Which only goes to show that vast numbers of women want help and advice about

pre-menstrual (and menstrual) problems. Fortunately, the new freedom to speak about these matters means that frank, helpful advice can be given. It’s only a few years since a television company prevented me from discussing period pain on another programme to which I was a regular contributor. The reason? ‘Because the schoolgirls might see it!’

Beryl Kingston gives just the sort of advice which both schoolgirls and adult women need in order to help them cope with their periods. If you suffer from the pre-menstrual syndrome, or from period pain, or from heavy, prolonged and tiring periods.

You’ll find that Beryl Kingston is particularly good on treating these problems with relaxation, a subject which—as a National Childbirth Trust lecturer —she knows a lot about. We ought to make much more use of the sort of relaxation therapy she describes, because people are far too ready to turn to powerful drugs these days when a spot of gentle relaxation would be much better for them. And it’s free of side-effects!

However, there’s no doubt that many women with period problems do need the help of modern drugs, even if it’s only a simple question of going on the Pill to abolish the miseries of period pain. Beryl Kingston discusses the various possible drug therapies for period trouble, with great common sense and with a degree of impartiality which is quite rare in these days when too many people seem to be ‘pushing’ some particular brand of therapy for commercial reasons.

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Today, the media presents us with a time of seemingly great unrest: divorce is common; violence is highlighted daily on radio, television and in newspapers; we hear music that neither soothes nor aids the healing of our minds or bodies. The messages are stimulation, instant gratification and instant excitement.

We have to determine where we are in life, before we can attempt to understand where young people are at today. They are troubled by the insecurity of disrupted family life. People don’t know how to communicate. The kids of today who get into trouble are hitting back at a society which has hurt them. If parents make the mistake of condemning the child instead of their behaviour, a communication gap is created and a message of complete disapproval is voiced.

To bridge this gap, we need to watch our sloppy language. How we speak is important. Children learn to understand society’s unwritten laws of behaviour through making mistakes. It is up to us to reaffirm that we love them, even if we can’t accept their behaviour or their attitudes. They must feel loved and

accepted it’s only their behaviour that we are not prepared to tolerate. This way their self-esteem remains intact.

There are great personal development courses for children and teenagers available, with names like: Discovery, Piece of Mind, Learning Adventures, Free To Be Me, and Outward Bound. They educate children to raise their self-esteem and teach parents how to communicate love and not belittle their offspring. This results in improved understanding between the generations.

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Chemicals are secreted which aggravate digestion and cause hyperacidity due to internal stress. As we get older, we should be gaining the benefits of experience to achieve understanding and forgiveness. Holding on to resentment only hurts yourself.

Anger after grief is often an indication that the healing process has started But the emotion can be handled better if it is changed to a positive one so that there can be benefits on all sides.

This is not to say that anger should be suppressed. It must be released Most people do this instinctively by hard exercise or throwing themselves into their favourite sport – a positive and healthy way of handling the problem. If not released, anger can develop into violence and hatred, with deep-seated aggression often leading to a tragic outcome.

As a clinician, my first therapy is acupuncture, where all internal tension is unwound and relief gained in a matter of minutes with no side effects! While I have you in this pinned-down state, I take advantage of this situation to hear the whole story and give appropriate counselling! Sharing a stress can also help you give it away, and my joy is to have a patient leave me laughing.

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It is nearly always a sacro-iliac joint sprain located in the pelvis. Spurs develop in the heel because of uneven pressure. However local joint adhesions from old sprains can be a cause of pain here too.

A man limped into my practice, complaining of a pain in his heel ‘underneath’ where his weight came down on it. He had been bushwalking the previous weekend and all was well till two days later when the pain became more than he was willing to suffer. His wife had already massaged it with liniment to no avail, and he had soaked it in a foot bath. Nothing seemed helpful so here he was. It was clear from a few tests that the sacro-iliac joint in his pelvis was the cause. He was walking with an apparent ‘short leg’ condition and weight bearing on the ankle was uneven. This is often the case.

