In summary, Alzheimer’s Disease is a specific diagnosis, named after a the guy who discovered it – Alois Alzheimer in 1906, whereas dementia describes a collection of symptoms that have a number of possible causes. Alzheimer’s Disease is confirmed by cognitive – behavioural assessments and brain scans, and is confirmed post mortem by an autopsy.

In the 15th century when disease was such a big part of daily life; this type of artwork was commonplace.

Generally, the difference between pandemic and epidemic is one of concentration and geographic reach. Epidemics occur in a specific area which can be a city, state or even an entire country as long as the incidence of the disease remains relatively constant with no exponential growth, and localized. Pandemics are more widespread, and affect a larger amount of people – an entire continent or world wide. HIV, the virus causing AIDS is considered a pandemic. As was the Bubonic plague and small pox.

Colloquially, when the word epidemic refers to a high rate of infection – higher than you would normally expect to be the case. There are frequent epidemics of Dengue fever in the tropics; a virus spread by infected mosquitoes. Seasonal flu is not considered to be an epidemic, even though it has a high rate of occurrence, because it is expected that many people will contract the flu. It can become an epidemic, however, if the number of cases is many more than is historically usual for the seasonal flu. This can become a pandemic if the cases start increasing exponentially and spreading to new populations and geographic locations unexpectedly.

Another cause of shin splints is a stress fracture in the tibia.  Unlike acute fractures that happen with impact stress and are instantaneous – breaking a leg skiing or falling; or breaking a bone in a car accident – large, instant traumas, stress fractures are usually caused by low forces acting on a bone over a long period of time. Also known as fatigue fractures, these breaks occur in athletes who do a lot of running and jumping on hard surfaces; dancers and runners.

Undiagnosed shin pain can be caused by Compartment syndrome. If you look at a cross section of the muscles and bones below the knee, you will see different pockets with the various muscles that make up the lower leg – these pockets, or compartments can contain one or several different muscles wrapped in fascia. Think of fascia like connective tissue shrink wrap surrounding your muscles. If, in the course of training, one of these muscles becomes too big for its compartment, it will cause stress and pain in the surrounding tissue. This is one cause of compartment syndrome. Another cause is swelling or bleeding resulting from a traumatic event.

Permanent treatment usually involves surgery – splitting the fascia; followed by careful rehabilitation. Short term treatments involve rest, physiotherapy and possibly orthotics.

My standard disclaimer – I am not a doctor, nor should any of the above information be taken as medical advice. I provide the above for informational interest. If your reaction to the above is “huh”, or “interesting”, my job is done.

What are the symptoms of shingles?

In the prodromal stage, between 2 and 5 days before a rash breaks out, you feel like you are getting the flu – fever, chills, nausea. You may also feel numbness, tingling, itching or pain on one side of your body or face. The VZV lies dormant in your nerve cells. The symptoms you feel on your body follow nerve pathways.

Small, clear fluid filled blisters appear in the eruptive stage. These blisters resemble chicken pox and follow the same nerve pathways where you may have already experienced itching, numbness, tingling and/or pain. These blisters can range from somewhat irritating to incredibly painful. They tend to appear in bands or clusters called dermatomes; an area on the skin where a single nerve cell provides sensation. Dermatomes are sort of like a road map of which nerves supply which areas of the body with sensation. In about 2 weeks, the blisters will become pus filled – your white blood cells hard at work – eventually dry up to form scabs. At this point, the blisters no longer contain the active virus. The blisters and inflamed area surrounding them can be uncomfortable for 3 to 5 weeks; most symptoms are resolved within 5 weeks with no lasting scars – unless the blisters were scratched open to become infected. Most healthy people don’t experience complications from shingles. The course of the illness may even be shortened if you manage to see your doctor and are started on a course of antivirals within the first 3 days of the rash appearing.

Complications

Elderly people and those with compromised immune systems may experience complications. Postherpetic neuralgia (the VZV is in the herpes family of viruses) occurs when pain associated with the rash persists for months or years following an outbreak. Nerves can be damaged from a shingles outbreak. Damaged nerves can send faulty messages that they body interprets as pain. Nerve damage is incredibly difficult to heal. Patients over the age of 50 seem to be most at risk for developing PHN.

Hutchinson’s Sign in a shingles outbreak is a rash appearing on the tip of your nose. This sign indicates VZV infection of the ophthalmic nerve. Temporary blindness and eye swelling and should be seen by a doctor immediately. Ramsay Hunt Syndrome occurs when the VZV invades the facial nerve. Intense pain in the ear combined with dizziness, hearing loss and blisters in and around the face, ear, neck and scalp should also be seen by a doctor right away.

Bacterial skin infections can result from scratching your skin open; creating a doorway for bacteria to get into the body. In an already weakened immune system, your body may not be able to fight off these additional pathogens.

