Herbal Health

Listening thoughtfully to the patient is an important aspect of counseling. As a counselor you should permit the patient to give as much information as possible without too many interruptions. Be aware of his attitudes as well as what he says.
A record of food intake is more reliable if the patient can have some visual reminders of size of portions: measuring spoons, several sizes of glasses and cups, measuring cup, and ruler.
After the patient has had opportunity to describe his food intake, it is usually necessary to follow up with more questions. You should avoid questions that suggest a right answer; for example, “What did you have for breakfast?” and “Did you eat cereal?” suggest that the patient should have eaten breakfast that included cereal. Better: “When did you first eat yesterday?” and “What did you eat at that time?” Usually you will need to obtain specific details concerning kinds of foods, methods of preparation, and amounts; for example, “What kind of bread?” “How many slices?” “What did you put on the bread?” “How was the meat cooked?” “How much gravy did you use?”
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Knelpp footbath
You need two small tubs for this bath. Fill one with hot water, 97 to 110 degrees; the other with cold water, 50 to 65 degrees. Water should be 8 to 12 inches deep.
Place feet in hot tub for 3 to 5 minutes. Switch to cold for 30 seconds. Repeat twice.
A foot bath is an excellent treatment for colds, chronic headaches, neuritis, catarrh, sinusitis, cold feet, poor circulation, nervous disorders and congestion in the abdomen and pelvic organs.

Kneipp arm bath
Use two small tubs, or one large wash basin and an extra tub. Fill one with hot water, 97 to 105 degrees; the other with cold, 50 to 65 degrees.
Keep arms, preferably deeper than the elbows, in hot water for 5 minutes, then in cold for 15 seconds. Repeat 3 times.
An arm bath is very beneficial in heart conditions, rheumatic conditions in hands and arms, bursitis and neuritis.

Cold shower
Famous nature-cure pioneer, Dr. Henry Lindlahr, said: “There is no such thing as a ‘cure-all’ – a remedy or panacea for all ailments – but if there were such a thing, it would be cold water, properly applied.”
A cold shower treatment has a special tonic-like magic of exerting a rejuvenative and healing effect on the entire system. It stimulates circulation and increases muscle tone and nerve force. It stimulates the entire glandular system. It improves digestion and speeds up general metabolism. It will increase resistance to infections and colds, if used regularly. It has a powerful influence on the central nervous system, on the brain and on all the vital organs of the body. It increases the blood count, as shown in actual studies. It has an electro-magnetic effect on the body, stimulating the flow of life energies and increasing the intake of oxygen to a remarkable degree.
As you see, Dr. Lindlahr wasn’t kidding!
If you can regulate the force of the water stream, set it on as forceful a flow as possible. The harder the stream, the greater the therapeutic value of the shower.
A cold shower can be taken twice a day – morning and evening. If you have a large enough shower room to place a cot, or at least a chair in it, you may take a long shower, keeping water at a comfortable temperature (even warm if necessary) and let the forceful stream pound the body, exposing every part of your body as you turn over on your cot. Showers like this have been taken for several hours, resulting in great health benefits.

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People who are watching their weight often falsely assume that by skipping a meal they have automatically sealed in a calorie loss. This is rarely true because he or she will eat twice as much at lunch, or will have a sweet coffee break in search of a pick-me-up. Skipping meals is one of the worst ways in the world to lose weight.

While breakfast need not be elaborate, you should have some kind of meal and eat it sitting at the table. (See Bad Habit #3.) I’m an advocate of a big breakfast because most of it will be burned off during the day. Besides, it appeals to a man’s sense of macho (big men start their big days with a big meal . . .).

Men who are salesmen or who work alone are often tempted to skip lunch because either they don’t like to take the time for the break or they don’t like to eat alone. A man who drives a territory is often tempted to grab a snack to eat while driving, instead of eating a real meal that he would have to consume alone. Men who have no one to lunch with are often tempted to skip lunch altogether and snack through the afternoon instead.

