Trocaventure

It’s never a happy thought, but we are all getting older. Those of us boomers are into our sixties now with the rest of the pack starting to catch up. This is the time when things really start going wrong with our bodies. Most of us have been lucky up to now. But despite the best efforts of medical science, there’s no pill to slow down the years. Worse, the most likely first symptom of age is going to be erectile dysfunction. All those high cholesterol meals we crammed away will come back to bite us as layers of platelets build up on the walls of our blood vessels. Some call this arteriosclerosis, others artherosclerosis. Whichever name, the result is the same. The muscles in the walls of the arteries needed to dilate start to fail. Without the dilation, there can be no erection. It’s an unhappy thought, but loss of sexual power can be the first symptom of a lifestyle with too much fat and too little exercise. When someone invents a time machine, we can go back and give ourselves good advice. Until then, we have to make the best of our golden years.

Curiously, the world is growing old with us. When we were young and living through the fifties, the television was a novelty. Replacing the radio and its world of advertiser-sponsored programs came the future with moving images and all the new ads. They were simple sales pitches, very naive by modern standards. But they got the message across. And what were those messages? Well, for the most part, housewives were told what food to put on our plates, what drinks to offer us. Then came the things to make the household run smoothly and the latest model vehicle to get us from A to B. In between were sometimes disturbing news reports which grew worse as we came into the sixties and the Russians took over Cuba as a missile base on our doorstep. In some senses, it’s actually more relaxing to have the modern coverage of world events. For the most part, our media have forgotten the need to tell us what’s happening outside our shores. It’s more important to package our local politics as the news and give us the messages most important to those controlling the content. The ads have changed as well. The networks have decided the silver-haired crowd has the buying power. We boomers hold what’s left of the purse strings. So we need to know about the adhesive to keep our dentures in place, heat wraps to keep the arthritis pain under control and the latest pills to keep Alzheimer’s away. Oh, and the pills to keep our sex lives going. [...]

Whenever you go online, there are headlines everywhere. Some attract our attention and we click through to find out more. Others strike no chord and our lack of knowledge continues. Looking back over the last ten years, it’s become impossible to avoid learning about the risks associated with obesity. Everyone makes the link between this condition and an “epidemic” – a word referring to diseases and disorders. The majority accept that eating a healthy diet and exercising on a regular basis is the way to protect our health. Unfortunately, fewer people make the link between lack of sleep and the same list of diseases affecting the overweight. We tend to rate sleep disorders low on the scale of dangers. If we have a bad night’s sleep, it’s difficult the next day. No-one relates loss of sleep to diabetes, cancer and heart disease.

Why worry? Because, thanks to the stresses and pressures of modern life, the majority of us are sleeping less than we did two generations ago. We used to sleep an average of nine hours a night. Now the average has dropped to seven-and-a-half. In part, this is due to longer commutes and more time spent at work. When you finally get home, there’s the family and things to do. You want to catch the latest episodes of your must-watch television series, chat with friends online. There are so many distractions to keep us from going to bed. And then, even if we lie down, we may still be thinking about the last exciting pass through the social networking site, electronic games, the latest music, the argument with your partner for not spending more time with him or her, [insert whatever you find keeps you awake].

No matter what people tell you, the ability to work well on less than five hours sleep a night is very rare. Indeed, the Archives of Internal Medicine reports that people sleeping less than seven hours release stress hormones and this increases the risk of heart disease. The National Cancer Institute proves a link between less sleep and cancer. Ten years ago, a study published in Lancet showed men deprived of sleep with glucose and lipid levels close to those associated with diabetes. People who sleep an average of five hours are 73% more likely to become obese. At present, the research shows no consistent pattern of cause and effect. When someone is diagnosed with heart disease is that caused by the stress, or was the stress only the trigger for lack of sleep which caused the disease? There is a real need for research into the role sleep plays in our lives. [...]

One of the things supposed to make America the best place in the world to live is its free market economy. If you listen to the propaganda, you believe you can buy anything you want in the US and, for the most part, the power of competition forces all traders and service providers to keep their prices low. Supposedly, if you don’t like the price or the quality of what’s on offer from one supplier, you can take your business elsewhere. This is all great in theory, but it breaks down when you get on to the subject of intellectual property rights. Now you can’t download music from anyone except iTunes and the roof falls on your head if you start up a business selling sodas and call it Pepsi. The idea of copyright or trademarks is simple. If you wrote the music and the lyrics, you own the rights and everyone has to pay to listen to them. Equally, anyone who brands a business gets a monopoly on the use of the name. No other business can copy your name and pass off its products as the brand. The predatory way in which all this works is most obvious in the patent market where anyone with a new idea can get a monopoly to exploit it. If anyone else tries to copy it, courts are quick to issue an injunction and damages follow. You can’t have failed to see news of the big cases between the technology companies, arguing who has the rights to mobile phones and hand-held devices.

