senule blog

Yet another weight-loss reality TV show

It seems the imagination of the folk who work for TV corporations is limited to the same basic formula. Reality shows are big business. If you want to earn the maximum revenue from selling ad space on TV, have a group of regular people running round the world doing silly things in a search for one million dollars or follow a group of families as they compete against each other to see who can lose the most weight. In these shows, the biggest losers are the winners. These are the people who, for some reason, catch the imagination of the public. They become fan favorites and find their public lives transformed with fans approaching them as they walk down Main Street. Actually, for weight loss, this can be a big plus because fans can embarrass people into keeping to a diet. Imagine how a participant in a weight loss show would feel if everyone pointed them out as they bought another donut. This would be a sure-fire way of motivating them to eat only healthy food.

Anyway, ABC has announced a new version of the same-old tired show. It’s to be called the Extreme Weight Loss Show. Note the touch of originality by adding “Extreme” to the title. You can always tell producers are desperate when they start using words like “extreme”. So the hook to convert the ordinary into the extreme is that each of the contestants in this competition must aim to lose an amazing amount of weight: the men must be on a program to lose not less than 200 pounds, the women not less than 150 pounds. Now the writer has a conceptual problem with these numbers. He weighs 170 pounds in total so the idea that someone could lose more than he weighs boggles his mind. Yet ABC expects the world to line up outside its doors in Nashville to volunteer their time and sweat. The lure of the fame or notoriety is just too great. Sorry, perhaps that should be the lure of the extreme cash prizes for the winner is just too great. It’s amazing how many people will humiliate themselves just to earn a dollar.

The show does have a realistic timeframe in mind. It is employing a team of personal trainers who will visit each contestant’s home to bully them into action. No reality show is complete without all those tears of frustration when contestants find their comfortable bubble punctured by aggressive trainers. The cameras will record these sessions and follow the contestants over a one year period. The person losing the most weight wins the prize. This is not unrealistic. It rules out all those who might try to starve themselves into a winning loss, offering a gentle and safe weight reduction approach. But only someone really motivated will keep to a high-intensity exercise program over a year. This is a fair test. Which brings us to phentermine because, when your motivation is running down and hunger is about to send you back into the kitchen for a soda and snacks, this drug steps into that gap in your stomach and sends out the message, “No” to the brain. Buy phentermine and find out why millions of people have lost weight over the last fifty years (and counting).

Your eyesight is not at risk

When I was growing up, my parents and other adults took up the challenge of trying to educate me in the ways of sex. It was dangerous work, but someone had to do it. One of the first pieces of advice that stuck concerned the activity of masturbation. Although no-one would give me a demonstration of what this thing was, I was led to understand that too much of it and I would go blind. Naturally, being of a stubborn disposition, I decided to keep the activity going, hoping I was only risking one eye. This is a classic use of fear and guilt to encourage people to modify their behavior. It came alongside a similar warning that watching too much television was also bad for my eyesight. Apparently, the cathode ray tube gave off radiation that would rot the lenses and turn my retinas to jelly. Or was it that my retinas were a kind of jelly and, as with a microwave, they would be cooked and stop admitting light. The details are hazy but the message was clear. The combination of television and sex were bad for the eyesight.

Coming forward to the new century and the FDA began to receive reports through the post-marketing monitoring program that some men were experiencing problems with their eyesight when using the little blue pills. Because they were blue pills, the men claimed their vision was tinged with blue and sometimes blurry. Actually, I made that up. The men made no such claim but their vision was tinged with blue. The reason was that PDE6 changes the way the retina works and the little blue pills are designed to affect PDE5 which is in the penis. Unfortunately, the pill is not always specific, what with sex and eyes being so closely connected.

At first, this was not thought to be a serious problem but it became so when one or two men reported actual vision loss. In a billion dollar US market, the notion that men may go blind is dangerous to future sales, so an immediate new clinical trial was ordered. Well, men can relax again. This October has seen the publication of the report from a six month trial. In a double-blind, randomized trial, two-thirds of the participants took the real drug and one-third took a placebo. At the end of six months, there was no measurable difference in the eyesight of the participants in both groups. Allowing for natural ageing, their eyesight was unchanged from start to finish.

