Cause

Whooping cough is caused by a germ (bacterium) called Bordatella pertussis. It is passed on through close personal contact, as well as through sneezing and coughing.

Clinical features

The incubation period of whooping cough is between 1-2 weeks. A child can remain infectious for up to a month after the onset of the cough. The entire illness can sometimes last for up to 2 months. Initially your child may just have the symptoms of a heavy cold for a week, such as watery eyes, a runny nose, sneezing and mild fever. The cough develops gradually, starting at night, but becoming worse in the daytime. The bouts of coughing worsen over the following 2 weeks, increasing both in their severity and frequency.

These coughing bouts are usually exhausting, as the child ‘barks’ several times on breathing out, then gasps for a deep breath, which is sometimes accompanied by the characteristic ‘whooping’ sound. The child’s face turns red and he often vomits at the end of a coughing bout. In between these episodes the child is usually comfortable. This stage of the illness can last for several weeks before improvement is seen. The cough itself may be present for months.

Pneumonia, or infection of the lungs, is the commonest complication of whooping cough. This requires treatment with antibiotics. Middle ear infection (otitis media) is another common complication also requiring antibiotic treatment. Small nosebleeds, or haemorrhages inside the eye can sometimes occur due to forceful coughing. If there is significant loss of appetite and persistent vomiting with the coughing bouts, there is a risk of weight loss and dehydration.

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No, you can’t break it off. The penis does not really get hard like the word “hard” when you think of wood or a rock. It really gets full of blood that makes it firm so it can join with the vagina for intercourse or be touched and held when you make love with someone you want to be with for a long time. The penis gets firm sometimes because you have to pee or when you are excited and sometimes just because it is part of the way your body works, like when you yawn or sneeze. Just because your penis is rigid doesn’t mean that you are feeling like making love, and you can feel very loving without your penis being rigid.

    ”Don’t girls get all wet when they want a penis in them?”

The vagina sort of sweats sometimes, and that is just like the penis getting firm. It happens for lots of reasons, including being afraid, being happy, and just because giris and women are human and that’s how the body works. The vagina getting wet can make joining the penis and vagina easier, but it doesn’t mean they want to make love all the time. These are things our bodies do that are part of being human, and they happen to you even when you were in the uterus, in that birth capsule.

“How do you know if you love somebody or if they love

you?”

There is a special secret about that. You can tell if you love somebody if you want to help them grow and be a better person. You can tell if they love you if they feel the same. If you or the person lies, or just wants to touch and kiss, or sometimes hurts your feelings intentionally, they don’t love you. And remember, love is work. You have to try to love, and touching and holding is the easy part that comes with trying to treat someone very, very nicely and letting them treat you nicely, too. That’s how you can be sure that your parents love you so, because they work to make you happy and your being happy makes them very, very happy. You can love a person very much and not have sex.

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WIFE

If men have been pressured by the focus on erection of the penis as a tangible sign of emotional state, then women have been pressured by a form of’ ‘sexual dipsticking,” checking for vaginal’ ‘fluid levels” as a sign of arousal. Both indicators are invalid because erection of penis, clitoris, and lubrication are merely reflexes that do not accurately reflect our emotional or arousal state. Men can he intensely aroused without erection and intensely erect without arousal, and women can be intensely aroused and not lubricated and abundantly lubricated and not aroused.

The sexist orientation of a well-lubricated opening for a rigid male organ neglected the fact of female clitoral erection. This orientation saw women as being made ready by men to receive men, and is unlike the new perspective, which sees couples getting ready together to merge and share. The early perspectives tried to make sexual response totally different from all other human physiological response. Our bodies just do not work that way. We are a system, and the sexual part of that system does not enjoy or suffer from exclusivity. If you are sweating heavily, you would not necessarily report that you are vigorously exercising. Sweating is determined by many factors, including temperature, humidity, general metabolism, diet, feelings, thoughts, and activity level. This concept is true for lubrication (actually transudation or a sweating of the vaginal walls).

We cannot look to our genitals to tell us whether or not we are turned on or aroused, because they are only a part of a complex interactional system that can arouse us as much as signal arousal. The phallocentric, vaginalcentric orientation limits our potential for sexual development by assuming a one-directional, stimulus/ response mechanism that does not exist in human experience. Learning this key point is another important step toward super marital sex.

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He doesn’t touch. He grabs. That’s men for you.

WIFE

She just cuddles. She doesn’t get it on, really get down to it. She’s like all women, I guess.

