Healthy Child

Ruling out mineral deficiencies

Most vitamin and mineral deficiencies are uncommon in the UK because British people tend to eat a varied diet and many foods are also enriched with nutrients. Two common mineral deficiencies in the UK, however, are iron and calcium.

“Iron-ing it out”

Without iron, your child can’t make enough red blood cells and her organs won’t function well. Iron deficiency can also affect your child’s growth and lead to learning and behavioral problems. Babies under the age of 1 year usually get enough iron, because breast milk is a natural iron source and formula milk is usually fortified with iron. Toddlers and young children are more prone to iron deficiency, because cows’ milk is low in iron and can even decrease the absorption of iron. Good sources of iron include red meat, dark poultry, tuna, salmon, eggs, pulses, dried fruits, leafy green vegetables, and whole grains.

Iron-deficiency anemia often has no symptoms to begin with because the body’s supply is depleted slowly. But as the anemia progresses, some of the following signs may appear:

• Fatigue and weakness
• Pale skin
• Rapid heartbeat
• Irritability
• Decreased appetite
• Dizziness or light-headedness

If your child has any of the above symptoms, ask your doctor to do a simple blood test to find out whether your child has iron-deficiency anemia  If she does have iron-deficiency anemia  the doctor may prescribe iron supplements. Excessive iron intake can cause health problems, so never give your child iron supplements without consulting your doctor first. Keep iron supplements well out of your child’s reach, as accidental overdosing can be extremely dangerous.

Catching up on calcium

Without enough calcium, your child’s bones and teeth won’t grow strong and straight. Calcium also helps the body to absorb vitamin D, and so calcium deficiency is related to rickets and osteoporosis (brittle-bone disease) later in life. Good sources of calcium include dairy products, calcium-fortified orange juice, and white beans. If your child is on a dairy-free or vegan diet, you may find it a bit harder to provide the right amount of calcium. Vegetables contain calcium, but other important non-dairy sources include calcium-fortified soya milk, tofu processed with calcium sulphate, and nuts and seeds. Giving your child milkshakes or yoghurt-based smoothies made from semi-skimmed milk is an excellent way to boost calcium intake.

MPO

Measuring MPO

White blood cells are the body’s natural defense against inflammation and infection. When the white blood cells sense trouble, they release myeloperoxidase (MPO), a protein that can knock the heck out of the bugs causing the inflammation and infection.

But MPO may also irritate arteries and short-circuit natural body chemicals that keep “bad” cholesterol particles from glomming on to artery walls, thus contributing to the buildup of plaque inside your blood vessels. In July 2007, the Journal of the American College of Cardiology published data from a study of more than 1,000 healthy Brits showing that, over the years, those with the highest blood levels of MPO had the highest risk of coronary artery disease (CAD).

In other words, high blood levels of MPO may signal artery trouble ahead, even when other indicators, such as LDL levels, are fine. Naturally, the researchers want to see more studies before they stick an MPO test onto your yearly lab tests, but, as one of the researchers said, “MPO looks like a ‘keeper’ that will one day become part of clinical care.”

Many insurance companies, including Medicare, may not pay for CRP or MPO blood tests because they argue that if you have elevated levels, you need to make all the necessary lifestyle changes (lose weight, treat high blood pressure, stop smoking, eat a healthy diet, and so on). You should be doing this anyway! However, sometimes demonstrating to people that their risk of a heart attack in the next five years is great can stimulate them to become more serious about making lifestyle changes.

GREEN

Go green

A potent antioxidant, green tea has been found in studies to boost longevity and the immune system, cut risk of heart disease and reduce inflammation. Antibacterial and antiviral, it also helps stimulate the burning of calories according to researchers at the University of Geneva. Drinking more than two cups a day keeps mind and memory sharp with age. Japanese women who drink green tea also have lower risk.

• Nettle tea helps maintain strong bones and is an antioxidant.

• Lemon balm tea refreshes in summer heat and stimulates brain and memory.

• Ginger tea gives instant zing and keeps joints mobile and circulation moving. Grate 1 in (2.5 cm) fresh ginger into a cup, pour over boiling water and steep for 10 minutes; sweeten with honey.

