. This usually occurs when leaded paint deteriorates or is subject to friction or abrasion (as on doors and windowsills and wells). In addition, lead can be dispersed when paint is disturbed during demolition, remodeling, paint removal, or preparation of painted surfaces for repainting.

Lead also may be found in other sources. These sources may be the exposure source for as many as 30% of lead-poisoned children in certain areas across the United States. They include:

* Traditional home health remedies such as azarcon and greta, which are used for upset stomach or indigestion, and paylooah, which is used for rash or fever

* Some imported candies (specifically those from Mexico)

* Imported toy jewelry

* Some imported cosmetics

* Pottery and ceramics

* Drinking water contaminated by lead leached from lead pipes, solder, brass fixtures, or valves

* Consumer products, including tea kettles and sidewalk chalk

Additionally, a variety of work and hobby activities and products expose adults to lead. This also can result in lead exposure for their families. Activities that are associated with lead exposure include indoor firing range use, home repairs and remodeling, and pottery making. “Take-home” exposures may result when people whose jobs expose them to lead wear their work clothes home or wash them with the family laundry. It also may result when they bring scrap or waste material home from work.

Prevention Strategies:

The goal is to prevent lead exposure to children before they are harmed. There are many ways parents can reduce a child’s exposure to lead. The key is stop children from coming into contact with lead. Lead hazards in a child’s environment must be identified and controlled or removed safely.

Lead-based paint is the major source of exposure for lead in U.S. children. All houses built before 1978 are likely to contain some lead-based paint. However, it is the deterioration of this paint that causes a problem. You should determine the construction year of the house or the dwelling where the child may spend a large amount of time (e.g., grandparents or daycare). In housing built before 1978, assume that the paint has lead unless tests show otherwise.

* Talk to your state or local health department about testing paint and dust from your home for lead.

* Make sure your child does not have access to peeling paint or chewable surfaces painted with lead-based paint.

* Pregnant women and children should not be present in housing built before 1978 that is undergoing renovation. They should not participate in activities that disturb old paint or in cleaning up paint debris after work is completed.

* Create barriers between living/play areas and lead sources. Until environmental clean-up is completed, parents should clean and isolate all sources of lead. They should close and lock doors to keep children away from chipping or peeling paint on walls. You can also apply temporary barriers such as contact paper or duct tape, to cover holes in walls or to block children’s access to other sources of lead.

* Regularly wash children’s hands and toys. Hands and toys can become contaminated from household dust or exterior soil. Both are known lead sources.

* Regularly wet-mop floors and wet-wipe window components. Because household dust is a major source of lead, parents should wet-mop floors and wet-wipe horizontal surfaces every 2-3 weeks. Windowsills and wells can contain high levels of leaded dust. They should be kept clean. If feasible, windows should be shut to prevent abrasion of painted surfaces or opened from the top sash.

* Prevent children from playing in bare soil; if possible, provide them with sandboxes. Parents should plant grass on areas of bare soil or cover the soil with grass seed, mulch, or wood chips, if possible. Until the bare soil is covered, parents should move play areas away from bare soil and away from the sides of the house. If using a sandbox, parents should also cover the box when not in use to prevent cats from using it as a litter box. That will help protect children from exposure to animal waste.

To further reduce a child’s exposure from nonpaint sources:

* Avoid using traditional home remedies and cosmetics that may contain lead.

* Avoid eating candies imported from Mexico.

* Avoid using containers, cookware, or tableware to store or cook foods or liquids that are not shown to be lead-free.

* Use only cold water from the tap for drinking, cooking, and for making baby formula. Hot water is more likely to contain higher levels of lead. Most of the lead in household water usually comes from the plumbing in your house, not from the local water supply.

* Shower and change clothes after finishing a task that involves working with lead-based products such as stained glass work, bullet making, or using a firing range.

If you are concerned that your child may have been exposed to lead, ask your doctor for a blood lead test. This simple test is the ONLY way to know for sure that your child does not have an elevated blood lead level. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that children ages 6-72 months who live in or frequently visit older buildings, including day care centers, have a blood lead test. Siblings, housemates, visitors, and playmates of children with confirmed lead poisoning may have similar exposures to lead and should be promptly tested. Children may also be exposed to other sources, such as those mentioned above, and should have a blood lead test. Children who have recently moved to the United States should be tested as well.

