Responsible Art

Archive for August, 2011

Thanks to Sarah Palin, we can now put verbs on either side of “baby” and still make perfect sense. In this case, we consumers all want there to be thousands of attorneys around to protect our interests when capitalist corporations sell us products that injure us. It can be a car that just will not stop no matter how hard we put our foot on the brake or a tomato that tries to kill us with salmonella. Just recently, even though we’re nowhere near Thanksgiving, 36 million pounds of turkey meat had to pulled from supermarket freezers around the country because it was dangerous. Cargill’s factory, where the meat was processed, has been closed down. Without attorneys to sue and get damages to cover the cost of our medical treatment, loss of earnings, and so on, we would pay for the product and then pay for our losses. Attorneys are wonderful human beings who deliver a great social service. Unless, that is, you listen to the GOP. To Republicans, attorneys are the spawn of the Devil who threaten to put good profit-earning companies out of business. The right wing believes attorneys are out of control and there must be limits placed on our right to sue those who injure us.

This is particularly hotly debated when it comes to the medical profession and the drugs they prescribe. The GOP wants limits on claims of professional negligence, and even suggests restricting the right to sue should people be injured by drugs or medical devices approved by the FDA. As to the latter, the argument goes that the FDA rigorously tests drugs and devices, and only licenses those that help more than harm patients. On the other side of the fence, we’ve recently had some interesting cases where attorneys have argued patients should be allowed to sue even though they ignored all the safety warnings in the leaflets sent out with the drugs. In one case, the patient acted as a complete idiot and not only took an outrageously high dose but did so for nearly a year. When he found the drug had damaged his stomach, he persuaded an attorney to sue. No one, he argued, can be expected to read and understand warnings put out by manufacturers. Everyone should be allowed to self-medicate and then sue if it goes wrong. Attorneys, you gotta love ‘em – always prepared to take on hopeless cases, gambling there will be prejudiced juries prepared to award damages against pharmaceutical companies.

All of which brings us to Accutane. There have been some cases involving celebrities who, fearing they would no longer be considered beautiful people, used the drug excessively and then tried to complain. At this point, we should note some of the research from outside the US which finds this drug effective and perfectly safe if taken at low dosage. The trials have lasted for up to a year without there being any adverse side effects. So the moral of all this should be clear. Follow the foreign research, take very low doses of Accutane and your acne will disappear. Abuse the drug by taking too much for too long and you will end up with serious problems. Fortunately, if you are injured, there will always be attorneys prepared to take on your case.

It might look slightly odd to put stress and acne together as if this is something new. In fact, everyone who has suffered acne knows all about stress. No matter whether those around us were considered friends or enemies, the appearance of acne converts everyone into a potential enemy to self-confidence. It can be a look that lingers just a little too long, or looks exchanged between people as you pass by, and that’s before you start hearing the comments. It would not be so bad if it happened to everyone at the same time. That way everyone would be the same. But some people start young. Others seem to have avoided the problem only to find it coming on years after everyone else has finished. These differences mean there is a steady supply of targets for cruelty. Those who recover the most quickly have the longest time to take their revenge on all those who follow them.

Yet look beyond the obvious connection and there are some very important questions. Suppose there’s a real link so that stress of anticipating the arrival of acne encourages it to come. Or that the stress of all the taunting slows down the recovery and makes the whole problem last longer. If either or both of these links was real, all children and teens would benefit from learning relaxation techniques. Yes, we can all smile and say there would be resistance. But if there was clear medical evidence that stress-busting was a cure for acne, this might encourage your children to be a little more calm and pleasant to live with.

Unfortunately, we now come to a major conflict of interest. There has been no significant research into proving or disproving the link. When you think about it, this is an extraordinary failure. Yet it’s easily explained. At present, Big Pharma and the cosmetics industry make several billion dollars a year out of selling drugs and various products to “help” those with acne. If all people had to do to cure acne was to meditate and relax, just think what would happen to all those profits. So we have to be sold the message that it’s medically necessary to treat acne as if it was a major disease and spend vast amounts of money on covering up the problem until it goes away.

Perhaps this criticism is unjustified. Perhaps there’s no link between stress and acne. But it would be better if there was proper research into proving cause and effect. The only “evidence” comes from a few unscientific tests. For example, one university monitored some twenty students and found they had more obvious acne before and during examinations. Although such findings are interesting, they are scientifically useless. Proper clinical trials require hundreds if not several thousand people for the evidence to be credible. Ironically, the only real scientific evidence comes courtesy of the FDA’s approval of Accutane which is proven highly effective in eliminating acne. Yes, there are problems if women of child-bearing age take the drug. Others have unwisely ignored the manufacturer’s warnings and have been injured. But millions of people have found Accutane effective. Respect the drug and it’s safe.

