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    Treating Common Ailments: Understanding the Process of Effective Treatment
    Treating Common Ailments: Understanding the Process of Effective Treatment
    Treating Common Ailments: Understanding the Process of Effective Treatment
    Ebook100 pages1 hour

    Treating Common Ailments: Understanding the Process of Effective Treatment

    By Ram Das

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    About this ebook

    'Nothing is worse than a familiar enemy' goes a well-known proverb and perhaps nowhere is it more appropriate than in the case of common ailments. While people rush too often and too soon to doctors for diseases like diabetes and angina pectoris, they tend to take more familiar diseases for granted. Take the case of headache, for example. Perhaps all of us are aware of that friendly middle-aged lady in our neighborhood who gets a headache all too often and who takes a tablet of aspirin all by herself to relieve her headache. Such a practice is perhaps quite acceptable for a couple of occasions but by repeatedly doing it she may be suppressing the 'warning cry' of the body, trying to caution her of some serious disorder. There are a host of other common ailments which one tends to take for granted, yet which could be the early signs warning the sufferer of some grave disorder. 
    There is a strong case then to know something about these common ailments. An attempt is made in this book to identify a few such common ailments and give some interesting information about them. There is yet another reason why we must know about them. Knowing something about our body and its common ailments is much like knowing our automobile and its common troubles. We may not be able to mend our automobile ourselves, but once we know about its working and its common troubles, we take care of our automobile more intelligently and use it in such a way that it 'falls sick' less often. Not only that, if it does 'fall sick', we can interact with the mechanic more fruitfully and more intelligently, and an unscrupulous mechanic would be hard put to take us for a ride. 
    Almost the same function is served by knowing some common ailments of our body. These are the ailments which all of us suffer from day in and day out. Once we know more about them, we can ensure that we don't fall prey to them again and again, and if we do fall ill we could at least interact with our family doctor in a more meaningful way. This way we help our doctor by conveying to him more useful information and consequently help ourselves. 
    It is hoped that by going through the pages of this book we would become more informed about our body and its working in health and disease. If, besides informing the reader, this book is also able to entertain and amuse the reader, its purpose would have been served. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWinchester Publications
    Release dateSep 9, 2018
    ISBN9781386522911
    Treating Common Ailments: Understanding the Process of Effective Treatment

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      Book preview

      Treating Common Ailments - Ram Das

      Introduction

      ‘N othing is worse than a familiar enemy’ goes a well-known proverb and perhaps nowhere is it more appropriate than in the case of common ailments. While people rush too often and too soon to doctors for diseases like diabetes and angina pectoris, they tend to take more familiar diseases for granted. Take the case of headache, for example. Perhaps all of us are aware of that friendly middle-aged lady in our neighborhood who gets a headache all too often and who takes a tablet of aspirin all by herself to relieve her headache. Such a practice is perhaps quite acceptable for a couple of occasions but by repeatedly doing it she may be suppressing the ‘warning cry’ of the body, trying to caution her of some serious disorder. There are a host of other common ailments which one tends to take for granted, yet which could be the early signs warning the sufferer of some grave disorder.

      There is a strong case then to know something about these common ailments. An attempt is made in this book to identify a few such common ailments and give some interesting information about them. There is yet another reason why we must know about them. Knowing something about our body and its common ailments is much like knowing our automobile and its common troubles. We may not be able to mend our automobile ourselves, but once we know about its working and its common troubles, we take care of our automobile more intelligently and use it in such a way that it ‘falls sick’ less often. Not only that, if it does ‘fall sick’, we can interact with the mechanic more fruitfully and more intelligently, and an unscrupulous mechanic would be hard put to take us for a ride.

      Almost the same function is served by knowing some common ailments of our body. These are the ailments which all of us suffer from day in and day out. Once we know more about them, we can ensure that we don’t fall prey to them again and again, and if we do fall ill we could at least interact with our family doctor in a more meaningful way. This way we help our doctor by conveying to him more useful information and consequently help ourselves.

      It is hoped that by going through the pages of this book we would become more informed about our body and its working in health and disease. If, besides informing the reader, this book is also able to entertain and amuse the reader, its purpose would have been served.

