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This October saw yet another medical device fail in a high-profile clinical trial. Alongside the pharmaceutical industry, manufacturers have been designing devices to help people lose weight. Why? Well, with obesity reaching epidemic proportions around the world, there are millions of people “out there” waiting to buy something that will help them shed unwanted pounds. Everyone wants a quick and easy solution to an age-old problem: how do you lose weight without any change in your lifestyle? Everyone wants to keep on eating without paying the price in extra pounds. Unfortunately, just as there’s no sign of a magic bullet drug that will burn away those unwanted pounds, the latest scientific implant has also failed. It has been deja vu all over again. The pre-trial hype claimed this revolutionary device would use technology to suppress appetite. If people do not feel hungry, they will eat less and lose weight. The result? The device proved absolutely safe. Why? Probably because the device had no measurable effect on the bodies of those who tried it out.

This latest failure forces everyone back to the real world. There are no drugs in the development pipeline to save people from themselves. There are no magic machines you can wave over your body or have a surgeon implant. The only way to lose weight is to eat a sensible diet and exercise. The hard rule is that you have to burn more calories than you eat. In the stock exchange, the share price of the latest manufacturer to claim a miracle treatment fell by almost 80% when the news of failure was announced. Reading this, your spirits have also fallen sharply. This is sad news. Indeed, this is why most people fail to lose weight. They get depressed when weight does not fall off. They give up the “unequal struggle” with their waistlines. The necessary lifestyle changes never materialize.

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Look around the bookshops and read some of the reviews for the latest books on weight loss and there’s a new buzzword on offer. It seems the genes you inherit from your parents change the way your body absorbs fat and carbohydrates. Gone are the days when a one-size-fits-all diet would sell like the proverbial hot cakes (unsweetened, of course). Now we are into the idea of personalized diets with DNA kits and gene testing offered as the way of designing the most effective way for you to lose those unwanted pounds. Except, there’s no science to support any of these claims. Myths help separate you from your money. The truth remains boring and does not sell many books.

Let’s start with the facts. The science of genetics has been around for centuries. Farmers, sports fans and governments have been selectively breeding animals (and plants) for their taste, speed or killing abilities. The results can be seen everywhere you buy food, on the race track, in the police and military compounds, and so on. There’s nothing new in aiming to select characteristics to transmit through the generations. And that’s where the science stops and the science fiction takes over. Although some scientists can now identify individual genes that may contribute to different characteristics, there’s no such thing as gene splicing – no designer babies for us humans to order – and no proven link between any combination of genes and human body weight.

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Let’s start with the downside. You picked up the dreaded pink slip. This did not do wonders for your self-esteem. You then looked around the job market and found precisely no jobs. It seems every employer has given up the idea of expansion. They are all hunkered down waiting for the recession to end. Only when all we consumers get back out into the malls and start spending again will the wheels of manufacturing and commerce start turning again. Until then, it’s the survival of the fittest – my apologies for mentioning Darwin, but it seems appropriate when applied the the species of employer. So with self-esteem on the floor and depression lurking in the corner of your mind wondering whether it should come out and join the party, it’s all too easy to slip into really bad habits. You become one of the dreaded couch potatoes, suddenly fascinated by the offerings of daytime TV. With nothing else to occupy yourself, you snack and hit the soda bottles. The results show in the first month. With a job and all the exercise of getting out of the house and running round to earn a living, you were reasonably thin. Now you are unoccupied, you find your waist growing and everything else starting to sag. It occurs to you that this may not help you find another job when the market improves. There’s a lot of discrimination out there and, with a choice between thinner and fatter candidates for a job, employers tend to pick the thinner ones because they are less likely to have health problems.

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Throughout our lives we often have to deal with pain in its various forms. It can be a small injury or a serious trauma, it can be a light headache or a strong back pain, it can wear off in minutes and last for years. Pain follows us throughout our lives and never leaves us to be careless about what we are doing. Of course, there’s nothing pleasant about pain but if we were unable to feel pain the world would be much more of a stranger place for us where surviving would be much harder for the whole humankind. Pain simply tells us that something is wrong, whether within our body or outside of it that is dangerous and harmful. Imagine world without pain – yes it would be a very good place for a couple of minutes until you are exposed to something harmful, not feeling it, and simply die. Yes, pain is that important.

However pain can certainly make you wish you were dead, especially when it’s severe and chronic. That is why people throughout centuries have been developing ways of treating pain. From herbs to from cold objects to cognitive therapy there are numerous ways you can manage pain. But before trying to overcome pain, you first have to understand what pain really is. It is not a medical condition by itself, pain is only a symptom, a signal that something is wrong in the body. And if in case of an injury the cause is evident, quite often pain signals that there are underlying health problems that have to be treated, which the person was not aware of. And this is one of the most effective ways to overcome pain – treating the condition causing it. Chronic pain is the type of pain that is most commonly observed in cases of an underlying medical condition. Acute pain usually results from injuries and typically fades away over a short period of time. Chronic pain, as you can guess from the name, persists for longer periods of time, which in some cases spread over days, months and even years.

Having two types of pain means that there are two different approaches. In case of mild or medium acute pain resulted from an injury you can simply use a cold object over the area of impact to calm the pain down. In cases of severe acute pain people usually take strong analgesics such as narcotics that act immediately and are not to be used repetitive.

When you deal with chronic pain, different types of pain management are employed. Suffering from chronic pains makes it impossible for strong narcotic painkillers to be used because of their heavy side-effects that make the remedy worse than the disease. Instead doctors usually prescribe drugs such as  (more…)