Questions in fibromyalgia diagnosing

Now, here’s some explanation of what may be happening to you, depending on your answers to Questions 1 through 10. Keep in mind, though, that only your doctor can actually diagnose you with fibromyalgia.

Question 1: If you’re experiencing pain in specific parts of your body, but you’re not seeing bruises or any apparent evidence of tissue damage (and neither is your doctor), these painful areas may be the muscle pains characteristic of fibromyalgia.

 

Question 2: If you said that your pain is sometimes very severe, this is another indicator that you may have fibromyalgia. Be sure to consult a physician to find out.

 

Question 3: If you have trouble sleeping three or more nights per week, this is serious. The problem may or may not be connected with fibromyalgia (although nearly everyone with FMS has sleep problems), but it’s important to resolve your serious sleep deficit. If you’re a walking zombie because you’re not getting enough sleep, you can’t perform well at work or home, nor will you be a happy person. Also, if you’re prone to developing fibromyalgia, this continuing bad pattern of a lack of sleep every night will make your other symptoms, such as your pain and fatigue, much worse.

 

Question 4: Severe fatigue is a chronic problem among nearly everyone who has fibromyalgia. Often, it’s linked to a lack of sleep. But it may also be an element of FMS as a medical problem. You may also have chronic fatigue syndrome or thyroid disease, and your doctor will need to help you sort it out.

 

Question 5: If you agreed that those you care about, or maybe even strangers around you, are commenting that you look sick, something about you probably doesn’t look right. You may be displaying your chronic pain and associated depression on your face without even knowing it.

 

On the other hand, other people tell individuals with fibromyalgia that they look “fine” and “great,” and the pain and symptoms are not reflected in the face or body language of the fibro sufferer. If this has happened to you, you’re definitely not alone.

 

Question 6: If you’re turning down invitations that you would have accepted in the past, have a serious talk with yourself to find out why. Is it because of pain and fatigue? Or could you be having a problem with depression or anxiety — both very common problems for people with and without fibromyalgia?

 

Question 7: When your pain is constant and chronic, asking yourself if it’s ever going to end is only natural. But what you need to do is consult with a physician. You may have fibromyalgia, or you may have another problem altogether. Don’t wait for the pain to magically disappear. Take action.

 

Question 8: If you constantly lose things or forget things, you may have the “fibro fog” that often stems from fibromyalgia. You may also have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Another possibility is that you may have neither of these but you’re simply trying to do too many things at once, and you need to take some things off your plate.

 

How do you know which it is? You make a stab at analyzing what you’re forgetting and when. If you can’t even begin to do that, and you’re also experiencing chronic pain, fatigue, and sleep problems, you may have fibromyalgia. But see your doctor to find out for sure.

 

Question 9: If your pain is severe on some days and then far less of a problem on other days, and you think there doesn’t seem to be any pattern to it at all, you may be experiencing the chronic ups and downs of fibromyalgia. Pain that can appear in one part of your body one day and migrate elsewhere on another day is a common symptom of FMS, as are days when you feel really bad and other days when you feel only mildly bad.

 

Question 10: If you don’t seem to enjoy anything anymore and maybe are sort of overwhelmed by your many aches and pains, you may have depression. Many people with fibromyalgia have both depression and FMS. You could also have a problem with an anxiety disorder, such as generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), where you are overwhelmed with extreme worry.

 

Parkinson’s disease and other related conditions

Several neurological conditions may appear to be idiopathic (without known cause) PD at first, but they eventually trace back to known causes, progress differently, and respond differently to therapy. These other conditions include the following:

Essential tremor (ET) is perhaps the most common type of tremor, affecting as many as five million Americans. ET differs from the tremor in idiopathic PD in several ways: ET occurs when the hand is active (as in eating, grasping, writing, and such). It may also occur in the face, voice, and arms. The renowned actress, Katherine Hepburn, had ET, not PD. Differentiating ET from PD is very important because each condition responds to completely different sets of medications.

Parkinson-plus syndromes may initially have the same symptoms as PD. But these syndromes also cause early and severe problems with balance, blood pressure, vision, and cognition and usually have a much faster progression compared to PD.