Infections in your internal organs may occur in patients with compromised immune systems.

My little disclaimer…

I am not a doctor or medical professional. This article is meant for informational interest only and should not be used in place of a physician’s diagnosis.

Major elements of the urinary system

The urinary bladder, as it is referred to anatomically to distinguish it from meaning “pouch or flexible enclosure”, sits atop your pelvic floor: protective layers of muscles and connective tissues designed to hold you internal organs in place. The bladder is the final internal destination for urine that has been collected and concentrated by the kidney and transported via the ureters – one for each kidney.

The urinary bladder; like the design of many other internal surfaces of your body, like the small intestine and the stomach is lined with folds of tissue. In the stomach and bladder, these folds are called rugae and they stretch and flatten in response to increased pressure – if you have just eaten a big meal or haven’t urinated in a long time. Our wonderful bodies follow this design because internal bladder expansion takes the pressure off the surrounding pelvic and abdominal organs. In contrast, if the bladder filled outwards like a balloon, our pelvic and abdominal muscles would be continually squashed.

We start feeling the urge to pee when our bladder is about 25% full. For most people; this pretty easy to ignore. Nerves on and near our bladder, when stretched, trigger the parasympathetic nervous system (the rest and digest part of our nervous system as opposed to the sympathetic fight or flight part of our nervous system) to signal us to go pee. As the bladder stretches, the PNS becomes more insistent that we go pee. If the bladder reaches 100% capacity you will expel urine involuntarily. The flow of urine is controlled by two muscles; an internal involuntary muscle called the detrusor muscle and an external voluntary Kegel muscle.

OK, a brief aside to explain involuntary and voluntary muscle: involuntary muscles are controlled directly by our nervous system without conscious input from us. They are made up of smooth muscle fibres. Skeletal muscle, under our voluntary control is also regulated by our nervous system, but we are the ones sending the signals to the brain to move or not move. Skeletal muscle is striated. Microscopically, they look very different from each other. Smooth muscles are working away in your body all the time; like for example, in your small intestine as the smooth muscles push food along the digestive tract towards the large intestine (or colon) and out the anus.

Kegel muscle a.k.a. the Pubococcygeus muscle

It is our voluntary muscle we contract to “hold pee in” You can strengthen this muscle by doing Kegel exercises – for women, flexing the little ring of muscles, inside your vaginal opening. Doing about 25 flexes of this muscle every day well help to prevent urinary incontinence problems when you are older. Men also have a Kegel muscle that allows their penis to stay erect, and controls their ejaculation and of course, help with incontinence. Men can isolate and strengthen this muscle by stopping and starting the flow when urinating. This is the same for women.

What can go wrong? Well it all boils down to incontinence, but for many different reasons. If you have damaged nerves, you may not be able to receive the PNS’s signals urging you to urinate as is the case with some Parkinson’s and Multiple Sclerosis patients. Your detrusor muscle (involuntary) is controlled by the PNS. If your PNS is damaged, this muscle may not function properly, and the only protection you have is your external muscle; which is likely not strong enough to hold back small outputs of urine. Prostate cancer can damage pelvic nerves resulting in incontinence.

Sometimes (mostly in women), if you laugh, sneeze or cough, the pressure it creates overcomes both sets of muscles resulting in little spurts of urine coming out. This is called Stress Incontinence and happens mostly in older women – over the age of 60, but can happen younger; say if you have a genetic predisposition to urinary incontinence.

Overactive bladder is diagnosed when you have to pee 8 or more times a day, and are up 1 or 2 times a night. Based on this definition approximately 1 in 6 people in the U.S. have this problem. OAB can be treated with antimuscarinic drugs or through a really cool sounding procedure whereby physicians insert an electrode near the tibial nerve in your leg. An electrical impulse travels to your sacral plexus via your tibial nerve. Recall, that your tibia is a bone in your lower leg. Your sacral plexus is a bundle of nerve fibers responsible for controlling parts of your pelvis and lower extremities. The treatment takes place once a week for 12 weeks. Some patients need more or ongoing treatment. I myself have an overactive bladder, but it doesn’t badly interfere with my life – excepting 11 hour long bus rides in Central Turkey with only one bathroom stop; I have just lived with it without treatment. Please understand, I am not a medical professional and I am not advocating any procedure or treatment, but just seek to educate people about our bodies and how they work. Peace out.

There are many different types of T-cells, but one of the best known to us are memory T-cells; as their name suggests, they are responsible for our immunity to certain diseases through vaccinations. B-cells make the antibodies that fight  antigens (foreign cells). In short, T-cells have the recipe and B-cells are the cooks. Natural killer cells attack viruses and tumor cells.

