Medical Articles, Medicine Information.

Description and Possible Medical Problems

In our society, suicide is most often talked about in context of a teenager or a middle-aged man who’s become despondent because he’s lost his job or his spouse. More common than people think, however, is the high rate of suicide among elderly people. Chronic illness, the loss of a spouse, and financial insecurities can all spark thoughts of suicide in an elderly person.

There are two classifications of suicide: active and passive. An active suicide is when a person attempts suicide by herself, sometimes through physical harm, such as hanging or electrocution. In the elderly, active suicide often involves either stopping medication or taking too much or abusing alcohol, often in combination with an overdose of medication. Passive suicide seems to be in the news every day, since this kind of suicide involves having someone else take responsibility for the act.

Signs of suicide include not only the actual attempt but complaints of severe pain, both physical and emotional. Frequently, a person who is considering suicide feels isolated and lonely and believes her family doesn’t care about her. Other signs may include making sure her affairs are in order by making out a will and paying all her bills. I had one patient who had her cat put to sleep right before she made a suicide attempt. In fact, once all of her arrangements are made and everything is cleared up, a person who is thinking about suicide may find that her loneliness will change to euphoria since she may feel that now she has a way out.

Treatment

Be aware of the signals that indicate that a person is thinking about suicide. If a close friend or family member complains of feeling hopeless, is depressed about the future, and starts talking about suicide, even in an offhand manner, she needs immediate medical attention. If she won’t seek it out for herself, you’ll have to do it for her.

Don’t wait. Get help now. Call 911 if the person is threatening to kill herself, or call one of the suicide hot lines in the community. Then, after the crisis has passed, work with the person to get psychiatric counseling on either a private or an individual basis; I’ve found that even joining a church or other social group can help a person become less depressed.

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The treatment for hallucinations depends on the underlying cause, whether it’s a physical illness or an emotional one. If the hallucinations are caused by an infection or a fever, these conditions will need to be brought under control with medication, either aspirin or antibiotics. If the hallucinations are the result of drug or alcohol withdrawal, a person may need to be hospitalized and/or sedated. For people with a long-term psychiatric illness or Alzheimer’s disease, ongoing treatment that includes therapy, medication, and support will be necessary.

The family of a person who is having hallucinations faces special problems; some don’t know whether to force the person into treatment or to agree with the hallucinations, like saying that you “see the rats, too.” I’d say that your criterion for deciding what to do should be based on keeping the person from hurting herself. The important thing to keep in mind is that not only does the person with the hallucinations need support, but you and the other caregivers need support in order to learn how to cope with the situation. Ask your relative’s doctor for advice.

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Description and Possible Medical Problems

If a patient tells me that he’s never had an anxious moment in his life, I tell him that either he’s not human or he’s lying.

We all know the physical signs of anxiety—sweaty palms, increased heartbeat, and a feeling of panic. Usually, the anxiety passes in time. For some people, however, anxiety can become overwhelming, even crippling. A person who is having a panic attack can develop heart palpitations and start to hyperventilate. His hands might become numb as a result of the hyperventilation. In rare cases, the hyperventiliation becomes so severe that he heads for the emergency room because he’s positive that he’s having a heart attack. Once I was on a plane over the Atlantic when a fellow passenger developed a panic attack so acute that he was absolutely convinced that the plane was going to crash before we landed.

Treatment

If you feel anxious and begin to hyperventilate, breathing into a paper bag will calm you and help you to breathe normally again. For some people, however, the anxiety can become so crippling that it can make it impossible for them to cope with even small problems. These people can benefit greatly from psychiatric intervention with regular therapy sessions and medications such as BuSpar, Xanax, and Valium. Relaxation and exercise can also have a soothing effect on people who are prone to anxiety attacks.

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I started to see that one of the most important things Body Signals could do would be to help the reader function better within the complex world of a rapidly changing health care system. We’re years away from instituting an ideal model of health care reform, though in some areas it’s already here. When it makes its appearance in all facets of American medicine, it will affect every American. Midlife adults will be affected even more, since they are reaching the stage of life when they need to access the health care system a little more each year. As health care reform begins to take shape over the course of this decade, it’s a good idea to know why it has become so necessary. To understand that, you’ll need to know how the medical establishment progressed in its treatment of disease from leeches to X rays to sophisticated MRIs and CAT scans.

Therefore, the first thing you must do to understand the complexities of our current health care system is learn how medicine developed and expanded in the United States after World War II. For centuries before the war, the physician’s role in maintaining the health of a community was actually quite limited. In this country, medical training was almost nonexistent until the late 1700s. To make a diagnosis, doctors were mostly limited to the use of elementary medical tools like the stethoscope, neurological hammer, and tongue depressor. A physician’s role was first to diagnose an illness and then to prescribe various medications, many of which would be considered to be homeopathic today, like herbs. The diagnostic skills of a physician were limited to what his five senses were able to detect, and a diagnosis often required surgery that many times was more dangerous than the illness itself.

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‘Fresh air’ is a frequently misunderstood term. Unless a room is completely sealed up, enough air comes in around doors and windows to provide oxygen for breathing. Whether more air should be circulated through the room is a matter of choice.

A few generations ago, air in itself was considered dangerous, especially night air, which was supposed to carry disease-laden vapours —called miasmas—and draughts, which doctors blamed for any number of illnesses. The result was that many of our ancestors accustomed themselves to wearing several layers of underclothing in all seasons, and to sleeping with their windows tightly closed. Newborn babies were wrapped up like mummies.

With such discoveries as the fact that malaria was caused by mosquitoes and not by night air, the pendulum began to swing in the opposite direction. One of the results of this change was the fresh-air fiend who went around flinging windows open, to the discomfort of his associates. A former patient of mine, a middle-aged woman from a well-to-do family, told me that her parents were so sold on the virtues of fresh air that they insisted on her being out of doors regardless of the temperature. As she was not a very active child, she was cold most of the time, even suffering from frostbitten fingers and toes. Each person needs to find the conditions in which he is most comfortable.

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