Secondary parkinsonism can result from head trauma or from damage to the brain due to multiple small strokes (atherosclerotic or vascular parkinsonism). Both forms can be ruled out through scans (CTs or MRIs) that produce images of the brain.

Pseudoparkinsonism can appear to be PD when in fact the person has another condition (such as depression) that can mimic the inexpressive face of PWP.

Drug - or toxin-induced parkinsonism can occur from taking antipsychotic medications (drug-induced) or from exposure to toxins such as carbon monoxide and manganese dust (toxin-induced). Drug-induced symptoms are usually (but not always) reversible; toxin-induced symptoms usually aren’t.

The subtleties of diagnosing idiopathic PD may lead your family doctor to send you to a neurologist, a specialist in the treatment of neurological conditions. If that happens, don’t panic. Getting the correct diagnosis is the first step toward figuring out what comes next for you.

How serious is osteoporosis?

Statistics related to osteoporosis are staggering. Consider just a few from the 2004 Surgeon General’s report:

·         Around 1.5 million people have a fracture related to osteoporosis each year.

·         Hip fractures are responsible for 300,000 hospitalizations each year.

·         Up to 700,000 vertebral compression fractures and 250,000 wrist fractures occur in the United States each year.

·         The cost for treating osteoporotic fractures each year is around $18 billion — $38 million a day.

·         Approximately 20 percent of seniors who suffer a hip fracture will die within one year.

·         Around 20 percent of seniors with a hip fracture will be in a nursing home within a year.

·         White women older than age 65 are twice as likely to fracture something as African American women. Latino women’s fracture rates fall between the two groups. A woman’s risk of hip fracture is equal to her risk of developing breast, uterine, and ovarian cancer combined.

·         By the year 2050, men will have one half of all hip fractures in the United States.

Osteoporosis

What exactly is osteoporosis? The standard World Health organization (WHO) definition is that osteoporosis is “a skeletal disorder characterized by compromised bone strength predisposing a person to an increased risk of fracture,” which is certainly a mouthful, if not a particularly enlightening one. Osteoporosis is the most common bone disease by far, but it’s a disease many people don’t understand.

Most people think of osteoporosis only in terms of bone fractures or loss of height, but osteoporosis is far more complicated. You’d probably understand osteoporosis most clearly if you could see a bone specimen affected by osteoporosis under the microscope, but you’re not likely to ever be privy to a bone biopsy. Doctors don’t usually perform bone biopsies in their patients to diagnosis osteoporosis, although pathological examination of bone is still the gold standard in diagnosing osteoporosis. Normal bone has a network of strong plates and bands. In osteoporosis the bands become thinner and weakened, and worse yet there are tiny breaks in the plates and bands.

Another way to define osteoporosis is that osteoporosis is present if bone mineral testing value is more than 2.5 standard deviations below the average adult, even if there’s no history of fractures. The word “osteoporosis” actually means porous bones. If something is porous, it has holes in it. Although all bone has cavities filled with cells and blood, in osteoporosis, the normal bony cavities enlarge. When the “holes” become larger, bone becomes more fragile and more susceptible to breaking. Minimal trauma can cause a fracture when you have osteoporosis.

Osteoporosis is a systemic disorder that affects the entire skeleton. Bone is in a constant state of remodeling; old bone is broken down and replaced with new bone. Osteoporosis can occur when you lose more bone than you rebuild, or when more bone than normal is broken down.

Bone mass decreases between 1 and 5 percent per year after age 40 in women, and less than 1 percent in men. Women are more likely to develop osteoporosis because they generally have less bone mass to start with than men do. The sudden loss of estrogen, a sex hormone that is instrumental in building healthy bone, in menopause also contributes to women’s increased risk of osteoporosis.

Food allergy

Foods can make you feel sick for a variety of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with food allergies. This leaves the door open to ‘’quackologists’’ selling all sorts of ineffective cures and treatments for a host of ailments that they falsely attribute to food allergies. To avoid getting sucked in by misinformation, be aware that the following ailments are rarely, if ever, related to food allergies:

·    Food intolerances: The inability to digest a particular food, such as milk or wheat, is typically related to a missing enzyme in the digestive system that prevents a person from fully digesting the food.