HUSBAND

American marriage continues to struggle with the prescribed roles of man and women in our society. “I chase him until he catches me.” “All women want is love, but they put up with sex.” “He’ll trade a little love for a lot of sex.” These and other cliches were reported by the husbands and wives, and such preconceptions of role assignment severely limited the evolution of a balanced sexual interaction in marriage. It resulted in someone getting made love “to” or “for” and someone doing the “making” of love.

The original Kinsey studies of male and female sexuality indicated that marriage was often accompanied by a diminishing of orgasms for women and a turning to prostitution and affairs for men. It was as if the couples were taking part in a predestined gender dance of a sexist courtship, sexual trade-offs matched to expected roles, self-fulfilling prophecies, conceptions, maternal investment and paternal distance, inevitable decline of sexual interest, and extramarital sex primarily for the man as some form of genetic inevitabilty.

Dr. Donald Symons at the University of California at Santa Barbara suggests that women have a stronger evolutionary investment in the conceptive aspects of sexuality and that they provide the larger “mass” of procreation, the egg. Men contribute only little naked pieces of DNA with tails. He implies that men act somewhat like their sperm: quick, attacking, mobile, and low on investment Women act out their “egg” orientation: stable, receptive, committed, and selective.

Does it have to be this way? Will men always have to contribute a little for a lot and women a lot for a little? Are we victims of some mammalian script? As one sociobiologist had suggested, are our genes wearing us? Can we break away to a more egalitarian interaction between husband and wife? If we cannot, American marriage will continue to de-eroticize, because conceptive and genetic imperatives will have been met and marriage will become a state of maintenance in the evolutionary scheme of things.

Certainly, there is little value for intimacy when human-eating animals lurked behind us as we copulated. Get together, get it on, get out, and live to copulate again. The stress of our modern world seems to create symbolic human eaters and we behave from our neurohormonal past patterns, with men as hunters and women who are kept and who raise the children. Intimacy then plays the role of providing a place for child-rearing, not for providing sexual fulfillment for the cave owners. Are we victims of this mammalian past, or do we have a choice?

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Osteoarthrosis is a degenerative joint disorder and evidence of this may be seen in joints as early as the twenties and by the forties 90 per cent of us have some signs. However, eventually only a third of those with this condition show symptoms.

It is so common and increases with age that it is regarded as a degenerative disorder, that is a wearing out process. Our joints are lined with cartilage or gristle, a smooth tissue that enables the bone surfaces forming the joint to move easily over each other.

This is living tissue and due to the constant wear and tear and the friction imposed on the surface of the cartilage, particularly in the weight bearing joints, it is constantly wearing out and degenerating but at the same time it is being replaced.

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The cause is unknown although it has been thought to be one of the auto-immune diseases where the body becomes allergic to its own tissues, producing antibodies which attach to and start to destroy those tissues.

The symptoms are diarrhoea with the passage of blood and mucus. Mild cases occur with little effect on general health but, in severe cases, there may be great weight loss, severe illness and even death.

Associated with the bowel disorder there are sometimes seen various inflammatory conditions of the eyes and a type of arthritis similar to rheumatoid arthritis. Inflammation of the lower joints of the spine may mimic the condition known as ankylosing spondylitis and lead to permanent stiffness of the spine.

The diagnosis can usually be confirmed by X-ray of the bowel and sigmoidoscopy, where an instrument is passed through the rectum and, under direct vision, the lower bowel can be inspected.

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The cause of this distressing condition is unknown, but current theory believes it is due to some organic change in the brain. Whether this comes from some inherited factor, some change which occurs before, during or after birth is uncertain. Some of these children are mentally retarded: others have normal or even above normal IQs.

The condition may be mild or severe. It is a disorder of infancy and most will become obvious before two and a half; 80 per cent of cases are boys.

These children seem to be locked into a world of their own, where others cannot enter. They have great difficulty with language. A few will never learn to speak but most will develop some language skills, but still have difficulty in communicating.

They strongly resist learning. Many do not like to be touched. These children seem not to recognise emotion in others and their faces may be blank most of the time, seeming not to show interest, happiness or sadness.

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Respect the fact that your exclusive inside knowledge makes you, without a doubt, the best judge of what is best for you. Your practitioner’s knowledge is important, but not of this kind. It consists of facts that can be shared. Provided these are explained properly, there is no reason why you should not understand the facts that are important to your case, as I have already told you.

So—find out all the alternatives, and the advantages and disadvantages of each. Don’t just let your practitioner tell you what to do. You make the best decision you can at the time. Always be prepared to revise it later in the light of new knowledge, experience or feelings. Summed up like that it sounds easy. You and I know it isn’t: it’s very, very difficult. Try anyway— remem-I he raft?

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