Antidepressants Blog

Once a diagnosis has been made the gynecologist should mark the size and location of all your implants, cysts, endometriomas and adhesions on a drawing or prepared chart of the reproductive organs. If you have any endometrial implants or cysts located outside the pelvic cavity, such as on the bowel or cervix, the gynecologist will make a note of the location of those implants and cysts somewhere on the chart. Similarly, if any other conditions, such as pelvic inflammatory disease, are found these will also be noted.

Because of the progressive and recurrent nature of endometriosis it is important that an accurate chart of your endometriosis be made at the time of your diagnostic laparoscopy. The chart will provide a record of the initial extent of your endometriosis that can be compared at a later date with the charts made during any subsequent laparoscopics so that an accurate assessment can be made of the progress of your condition.

The information gained from the laparoscopy and the chart is then used to rate the extent and severity of your condition. There are several formal classification systems which have been developed, the most widely known being a system developed by the American Fertility Society. These classification systems generally allocate a certain number of points to each implant or cyst depending on its nature, size and location and the total number of points is then used to classify the severity of the condition.

For example, according to the American Fertility Society’s classification scheme, a woman with a four centimeter endometrioma on one ovary, some adhesions on both ovaries and implants in the Pouch of Douglas would score a total of 30 points (20 + 2 + 2 + 6) which would be defined as moderate endometriosis (16-40 points).

However it appears that few gynecologists in Australia use any of the formal classification systems. Their classification of the disease is usually based on their visual impression gained from the laparoscopy.

The four categories most commonly used to classify endometriosis are minimal, mild, moderate and severe. The terms stage I, stage II, stage III and stage IV are also used occasionally. A brief description and diagram of a typical example of each category is shown in Fig.9 on p.56.

It is important to remember that the classification system only rates the extent and severity of your endometriosis and your classification does not necessarily bear any relationship to the severity of your symptoms. Minimal or mild endometriosis can cause severe symptoms while severe endometriosis can sometimes cause no symptoms.

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Not so long ago, biologists conceived of the brain as a kind of computer, a machine that generates and processes electrical signals. New discoveries forced us to revise that model. We now think of the brain more in terms of a chemical factory. Chemical “messengers” travel across the gap between nerve endings, and when they reach the proper receptors they trigger electrical signals.

Without the presence of a neurotransmitter, an electrical impulse comes to a biological dead end-its message can’t get through. Too much or too little of a given chemical can also affect the rate and the clarity with which the signal is carried. That’s why we speak of chemical imbalance as the cause of a number of mental and physical disorders.

Sitting within the skull, the brain is enmeshed in an intricate network of blood vessels. Before blood can reach the brain, it must pass through a kind of filter known as the blood-brain barrier. This barrier acts, quite literally, as a bodyguard, preventing potentially harmful molecules carried in the blood from gaining access to the brain. For example, the blood-brain barrier will not permit certain drugs to enter the brain and wreak biological havoc.

Blood contains the red cells, which transport vital supplies of oxygen to nourish the brain cells and keep them functioning, and the white cells of the immune system, responsible for protecting the body from invaders. These cells are suspended in plasma, the fluid portion of blood made up of water, minerals, glucose, fats, proteins, and other substances.

The exact composition of plasma is determined in part by the types and amounts of food you eat. Following a meal, the chemical makeup of plasma changes. For example, if you’ve eaten a large steak, the presence of certain amino acids-the building blocks of protein-may increase. When blood containing this particular plasma mix reaches the blood-brain barrier, the different amino acids compete with each other to squeeze through the openings in the filter. Like shoppers clawing their way to reach a K-mart blue light special, only a few can get through.

Different chemical mixtures trigger the manufacture of different neurotransmitters. Let me give you an example. (Bear in mind, however, that not all the facts are in on this intricate process.)

Eating carbohydrates stimulates the pancreas to release insulin, in turn lowering the blood levels of most amino acids. The amino acid tryptophan is unaffected by this process. More tryptophan enters the brain, since there is less competition at the blood-brain barrier from other amino acids. In the next step of the process, tryptophan is converted to a powerful neurotransmitter called serotonin. The higher the tryptophan level, the more serotonin the body can make.