·    Food poisoning: Some foods may have toxins or bacteria that make you sick. Just because a food makes you sick one time does not mean you’re allergic to it, although you should have your doctor check it out.

·     Histamine poisoning: When you have an allergic reaction, your body releases histamine into your system, which causes most of the symptoms you experience. Some foods, including strawberries, chocolate, wine, and beer, may contain enough histamine to produce similar reactions, but these are not bona fide allergic reactions.

·  Reactions to food additives: MSG (monosodium glutamate) and sulphites often cause reactions, but in these cases, the body has a chemical reaction, not an allergic reaction, to the additive, not to the food itself.

·    Other common ailments: Food allergy is blamed for everything from migraine headaches to irritable bowel syndrome, but most of these ailments are caused by something other than a food allergy. Don’t waste your time chasing the food allergy ghost. Work with your doctor to identify the real cause and obtain more effective treatments.

CBT

Cognitive behavioral therapy – more commonly referred to as CBT – focuses on the way people think and act in order to help them overcome their emotional and behavioral problems.

Many of the effective CBT practices should seem like everyday good sense.  CBT does have some very straightforward and clear principles and is a largely sensible and practical approach to helping people overcome problems. However, human beings don’t always act according to sensible principles, and most people find that simple solutions can be very difficult to put into practice sometimes. CBT can maximize on your common sense and help you to do the healthy things that you may sometimes do naturally and unthinkingly in a deliberate and self-enhancing way on a regular basis.

What Chronic Pain Feels Like

If you have chronic pain, at some point, you realized part of your body has been hurting way too long. Maybe you have ongoing pain in your hip, and you’re beginning to limp. When you first noticed the pain, you thought it was related to that day you fell on the ice in the driveway. But that was a year ago. Your bruised hip has long since healed, and yet the pain is still with you. You go to the doctor, who takes an X-ray and discovers that you have significant arthritis in your hip, which was probably irritated by the fall, but is a problem on its own.

In another example, your daughter, age 4, comes home from a Halloween party with a crushing headache. You attribute it to a sugar overdose. You take care of her, and she recovers. But a couple of weeks later, she has another severe headache. And three weeks after that, she has yet another one. Her pediatrician eventually diagnoses your child with chronic migraine headaches.

Chronic pain is not only persistent, resistant, and insistent, but it also seems ruthless. It’s always with you on some level. It either doesn’t give you a break, or it gives you very brief respites, fooling you into thinking you’re all better and then returning with a wallop — regardless of whether you have an important sales presentation that afternoon, it’s your son’s birthday, or your plane to the Caribbean is about to take off.

Sensations of chronic pain range from a small, constant ache to excruciating pain. Your chronic pain may feel like one or more of the following feelings: aching, burning, crushing pain, dull pain, electrical-like pain, flu-like symptoms, jabbing pain, mental fogginess, numbness, piercing, prickling, sharp pain, shooting pain, soreness, stiffness, stinging sensations, throbbing, tightness, tingling, or vise-like pain.

Most people with chronic pain experience more than one of these feelings. For example, many people with fibromyalgia have flu-like pain, aching, and stiffness. And people with rheumatoid arthritis struggle with aching, stiffness, weight loss, and mental fogginess (a term used to describe confusion and forgetfulness).

 more tips for managing chronic pain...

Adding Up Your Basic Cholesterol Numbers

Before you decide what to do about your cholesterol, you need to know how much cholesterol you actually have. So get up, march over to your doctor’s office, and hold out your arm so your doctor can stick a hollow needle into the vein in the crook of your elbow and draw about 20 milliliters (ml) of bright, red blood. Then when you go home, the little glass tube holding your blood goes off to a medical laboratory where a technician counts the cholesterol particles. The results you get back look like this: 225 mg/dL. Translation: You have 225 milligrams of total cholesterol in every decilitre (1⁄10 liter) of blood.

