HYPERSENSITIVITY OF F AND/OR R AREA: I feel like a big stick of dynamite and my penis is the fuse. It is so sensitive that it can hurt. HUSBAND Virtually all of the men reported some hypersensitivity of the F and/or R area sometimes during their sexual experiences. Two hundred twenty-one of the men reported [...]

I’ll tell you one thing. We are so in tune with each other that it gets us in trouble. If I’m really down on a given day, then he is down. We get down together in minutes. We just reflect each other perfectly, almost like one mood together. We are like one tree in the [...]

Cortisone given by mouth or by injection is not used in psoriasis except to treat severe unstable cases where local treatment is best avoided. Methotrexate is a drug widely used in treating various cancers. It is effective in some cases of psoriasis because it depresses the over-activity of the cells in the skin. This is [...]

Crohn’s disease is a chronic inflammatory disorder of the gastrointestinal tract and can affect any part of it from the mouth to the anus. It is most common at the end of the small bowel just where it joins the large bowel. The causes are unknown and in many ways, it resembles ulcerative colitis, another [...]

BRONCHIOLITIS: Confined to children under the age of two. It is usually due to the respiratory syncytial virus but may have secondary bacterial invaders. It involves the smallest of the airways — the bronchioles — as well as the larger bronchi. The illness often starts as a rather mild infection with a nasal discharge and [...]

Doctors have developed a sort of shorthand method for describing how extensive a cancer seems to be. We call this the stage of the cancer. For most cancers there are four stages. Here are the essential things which determine the stage of a cancer. I won’t go into details, but for each type there are [...]

‘Osteoporosis and its consequences may be regarded as one of the most serious long-term consequences of the human menopause.’ from Focus – The Menopause, International Monograph Series, 1990. ‘We are all aware of the undoubted benefits of HRT in preventing bone loss.’ letter in British Medical Journal, 1990. It is possible that you have read [...]

The continuing debate about whether hysterectomy is overused is an issue of great importance for the many women who will ask themselves at some time in their lives, Ts a hysterectomy really necessary for me?’ The debate has been fuelled by findings of large variations in rates of hysterectomy between and within countries for no [...]

But should we take sleeping pills? What is the attitude of society towards pills? We can look at this issue through the eyes of three groups of people, each with different attitudes to taking drugs: *No drugs at all—some people believe that the human body has a lot of inner resources and that drugs are [...]

The history of medicine shows us very clearly that there is a recurring tendency for different forms of treatment to become fashionable and to be used overenthusiastically, often to the exclusion of simpler and more effective means of treatment. It would seem to me to be beyond doubt that this is the case with the [...]