It’s a little ironic after all these years to see real panic at the notion that too much sex using viagra will make you go blind. My parents would have appreciated the temporary support to their own threats relating to masturbation. Although I do admit to having to wear spectacles these days, I am no different from the millions of older men. We Boomers wear our fading eyesight with pride. Despite all the sex over the years, we have managed to make it this far with only minor short-sightedness. With a little help from contemprorary medicine (in other words, if you buy viagra) when our muscles tire, we can expect to enjoy many more years of sex.

Should testing be compulsory?

There’s an interesting campaign building in Tamil Nadu. For those of you whose geography is not strong, Tamil Nadu is one of the states in India and it has a large population. It’s also very socially conservative. This means that “family values” are very strong. Marriage is definitely only for heterosexual couples with divorce strongly disapproved. So far, India matches the Western model but here the similarities end because the usual form of marriage is arranged between the families without the need for the happy couple to meet before the ceremony. Marriage is seen as building links between families of comparable status and wealth. For most, marriage for love is an alien concept.

The problem with this system is that it can trap women in marriages that are, at best, loveless and, at worst, violent and dangerous. There are a number of reasons for this. Because the marriages are often made to consolidate property ownership, the welfare of the couple is irrelevant. Once the marriage has been celebrated and the title to the land transferred, the couple are left to their own devices. The reason why divorce is discouraged is because the courts might disturb the ownership of property. Indeed, wives who threaten divorce can be relentlessly bullied to keep quiet. A further problem is that homosexuality is still concealed. Thus, sons are married off without regard to their sexual preferences. This can leave wives in unconsummated marriages. The same result is achieved by the men who are impotent but dare not go to a doctor to admit the problem and get treatment. The worst possibility is that the men have been routinely engaging in unprotected sex with prostitutes before marriage and have picked up a sexually transmitted disease (STD). When the marriage is consummated, this can leave the wives with serious health problems.

A politically active group of Bollywood women is campaigning for all men to produce evidence of potency and freedom from STDs before being allowed to marry. Although the idea of a certificate of erectile function is never going to be practical – just how would the evidence be collected? – there’s great merit in screening tests to ensure that both parties are free from sexually transmitted disease. Because many couples still prefer unprotected sex, the incidence of STDs has been rising quite sharply over the last ten years. Testing would therefore be a good thing not only in India but around the world.

In the West, since there’s no real need for gay men to marry for the sake of appearances, all men who have problems of erectile dysfunction simply rely on levitra. This drug produces the best erections in most men no matter what the physical or psychological problems. This is somewhat ironic since the leading manufacturers of the generic form of levitra are based in India but local distribution is limited by a culture that refuses to discuss sexual matters openly. Unlike the West, it’s also quite difficult to buy levitra online. This unfairly leaves many Indian men struggling to cope with their impotence.

Never lie about having acne

Medicalization is a wonderful newish word. It means the process of taking a natural condition and convincing people that it’s a disease to be treated and cured by the medical profession. Once a condition is medicalized, the pharmaceutical industry can sell drugs, doctors and hospitals can charge fees. The cash registers just keep on ringing up the profits. Once this happens, there’s a kind of bandwagon effect. The condition suddenly becomes a lot more serious. It’s now a disorder or disease. For health insurance companies, it’s a pre-existing condition.

Now there’s a funny thing about health insurance companies. They are never shy about coming forward with new reasons for not paying out on their policies. One of their classic excuses is the “disclosure” rule. The law sounds quite reasonable. If you are sitting in your office and never get to meet the person applying for a health plan, you have to rely on the honesty of what the person says when you decide whether to write the policy. It’s a sad fact that some people are less than honest when they apply for policies. They forget the heart problem and declare themselves fit and healthy. Insurance companies therefore need the right to rescind the policy – to cancel it if the applicant failed to disclose information needed to assess the risk.

So now we come to the case of Otto Raddatz who, courtesy of his sister, became a famous victim after his death. She testified to a Senate committee about what happened and the story, in suitably dramatic form, was later picked up by President Obama in support of his campaign for healthcare reform. The facts are easy to state. Here was a man lining up to get surgery for cancer. The hospital appointment was booked when, surprise, the insurance company decided to rescind the policy. Why? Because Otto had failed to disclose the fact he had acne as a teen! This was a serious pre-existing condition and likely an indicator he would get cancer later in his life. His failure to disclose it justified rescission. Well, fortunately, his sister was an attorney and she got the state attorney general on the job. Six weeks later, the insurer reinstated the policy and Otto got his operation. This gave him six more years of life.