But these numbers don’t paint the whole picture. The figures for your low density lipoproteins (VLDLs, IDLs, LDLs) and high-density lipoproteins (HDLs) are still missing. Lipoproteins are fat-and-protein particles that carry cholesterol into your arteries (LDLs) or out of your body (HDLs), which is why HDLs are “good” and some of the LDLs are “bad.”

The problem with simple finger-stick tests such as those found in cholesterol home-testing kits is that they only measure total cholesterol levels — no HDLs and no LDLs. An incomplete result (total cholesterol alone) can scare you to death if it shows you have high total cholesterol without letting you know that you — lucky girl! lucky boy! — also have high HDLs. The fingerstick test can also provide false reassurance if it shows a low total cholesterol level without letting you know that your LDLs are also very low.

Now that you know all this and have an accurate, complete doctor’s report in hand, what do the results say about you? How can you tell if the numbers are high, low, or in-between?

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Celiac Disease

Celiac disease, also known as celiac sprue, non-tropical sprue, and gluten-sensitive enteropathy, is a condition in which consuming gluten — a protein found in wheat, rye, barley, and some other grains — leads, in susceptible people, to damage to the lining of the small intestine, resulting in the inability to properly absorb nutrients into the body. This can lead to many different symptoms, including fatigue, malaise (feeling generally poorly), bloating, and diarrhea.

Left untreated or insufficiently treated, celiac disease can lead to damage to other organs. If properly treated, celiac disease typically leads to absolutely nothing! In your travels, you may see the word celiac spelled as coeliac. Both terms refer to the same condition. Celiac is the spelling far more commonly used in North America. Incidentally, the term celiac (or coeliac) comes from the Greek word Koila, which refers to the abdomen.

Doctors have known about celiac disease for a long time. Articles describing individuals suffering from diarrhea (most likely due to what we now call celiac disease) first appeared over two thousand years ago. It was, however, Dr. Samuel Gee who, in London, England in 1887, first described the condition in detail and even presciently observed that successful therapy was to be found in changing a patient’s diet.

 Living and Thriving with Celiac Disease

Although people living with celiac disease share many similar challenges, differences exist for some people based on age, living condition (home or in a college dorm for instance), and special circumstances such as attempting to conceive, or being pregnant.

Perhaps it’s been some time since you were diagnosed with celiac disease and you are nicely on track with your gluten-free existence. What then? Do you need to be monitored for celiac disease-related health issues? If so, how should the monitoring be done? Better ways of managing celiac disease may emerge in the future. Indeed, there may come a time when you may not need to follow a gluten-free diet. There are and other possible options for dealing with celiac disease that may come about someday.

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Self-medication

Medical problems come in all shapes and sizes. Some are easy to recognize, simple or harmless, whereas others may not be so obvious, are complex, or even dangerous. Telling the difference between them can be quite tricky, and making a formal medical diagnosis is best left to the professionals.

Whenever you develop a health problem, you automatically make a diagnosis yourself – whether you know it or not. If you develop a headache, for example, you may decide to ignore it for a few days and see what happens, or take some simple painkillers to relieve your symptoms. But what if the headache gets worse, or if it’s very severe? When – and how – can you tell whether you should seek medical advice? This section aims to help you make these types of decisions by thinking like a medic – so that you can approach a variety of common or potentially serious problems appropriately.

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COPD - a status report

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, is the fourth leading cause of death in the United States and the second leading cause of disability. The costs associated with COPD are enormous — more than $37 billion a year, including $20 billion a year just in direct healthcare costs. Some 12 million American adults have been diagnosed with COPD, and another 12 million may have it but don’t know it.

How can there be so many undiagnosed cases of a life-threatening illness? For the same reason that many diabetics and people with high blood pressure go undiagnosed: The symptoms, especially early on, are so vague that they’re easy to ignore. And when COPD symptoms do appear, they can be mistaken for other conditions, like asthma.

In fact, until fairly recently, most people outside the health profession had never heard of COPD, and those who had heard of it very often dismissed it as a “smoker’s disease.” Smoking is the number-one risk factor for COPD, but it is by no means the only one. Long-term exposure to dust, chemical fumes, secondhand smoke, and other pollutants can lead to COPD, and there’s even a genetic condition that, though rare, can cause the disease.COPD also was long considered a man’s disease. But since 2003, more women than men have died every year from COPD. Many experts attribute this shift to the fact that, while smoking rates among men have dropped over the past two or three decades, the smoking rates for women have crept upward.

