Health tips for better life

Well, it’s that time of the decade again and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is going through it ritual of revising the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Let’s be clear why this is important. For better of worse, the DSM is like a bible, containing words of wisdom on which clusters of symptoms represent which disorders. The idea is to do away with the zip code lottery of diagnosis. In one US state you might be diagnosed as a bit eccentric. With the same behavior in a different state, you might be considered a danger to the community and committed to care. With the DSM as a guide, you hope to get the same diagnosis no matter who the patient is, where he or she may be found and who the doctor is. Unfortunately, the APA is caught in a terrible conflict of interest. The majority of its members regularly receive gifts and incentives from the drug manufacturers. This benevolence is designed to encourage the use of the relevant drugs. When these same doctors sit down to discuss diagnoses and which drugs to recommend, they cannot forget all the past generosity. It inevitably influences their decisions. More importantly, if particular drugs receive approval in the DSM, this represents several billion dollars in revenue. The manufacturers therefore spend heavily in trying to ensure their drugs continue to be linked to the relevant disorders. The result is the DSM is full of disorders that are only poorly defined and linked to drugs often little more effective than placebos.

If we go back sixty years, psychiatry in the US was still running in parallel with the European tradition of scientific method. This produced carefully defined diagnoses for general conditions, leaving practitioners with some flexibility to take a common sense view of the individual patient. Hence, the technical term might be a “nervous breakdown” which is a catch-all definition for anyone who has a few problems. But as the pharmaceutical industry used its economic power, these broad definitions were increasingly broken down into separate classes of disorder. As each new batch of disorders was defined, the manufacturers produced drugs specifically targeting each new disorder. In reality, people are still having nervous breakdowns and, truth be told, all the major drugs are interchangeable because the separate disorders are really only one or two basic types.

What prompted this redefinition of terms? Firstly, the introduction of the benzodiazepines. The manufacturers wanted a distinction between anxiety disorders and depression for marketing purposes. Once the APA gave in, it was the slippery slope to the present confused mess. As everyone knows, all depression has elements of anxiety and panic, just as anxiety and panic are indistinguishable from elements in depression. Recent surveys have found doctors routinely prescribing benzodiazepines such as xanax regardless of the diagnosis as anxiety or depression, and finding the same excellent results. Secondly, the APA wanted to move away from Freudian analysis and to ground diagnosis in observable symptoms. This led to the introduction of “major depression” and “bipolar disorder” which lump different sets of symptoms together in either a stable or unstable form. As the SSRIs came in as treatments for major depression, the pressure to keep inventing new disorders grew. Now all the anxiety and panic disorders are multiplying. Needless to say, xanax remains the most effective treatment no matter what labels are attached to the symptoms. If you are anxious, xanax is the answer. Sadly, the APA will not sympathize with such a simple view of the world.

There are two interesting facts about solar energy that people don’t often consider.

First, all energy on earth is solar energy in one form or another. The only difference is that solar electricity uses this energy immediately, while other forms lock it away until it is released through combustion (such as burning of coal, oil or wood).

Second, the idea of using sunlight as a direct energy source is far from new. Methods of employing direct sunlight as a form of utility energy have been the object of experimentation for at least 2,000 years. However, the idea of solar electricity is a fairly new concept that only got traction about sixty years ago. It was in the late 1940s that the first practical solar cells were finally developed.

For many years, the cost of solar electric power made it impractical to use on a large scale, despite the fact that the earth’s surface receives 1,000 kilowatts of energy per square yard of surface every sunny day. The methods and materials required to manufacture the panels were initially very expensive, meaning that solar electricity cost several times what consumers paid for utility energy from oil and coal-fired plants.

That gap is closing rapidly however, partially due to cheaper and more efficient methods of manufacturing solar panels and partially due to increased efficiency of the panels themselves. Current trends indicate that solar electricity will reach grid parity meaning that it will be competitive price-wise with other forms of electrical energy by the year 2020.

Currently, the major challenge facing the solar energy industry (aside from the oil and coal industries and their Washington D.C. lobbyists) is how to get electricity from a generating plant to the communities that need it. The locations in the U.S. that are most suitable for producing solar electricity are far from most major population centers (the exception being those in the Southwest such as Las Vegas and Phoenix) and would require massive and expensive infrastructure projects in order to connect them to the existing grid.

The most likely solution is to install miniature solar generation equipment on individual buildings and homes as has been done in Germany for several years. This would provide an added benefit to homeowners who could feed their excess electricity back into the grid and actually be paid for it, effectively brining their solar energy costs to zero.

An increasing percentage of the older population are boomers. When they started off their lives back in the period just after the war, the average life expectancy was depressingly low. As they grew up, they watched their ageing relatives dropping around them. Never a year went by without a grandparent, great uncle or more recent family disappearing from view. Walking around the neighborhood and talking at school also produced a familiar story. Older men retired, seemed to shrivel up and were dead a few months later. Facts were facts. Men just died young. The last sixty years has seen a quiet revolution. It’s partly improved nutrition, better health care and a better, cleaner and safer environment. But it’s also a change in attitude. Back in the 1940′s and 50′s, men were the breadwinners. When they stopped earning the bread, they had done their job and could go with a clear conscience. Now the attitude is to enjoy life to the full for as long as there are days to live. People have been planning for their retirements. They have their 401(k) plans. Sure, these plans have taken a beating during this latest recession. But folks still plan on plenty of “rest and recuperation” after they stop work. R&R was old army slang for sex. Nothing changes. Older men still want their sex.

The reality that men would die young has been displaced. US men can now expect to live to an average age of 76. But most of the scientific evidence suggests that erectile dysfunction grows more common with age. Obviously men of three score and ten years and more will experience the most difficulty – assuming they can find willing partners, of course. All of which brings us to Richard Roden who, at the ripe old age of 71, has just become the oldest man in the UK to father twins. Obviously we should offer congratulations. This gives him a total of twelve children with different mothers. His current wife is only 25 and the happy couple are confidently talking about adding to the family. Ignoring the questions of finance – it’s expensive to bring up children – and the morality of bringing children into the world when you know you have only a few years to live as their parent, let’s all adjust to the new reality. Terry Jones, one of the Monty Python crew, leads an ever increasing pack of men in their late sixties and seventies who are repeating the fatherhood experience.

The men who talk openly about their sex lives usually deny the help of viagra. They put down their continued potency to their healthy lifestyles. They eat modestly, never drink to excess, do not smoke, exercise regularly, and so on. It does not matter whether this is true. They have become the new poster boys for the boomers. They are the living proof there is life after retirement. They are the hope for the future. And if it does turn out that the lifestyle is not as healthy and there are problems, there’s always viagra to make sure the news story comes out right in the end. If this is you, buy viagra and keep your sex life going. More importantly, stop thinking about age. Just be yourself and have fun.