Source:kidsgrowth.com

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Therapetic treatment

Alternative Methods for Pain Reduction

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Alternative medicine and complementary therapy are no longer terms used solely by the granola-eating crowd. The search for alternatives to conventional medicine, especially within the realm of pain relief, has been gaining momentum. Whatever the reason  from the health-threatening side effects of popular pain medicines like Vioxx , to a desire to use only natural remedies  the chase is on for new therapies to alleviate the pain of chronic illness.

The Facts
According to the American Pain Foundation, complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is growing at a rate of 15% each year, with more than $24 billion spent on therapies outside conventional medicine. In large part because of this growth, the government established the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine in 1991, an organization whose charge is to investigate promising unconventional medical practices.

It’s important to note that while complementary medicine and alternative medicine can often refer to the same types of treatment, they are employed differently. Complementary medicine refers to treatments that are combined with conventional medicine, while alternative medicine replaces conventional medicine.

Chronic pain  pain lasting longer than six month   can be brought on by many conditions, but the major contributors are arthritis, cancer, back pain, migraines, and neurogenic pain (nerve pain). Various CAM therapies have been used to alleviate pain, including acupuncture, magnet therapy, chiropractic therapy, local electrical stimulation, brain stimulation, relaxation therapy, certain herbs, hypnosis, and biofeedback.

Acupuncture
Despite the fact that acupuncture is thousands of years old, only recently has its effectiveness in relieving pain been studied. Acupuncture works on the premise that the body is made up of twelve main meridians, or energy pathways, and that disease develops when there is an internal imbalance of the body’s energy. In acupuncture, hair-thin needles are inserted into the skin at specific areas to increase the flow of energy throughout the body.

In a recent study, researchers led by Jorge Vas from the Pain Treatment Unit in Dos Hermanas, Spain, analyzed the efficacy of acupuncture in treating osteoarthritis. Ninety-seven patients with osteoarthritis of the knee were randomly split into two groups. Half received acupuncture and diclofenac (a prescription NSAID), while the rest received diclofenac and placebo acupuncture. Placebo acupuncture was given by using retractable needles that didn’t puncture the skin. The researchers found that acupuncture, as a complementary therapy, was more effective than just pharmacological treatment in reducing pain and rigidity, as well as improving physical functioning, in osteoarthritis sufferers.

In another, smaller study, Kenneth D. Phillips, PhD and colleagues studied the effect of acupuncture in relieving peripheral neuropathy pain in 21 HIV-infected individuals. Acupuncture was performed on the subjects a total of ten times over five weeks. The needles were inserted according to individual symptoms. The results showed significant reduction in pain, and reduced symptoms of peripheral neuropathy. The researchers concluded that acupuncture can successfully treat the symptoms of pain and neuropathy in HIV-infected individuals, and that further research is warranted.

Magnet Therapy
Magnet therapy can be traced back to the third century A.D. when Greek physicians prescribed magnetized rings to treat arthritis. Theories about how magnets work range far and wide, yet research has not conclusively proven their efficacy. Still, the popularity of magnet therapy persists  in the form of magnetic bracelets, shoe insoles, belts, and bandages, with one survey ranking it second in CAM therapies used by arthritis and fibromyalgia patients.

Scientific research has produced some promising, if not conclusive results. In a study led by Candace S. Brown, PharmD, 32 patients with chronic pelvic pain were given either active or placebo magnets attached to their abdomens. Changes in pain relief and disability were calculated using three pain measurement tools. The patients who received active magnets for four weeks experienced less pain. The researchers point out, however, that the active group was more likely to identify their treatment, affecting the blinding efficacy of the study.

In a study out of Harvard Medical School, researchers enrolled 29 patients with osteoarthritis of the knee to see if magnet therapy could relieve their pain. Subjects received a sleeve equipped with either an active or a placebo magnet initially to be worn for four hours in a hospital setting. Patients were also instructed to wear their sleeves for six hours a day for the next six weeks. In this study, the researchers found improvement in pain among the magnet-wearers at four hours, but the relief was not sustained at weeks one or six.

Chiropractic Therapy
Chiropractic therapy is a hands-on therapy that uses manipulations to the spine to help the body function better. Neck and back pain are the most common reasons for chiropractor visits. While adjustments or manipulations are the major therapies used by chiropractors, other mediums such as heat and ice, ultrasound, electrical stimulation, magnetic therapy, and exercise may be used to supplement the treatment plan.