Although, current knowledge of the role of our appendix is based on well educated guesses, here is what we know:: our appendix may have played a role in helping our distant relatives digest plant matter; a mainstay of their ancient diet; by storing additional digestive enzymes. Scientists base this knowledge on the comparison between the human appendix and the koala bear appendix. The appendix is rich in lymphocytes as stated above. Finally, the appendix may play an important role in repopulating natural bacteria to our large intestine that are wiped out by diarrhea and other similar illnesses.

Why do so many people undergo an appendectomy?

Partially digested food and foreign antigens can become stuck in the appendix because of its remote location. Your appendix is a closed tube, making it difficult for your body to clear away debris, should any infection causing bacteria or other matter become stuck. It used to be routine practice to remove the appendix during any abdominal surgery due to its propensity for becoming infected and the deadly consequences that could result from this infection. If an infection continues without treatment, your appendix could rupture, spewing out bacteria laden materials into your peritoneum and abdominal cavity, possibly resulting in sepsis and death. Rather than take this risk, doctors used to routinely remove the appendix, but current medical practices include giving IV antibiotics to treat appendicitis (“citis” means inflammed), that can lead to a full recovery. It is worth noting, however, that most people don’t notice any difference in their body’s immune functioning after having their appendix removed.

This article is for Mike

We all know the simple answer; it pumps blood, but how exactly does it work. Let’s piggy back on a red blood cell and follow its journey as it leaves the lungs with a fresh supply of oxygen. But first, understand there are many components that make up our blood including plasma, red and white blood cells, platelets and nutrients from our food.

Freshly rejuvenated with a  supply of oxygen from the alveoli in our lungs, the rbc enters the left atrium of the heart via the pulmonary veins. Although undetectable when checking your own pulse; your heart actually has two sets of contractions; atrial and ventricular systole. The left atrium contracts to force the newly oxygenated blood into the left ventricle via the mitral valve; while at the same time, the right atrium contracts to force deoxygenated blood into the right ventricle en route to the lungs. During ventricular systole, the left ventricle contracts, forcing the oxygen saturated rbc into the superior (upper) and inferior (lower) aorta for distribution through your body. There are special valves that close to prevent back flow into the atrium during the powerful ventricular systole. Some people have a disorder called a heart murmur, where their mitral valve doesn’t close properly and blood from the ventricle flows back into the atrium. In aortic stenosis, the aortic valve doesn’t close completely and blood doesn’t properly leave the ventricle forcing the heart into a number of compensatory mechanisms, some of which cause ventricular hypertrophy; an enlargement of heart muscle. Simply put, a muscle working hard will get bigger, much like weight lifters building body muscle mass.

The aorta immediately branches into the ascending and descending aortas; to distribute blood to the upper and lower body.  At rest, the blood flow percentages to the body are as follows: 4-5% is used by the heart muscle itself, 21-22% is used by the kidneys, 18% is used by the skeletal muscles (during exercise, the skeletal muscles use 71-72% of our total blood flow), 7% by our skin, 25% by our viscera, 13% by our brain (consider that the brain only makes up 1/50th the total mass of our bodies), 11-12% by the rest of our bodies.

Our red blood cells exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide; a waste product of cellular respiration. This carbon dioxide needs to be transported back to our lungs via our veins for us to breath out. The easiest way to remember which vessel carries which type of blood is to associate our arteries with “away”; in that arteries take blood away from the heart. Veins transport blood back to the right atrium of the heart via the superior and inferior vena cava. Veins always bring blood to the heart. Our red blood cell has exchanged its oxygen for carbon dioxide and now needs to return to the lungs for refueling.  From the right atrium, into the right ventricle and back to the lungs via the pulmonary arteries, the indispensable red blood cell has completed one full circuit through our bodies.

Interestingly, the “lub dub” sounds heard through the doctor’s stethoscope are the closing of the valves of the heart; the bicuspid (a.k.a mitral) and tricuspid valves that separate the right and left atrium from the right and left ventricle, and the semilunar valves that prevent back flow into the ventricles once the blood has been forced out into the aorta and pulmonary arteries.

What is an Electrocardiogram or ECG?

The ECG measures electrical impulses traveling through the heart. The heart contracts based on a signal generated by the sinoatrial node (SA), and continued by the atrioventricular node (AV). The SA node is our pacemaker; it sets the normal sinus rhythm of our heart. The electrical impulse travels to the AV node which conducts this impulse from the atria to the ventricles. This sinus rhythm is what causes the contraction of the heart muscle. While, the cells that generate the electrical impulse are heart muscle cells, they, themselves do not contract. To me, this is the beauty of the body at work; real magic.