It’s sometimes odd to see how the world works. The medical profession goes to great trouble to convince everyone that acne is a disease. The pharmaceutical industry sells us accutane which is an almost always effective treatment, clearing the skin and restoring beauty during the first period of treatment. And then insurance companies accept this medicalization and require people applying for policies to disclose acne as a pre-existing condition. This is a logical and predictable progression. If doctors say acne is a disease, it must be a pre-existing condition and everyone should disclose it when they apply for health insurance! Do not be deceived! The Illinois attorney general does not fight for everyone. Otto was lucky that his sister was an attorney with the right political connections. So never lie about having acne! The risk of rescission is real. And while you have acne, rely on accutane, the sure-fire way of solving the problem.

Erectile dysfunction can be an early sign of heart disease

It’s a sad fact of life that much of the research published in the medical journals is depressing. These scientists spend their lives studying all the different ways in which people can die. There are only a few major breakthroughs each year. The rest of the time, the best you can hope for is a small step forward in understanding the problems. In the case of erectile dysfunction there is a clear trend emerging. In England, Dr Kirby who recently published Sleeping With Ed, has been co-ordinating research into the relationship between men with erectile dysfunction and cardiovascular disease. The current state of the research shows that the first symptoms of erectile dysfunction double the risk of developing heart disease within four years. The reason is easy to state. The usual physical reason for erectile dysfunction is that the artery leading into the penis does not dilate properly. This is a narrow artery. If there is a problem with this artery now, the same problem is likely to affect the larger arteries in the chest and lungs next. erectile dysfunction is a better predictor of heart disease than high cholesterol, high blood pressure or among smokers. The next phase of the research is to begin treating men with drugs to lower the levels of lipids and statins to see whether fewer cases of heart disease emerge. But in the UK, many doctors continue to view erectile dysfunction as a problem of lifestyle and not as the basis of predicting more serious health problems.

In the US, the Mayo Clinic has recently published an important new study demonstrating that heart disease can be slowed or halted by early medical intervention. This means treating all younger men between 40 and 49 who consult their doctors with erectile dysfunction as potential heart patients. So, when you go see your doctor about erectile dysfunction, do not be surprised if a range of tests for heart disease are ordered. For the record, between 5 and 10% of men under 40 are likely to experience erectile dysfunction. It then becomes increasingly common as men age. Between 40 and 60% of men over 70 are affected.

So, this research is good news for two reasons. The first is that, having proved the link, it is now possible to prevent the early deaths of many younger men from strokes or heart attacks. Drugs to reduce blood pressure and cholesterol levels, improved diet and exercise combine in a regime to extend lives. All this is possible because you experience erectile dysfunction. The second reason is that levitra will offer immediate relief to the problem of erectile dysfunction. However, you should not buy levitra on the internet and self-medicate. You need careful guidance on dosage if you do start taking other drugs to control your blood pressure. That said, with proper guidance, there is no reason why, with levitra, you should not cure the erectile dysfunction, and live a longer and more satisfying life as a result.

The politics of pain management

Doctors make a general distinction between acute pain from an injury that’s going to heal or disease that’s going to be cured, and chronic pain where you will be forced to deal with pain over a long period of time. So, for acute pain, all you need is a few pills and patience while the pain slowly fades away. Chronic pain should have a different approach but, for the following reasons, doctors prefer the pill bottle. If you look at the way the US healthcare service is organized, the basic motivation is making a profit. Because most patients carry some insurance, the strategy for doctors is to see as many patients in the day as possible so they can maximize the bill presented to the insurers for payment. In the good old days, a caring physician would take the time to get to know the patient and understand his or her needs. Now it’s straight to the business of writing out a prescription and calling for the next patient. Very few doctors ever take the time to investigate the underlying causes of the pain and find the best treatments because this takes time and time is money. Of course, the patients with the top-of-the-line insurance plans are covered. And the wealthy can afford to pay their own way to the best treatment. But the average citizen is on a conveyor belt to the fastest and easiest treatment which, by some strange coincidence, just happens to be a drug.