Serotonin circulates in the blood, eventually reaching a certain part of the hypothalamus. When the serotonin level is high enough, it triggers a message that speeds to the other parts of the brain. The message reads something like: “Stop eating carbohydrates now and look for food with other nutrients.” Thus it may be that the specific foods you have already eaten may lead to cravings for other types of foods.

Experiments have shown just how powerful these neurotransmitters can be. For example, animals who normally eat a balanced diet will turn into voracious carbohydrate-cravers, even to the point of endangering their health, if their brains are flooded with certain chemicals that stimulate carbohydrate ingestion.

There are actually three main groups of neurotransmitters involved in the regulation of appetite: the monoamines (of which serotonin is one), the amino acids, and the neuropeptides.

At this point let me introduce the term macronutrients, a word that refers to the major components in food. The three types of macronutrients are carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Each of these supplies a different type of energy to the body. A balanced diet contains a healthy mix of all three macronutrients. As a rule, animals and most humans will seek out foods that, over the course of time (say, a day) will supply the macronutrient blend their bodies need.

Macronutrients affect the production and release of neurotransmitters. As we saw in the above example, carbohydrate consumption may lead to increased serotonin levels. Similarly, sweet or fatty foods lead to production of certain neuropeptides.

Like a biological traffic cop, the hypothalamus directs all this activity, and it’s a particularly busy intersection. Signals coming from the brain affect the diet, while diet in turn affects the signals heading for the brain. Should something go wrong, a neurotransmitter disturbance might trigger an abnormal pattern of eating. This in turn might worsen the already existing neurotransmitter disturbance, causing more abnormal eating, and so on.

Such findings underscore how chemical messengers spark specific behavior. Controlling the balance of these chemicals through medications might ultimately enable us to bring abnormal eating patterns under control.

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Many of us talk about recapturing our youth. Kirie Pedersen actually did it. And it helped her get rid of 40 unwanted pounds.

Kirie, a 48-year-old freelance writer from Brinnon, Washington, prided herself on leading a healthy lifestyle. Her diet consisted primarily of grains and vegetables—little meat, little sugar, no junk food. And she walked for a half-hour to an hour every day.

So when the scale showed that her weight had crept up to 159 pounds, Kirie could come up with only one explanation. “Almost every day for 6 years, my job had me sitting for 8 to 9 hours at a stretch,” she says. “Even though I was eating well and exercising regularly, most of the time I was glued to a chair.”

Kirie became convinced that if she could reclaim some of the nervous energy that she had as a child, she could burn a few more calories over the course of a day. So she found ways to incorporate playful, childlike movements into her life. Every morning, she woke with a big stretch. She swung her arms vigorously when she walked. “I’d act childish in the privacy of my home office,” she says. “I’d set a

timer to go off every hour. That was my cue to get up and move. For 15 minutes, I’d squat, skip, wiggle, dance, whatever I felt like doing.”

One year after she began incorporating childlike movements into her daily routine, Kirie went shopping for clothes with her daughter. “I was comfortable with my wardrobe of baggy clothes, but my daughter persuaded me to try on a pair of jeans, something that I don’t usually wear,” Kirie recalls. “I figured that I’d need a size 12 or 14. My daughter looked at me and said, ‘I don’t think you realize how much weight you’ve lost!’

Her daughter was right. Kirie had taken off 40 pounds—and slimmed down to a size 6—simply by acting like a kid again.

WINNING ACTION

Fidget, stretch, squirm. As it turns out, Kirie is on to something. That something is known as non-exercise thermogenesis, which, in plain English, means that you can burn calories without actually working out. A study at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, found that folks who fidgeted, changed posture, or otherwise moved around a lot during the normal activities of daily living burned many more calories than those who didn’t. As a result, the fidgeters were able to eat more without gaining weight. So go ahead and fidget!

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Unhappiness is often associated with grudges and hatreds. Some of the unhappiest people I’ve ever met have excellent memories. They can tell you every little wrong that someone ever did to them. They remember all the hurts and wounds of life and what somebody said about them 20 or 30 years ago. Some are still mad at people who are long dead. I tell them to forgive and forget. It doesn’t matter what happened to you. Forgive the person, and get those hateful thoughts out of your head. By the way, you don’t have to tell the person you forgive them, and you don’t have to love them. Just let go of the negative thoughts. Here’s what to say:

Beginning right now, I freely and willingly forgive everyone who has ever harmed or slighted me. I happily throw away any grudges and hatreds I may carry. I also forgive myself for all the mistakes I have made. Each day I start anew, at peace with the world and at peace with myself.

