May 19, 2012

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Common Childhood Illnesses

BOCA RATON, FL - JANUARY 08: Sandy Fournies, ...
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No one wants their child to get sick, but the reality is that children catch germs that make them ill. Most of the time, your children will recover with little trauma. Understanding these common childhood illnesses will help you feel prepared to nurse your child back to health.

Colds
Caused by a viral infection, a cold usually lasts four to 10 days. Symptoms may include fever, stuffy or runny nose, cough, and fatigue. Usually, parents can treat the symptoms at home with over-the-counter remedies. Contact the doctor if your child develops difficulty breathing, doesn’t get better, or spikes a high fever.

Ear Infections
When the Eustachian tubes become blocked, fluid builds up in your ears and often develops into a middle ear infection. Often, children come down with an ear infection after having a cold, severe allergy attack, or sinus infection. Most of the time, ear infections often exhibit few symptoms besides pain and/or fever. Rest and home care will often cure an ear infection. In fact, 80 percent of ear infections will improve without treatment. However, if you child doesn’t improve after several days, call your pediatrician.

Pink Eye
Also called conjunctivitis, pink eye is swelling and redness of the mucous membrane that lines the eyelid and eye surface. Children with pink eye will often have an itchy, swollen eye with drainage that crust over. Pink eye is frequently cause by viral or bacterial infections; viral pink eye often clears up on its own, but you will need an antibiotic if the infection is caused by bacteria. To prevent spreading of pink eye to other family members, encourage regular hand washing and launder all linens used by the sick child.

Chicken Pox
Identified by an itchy rash and red blisters (pox) that cover the body, chicken pox is a childhood disease produced by the varicella-zoster virus. Highly contagious, children pick up the virus from any surfaces an infected person touches as well as from the coughs and sneezes of someone with chicken pox. Usually, chicken pox begins with general tiredness and malaise, followed by the rash, which begins to appear one to two days later.

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Filed Under: Child Health, Health Care, Health Tips, Medication Tagged With: , , ,

Radiation Therapy: Behind The Scenes

Clinac 2100 C accelerator in the polyclinique ...
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Although radiation therapy sounds ominous – and in fact, many of the people who receive it are gravely ill – it is an awesome field of medicine and it is tremendously useful in the battle against many types of cancer. Unlike diagnostic radiation, which is used in x-rays and CT scans, therapeutic radiation is much more powerful, and is actually designed to kill cells or sterilize them. This power makes the use of radiation therapy an extremely specialized and careful process, both for the doctors who prescribe it and for the technicians who administer it. Let’s take a look at a couple interesting things about radiation therapy.

Precision Is Everything

Since radiation therapy is designed to kill cancer cells, the doses of radiation involved are quite high, and can have harmful side effects like skin damage and even can cause new cancers. So, before any treatment is given, the physician involved must decide if the benefits will outweigh the costs. Once the decision is made to proceed with the treatment, the physician usually consults with a radiation physicist to determine a treatment plan, which details how often the radiation will be administered, as well as its intensity, the angle of treatment, and other factors.

Patient Marking

Once the treatment plan is complete, the patient must be treated. But before this can happen, the technician must enable a way to precisely target the same area of the patient’s body every time treatment is given. To accomplish this, the technician uses several methods: tattooing the patient, making a cast of the patient’s body for them to lie in (so they lie the same way every time), and also making a specific metal filter for the radiation for each patient. By doing this, the technician minimizes the damage to the patient’s healthy tissue. Typically, radiation therapy lasts several weeks, because the body can only withstand so much radiation at any given time. Not all radiation therapy patients are cured. However, the success rate is high enough so that it remains a valuable technique to help cancer patients.

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High Risk Pregnancy Explained

Woman pregnancy month by month.
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Having a baby can be the happiest time in a woman’s life. Most women go through the nine months with little more than morning sickness, swollen ankles, and an aching back. Good prenatal treatment and taking care of yourself will also contribute to a healthy, successful pregnancy. In some cases, however, certain conditions and factors can lead to a high-risk pregnancy.

Doctors use the term high-risk pregnancy to define any situation where the mother and/or baby have an increased chance of health problems. Otherwise healthy women can develop conditions that lead to high-risk pregnancies. Although the label high-risk sounds frightening, your physician will use this term to make sure you get the extra care you need and deliver your baby as planned.

Your doctor may consider your pregnancy high-risk if you:
• Develop preeclampsia or eclampsia, which can affect the mother’s blood pressure, kidney function, and liver enzymes. Sometimes women will develop gestational diabetes, which occurs only during pregnancy, and can also lead to a high risk designation.
• Have a pre-existing condition such as HIV, hepatitis C, diabetes, or epilepsy.
• Experience pre-term labor. Anything before 37 weeks is considered pre-term.
• Are under 17 or over 35.
• Learn that the baby is diagnosed with some sort of problem like Down’s syndrome or anything relating to the lungs, heart, or other critical system.
• Carry more than one baby.
• Contract an illness such as chicken pox, rubella, or fifth’s disease during pregnancy.

Once your pregnancy is classified as high-risk, your physician will probably schedule more frequent visits and may order additional ultrasounds to monitor your progress. In some cases, your ob-gyn may refer you to a maternal-fetal specialist to care for you and your baby. As your due date approaches, you will want to review your birth plan with your physician and see if any special care will be needed during delivery.

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Filed Under: Child Health, Health Care, Reproductive Health, Women's Health Tagged With: , , ,