THE NURSE’S ROLE IN DIETARY COUNSELING: SOME INTERVIEWING TECHNIQUES
June 16th, 2010 | Posted by admin | Category: General healthNo Comments
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?”
*132/234/5*
THERAPEUTIC BATHS: KNElPP FOOTBATH, KNEIPP ARM BATH AND COLD SHOWER
June 16th, 2010 | Posted by admin | Category: General healthNo Comments
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.
*132/103/5*
YOUR CHILD’S HEALTH: THE WORKING MOTHER
May 19th, 2009 | Posted by admin | Category: General healthNo Comments
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.
*108\90\8*
OUR MARITAL HEALTH/SEX AND PROBLEMS OF DAILY LIVING: FOR LOVE AND MONEY
May 18th, 2009 | Posted by admin | Category: General healthNo Comments
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.”
*218\97\8*
SUPER LOVE FOR SUPER SEX/LOVE-MAP LANDMARKS: DESCRIBE A “SEX REHEARSAL”: SEX PLAY YOU ENGAGED IN WITH SOMEONE OF YOUR OWN GENDER
May 18th, 2009 | Posted by admin | Category: General healthNo Comments
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.
*78\97\8*
VARICOSE VEINS – TREATMENT
May 15th, 2009 | Posted by admin | Category: General healthNo Comments
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.
*588/71/1*
EMPHYSEMA – INTRODUCTION
May 15th, 2009 | Posted by admin | Category: General healthNo Comments
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.
*331/71/1*
PURPURA – GENERAL INFORMATION
May 12th, 2009 | Posted by admin | Category: General healthNo Comments
The Schonlein-Henoch syndrome or anaphylactoid purpura is essentially a disease of childhood usually at around the ages of five to seven.
It is believed to be an allergic type reaction occurring some weeks after a respiratory infection and, in this respect, resembles rheumatic fever.
The lesion is an inflammation of small blood vessels and affects many organs. The skin is almost always involved and small bleedings under the skin produce the small red marks called purpura.
The joints, the gastro-intestinal tract and the kidneys may also be involved.
No treatment appears to be effective, but, in most cases, the disorder slowly resolves over six to eight weeks. About 5 to 10 per cent may go on to develop chronic kidney inflammation.
*81/71/1*
CHILDREN’S HEALTH: TOOTHACHE
April 28th, 2009 | Posted by admin | Category: General healthNo Comments
In common with earaches and the onset of labor, children’s toothaches always happen at the least convenient time – after pharmacists have closed their doors and doctors and dentists have closed their offices. A toothache can be caused by an injury to a tooth, an infection between the gum and the tooth, or an abscess of the root of the tooth due to extension of a cavity (even a filled one) into the tooth’s pulp.
Signs and symptoms
The source of a toothache is obvious if the gum near the tooth is red, swollen, and tender, or if a cavity is visible. If the source of the pain is in doubt, tapping gently with a tongue depressor or the handle of a spoon will cause sharp pain in the tooth responsible.
Home care
Temporary treatment is to ease the pain of the toothache with aspirin or paracetamol. An ice pack on the jaw may help, but heat may make the toothache worse. Call your dentist.
Part of home treatment is prevention. Your child should see a dentist regularly, beginning at age two or three. The child should brush his or her teeth at least daily and use dental floss. Through adolescence, fluoride must be provided each day. If you live in an area where the water is not fluoridated, supplementary fluoride is needed. Talk to your dentist about this.
Precautions
• Take your child to a dentist regularly to avoid any emergency situation involving a toothache.
• Do not apply heat to the site of a toothache.
Medical treatment
Your doctor may prescribe a pain killer or an antibiotic if an infection is present, but treatment of the tooth is left to the dentist.
*231/84/5*
PREVENTION AND HEALTH: VENEREAL DISEASE (VD)
April 23rd, 2009 | Posted by admin | Category: General healthNo Comments
Venereal disease is a family of infections involving the genital organs. They are, by definition, caught by having sexual contact with another person but in reality this is too narrow a way of looking at the problem, as we shall see.
VD (otherwise known as sexually transmitted diseases-STDs) is a fast-growing problem. Gonorrhea, for example, is the second most common infectious illness in the world after measles.
VD is becoming more of a problem for several reasons. First, society’s changed attitudes over the last twenty years or so have encouraged young people to have intercourse at a younger age. The babies born in the 1950s and 1960s are now teenagers and young adults and this group are exceptionally active sexually. Premarital sex is more commonplace than it used to be-a change particularly involving women. Most surveys show that over 90 per cent of women are not virgins when they go up the aisle. Half of all US women who have never been married have had more than one sex partner, compared with just over a third fifteen years ago. The divorce rate is rising steadily; more adults are choosing to remain single or are postponing marriage for various reasons; and so the list of changes goes on. All of this has led to increasing numbers of individuals having sex with larger numbers of partners than ever before.
Women and newborn babies bear the major brunt of this epidemic of venereal infections. One in every twenty babies born in the US has an infection with Chlamydia, and of the infected group half will develop conjunctivitis and one in five pneumonia. Early syphilis, until recently a rare disease, is once more appearing in women of childbearing age. If early syphilis is untreated in pregnancy 40 per cent of the infants will be still-born, born prematurely or die prematurely. Another 40 per cent will have congenital syphilis. Such a woman has only a one in five chance of having a normal, healthy baby.
As many as three in every 10,000 babies are born with herpes. Half die very early in life and a quarter of those who survive will be damaged. Three in every 200 babies are affected with cytomegalovirus and one in seven of them will be deaf, retarded or suffer eye defects. Nearly 5,000 babies a year die from beta-hemolytic streptococcus-a proportion of these infections are probably sexually transmitted.
Pelvic inflammatory disease is the most common serious complication of chlamydial and gonococcal infections. These diseases cause 25,000 ectopic pregnancies (pregnancies that occur outside the womb in the fallopian tubes), 213,000 hospital admissions, 115,000 major surgical operations, and 900 deaths, per year in the US alone.
*252/72/5*