Why a coincidence? Because all the ads you see on television and in the newspapers and magazines, are paid for by the pharmaceutical industry. The corporations making the drugs are using hard-selling techniques to reinforce your dependence on pills as the primary form of treatment. That way, you go into your doctor’s clinic with the brand names of the relevant drugs on your lips. You are brainwashed into thinking the use of drugs should be the first response to all your problems. Why is this a problem? Because it’s turning the US into a country of addicts. Worse, as people continue to use many of the drugs, their tolerance increases and the effectiveness of the drugs declines. According to the National Centers for Health Statistics, approximately 75 million people in the US suffer some degree of chronic pain, i.e. pain giving them a poor quality of life. Agreeing, the American Pain Foundation offers a simple comparison. If you count up all the people who have cancer, strokes and heart disease every year, only a million or so die every year, but the pharmaceutical industry, hospitals and clinics devote vast amounts of time and money to offering treatments. Because there’s not the same amount of money to be made out of people suffering chronic pain, you are offered second-best service.

This is a political problem and, so far, there’s no sign the reform bills going through the House and Congress will deal with this. It all comes down to the priorities of how limited money is to be spent. On the one hand, you can be offered painkillers on a take-it-or-leave it basis. This is not so bad. Tramadol is an excellent drug and gives consistent relief from moderate to severe pain. Or you can be offered access to proper diagnosis and treatment. While we wait for a revolution, buy tramadol and find some relief from the pain of your condition.

Erectile dysfunction should not be a threat to your private life

Erectile dysfunction is no longer a taboo topic. This problem is not treated like a problem no more. It is more of a fact that needs a simple doctor’s prescription. There are many and many pills that promise to give you a good result. But you have to remember one thing – no pill will promise to give you the desire to have sex when you don’t want it. Erectile dysfunction pills are produced to help men feel strong again. As we all know good sexual life means a lot to men. Therefore those who do not receive joy from sex are not fully satisfied in life. As the result lots of complexes and insecurities appear.

Before you rush to grab your coat to purchase erectile dysfunction medication, we want to update you with some of the most important information on the drugs. Most impotence drugs resemble each other. Mainly this is so because of the fact that they are meant to cure impotency and their ingredients and effect on the body is the same. If you want to experiment and try different medication in order to choose the best one for yourself – you can do so, but it is better to get an advice from a good specialist that will prescribe you the dug according to your problem and budget. Usually erectile dysfunction medicine is quick and effective. You can see the result within an hour and compare it to your expectations.

What is necessary to remember for every individual is that impotence drugs are good for 90% percent of people but not to everyone. It may depend on lots of things from overall health state to body reaction on the drug itself. It is not recommended to mix any medication with any other type of drugs as it may lead to unpredictable consequences. The reason why we always advice our readers to seek some professional advice is because anybody who suffers from side -effects while taking drugs can fall into category of people that will suffer more from the drug that is supposed to help than they have to really. The period of time that the drug stays active during is 36 hours so it may be too much to handle well.

Erectile dysfunction medication has been the matter of multiple researches that clinical staff studied. There researches gave a certain guarantee that the pills actually help those that address them for impotence help. Whether you have mild, moderate and severe erectile dysfunction – there will always be a pill that will control your sexual potency and make it better. But don’t get caught up in lies when you hear that drugs like Viagra will give you an urge to have sex. The truth is that the drug will only help you stay sexually active when you have the desire to have sex but you can’t. Satisfaction and the ability to maintain erections for successful sexual intercourse are the main promises of any impotence pill.

Cialis is one of the best impotence curing medication on the market right now. It is better than well-known Viagra as its effectiveness lasts slightly longer. But don’t just trust our work like that and get it straight away. It is important to buy Cialis with a full awareness of the right choice made. Just like any other pill, this medication can be harmful to those who do not know how to treat themselves with pills. You can pre-order the drug from any online pharmacy or buy Cialis in the local drugstore. Either way you will make a right decision if that’s what you need to take.

Treating ED with respect to its causes

Male impotence or, as the doctors call it, erectile dysfunction (ED) is a constant or periodical inability to obtain or maintain an erection strong enough for having sexual intercourse. And as the overall satisfaction with sexual life is a very important aspect of an individual’s wellbeing, seeing the rise in erectile dysfunction and female sexual problems within the aging population becomes disturbing. That’s why the question of successfully treating erectile dysfunction becomes more and more relevant for a constantly growing group of people, bringing satisfaction and preventing from psychological problems from taking place in case it helps.