If we see a sentence suggesting pain is good thing, most people would scratch their heads and think the author was playing a joke. Everyone knows pain is unpleasant and to be avoided at all costs. Indeed, it’s this attitude of wanting to avoid pain at all costs that’s lifted the US to the top of the world rankings. No matter what you might think of the competition, the US takes more painkillers per head of population than any other country in the world. It’s not clear exactly what the prize for winning is, but the obvious consequence is that we have more people abusing painkillers and so becoming dependent. This seriously complicates the treatment for the underlying cause. So let’s split this into two separate questions: why is pain a good thing? and why should we aim to treat pain without relying on drugs?

Pain works in exactly the same way as a burglar alarm. You fit one to your home and if someone enters without your consent, you get a warning. Well, it’s the same with pain. If a virus or bacterium gets into your body, you need something to tell you there’s a problem. If you get into an accident, you need pain to tell you exactly what injuries you have, whether you can walk or need an ambulance, and what treatment you are likely to need. Without pain, you might never know if you were falling ill, and you might make an injury worse if you continued to move with, say, strained muscles or broken bones. That makes pain very useful. The problem comes because once you know you are ill or have an injury, you want the pain to stop. Well that’s just plain wrong. Suppose you hurt your leg. Do you want to feel no pain so that, if you pick up something that’s too hot, you have to wait for the burning smell before you drop it? No! If one part of the body is hurt, you want want to know if the pain is spreading or growing worse. The pattern of the pain helps you monitor whether you are getting better or worse.

So moving on to the second question, as medial science stands, the only way to switch off pain completely is to make you almost completely unaware or actually unconscious. No matter what pill you take, you will feel a little pain so long as you remain alert. The problem with the strongest painkillers is that they are all addictive. The advantage of Tramadol is that you can take it in quite high doses for quite long periods of time and still stop without major withdrawal symptoms. You should always be in a treatment regime that allows you to continue feeling some pain and, more importantly, that you can stop without experiencing withdrawal symptoms. That means you must be planning for life without pills. If you assume you will have to continue taking pills for the rest of your life, consider the cost. If you take 3 pills a day at $1 per pill, that’s $1095 per year. This assumes you do not build up tolerance and need to take more than 3 pills per day. How many years do you want to spend this money on Tramadol?

There comes a point in the treatment of any problem when the doctors decide nothing more can be done. Let’s say you were unlucky in a traffic accident and, despite surgery and physical therapy, you will be left with a limp. At first, the pain was severe but, with constant attention to the underlying cause, it has eased a little. Now is the time for a change in the medical team. The problem remaining to be treated is the pain. The best people to treat it are those doctors who specialize in pain management. That’s what happens in other countries. It does not happen here but we can come back to this lack of specialists in another article. First, what is pain management?

Once you have decided to treat the pain as if it was a completely separate illness in its own right, the first step is for the pain specialists to review all the treatment to date. A fresh set of eyes is needed to make absolutely sure nothing has been overlooked. Why is this necessary? Well, let’s say you have been treated for your injuries by the orthopedic surgery department. They have patched you up and sewn you back together. But these are doctors who specialize in the skeleton, joints and muscles. They might not have noticed if you were growing depressed and this was having a negative effect on your perception of pain. So the first step in pain management is to review everything done so far and, if anything has been missed, this can be put right first. Only when the pain specialists are confident nothing more can be done to treat the underlying cause can they focus on the pain itself.

Now comes the team approach. Pain is partly physical and partly psychological. Some people find any continuing pain a threat to their quality of life. They feel unable to cope unless there’s a high dosage of painkillers. Even with the help of medication, they retreat into themselves and turn themselves into invalids. Others have a positive attitude and, even though there’s a little pain, they work round it to enjoy life. In other words, unless you treat the person and understand how each individual responds to pain, there’s little chance of a successful outcome. This highlights one of the difficulties in the conventional hospital department. Even though you can get to see the doctor or surgeon responsible for your treatment, it tends to be only for a few minutes. There’s little tine to discuss your problems in detail and the most usual outcome is a prescription for a painkiller.

In a specialist pain management clinic, there’s a team of doctors, psychologists, counselors, physical therapists and cognitive behavioral therapists. Everyone is potentially different. Some patients may prefer treatment in their own homes so a community-based team can visit. Others may live close to swimming pools and other facilities where they can exercise. Those that live in exurbs with no recreational services may need help to travel to places where they can exercise under supervision. All the research shows this focus on the individual produces the best outcomes. If there’s still too much pain, Tramadol in short bursts is the usual strategy. But the aim of the team is always to avoid using drugs, even those as mild as Tramadol.

