Few give much attention to the feet until they start to play up but that probably applies to the rest of the body as well.
The foot has 26 bones, 19 muscles, 33 joints and over 100 ligaments.
It is a complex, strong, supple structure which supports us through life, yet we squeeze it into shoes which are too tight and designed by the whim of fashion rather than for comfort.
Management of problems of the feet mainly rests with the medical profession.
The general practitioner sees and deals with most problems, referring the more difficult, or those which require operation, to an orthopaedic surgeon.
In the past, chiropodists confined their practice to cutting toenails and paring corns and calluses.
They have now changed their name to podiatrists and have more training in all aspects of feet problems. Increasingly, people are going directly to podiatrists when feet start to ache.
Let us look at a few of the common foot problems.
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Posted by admin on
May 15th, 2009 :: Filed under
General healthTags ::
General health
Most infections of the urinary tract in women are located in the bladder and urethra and, although they cause great discomfort, they are not serious, infection is more dangerous when it involves the kidney. Infection in the kidney has usually spread upwards from the bladder.
Although little girls and elderly women do suffer from bladder infection it is usually a problem of sexually active women.
Symptoms come on suddenly and involve discomfort in the lower abdomen, frequency in passing urine, and burning or scalding usually at the end of the stream. There may be precipitancy, the feeling that the urine is going to come away, and the desire to pass water again straight after the bladder is emptied. Occasionally there is incontinence, when control is lost, or there may be blood in the urine.
Fortunately, these symptoms may settle down without any treatment, or the old-fashioned trick of drinking barley water works, as does any treatment to make the urine alkaline in reaction.
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Posted by admin on
May 15th, 2009 :: Filed under
General healthTags ::
General health
Prior to the early 1960s, chemotherapy was in its infancy and the drugs were used one at a time. A few types of cancer were found to be very sensitive to particular drugs. Some cancers were even cured—for example, the rare cancer of women called choriocarcinoma could be completely cured by the drug methotrexate. As there was previously no effective treatment for these cancers, it was very obvious that the new treatment was a major improvement!
In the early 1960s, a group of doctors from the United States reported using a revolutionary new technique. They combined high doses of four different chemotherapy drugs (mustine, vincristine, procarbazine and prednisone) to produce a treatment that produced remissions in the majority of patients with Hodgkin’s disease. Prior to this, extensive Hodgkin’s disease was fatal within a few months. Now patients were living for years and, in fact, many of them later proved to be completely cured. The improvement in results was so great and significant that no special research techniques were needed to prove it.
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Posted by admin on
May 15th, 2009 :: Filed under
CancerTags ::
Cancer