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Caution: Check with your physician before beginning this or any other exercise program, and before making major changes in your exercise program.

The exercise program I recommend to my patients is very simple and easy to do. It requires no training or practice. There’s nothing to learn, no special clothes or equipment to purchase, no clubs to join.

It begins with walking.

After carefully examining my patients to make sure they’re able, I tell them to start by setting aside ten minutes every day for a brisk walk. How brisk? As brisk as you can make it: work up to double time.

The initial goal is ten consecutive minutes of brisk walking. How far you go isn’t important. If ten minutes is too difficult at first, walk as much as you comfortably can, rest and then walk a little more at a slower pace.

When you can walk briskly for ten minutes without stopping, start increasing your time. Add two minutes to the ten, then another two and another two, and so on until you reach 24 minutes of nonstop, brisk walking. Add one more minute to make it 25, and you’ve mastered brisk walking. You’re giving your heart, lungs, legs and other parts of your body a real workout, and you’re strengthening your “doctor within.”

How long should it take to go from ten to 25 minutes? That depends on you. You’re not training for the Olympics, and there are no deadlines. Yours is a program of lifelong exercise for the benefit of your “doctor within.” Whether it takes two days or two months of practice to be able to walk 25 minutes nonstop is unimportant.

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“Well, eating Super Foods makes sense to me, but what about vitamins and minerals? Should I take supplements?” Some people claim that we don’t need to take vitamin and mineral supplements if we’re eating a “good” diet that supplies all the RDAs (Recommended Dietary Allowances).

Unfortunately, relatively few of us eat a “good” diet. Studies have shown that most people aren’t taking in all the RDAs. But even consuming all the RDAs won’t guarantee good health. Why? Because the RDAs are set much too low. They’re based on the dangerous either/or approach to health: you’re either sick or you’re healthy. If you don’t have scurvy or another of the classic vitamin-deficiency diseases, then you’re getting all the vitamins you need. As we’ve seen, however, the either/or approach to health is an invitation to trouble.

You don’t wake up one morning to find yourself suddenly suffering from a serious vitamin-deficiency disease. Instead, your nutrient status gradually slips from healthful to terrible, with signs and symptoms sounding warnings at each stage.

Very few of us can boast of having all the vitamins, minerals and other nutrients we need for optimum health. Most of us are lacking in several vitamins and minerals. Our body tries to tell us that something is wrong, but we don’t recognize the signs and symptoms.

I believe that problems related to lack of nutrients are relatively common. But our medical system doesn’t consider nutrient deficiencies to be a problem, not until they produce an obvious disease. Recurrent infections and personality changes, for example, simply do not qualify. So millions of people are left to suffer, wondering why they’re sick or unhappy so often. They don’t know that their problems are related to nutrient deficiencies, but they do know that they don’t feel right.

It’s only when a person has a recognizable disease that doctors begin to pay serious attention. Now the patient has a disease that can be labeled. But which disease? A lack of vitamins and minerals can prompt immune-system malfunctions that can result in any number of diseases, from the mild to the very serious.

A Note on”Diet”

The Super Food diet isn’t the type of diet you go on for two weeks or two months and then stop. It’s not a weight-loss diet that you stop when you’ve lost enough pounds, or a “health” diet you eat until you feel better. The Super Food diet is a blueprint for healthy living. It’s a game plan, a lifelong approach to keeping your “doctor within” hale and hearty. Make the Super Food diet part of your everyday life.

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You are what you eat, in the sense that food is the raw material with which your body—and your “doctor within’—work. Like any craftsperson, your “doctor within” needs the right tools and materials to do a good job. These include complex carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, fiber and water. Adequate supplies of protein, plus a small amount of fat, are also necessary.

Most of us eat the Standard American Diet (S.A.D.), which is loaded with fat, protein and simple carbohydrates (sugars), but sadly lacking in complex carbohydrates, fiber, vitamins and minerals. Eating the S.A.D. deprives your “doctor within” of many of the tools needed to build health. At the same time, eating the S.A.D. forces your body to work overtime trying to deal with the mounds of sugar and globs of fat filling your stomach.