One of the enduring myths has been selling the link between stress and most of the ills that affect us in our high-powered modern lives. There’s a major industry built on calming us down and helping us to relax. It doesn’t matter which end of the scale you come from, there’s always someone trying to separate you from your money. It can be books and self-improvement courses, sometimes dabbling in philosophies and introducing activities like yoga. Then there are spas for men (that’s the massage without the sex, of course). Or beer. . . Or anti-anxiety drugs. . . You bet whatever you have left in your bank account that someone somewhere has just the thing to make you feel better about the financial struggle to keep a roof over your head, the threat of unemployment, and all the other side effects of one of the worst recessions we have ever seen in America.

And there’s some truth in the myth about hair loss. You only have to look at what happens to people when the physical shock of chemo- or radio-therapy hits their bodies. It’s the same for major surgery. The stress of treatment can cause hair loss. The only difference between the real world and the myth is that once this stress goes away, your hair grows back. In the more usual cases of premature balding, it’s the reverse situation. There you are enjoying life. Everything is as good as it’s going to get and, suddenly, you begin looking at the hairline in the mirror. The notion creeps up on you that there’s more skin showing than usual. You begin to wonder. There’s the first sign of worry and, before you can say, “Jack Robinson” or whatever passing for WTF these days, the stress is there because your hair is dropping out.

It would be good if we could write reassuring words at this point. All you have to do is have that very attractive young girl, who may actually be from Sweden, rub your head while playing some relaxing music and advising on breathing techniques to relax you even further. Except, there’s absolutely no evidence to suggest that any type of relaxation techniques have any effect on male pattern baldness. Once it starts, the only thing that will stop it is Propecia. So there you have the brutal truth. No matter what any cold caller or high-pressure marketer may tell you, there are no natural products, no special stress-busting techniques to help you keep a full head of hair. If there had been such things, the centuries of practical experiments with every conceivable natural ingredients would have hit the jackpot.

So you either adapt your world view to accept baldness, or you start taking Propecia. Millions of men around the world lose their hair gracefully or accelerate the loss by shaving and going out proudly with heads smooth and polished. Those that try to cover up the loss are usually mocked for always wearing a baseball cap, even indoors, or suddenly appearing in what is so obviously a wig. Remember, if you do go down the drug line, you must start early and, as soon as you stop, the hair loss resumes. So starting the hair loss drug requires commitment. Decide what’s most important to you and live with the consequences.

We all know that there are tons of effective and not very effective anti-acne solutions available on the market. Being considered as a part of skin care industry, these solutions account billions of dollars of income for companies producing them. And sometimes a simple tube of anti-acne gel can cost more than you can actually afford at the moment. But if you desperately need to get rid of acne fast there are simple homemade anti-acne solutions you can actually try to eliminate those pimples. And here’s what you can do about them:

Toothpaste

It’s a rather conventional homemade acne solution that is actually very effective for mild forms of acne. All you need to do is just gently rub a small drop of simple toothpaste into the pimple. First of all this will reduce inflammation because toothpaste contains special anti-inflammatory agents and it will also make the acne less visible. The best time to use this method is to apply the toothpaste before going to bed in the evening – this will allow plenty of time to pass for the method to deliver effects. Just make sure to check your face in the mirror before going out in the morning because you don’t want to be seen with toothpaste on your face, do you?

Eye drops

Yes, simple eye drops can help with acne too. You can use them with a Q-tip or simply taking the liquid with the tip of your finger and gently rubbing it to the pimple. This won’t prevent future acne breakouts like if using Accutane but it will at least reduce the redness and make the acne less noticeable, which is rather important when you have to get out soon and acne are ruining your looks.

Garlic or honey

Both garlic and honey are very effective natural antibiotics with antiseptic effects. You can use them separately by applying these products on the affected regions, or can even mix them for better results. Of course, this won’t help you get rid of really severe acne just like drugs like Accutane would do. Nor it will have the effect of really potent antibiotics. But it’s a safe way to eliminate mild to moderate acne without having to take any drugs.

Antibiotics

There are several antibiotic ointments that can easily be used for eliminating acne. One of the most commonly used solutions of this kind is Neosporin. Topical antibiotic solutions can effectively eliminate bacterial infections that are one of the main causes of acne breakouts. Just make sure to apply it not more often than two times a day.

Ice cubes

This simple solution won’t eliminate your acne of course nor it will help get rid of it for a shorter period of time. However, by holding some ice next to your pimples for a couple of minutes can reduce the primary visual effects of acne – redness and swelling. It won’t go away, but at least it won’t look like a big red spot on your face, and that can sometimes be really important too.