HEALTH AND WELLNESS

                                                          AVIS was driving home alone when suddenly her vision became blurred. She quickly stopped the car. After a few minutes, her sight cleared, and she continued on her way, attributing the incident to tiredness. Then, while on vacation four years later, AVIS awoke in the middle of the night with severe headache. She went to the hospital, where a doctor gave her an analgesic and kept her under observation, fearing a possible aneurysm. The next day the pain was gone. However, AVIS felt very weak. She even had difficulty holding a glass of water, and she felt a tingling, blurring sensation on her right side. Concerned, she and her husband cut short their vacation and drove home. The following morning at breakfast, AVIS could not control her fork, and the right side of her entire body now felt weak. She went to a hospital, where doctors gave her a battery of tests that ruled out stroke. Unaware of the event that h

                                      I gave birth to my daughter Hillary after a normal pregnancy. She seemed to be the picture of health, but the doctor discovered that she had a cleft palate. He said that this particular type of cleft in the soft palate is usually corrected easily by surgery when a child is about two years old. The only immediate problem was that she could not nurse properly. With part of her palate missing, she was not able to create the vacuum necessary for suction. For the first three months, Hillary had to be fed by hand. Then, in her fourth month, she somehow learned to suck her nostrils in and create a vacuum. This permitted her to nurse. What a relief? Soon Hillary began to gain weight, and everything appeared to be normal. She could use her hands to hold things. She also made baby sounds and learned to sit up.                                                   MYSTERIOUS SYMPTOMS DEVELOP When it was time for Hillary to start crawlin

CAN we overcome stress? If we can, should we? Today psychophysiologists are beginning to formulate models showing that stress, anxiety, and depression influence the body to create or aggravate mental and physical disorders. Greater stress and anxiety tend to degenerate the physical body and depress one’s mental outlook on the world.   Are there ways to reverse this process of physical degeneration while maximizing the condition under which positive attitudes, beliefs, and life-style changes can heal the afflicted body and mind?      The basic assumption at the root of current research is that there is both a psychological and a physical component to all disease. Another common assumption is that individual is able to exercise a marked degree of will power in the development, aggravation, and alleviation of these disorders.   From these assumptions one might conclude that a personal psychology or philosophy may have a pronounced effect upon whether a person maintai

                                I woke up one morning when I was 12 years old, remembers James sat on the edge of my bed, and wondered, is today the day I die. James was in the grip of major depression. Every day of my life, says James 30 years later. I have fought this emotional and mental illness. James felt so worthless when he was young that he tore up his childhood photographs. I didn’t even think I was worth remembering, he recalls. More than just a spell of melancholy blues, clinical depression is a grave disturbance that often hinders a person from carrying out daily activities       Because we all contend with feelings of sadness occasionally, we could conclude that we understand what depression is all about. But how, does it feel to have clinical depression. Although depression sometimes has an obvious trigger, it often intrudes on a person’s life without warning. Your life is suddenly darkened by a cloud of sadness for no apparent reason. Nobody you kno