Unwrap a stick of butter. Squeeze it in your fist. Rub that butter between your two hands, spreading it all over your hands and fingers. That’s about as much fat as there is in the food the typical person eats in a day. Feel that fat on your hands. It’s thick and gooey. Imagine that much fat in your arteries, turning your bloodstream into a swamp.

As if that weren’t enough, the S.A.D, with its quantities of meat and processed foods, is filled with chemical additives that can hamper—and eventually overcome—your “doctor within.” Despite the claims of the food industry, the additives we consume have not been properly tested. Many, in fact, have never really been tested at all: “Grandfather” clauses in the law exempted them from the more stringent requirements. Furthermore, we don’t know what happens when the chemicals get together inside your body. Chemical A in your ice cream may be relatively harmless by itself. So might Chemical B in your fast-food French fries. But what happens when the two chemicals meet in your bloodstream or liver? Do they ignore each other? Do they combine? Does A convert B into a more dangerous form? We don’t always know what happens. The untold numbers of combinations that can result from eating additive-laden foods have not been studied.

The S.A.D. contributes directly to much of the heart disease we suffer, as well as to strokes, diabetes, arthritis and even cancer. And to the extent that the fatty, sugary, nutrient-poor S.A.D disrupts your “doctor within,” it contributes indirectly to many other problems. To be blunt, the S.A.D. is a killer. And its one and only target is you.

I had known Joan for many years, since my days at Los Angeles County Hospital. Even back then she had a great love for food. She ate juicy hamburgers, steak sandwiches dripping with fat, milk shakes, sausage-and-mustard sandwiches, corned-beef sandwiches and pie for dessert. As we grew older, her weight grew. Although she was never grotesquely fat, there was almost twice as much of her as there should have been. “More of me to love,” she said with a smile.

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So far, we have only looked at attitudes to food intolerance in terms of beliefs and preconceived ideas, which will undoubtedly seem odd to anyone with a scientific turn of mind. In theory, medical beliefs should be secondary to the scientific evidence, for or against, although in reality they rarely are. Dr David Atherton of the Institute of Child Health in London, who specializes in treating eczema, writes: ‘I am often asked by sceptical colleagues whether I “believe in all this food business”? It is a sad reflection on current medical practice that such an important question as the relationship between a patient’s diet and their disease should be relegated to one of belief or disbelief.’

In the next section we will consider the scientific evidence, but as we do so the importance of prejudice will again become evident. Even in the most scientific studies of this subject, it seems that the beliefs of the experimenters can influence the outcome. In general, those who ‘believe’ in food intolerance tend to get positive results, while the disbelievers usually get negative results. The conclusions you draw from this will, of course, be influenced by what you believe! But, as we hope to show, there are simple explanations for these apparently contradictory findings.

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The importance of the bran and germ of the rice grain was drastically demonstrated when people in the Orient began to copy those in the West by refining their staple food, their rice. A disease known as beriberi became rife among them and after all the known medicines had been thrown into the combat against the disease without success, a colonial doctor, Dr Eijkman, as well as other researchers, discovered that rice bran alone was able to cure the scourge. This definitely established the fact that beriberi was a deficiency disease, an avitaminosis, not an infectious disease as had been thought previously.

Fortunately, our Western diet is much more varied than that of the Oriental nations and such pronounced deficiencies rarely occur. If our diet lacks one substance or another, the deficiency can usually be compensated for, at least partly, by the substances contained in other foods we eat. However, it is only a partial compensation and we still often suffer from an imbalance in our food intake, as will be discussed in a later section. Many people in the Orient suffered the sad consequences of beriberi, but as soon as they began to take food supplements or returned to their former way of preparing whole rice, their health was restored.

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Of course, I do not wish to say that such lactic acid preparations are a panacea, a cure-all, but they have certainly brought the treatment of cancer a step further along the road. Because Molkosan has a fairly high percentage of natural lactic acid, it is of immense value in a cancer diet. As a drink, diluted with mineral water, it is both prophylactic and curative in its effect. Dr Kuhl also recommends raw sauerkraut for this purpose, because of its

lactic acid content.

It is, indeed, a great pleasure to see how the experiences and observations we began to report on in our magazine and books many years ago are now being confirmed as facts.

Once you are familiar with the many good effects of whey concentrate you will appreciate it and stop wondering why, in the past, even high-ranking personages did not consider it beneath their dignity to take ‘whey cures’ for the benefit of their health.

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