Once your man knows about this food plan, he will learn to appreciate lunch more. In fact, he’ll soon learn that it is his best opportunity to cheat a little. Since it’s unlikely that it will be possible for you to be with your man at lunch time, you’re just going to have to shrug your shoulders and pretend to be relaxed. It is better for a person to overeat at lunch than to skip it!

As for skipping dinner, I’ve never known a man who considered such a crazy idea.

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Weight Loss

In Australia only a minority of married couples are of the traditional model, in which father goes to work, while mother stays home with the kids. Women are now an important part of the workforce. Dual incomes have become necessary for many families to maintain their standard of living. Many couples work full-time, and this can create pressures for the family, with many parents facing the difficulties of juggling childcare and full-time work. Inadequate provision of day-care facilities compounds the problem.

For a working mother in particular, the burden can be immense, especially if her partner is unwilling to share responsibility for looking after the children and the house. Some mothers feel guilty that they have chosen, often out of necessity, not to follow the traditional role of staying home and looking after the children. Many will have grown up in households where the mother was always there with milk and cookies when the children came home from school. Breaking away from this tradition can be difficult, and many working mothers have genuine concerns about how it will affect their children.

Working full-time when you have a family requires excellent organisation. The time you do spend with your children needs to be ‘quality time’, that is, time when you are available for them. Part of this organisation process may include spending one evening a week cooking meals in preparation for the coming week. These can be wrapped separately and stored in the freezer till required. Delegating is a useful way of distributing the labour. Don’t be ashamed to ask people for support, and accept any offers of help, be it with preparing meals or picking the children up from school.

Flexibility at work makes things much easier for the working mother. Some employers, however, are still unwilling to see their employees as having lives outside work. Hopefully this is changing, with more and more opportunities for flexitime, job-sharing, and part-time work becoming available. There has been a gradual increase in the number of workplaces which have on-site daycare facilities. This can be reassuring, as well as convenient for parents.

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You would think we would be able to deal with money. There isn’t much of it anyway. We spend more minutes on money than we have money. I wish we got paid to worry about money. We’d be rich.

HUSBAND

There are several books that trace the relationship between love and managing money. Carol Colman’s book Love and Money explores some of the patterns that evolve in marriage related to financial issues. Money seems to be the great quantifier of worth in our society and even in our marriages. Earlier in this chapter you read about the man who had sexual problems because of his wife’s higher salary. Several of the couples reported problems in this area.

Here are some of the adjustments couples made to issues of money and sex. Discuss these and the other problem remembering that super marital sex is a process, not a goal.

The Banker: This spouse feels that his or her entire self-esteem is measured by his or her control of the family finances. He or she controls the checkbook, saving books, all shopping, buying, allowances, and investments and seems to get more enjoyment out of a balanced checkbook than a balanced love life. Super marital sex cannot survive if partners exclusively assume any one marital task.

The Client: This is the spouse who is married to the Banker. He or she may criticize the lack of money, poor investments, missing checks, the size of the grocery bill, but make little effort to share the financial responsibility. The Client defaults financially, and so ends up defaulting sexually, feeling unfulfilled but helpless to correct the problem because the spouse “is responsible.”

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Same-gender sex play is common, and most spouses could remember a specific time when they engaged in such behavior. Think back to your own sex play with a same-gender person, perhaps a sibling, a cousin, a neighborhood friend?

“That’s easy,” one wife reported. “We had a breast-comparison contest. My best friend and 1.1 must have been about fourteen or so, and so was she. It started out with looking, then she touched mine and I touched hers. It wasn’t like sex excitement like it is an adult, but a tingling sensation. I imagined she was a boy. Somehow we kissed. She stuck her tongue in my mouth, and I started to spit. I spat until I was dry.”

This wife had mentioned a concern that she might be homosexual, not an atypical concern of the wives. She felt guilty even now, and added that “I’m still curious about other women’s breasts.” She was converting natural curiosity and arousal to fear and misunderstanding. Love maps can take wrong rums when we compare what happened to us in our natural learning with what we fear might happen to us.