Women also seem to suffer more than men from many of the health-sapping effects of COPD, so it tends to progress faster in women than it does in men. That’s the insidious thing about COPD: It’s a progressive disease. New treatments and better understanding have improved management of its symptoms, but there is no cure, and the average life expectancy after diagnosis is about five years, depending on the severity of the COPD and other health factors.

Faced with these sobering facts, many people feel overwhelmed, even discouraged or depressed, when they first learn they have COPD. But you aren’t completely powerless. There are all kinds of steps you can take to manage your COPD symptoms and improve your quality of life. The first step is understanding COPD and how it affects your body.

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Homocysteine

Hunting homocysteine

Amino acids are the building blocks of protein. Most amino acids are friendly to your body, but homocysteine is a potentially hostile amino acid released when you digest protein foods. Researchers have conducted about a dozen important homocysteine studies in recent years, and most of the studies have demonstrated a clear link between high homocysteine levels (called hyperhomocysteinemia) and an increased risk of heart attack. The reasons for this connection are still a mystery. The current theory is that homocysteine may chew up cells in the lining of your blood vessels, trigger blood clots, or produce debris that blocks the arteries.

The American Heart Association (AHA) hasn’t yet labeled hyperhomocysteinemia a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease. But the AHA does recommend that people who have at least one other known risk factor for heart disease, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking, obesity, or a family history of heart disease, attempt to lower their homocysteine level.

How do you lower homocysteine? No problem. The good news is that consuming adequate amounts of the B vitamins — folic acid (also known as folacin or folates), vitamin B6 (also known as pyridoxal, pyridoxine, and pyridoxamine), and vitamin B12 — efficiently lowers the amount of homocysteine in your blood.

If you’re at high risk, check with your doctor to see how you can include foods high in B vitamins in your diet. Table 2-1 lists the homocysteine fighters and some of the foods you can find them in. It hasn’t been shown, however, that lowering homocysteine levels in the blood reduces the incidence of heart disease.

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TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine)

A Brief History of TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine)

Traditional Chinese Medicine is thought to have started over 2,500 years ago. Its history is blended with myth and legend. TCM is said to have originated from two legendary emperors who were medical pioneers and keen to live long and healthy lives.

Early Chinese people are believed to have used herbs as medicines and to have warmed stones as a form of heat treatment. Inscriptions on tortoise shells over a thousand years old give evidence of the use of water and simple herbal remedies for healing. Over time (in the Zhou dynasties from 1100–256 BC), medicine developed into an organized system and absorbed influences from the philosophical and religious traditions of Confucianism and Daoism. This led to the development of the concepts of yin and yang and the five elements or phases. The system of diagnosing by means of the tongue and pulse and observing other body signs was also created.

Over many centuries great Chinese medical texts were compiled and acupuncture (needle treatment), moxibustion (heat treatment with a warming herb), and herbal medicine became widespread.

The arrival of Christian missionaries in China in the 19th and early 20th centuries led to the introduction of Western medical ideas and a downsurge of interest in TCM. However TCM was revived by Chairman Mao as part of his Revolution and it now flourishes alongside Western medicine in modern day China.

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CFS [Chronic Fatigue Syndrome]

What is CFS, anyway?

First and foremost, in order to be classified as having CFS [Chronic Fatigue Syndrome], you need to have fatigue for at least six months. This fatigue can’t be explained or has been a lifelong condition, and most importantly, plenty of rest doesn’t take it away.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), you have to have at least four of the following symptoms in addition to the long-term fatigue to be diagnosed with CFS:

·   Headache of a different type or length than the headaches you’ve gotten in the past - a headache like you’ve never had before

·         Aching muscles

·         Painful joints

·       An increase in symptoms before exercise; exercise makes them worse.