Out of the public eye, the drug manufacturers protect their monopolies. They rely on local patents to keep the competition out of the US market and a lot of propaganda to slime the online pharmacies as unsafe places to buy your must-have drugs. Of course, they are more worried about the cheaper prices charged by the online pharmacies taking their business away rather than public safety. But the message comes out continuously and strong. Wherever possible, the manufacturers avoid court cases. This can be bad publicity. The common strategy is to pay foreign manufacturers not to make generic copies. But, every now and again, the foreign company will not play ball, i.e. it asks for too much money. So now we see Pfizer taking an Israeli company to court. This is Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd and it’s one of the larger generic manufacturers. In 2004, it applied to the FDA for a licence to make and sell as generic version of viagra. The FDA has indicated its willingness to grant the licence, but has yet to actually do so. If it does, the licensed generic version will eat into Pfizer’s profits. Hence, the action seeking an injunction to prevent Teva from launching the generic. [...]

Muscle relaxant drugs usually come with doctor’s prescription and are employed for relieving muscle spasm and muscular pain. These symptoms usually occur as signs of other conditions such as arthritis, chronic diseases or can be the aftermath of injuries. Muscle pain and spasms can also be caused by the over-use of certain muscles like in case of over-exercising by athletes. Certain muscle relaxant drugs are very powerful and have addictive properties, that’s why they are mostly issues with a prescription and are controlled by the FDA. Like with any other prescription drugs there may be side effects occurring with the use of muscle relaxants, however they are not as common as with some other types of drugs, especially painkillers.

Muscle relaxants, as you may guess from the name, work by relaxing the muscles and relieving the pain associated with constant tension of different muscle groups. They are quite often prescribed for treating and relieving such degenerative conditions as arthritis or direct muscle injury. However, most doctors prescribe these drugs in conjunction with physical therapy in order to assure prompt treatment. The most commonly prescribed muscle relaxant drugs include carisoprodol, diazepam and cyclobenzaprine.

Types of muscle relaxant drugs

Soma

Soma is muscle relaxant available only through prescription that has carisoprodol as its main active element. In most cases the drug is prescribed to be taken three or four times daily regardless of meals. Pregnant or nursing mothers are forbidden to take the medication as it has potential hazard for the baby. The most common side effects observed with the use of Soma include such symptoms as increased heart rate, drowsiness, dizziness, vomiting and indigestion.

Valium

Valium is usually prescribed for treating anxiety disorders, however many physicians also prescribe it for relieving muscle spasms and pain due to its sedative and relaxing effects. It is also known to help with sleep disorders and depression. The effectiveness of Valium is usually decreased with the use of nicotine. The most common side effects reported with the use of this drug include dizziness, decrease of sex drive, diarrhea, indigestion and dry mouth. [...]

Sometimes people want their good news delivered in convenient bite-sized amounts. If you cut out all the chatter and boil it down to just one simple thing, what do I have to do to lose weight? When experts get put on the spot, they tend to fall back on a formula. Reduce your diet to this number of calories and you will lose weight. The person does a mental calculation. That number sounds doable. Right. Let’s do it! There may be a lot of other information that should be given, other factors to take into account. But none of that is heard. The decision is based on just one number. Way back when, one of the more common formulas to see the light of day was an equation. About 3,500 calories add up to about 1 pound of fat (that’s 0.45 kg who think in metric). Keeping it simple, that means you lose 1 pound every week if you cut 500 calories a day.

When an expert is trapped into endorsing such a plan, almost everyone will say they can do it. Ah, but wait a moment. At your current intake, you may have been putting on 1 pound of fat every week. So if all you do is reduce your overall intake by 3,500, the only effect would be to avoid putting on another pound. What tends to happen as people age is their stomach capacity grows. They feel comfortable with increasingly large volumes of food inside. This fuels a progressive weight increase and a slow journey into obesity. So whatever charges you plan to make to your diet must take account of your current weight and eating habits. This is not to say that sacrificing 3,500 calories a week will not produce some weight loss. But whatever is lost is unlikely to be significant and the loss will not continue. People who diet will know that, after a month or so, their weight stabilizes at a new level. Those who are easily discouraged go back to their old eating habits and stop whatever exercise they had started. Within a week or so, they are back to their old weight. [...]