As for pain relief, back pain has been the most studied in terms of chiropractic therapy. In a randomized clinical trial conducted by Hurwitz et al, 652 patients with low-back pain received either conventional medical care or chiropractic care. At the end of six months, the researchers found that conventional medical care and chiropractic regimens were comparably effective in reducing pain intensity and disability.

Combining Therapies
Medicine, whether conventional, alternative, or complementary, is not an exact science. As our understanding of CAM therapies grows, so does our ability to employ additional alternatives to treating chronic pain. Perhaps a combination approach based on the individual patient will prove to be the most effective medicine. For now it is always wise to  talk to your physician and decide together what’s best for you.

By:Patricia Griffin Kellicker, BSN

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RESOURCES:

American Pain Foundation
http://www.painfoundation.org

American Pain Society

Ampainsoc – Amplified Performance, Alleviate Injury & Network Socially

National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine
http://nccam.nih.gov

Categories
Ailmemts & Remedies

Hysteria

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DEFINITION: –Conversion Reaction; Conversion Disorder; Dissociative Reaction; Dissociative Disorder.
A neurotic disorder characterized by a wide variety of somatic and mental symptoms resulting from dissociation, typically beginning during adolescence or early adulthood and occurring more commonly in women than men. Since the concept of hysteria as a disease is over 2000 yr old, its limits as a disorder have become blurred by a variety of definitions. Discussion is restricted to those phenomena classified as conversion and dissociative disorders of consciousness, which have a common basis in the mental phenomenon of dissociation.

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HYSTERICAL NEUROSIS – Etiology

The concept of dissociation, a process whereby specific internal mental contents (memories, ideas, feelings, perceptions) are lost to conscious awareness and become unavailable to voluntary recall, is central to an understanding of the genesis of hysterical symptoms. Though unconscious, these mental contents can be recovered under special circumstances (eg, in dreams or a hypnotic trance). Furthermore, they are able to affect the individual’s awareness and behavior in a variety of ways. For example, the dissociation and loss from consciousness of memories of motor patterns lead to paralysis; the emergence of a fragment of a dissociated visual memory may produce an ego-alien visual hallucination; the emergence of a complex of mental associations forming a dissociated personality may effect a complete change in the individual’s behavior. All phenomena of conversion and dissociative hysteria may be viewed as the effects of either the dissociation itself or the eruption into consciousness of portions of the dissociated mental contents of varying degrees of complexity. Proneness to dissociation may in part be genetic.

Two special aspects of dissociation should be noted: (1) It is closely correlated with hypnotizability, and individuals prone to spontaneous dissociation usually rate high on hypnotizability scales. (2) It may serve as a psychologic defense; ie, it provides a mechanism for banishing unpleasant, painful, and anxiety-provoking mental contents from consciousness. Recent clinical studies point to the particularly frequent presence of memories of major aggressive and sexual child abuse in patients with multiple personality disorders.

HYSTERICAL NEUROSIS – Symptoms and Signs

Conversion symptoms: Almost any organ disease symptom can be simulated on an hysterical basis; eg, symptoms mimicking the illness of a deceased relative. A variety of sensorimotor symptoms have been considered to be specific to and characteristic of hysterical neurosis. Weakness and paralysis of muscular groups are common; spasms and abnormal movements, less frequent. The motor disturbances are usually accompanied by altered sensibility, especially those involving touch, pain, temperature, and position sense. Especially characteristic are the “glove and stocking” distribution of the motor and sensory disturbances when these affect the limbs; ie, the distribution is determined by the body-image concept of a functional arm and leg rather than the dermatome innervation of the area affected. Another common distribution is complete hemianesthesia, which extends exactly to the midline of the body fore and aft. Less frequently, special senses and functions may be affected, such as in hysterical blindness, deafness, and aphonia; both visual and auditory hallucinations may occur.

Dissociative phenomena: A variety of altered states of consciousness may result from the dissociative process. In somnambulism, the patient appears to be out of contact with his environment, is seemingly unresponsive to external stimuli, and in many cases appears to be living out a vivid, hallucinated drama, often the memory of some past emotionally traumatic event. In amnesia, the most common form of dissociative hysteria, the patient typically has a complete loss of memory for all past events covering a period of several hours to several weeks. Anterograde amnesia may occur, wherein the amnesia covers the memory of events as they are experienced, the patient forgetting continuously from moment to moment what he has just been thinking, feeling, and doing. For a discussion of amnesia as a functional syndrome in organic cerebral disease.