Erectile dysfunction is of course a male problem, but it also involves the activity of the partner, who should support the man and give him all the love and care to make the treatment really effective. Erection starts first and foremost in the brain, and making your man feel relaxed, loved and wanted is the best thing you can give him if there are any problems with erection. Don’t expect the erection to occur on its own – even with strong ED medications erection won’t take place if there’s no sexual stimulation. So you’ll have to get in touch with the most erotic part of a man’s body – his brain – and make sure the signals are all good and working.

Erection involves three stages, each of them involving a different system in the body. And if there’s anything wrong with just any element on any of these stages, it is likely that the erection will not be as good as might want it to be, if there will be any at all. So make sure everything is right during the following stages:

Sexual arousal. Occurring in the brain, it is usually caused by sensory experience or by plain thoughts of sexual content.

Response of the nervous system. Aroused brain sends signals to the corresponding areas of the body through the means of the nervous system.

Blood circulation increase. This way more blood enters the cavernous bodies in the penile shaft, which results in a strong and durable erection.

Having such a complex mechanism, no wonder that sometimes erection comes out not as you wish it to be. Problems at any of the above mentioned stages mean that there will be problems with erection. The most typical causes for erectile dysfunction are those that have to do with nervous response and blood circulation.

Nervous system response can be affected by a variety of psychological reasons such as anxiety, stress, depression, mental disorders, relationship problems and so on, and by eliminating these conditions you are likely to improve the quality of your erection.

Blood circulation is affected by another set of conditions such as diabetes, high or low blood pressure, heart diseases, high cholesterol levels, surgical operations, penis shape deformation and many others. In many cases blood circulation problems can be eliminated by drugs such as Levitra. Levitra and other highly popularized erectile dysfunction medications work exactly by increasing the blood flow into the penile area. So if you’re sure that your impotence is caused by blood circulation problems you can easily order Levitra online and rest assured that it will help you.

New research finds limits to the effectiveness of opioids

Once formed, habits are difficult to break. It always just seems easier to go on as you have before. This can become a serious problem when science gets in the way of the habits. If you look at the world of adverts in print and the media, you will see opioids recommended as the sure-fire drugs to use as painkillers, no matter what the pain. It carries on in the venerable tradition of the slogan, “Beecham’s Pills cure all ills”. The idea of a panacea – one pill to rule them all, as The Dark Lord of Mordor might have said – has been around since the beginning of time. This is fair game for the marketers to use when talking to the public, but the same thinking has entered the training manuals for the medical profession. Sit in lectures for student doctors and you will hear the same story that opioids are the first line of defense when it comes to moderate to severe pain. Once you have the source of the prescriptions in on the group think, the habit is almost impossible to break.

The monitoring and review process put in place after a drug is released into the market is designed to catch any unexpected side effects. If evidence of problems emerges, the FDA can require the manufacturer to change the warnings on the label or, in the worst cases, withdraw the drug from the market. But this monitoring process is not designed to catch the drugs that are ineffective. If no-one has an adverse reaction when taking it, no report is filed with the FDA. It’s safe so who cares whether it works. All this brings us to the Cochrane Collaboration. This is a non-profit group where researchers sift through and analyze existing published medical research to see whether there are any consistent patterns – what might not be apparent in one clinical trial involving two hundred participants might be identified when you compile the results from fifteen different trials, each involving two hundred participants. Two recently published Cochrane Reports have concluded that opioids should not be routinely prescribed to patients even with severe pain from hip and knee osteoarthritis.

In both Reports, the independent conclusions were that the adverse side effects outweighed the benefits and that tramadol, as the leading opioid, was no more effective than the strongest NSAIDs. The first Report consolidated the results from ten trials involving a total of just over 2,250 participants and concluded that there was little pain relief and minimal improvement in mobility. With higher dosages, one in twelve participants experienced adverse side effects. The second Report consolidated the results from eleven trials involving 1,020 participants and found little difference between the effectiveness of tramadol and the placebo. This leads to a somewhat controversial conclusion. That doctors should not routinely prescribe opioids for the treatment of hip and knee osteoarthritis. There should be a careful discussion of treatment options including weight loss, physical therapy and exercise, and a detailed explanation of all the adverse side effects to be expected. This new research does not change the general acceptance of tramadol as an effective painkiller. All it does is confirm that there is no such thing as one pill to cure all ills.

Cure for acne

…