The normal sinus rhythm is represented by a series of peaks and depressions on graph. The P-wave is the current traveling between the SA and the AV Nodes. It is worth noting that the spikes on an ECG reading don’t represent the physical contraction of the heart muscle, but rather the flow of electrical impulse through the myocardium (“myo” means muscle and “cardium” means heart). The QRS segment is the depolarization of the ventricles and the T-wave is the repolarization of the ventricles – allowing them a brief state of rest before the next impulse occurs. Doctors can diagnose potential heart problems and their approximate location based on disruptions in these waves.

Whenever I think about how people abuse their bodies with substances, I marvel at the heart’s marvelous capacity for being both an incredibly precise and terribly complicated machine and one of incredible power. If you live to be 80, your heart will beat between 2 and 3 billion times. There is no machine I can think of more efficient than that!

Xanax, also known as Alprazolam, is a benzodiazepine used to treat anxiety, convulsions and depression. It is also used as a muscle relaxant.

How long Xanax stays in your system depends on your dosage, weight, age and your body’s ability to metabolize the drug. Generally, it remains detectable in your body for 2 days to 2 weeks after ingestion. It will be detected in a drug test as long as a week after consumption. If you are elderly, the clearance time will be longer. Your liver is primarily responsible for metabolizing Xanax, so if you have any impaired liver function, you probably shouldn’t be taking this drug without the advice of a physician, but nonetheless, your degree of liver functioning will affect how long this drug stays in your system.

This drug’s clearance time can be delayed when taken with other medications such as some anti fungals, antibiotics, and SSRI antidepressants.  Xanax can also have a synergistic effect, meaning the two (or more) drugs taken together will increase or prolong each others’ effect; when taken with alcohol, imipramine and desipramine.

When taken by pregnant women, Xanax can affect the developing fetus. Babies can develop withdrawal symptoms after birth if exposed to Xanax prenatally. It is also excreted in breastmilk and can cause lethargy and delayed growth in breastfeeding infants.

What about amalgam fillings? The US National Institute of Health have ruled amalgam fillings to be safe, but there remains controversy over these findings. Some countries in Northern Europe: Norway, Sweden and Denmark have banned amalgam fillings. Amalgam poses an environmental risk as well. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 50% of environmental mercury levels come dentistry; manufacture of fillings, etc.

Symptoms of mercury poisoning include poor coordination, and impaired vision, speech and hearing. According to these symptoms, I have mercury poisoning every morning before my daily caffeine fix, but I digress. Additional signs include desquamation;a mass shedding of skin. Pink disease, a condition characterized by pain and pink discoloration of the hands and feet affected children in the first half of the 20th century. This was likely caused by a teething powder containing Calomel that contained mercury. Childhood occurrences of Pink Disease decreased dramatically after Calomel was removed in the early 1950′s. Mercury mainly attacks the central nervous system – your brain and spinal cord, the endocrine system – anything to do with hormones/neurotransmitters, and your kidneys.

Thiomersal, containing mercury, is a preservative used in vaccines. There is much controversy around thiomersal being the cause of autism in children. I don’t weigh in on either side, but since this controversy began, there are fewer vaccines containing thiomersal. It should be noted however, the FDA, WHO and the Institute of Medicine has reject the hypothesis that thiomersal plays any role in developing autism.

Some skin whitening products, popular in Asian culture have been found to contain 9,000 to 60,000 times the recommended exposure to mercury. These cosmetics are banned in the US, but some still manage to make it onto the market, so be wary and read, read, read ingredient labels. Please note that these skin whitening products are not the same toxic products the Geisha women were using. Their white face make up used to contain lead, not mercury.

Florescent light bulbs release mercury when broken in the form of liquid and vapour. There are safe methods to dispose of broken bulbs and many municipalities or counties have rules and regulations governing the safe clean up and disposal of florescent bulbs. Unlike you may currently practice, florescent bulbs are NOT to be thrown out with regular garbage or recycling.

So what are MMI’s? They are derived from milk and consist of products such as butteroil, whey, casein, and if you are lucky, powdered milk. Miss Tuffet would be rolling over in her grave if she knew how her precious whey was being used. Whey is a byproduct of cheese manufacturing; the liquid that remains after the milk has been curdled and strained. I’ll leave that for the spider thanks! Butteroil is 50% sugar. Casein is isolated milk protein. Most MMI’s are imported from Australia or New Zealand for a cheap cost as they are not considered “fresh milk” and are therefore not subject to the same import tax. In Canada, a food can be labeled as “Made in Canada” if 50% or more of the cost of product manufacturing takes place in Canada. What does this mean? Well, if you get your modified milk ingredients from New Zealand, your chocolate chips from the United States and your mint flavoring from China, but mix the ingredients into a frozen dessert in Canada and pour them into a Canadian made container, you can label it as a “Product of Canada”. For more information on “Made in Canada” products, check out the CBC Marketplace special.

How do they make frozen dessert taste creamy? They add various guar gums and carrageenan and other stuff to give the dessert its trademark creamy texture which, rather than being creamy, is more gummy.