Female hysteria was an incorrectly diagnosed medical condition in Western medicine that is not currently acknowledged by the medical community. It was a popular diagnosis in the Victorian era for a wide array of symptoms including faintness, nervousness, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and a “tendency to cause trouble”.

TREATMENT:

Patients diagnosed with female hysteria would undergo “pelvic massage”

Water massages as a treatment for hysteria c. 1860.

manual stimulation of the woman’s genitals by the doctor to “hysterical paroxysm”, which is now recognized as orgasm.

Herbal Medicines:

1.. Asafoetidia (hing) is an effective remedy for hysteria.Inhailing the gum prevents hysterial attacks.An emulsion of 2 gms. of gum with 120 ml. of water is valuable in treating hysteria.It should be taken externally.

2. One gm. of powdered root of rauwolfia (sarpagandha) can be adminstered thrice with milk.This treatment should be continued till a complete cure is obtained.

3.Use termaric and saffron (keshar) are beneficial in curing priodic attacks of hysteria.

Acupunture treatment sometimes works very well for a hysteria patient.

Home Medicine and Natural medicine –Preventive Treatment Of Hysteria may work aswell.

Homeopathic Treatment for hysteria may also be a good choice

Disclaimer: This information is not meant to be a substitute for professional medical advise or help. It is always best to consult with a Physician about serious health concerns. This information is in no way intended to diagnose or prescribe remedies.

Help taken from: www. en.wikipedia.org and www.ellenwhite.org

 

 

 

 

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News on Health & Science

Bicycle Seats Can Cause Impotence in Women

THE FACTS For several years, scientists have known that traditional bicycle seats can cause sexual dysfunction in men. Although female cyclists had not been studied directly, it was widely assumed that they, too, could suffer that fate.

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But that may not be the case. For the first time, a study this month looked at avid female cyclists and found that bike seats may affect them differently. Like male riders, many women in the study experienced tingling, pain and decreased genital sensation. But they did not show symptoms of impaired sexual function, possibly reflecting a lower susceptibility to sexual side effects than men.

The study, published in the journal Sexual Medicine, looked at 48 healthy, premenopausal cyclists who biked about three to four days a week for two hours at a time, then compared them with 22 runners.

In men, traditional bike seats compress an artery and nerve that supply the genitals with blood and sensation, increasing the risk of impotence over time. Because the same artery and nerve are crucial to sexual function in women, assumptions about female cyclists are often extrapolated from studies on men.

But Dr. Marsha K. Guess, an assistant professor at Yale medical school and the lead author of the new study, said female cyclists may benefit from anatomical differences that produce less compression. She also stressed the possibility that sexual side effects in female cyclists might be noticeable only in longer-term studies.

THE BOTTOM LINE Bicycle seats can cause decreased genital sensation in avid female cyclists, but the latest study suggests they may not cause sexual dysfunction.

Source:New York Times

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Health Alert

If Dog Or Cat Bites Children

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What Parents should do when dog or cat bites children ?

Remain calm and reassure your child that everything will be okay!

Superficial bite from a family household pet who is immunized & in good health:
1.Wash the wound with soap and water under pressure from a faucit for at least five minutes, but do not scratch as this may bruise the tissue. Apply an antiseptic cream or lotion.

2. Watch for signs of infection at the site, such as increased redness or pain, swelling, or drainage, or if your child develops a fever. Call your child’s physician or healthcare provider right away if any of these occur.

3.Check to make sure your child’s Tetanus immunization is correct.

For Deeper bites or puncture wounds from any animal,or from any bite from a strange animal.
1.If the bite or scratch is bleeding, apply pressure to it with a clean bandage or towel to stop the bleeding.

2.Wash the wound with soap and water under pressure from a faucet for at least five minutes, but do not scrub as this may bruise the tissue.

3.Dry the wound and cover it with a sterile dressing. Do not use tape or butterfly bandages to close the wound as this could trap harmful bacteria in the wound.

4.Call your child’s physician or health care provider for help in reporting the attack and to decide if additional treatment, such as antibiotics a Tetanus booster or a rabis vaccination is needed

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