We can use a direct chiropractic adjustment with no clicking sounds to manipulate this joint. The patient described above walked out in a different but corrected position – much happier than when he walked in. A couple of days of walking evenly took care of the pain.

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The lifting of heavy garden pots or a television set from room to room causes injuries that chiropractors and osteopaths see all the time. Christmas parties cause many of this type of injury.

Great loads of food are brought in from the shops and the car. A crate of champagne or a dozen frozen turkeys – it matters not how exotic the load – bad posture when lifting gets you in the end! Who am I to complain? It’s all work for us, but the pain is something we would like you to avoid.

The problem is brought on by rotating the spine as you lift something, such as the baby from its cot, or moving the groceries out of the car, carrying a typewriter at the office, moving rocks in the garden or mother sitting baby on her hip. All are classic injuries which involve bending down and lifting, while twisting to the left or right in the bent position.

Most people just bend down and lift straight up with their arms. This thoughtless movement strains the lower back and vertebral muscles and

overstretches the ligaments of the lumbar joints. Often the pelvic joints are stressed too.

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Low blood sugar symptoms mimic chronic fatigue syndrome and similar problems. We are victims of TV advertising that tells us ‘light’ breakfast cereals are enough for our first meal of the day. This is not so for people who have this metabolic problem.

Low blood sugar cases suffer exhaustion, depression, headaches, poor concentration, and a desperate need to eat something immediately. They choose sweets or strong stimulants like tea or coffee or Coke especially at 3.30-4 p.m.

This is the danger time when children come home from school and have to buy chocolate on the way, or they arrive home famished because their breakfast lacked the protein required to adequately sustain the level of blood sugar. Workers go to sleep on the job; mothers driving children home after school can go to sleep in their cars.

It’s the same story every time: ‘I don’t eat breakfast’, or ‘I only have fruit’, or ‘just a cereal’ or ‘just tea and toast’. These foods are digested in an hour or less. People suffering low blood sugar symptoms need to eat a substantial meal at 7.30 a.m. to control blood sugar crashes at 9.30 a.m., 3.30 p.m. and 2 a.m.

When an ‘English style, breakfast is missed, fatigue symptoms show about 9.30 a.m. Morning tea is needed urgently (preferably something sweet for a quick pick-me-up) and again at 3.30 p.m. when a strong sweet stimulating tea or coffee seems to be a necessity. This is how weight is put on — trying to boost the blood sugar level after 4 p.m. when the metabolic rate slows down for the day.

The continental breakfast of croissants and coffee is not a good habit if you have low blood sugar problems which show up as extreme tiredness around these hours.

Five-Day Cure-This routine usually only takes five days to stop the craving for sweets or stimulants mid-morning and mid-afternoon. It will take longer to stabilise your metabolism and revitalise your life. But the benefits are increased energy, better concentration at work and school, weight loss for those with weight to lose, and a state of wellbeing.

1. Eat a protein meal for breakfast. As well as cereal, please include a slice of

ham on toast, some leftover chicken, a poached egg, a piece of cheese, a slice

of turkey with cranberry sauce, or baked beans and boiled bacon. (Have your

cereal in the afternoon if necessary.)

2. Eat small protein meals every two-and-a-half hours. Buy a pack of seeds,

sultanas and nuts to nibble.

3. Add unrefined carbohydrate foods like wholegrain bread, brown rice, pasta or

bananas if underweight.

4. Take a tablespoonful of glycerine mixed in milk or diluted fruit juice three

times a day if your condition is severe.

5. Take the amino acid, phenylalanine, in tablets from your health food store.

Also take zinc, vitamins B and C and chromium. Best to see a naturopath or

nutritionist.

Overcoming resistance: Don’t ask your family if they want a protein breakfast. Start cooking and let the smell of the food sell the idea to them. Sell the sizzle before the sausage! Who can resist hot food on a cold day? Grilled lamp chops smell delicious. Vegetarian protein doesn’t work quickly for those really in trouble. If you feel like ‘throwing up’ at the thought of breakfast, then usually there is undigested food in your stomach from eating late the night before or there isn’t enough gastric acid to digest the protein.