“We just unzipped each other’s pants and reached in. I touched his penis and he touched mine. Then we watched each other pee,” reported one husband. “I think he is probably a fag now as an adult, because he was the instigator.”

There are societies in which the absence of homosexuality activity during sexual development is viewed as abnormal. One such society is the Sambia tribe of New Guinea, where all young boys are expected to live temporarily with males, ingesting semen as a counterbalance to their drinking of mother’s milk. Only after this act takes place can they truly become men. We must look far beyond our own ethnocentrism if we are to begin to leam about the evolution of gender orientation. Certainly, sex play with the same gender is almost universal in our own society, and fears about it only block further healthy love mapping.

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This skin may break down to form an ulcer, and these varicose ulcers are notoriously slow to heal.

Treatment therefore is worthwhile.

In the past, for varicose veins below the knee injections were used, but the results were poor. Operation is considered the treatment of choice.

Here, the large saphenous vein, which runs from ankle to the groin, is “stripped.” An incision is made in the skin at the ankle, a cut made in the vein, and a flexible metal rod is inserted through the vein and pushed up to the top of the vein at the groin.

Where this vein joins the main vein of the leg it is tied off, the metal rod is then attached to the vein, and the surgeon, grasping the rod where it has appeared through a cut in the groin, pulls the vein upwards, turning it inside-out and “stripping” it.

This tears off the small branches of the vein along the way.

While the surgeon is carrying out this procedure, an assistant is applying a firm bandage from the toes upward to put pressure on the leg and reduce bleeding.

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Lung tissue consists of many small, thin-walled air sacs, called alveoli.

Air is carried down the bronchial tubes to these air sacs, and the gases, oxygen and carbon dioxide pass to and fro across these to the blood in the thin-walled capillaries.

In emphysema, there is a reduction in the number of alveoli and an increase in their size.

This reduces the total surface area of the air sacs, and as the gases are exchanged across the surface this leads to a reduction in the amount of available lung tissue.

The main symptom of emphysema is shortness of breath.

As well as this distension of the air sacs, there is usually an associated spasm or constriction of the bronchial tubes, which makes it difficult for the air to move in and out.

There are many causes of emphysema — usually several acting together.

It is a disease which appears to run in families. It may occur in the young, although it is more common in the late middle-aged and the elderly.

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You may have been wondering why I have made no reference to blood tests yet. This is because blood tests are rarely useful in making a definite diagnosis of cancer. You remember the two essential steps in diagnosing cancer don’t you?— ’seeing’ the source of the symptom and taking a specimen. Blood tests are no use for either of these unless the cancer actually starts in one of the types of blood or lymph cells. With leukaemias, some myelomas and some lymphomas, enough malignant cells travel in the bloodstream to allow a diagnosis to be made by looking at a small sample of blood under the microscope. Even so, specimens from bone marrow or lymph nodes are usually necessary as well.

You may well ask: ‘But don’t many types of cancer spread through the bloodstream?’ Indeed they do. The problem is that only a few cells at a time are released from the primary cancer and they don’t stay in the blood for long. The chances of actually seeing them in a small blood specimen are minute. It can happen but it’s very rare.

Blood tests sometimes help by giving us clues as to where to look when cancer is suspected.

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Bone scans are a Very useful means of looking for secondaries. They can also pick up cancer deposits in bones which look normal on plain X-ray. A spot which has hardly weakened the bone at all still produces a reaction in the normal bone cells nearby. It is in these active bone cells that the radioactive substance is concentrated. Thus the bone scan can detect cancer deposits which are at an earlier stage than those visible on a plain X-ray. The problem is that the bone scan shows up all reactive bone cells regardless of the reason for the reaction. Fractures (recent or old), arthritis and infections also can show up on bone scans as ‘hot spots’. Bones which show ‘hot spots’ on scan usually have to be X-rayed to find out what is causing them. Occasionally the normal bone cells do not react to cancer cells nearby. In this case the bone scan will be falsely negative, that is, will miss the cancer spots. This happens especially with myeloma. The most reliable way of looking for bone secondaries is with a combination of bone scan and X-rays.

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