Category: General health

Ideally you will have the luxury of making a fully informed choice. In reality your options are likely to be more limited. If your relative is arriving from the community, the best homes tend to have long waiting lists. Priority is given to patients coming from hospitals. Even if your ideal choice has a wait [...]

The physical plant. Is the home clean, well lit, relatively odor-free, laid out with a disabled person’s needs in mind? Do residents’ rooms contain personal belongings? What is the policy on bringing in such belongings? Is there enough room for privacy and an attractive place to sit outside?
You want a place that looks cheerful and [...]

Parents have a variety of complaints about their toddlers. Many toddlers refuse to go to bed at night. They will invent an extraordinary variety of reasons why they should stay up a little longer, and some parents dread the approach of bedtime as they know that they will inevitably get involved in a drawn-out struggle [...]

You should learn how to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and teach it to your older children.

If breathing has stopped, place the patient on his back. Check to see whether his heart is beating. The pulse can be felt at the wrist or at the neck, or you can place your hand over his heart and feel [...]

The defect in vision usually affects the inner or nasal side and this loss is often not noticed because it falls into the binocular area covered by both eyes.

Later it may involve the outer area and so lead to “tunnel vision”, where it appears the vision is reduced to seeing straight ahead as if one [...]

A generation has grown up not knowing that the large obstetric hospitals developed because of unsatisfactory results in home deliveries of babies.

Confinements are normal and mother and baby do well in 70 per cent of cases with no complications so for the majority it really doesn’t matter where the mother has the baby.

But what of [...]

Acquiring the teeth is a perfectly normal process. It is certainly not a disorder, nor a disease, nor anything sinister. But it is included in this section because many infants experience difficulty when teething.

A large number of disorders have been blamed on the teething process. Diarrhoea, convulsions, coughs and cold and general respiratory illnesses and [...]

‘There is no doubt that the psychological value is enormous,’ I agreed. ‘Doctors refer to it as bonding—a link or interaction between mother and baby, which is important. The earlier breast feeding begins, the more intense and successful bonding will be.’

‘Then why is it some mothers have difficulty?’ Karen asked.

‘Some are simply not interested or [...]

This particularly unpleasant form of headache is sometimes known as sick headache and a percentage of the population, mostly female, is prone to recurrent attacks. The patient will be warned that a migraine is imminent by visual disturbances such as bright flashes of light and squiggly patterns before the eyes. These are caused by the [...]

Chicken pox is caused by a specific virus which is highly contagious. Chicken pox is contracted through the air from a person who has the disease. Symptoms may appear within 12 to 21 days after being exposed to a person with chicken pox.

One attack of chicken pox makes a person immune for life, unless the [...]