Adjustments, acupuncture or digestive enzymes are also used, depending on the patient’s overall problems.

Swing the meals around by taking the protein out of the evening meal and putting it into breakfast for a few days. Let dinner be one course only – just a plate of vegetables, a thick bowl of vegie soup, a large salad or a fruit platter, depending on the weather.

The humble egg has been given bad publicity because of people suffering from high cholesterol (and that’s another story). So, even those who need them, such as growing children and mothers of young families, have shied away from eating eggs sensibly. Please don’t deny your children one of the best foods nature has provided. Eggs are great for all except those who are allergic to them or who are on special diets.

Go out of your way to buy organic food if you are concerned with chemical poisons in the food chain.

In my experience low blood sugar is often a female condition, made worse when complicated by a hormone imbalance.

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There are two ways to treat a squint: firstly, to go on using the eyes, using procedures and exercises to strengthen the muscles; secondly, if necessary, to operate on the eye muscles to re-position them so that the eye no longer turns in (or out).

One word of warning: The way in which the brain processes information means that a child with a squint soon learns to ignore the information coming from the squinting eye, which may therefore go blind. It is therefore enormously important to spot a child who is developing a squint.

The critical time can be surprisingly early in a child’s development. Before the age of seven it is often possible to correct a squint, so that the child no longer ignores information coming from the squinting eye.

Even though a child may have vision out of each eye, still she may well not develop proper depth vision, especially in those squints that always were constant.

Large squints are therefore a considerable hazard to ‘the development of normal vision, but squints like this don’t; usually cause headaches. It is the minor degrees of squint that cause the excess muscle tension associated with headaches.

Type of headache

The headache of eye-strain is at. the front of the face and forehead. It is often worse after reading, or other close work.

What else could it be?

‘Tension headache is often perceived over the forehead or round the eyes. Temporal arteritis is associated with tenderness of the arteries in the temples – and also, unfortunately, with sudden blindness.

Many people with headaches ask if it could be due to eye-strain: the only sure-way to find out is to see an optician and get a full check on your eye-sight, including (in children) a test to check for squinting.

Self-help

If you have symptoms that sound like eye-strain – pain in the eyes, which is worse after reading or intensive close work, and which goes away after a period of rest -then the remedy may be simple. Have your eyes checked. And use the glasses that the optician suggests.

The biggest problem comes with those whose vision is good enough to do without glasses on most occasions, but not quite good enough to be able to see properly without screwing up the eyes slightly.

Dim light makes focusing that much more difficult and someone with more or less normal vision in bright light may be quite severely short-sighted under dim conditions. A person like this may only need to use her glasses in dim light – such as in theatres and cinemas, when driving at night, and also when watching television. However, if she doesn’t use .her glasses in dim conditions, she’s likely to get tense muscles from straining the eyes.

This obviously brings up a convenient way to reduce eye-strain – don’t work in dim light. The older we are, the more light we need in order to see properly and if we can’t see properly we tend to peer and strain and tense up those muscles around the eye again. To read clear print, a sixty-year-old person will need up to fifteen times as much light as a child at school, and ten times as much light as a twenty to thirty-year-old.

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An aromatherapist might suggest the anti-depressant oils bergamot, clary sage, camomile, geranium, jasmine, melissa, neroli and ylang ylang, used in any of the usual aromatherapy forms (baths, vapourisers, massage, etc). You might also try some of the anti-inflammatory oils in the same way – marigold, camomile or myrrh.

Basil leaves can be steeped in boiling water and drunk as a tea. Basil oil can be massaged into the temples. Bach flower remedies (especially the Rescue Remedy) can help with emotional problems that might follow, and lead to further headaches. A homoeopath would have to prescribe according to very specific symptoms, but cicuta or nat sulph are two possible remedies.