·         Sore throat that comes and goes

·         Swollen lymph nodes in neck, and underarms

·         Short-term memory and concentration problems

·         Unrefreshing sleep

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Cholesterol - the good side

Cholesterol helps your body develop

Cholesterol begins to influence your body even before you’re born. According to a 1996 report in the journal Science, cholesterol enhances an embryo’s healthy development by triggering the activity of the specific genesthat instruct embryonic cells to become specialized body structures — arms, legs, spine, and so on. Sadly, as Science reported, approximately one in every 9,000 babies is born with a birth defect linked to the fetus’s failure to make the cholesterol it needs.

In 2003, researchers at the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute linked a pregnant woman’s cholesterol deficiency to a defect in the fetal brain called HPE (the failure of the brain to divide normally into two halves). Ninety-nine percent of embryos with HPE are spontaneously aborted; those born live experience severe mental retardation, are unable to walk or talk, and usually die within the first year of life. To prevent these problems, pregnant women are often advised not to take cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Cholesterol holds your cells together

Think back to your first chemistry or physics class. Never took chemistry or physics? Well, then imagine being in class where one of the first things your teacher wants you to know is that there’s no such thing as a solid substance.

Things that look solid — this book, that lamp, you, and me — are actually gazillions of individual atoms, molecules, and cells whirling around in space, held together only by an exchange of electrical charges. If you can’t remember much chemistry or physics, check out the “Recognizing the difference between an atom, a molecule, and a body cell” sidebar in this chapter. Mark your place, read the sidebar, and then come right back.

Some things that look solid aren’t solid. They’re simply groups of cells held together by electrical charges that keep the cells in place so that a piece of this page or a piece of your finger doesn’t go spinning off into space. Individual cells stay intact because they have a cell membrane, an outer skin that serves as neat and tidy packaging for the cell.

One requirement for healthy cell membranes is — drumroll please — cholesterol. A whopping 90 percent of all the cholesterol in your body is in your cell membranes. The cholesterol protects the integrity of the cell membrane, helping to keep it flexible and strong.

If you were to diet so stringently or use so many cholesterol-lowering drugs that your cholesterol level fell to zero (an impossibility by the way), your cell membranes would be very dry and easily torn. The stuff inside the cells would leak out, and cells would die all over the place. That would sort of put an end to the whole darn shootin’ match. Every healthy body cell needs some cholesterol, and so does every healthy brain.

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What Is Chronic Pain?

Medical professionals categorize pain as either acute or chronic. Acute pain is your nervous system’s way of alerting you to an injury or other damage to your body’s tissues. Acute pain gets your attention so that you’ll take care of yourself fast. In fact, the word acute comes from the Latin word for needle, and if you’ve ever stepped on a needle, you’ll agree that it’s a good representation of acute pain. Acute pain usually goes away as the injury heals, although it may return for short periods.

Chronic pain is persistent pain. The word chronic comes from the Greek word for time. In medical terms, pain is chronic when it lasts three months or more when pain becomes chronic, your body’s pain signals keep firing for weeks, months, or years, even though the damage that set them off may have long since healed. The pain may have been caused by an injury, and, for unknown reasons, your body never turned off its pain switch. Or the pain may have an ongoing cause, such as arthritis, cancer, or nerve damage. You also may have multiple causes of chronic pain, which is particularly common for older adults.

One big difference between acute and chronic pain is when you have acute pain, you usually know why it hurts. (Some examples of acute pain are broken bones, kidney stones, and childbirth.) When you have chronic pain, you may have no idea what’s causing the hurting. The bone has healed, the stone has passed, and the baby is now walking and talking, but you still have lingering problems in the areas where the acute pain occurred.

In addition, many people with chronic pain aren’t even aware that an injury ever occurred in the first place. (And, indeed, maybe there was no injury to begin with!) For them, the pain appears to slam in from out of the blue, like a sudden tornado that levels a house. Whether you know the source, chronic pain is a sensation without purpose. It has no biological function, and its usefulness as a warning system has long since passed or never existed. Ironically, while chronic pain has no purpose, it’s still often difficult to treat. The medical term for this type of pain is treatment resistant pain. Experts describe chronic pain this way: It persists, resists, and insists: It persists beyond the expected healing time, resists interventions (treatments), and it also insists upon being recognized.

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