      ALLERGIES

      I am allergic to my boss or I am allergic to my mother-in-law are the common exclamatory remarks made in everyday life. By and large, in such situations the word allergy is used as synonymous to ’dislike’. In medical parlance the word ’allergy’ conveys a similar, if not exactly the same meaning. Normally a person would not have any unpleasant or untoward reaction to common objects such as pollen, animal hair, washing powder or eggs. However, about 20 per cent of the population (or about one in every five persons) reacts abnormally to one or more of these common substances. Such people may have severe breathing difficulties on being exposed to pollen or animal hair, or may get itchy blisters whenever their skin comes in contact with objects like jewelry, or say washing powder. In a way, we can say that their bodies do not ‘like’ these substances and react violently whenever exposed to them. In 1906, an Austrian child specialist, Clemens von Pirquet (1874-1929), used the word allergy to denote such conditions, forming the word from the Greek allo meaning ’different’ and ergon meaning, 'work’. Literally therefore, the word allergy means ‘different work’ or to put it more clearly, an allergy is something that ‘works differently’ from the normal. Substances (such as pollen or chemicals in washing powder), which elicit such abnormal responses, are called allergens . Why some people react strangely to these common substances is not quite clear but certain interesting speculations have been made, as we shall see later.

      There are literally thousands upon thousands of allergens. In fact it has been said that anything and everything under the sun can cause allergy. However, the most common allergens are various foods (such as cheese, cow’s milk, flour and eggs), dust, pollen, medicines and certain chemicals. An allergen can only excite an abnormal response in a sensitive individual, when it comes in actual bodily contact with an allergic individual. An allergen can do so in four principal ways: it can either he inhaled such as pollen, ingested such as cow’s milk, injected such as a vaccine or touched such as a cosmetic or a dye. In all cases, the response may be different. Thus inhalant allergens (or allergens which are inhaled) generally cause breathing difficulties; ingestant allergens cause nausea, vomiting, stomach upset and diarrhea, and contactant allergens cause rashes, itching and weeping blisters. Injected allergens can cause any of these symptoms.

      Although the term allergy was coined in 1906, the condition has been known since ancient times. In the fourth century B.C., the Greek physician, Hippocrates (460 B.c.-370 B.C.), recorded the apparent anomaly that some foods, though healthy and nourishing for most people, made a few people sick. Cheese was such a food, and to explain the phenomenon involved, it was suggested that cheese contained a substance which acted as poison for a few. Why it should be so, or what was the actual poison involved, was left unexplained. Roman philosopher and poet, Lucretius (95 B.c.-55 B.c.), wrote in his famous scientific poem, On the Nature of Things, that what was good for some might be poison for others. The prince of physicians, Galen (AD. 131-201), also noted allergic reactions to certain plants but made no attempt to explain this strange phenomenon.

      By the middle of the sixteenth century, reactions to external agents had begun to attract attention and there were several reports of ‘rose fever’. It was nothing but hay fever, as we know it today, and is caused by pollen from flowers. Its chief symptoms are sore itchy eyes, ‘runny’ or stuffy nose and prolonged sneezing. A patient of the Italian surgeon, Leonardo Botallo (1519-88), whose patients incidentally included such prominent figures as Charles IX and Catherine de Medici, found that roses made him sneeze, made his nose itch, and gave him headaches. He described these symptoms carefully in 1565 and thus became the first person in history to give an accurate description of hay fever, one of the major allergic disorders. Another Italian doctor, Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501-1577), had a patient who was so sensitive to cats that he became ill on entering a room in which a cat was concealed, i.e. despite being unaware of it.

      One of the most interesting and famous experiments to explore the causes of allergy was done in the early twentieth century, which goes by the name Prausnitz-Kiistner reaction. Heinz Kiistner (1897-1931) was a German gynecologist and obstetrician, who was allergic to cooked fish. He could not eat cooked fish without experiencing itching, skin swelling, coughing, sneezing and vomiting, the reaction taking about twelve hours to settle down. Carl Wilhelm Prausnitz (1861-1933), the German hygienist and bacteriologist, thought that the blood of allergic individuals contained a substance which he called reagin (a term modelled on ‘reagent’). This reagin acted with the allergen and produced untoward and unpleasant symptoms. But, the blood of normal

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