According to complementary practitioners calcium and magnesium are nature’s tranquillisers, and supplementation may help some sufferers. Music and dance therapy is useful, following healing of the injury. Relaxation therapies and the Alexander Technique both claim to help post-accident suffering, by facilitating quicker recovery and dealing with tensions and stress. Obviously, any of the post-operative or post-illness suggestions offered in Chapter Nine will be useful.

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What else could it be?

At first a TIA is just like a stroke; you only know it’s a TIA because it goes away again after a time. Any TIA that doesn’t go away isn’t a true TIA. It must have been caused by a clot which didn’t disperse, and which blocked the artery long enough, to kill off some of the surrounding nerve cells.

Just occasionally what looks like TIAs can actually be the lip of the iceberg for a rather more sinister event, such as a brain tumour. It can be remarkably difficult to spot these, but unexplained, recent weight loss, increasing or continuous headaches, no response to treatment, and abnormalities in blood tests are all features that point towards this diagnosis; but it often needs some very specialised tests such as MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanning to be sure of what is going on.

Orthodox treatment

Although TIAs are like mini-strokes, unlike strokes TIAs are eminently treatable. The aim is to reduce the stickiness of the platelets and stop them clumping together. A tiny dose of aspirin is sufficient – just a child’s dose (75-150 mg) once a day is all that is required to make the platelets a little less sticky (the normal adult dose of aspirin is 600 mg every four hours). Alternatively, your doctor may use a drug called dipyridamole (Persantin) which has the same effect.

Self-help

Firstly, don’t panic. Although at first it looks just like a stroke, a TIA goes away completely after a short lime. Once you’ve had one TIA, you may be prone to i it hers; be sure lo consult your doctor to be sure of the diagnosis. And do remember that TIAs don’t necessarily lead to full-blown strokes.

Complementary treatment

I regular infusion of white willow bark or meadowsweet tea might help, as In lib of these contain aspirin in natural form. However, it may be best just to use a tablet of the pure drug, in a proper controlled dose. Taken regularly, aspirin will reduce the stickiness of the latelets help prevent clots.

Associated problems

Strokes are often associated with high blood pressure ; imbalances in the muscles of the neck can lead to muscular spasms and tension headaches. Physiotherapy or some of the other manipulative medicines may be helpful in dealing with this. Strokes mainly occur in older people, many of whom have a degree of cervical spondylosis or osteo-arthritis in the neck. Depression may follow a severe stroke and make muscle tension, and tension headaches, worse.

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Infusions of lady’s slipper, oats, skullcap and St John’s wort (which is also an anti-depressant) might help. Tinctures of marigold (calendula) can be used to bathe the affected area. ‘Topical creams which contain capsicum help to cool the pain of nerve disorders affecting the skin, like shingles. It can also provide substantial relief of the pain that develops in the wake of the illness. Try to include hot red peppers in your diet, if you are suffering from this. Glycyrhizin is an extract of licorice root and has been reported as being beneficial in the treatment of shingles, showing anti-viral activity.

A reflexologist would massage the following reflex areas: solar plexus/diaphragm, chest/lung, shoulder/arm, and neck/thyroid. the second stage would be breast/chest, lymph, neck/chest, shoulder/arm, thymus, neck/throat, spine, lymph/groin.

A homoeopath might suggest arsen alb, kali phos and rhus tox, but all chosen remedies would, of course, be dependent on a full consultation.

Acupuncture can help deal with the pain, and facilitate faster healing, as well as stimulating the immune system.

Aromatherapy can soothe painful symptoms of shingles, but contact a registered aromatherapist for a suitable blend of oils that will not irritate the skin condition, particularly if you plan gently to massage the body. Light massage with camomile, bergamot, eucalyptus, geranium and tea tree can soothe the painful blisters, or try applying a poultice with essential oil of rose. Bergamot is an anti-depressant and can be applied to the blisters, or in a bath at night. All of the above oils can be vapourised to relieve the symptoms of shingles.

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