Archive for ◊ December, 2010 ◊

Aphrodisiacs, Your Sex Drive, and Medications
Author:
• Friday, December 17th, 2010

Let’s be clear from the get-go: there are not any foods that will ramp up sex drive. What you need is a healthy diet that will stabilize your physical and mental health, as well as regular exercise. However, there are some foods that might improve sexual ability with a stretch of the imagination, and, if you don’t believe that aphrodisiacs are mythical, there are some convincing enough to at least get the placebo effect.

But the fact is, aside from medicine or long-term behavioral changes, there isn’t much you can do to improve your sex. Still, let’s go through the more interesting options and the ones that are important to avoid.

Stuff that MIGHT Work

Evidence is anecdotal at best, but try these:

Yohimbe - A vine said to be a “natural viagra“. Personal accounts back this up and there is no health drawback.
Chickpeas – Garbonzos are recommended by the Kama Suttra to give men stamina. Either way, hummus is delicious and healthy. Why not eat it every day?
Truffle – “Experts” claim that truffle emit sex pheromones, but in reality they just smell vaguely musky. If it works, it works though.
Chocolate – The caffeine and antioxidants might improve sex given some time, but more, the creamy, silky taste is more like to get people in the mood. Sex is about sensory experience, and chocolate has it all: smell, taste, texture, and even the sound of biting into a piece or slurping it hot.
Alcohol - Don’t overdue it. A binge won’t help. But, a small taste or even smell-such as cooking a meal with brandy-will open up the amorous parts of the brain and put you in a mood.

Stuff that DOESN’T Work

Avoid the following:

Spanish Fly – Will aggravate your urinary tract, causing you to writhe in pain.
Oysters – High mercury levels can be dangerous. Though it works because it looks like the vulva.
Beef – You will not take on the properties of the bull. Red meat will lower your sex drive.
Rabbit – No truth to this one, and it tastes bad!

Meat will harm your sex drive more than help it.

Any Testicles – This does not work. Few enjoy the experience.

Alcohol – Seriously, don’t have a whole drink before. It could ruin you!

Exotics

People tend to think exotic foods, “oriental” delicacies, and things that are hard to pronounce are aphrodisiacs. This believe comes from a deeply embedded archaic racism that suggested non-Europeans were more basic and lustful. Now we attribute it to their food. Don’t fall into this expensive trap.

Medicine

This is the only true aphrodisiac out there that works short-term. As science has advanced, we have gotten more and more options. The safest and most effective for erectile dysfunction Sufferers out there is Levitra. It comes in a simple little pill and will give you robust confidence and stamina to find boudoir bliss and satisfy your partner. For women, there are studies suggesting that Levitra may make it easier to orgasm. Talk to your doctor first, but there is a much better chance of Levitra working than anything above, and, pill-for-pill, pound-for-pound, it’s cheaper.

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Quick Smoking Easy and Stay Thin
Author:
• Friday, December 17th, 2010

Studies have consistently shown that smokers who have tried and failed many times before find success in quitting with this medication. That’s right, not only does it help you to lose weight, it also makes it easier to quit smoking. CB1 inhibitors suppress appetite, which allows you to make better decisions for weight and health. The same is true of smoking addiction. Your cravings will be suppressed, allowing you to go through the withdrawal period more easily.

Even better, there is none of the weight gain that usually comes with quitting smoking.

The common link between these two things is something called the Endocannabinoid System (EC System). This is the system in your body that balances your energy using food and energy output. The same system is suspected to be involved in tobacco and drug dependence.

While tobacco suppresses the appetite to some degree, when you go of cigarettes your normal appetite doesn’t return. All that smoking has unbalanced your EC System. Your CB1 receptors in the brain and fat cells aren’t quite right anymore, so you tend to eat a lot more and exercise less just after you quit.

CB1 inhibitors have been shown to suppress these CB1 receptors’ negative influence on your eating habits.

While not everyone gains a lot of weight after quitting, most people gain a little, and 10% of quitters gain more than 30 lbs. Your health will still be improved and in the long-term, it will be easier to exercise and lose that weight, so even if you don’t want medicinal help, it is definitely worth it. There are some good tips that will help keep the weight off as well: exercise more, avoid snacks, and limit the amount of alcohol drinking you do for a few weeks.

The exercise part doesn’t have to be hard at all. Just replace some of the times where you would have smoked with a walk.

After dinner? Take a walk.

Break from work? Stroll around.

Something frustrating you? Toddle about the neighborhood for 5 minutes.

Make sure not to be too spartan. You can still have a snack or a treat once in a while. Limiting yourself completely will likely make you go overboard when something saps your willpower.

As far as the withdrawal symptoms, you’ll have to get help elsewhere for those. You will still experience the hand tingling, sweating, cramping, headaches, and coughing. You might get insomnia, feel confused, have some anxiety, and experience some troubling moods too, but it they will pass and you will be healthier and, most likely, happier in the end.

If you’re worried about the side effects of Acomplia, keep in mind that the side effects of smoking are a lot worse. If gaining 30 lbs will put you into the obese zone, then it might be better to risk the minimal side effects of Acomplia anyhow.

If you still aren’t sure that taking Acomplia to quit is the right thing, think about only taking 5 mg doses instead of 20 mg doses. 20 mg is a lot more effective, but 5 will still help you a lot, and you are pretty unlikely to experience any bad side effects.

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Oh, cuddly furry squirrels!
Author:
• Wednesday, December 08th, 2010

One of the really great things about cartoons is how adorable they make smaller animals. Chipmunks, mice and canaries are forever doomed to be cute. Even Pep? Le Pew did wonders for the rep of skunks (at least the French branch of the family). It’s hard to say why this should be. Most of them are pests and animators really should know better. But, given a choice of the animal kingdom, small children are expected to keel over in a sentimental mush at the idea of picking one of these creatures up and giving it a hug. They are given a starring role and Toys R Us gets filled up with the stuffed furry character from the latest movie (that or you get a plastic replica with your burger).

Perhaps the animators should leave their air-conditioned offices and walk out into the Californian countryside for the inspiration for their next blockbuster. Did you see the news out of the Angeles National Forest over the last weekend? On a regular basis, the Rangers trap squirrels and other rodents. They take samples and send them off for testing. About two weeks ago these dedicated public servants caught a squirrel wandering around the Los Alamos Campsite. The results of the test just came back. This cuddly creature was carrying the plague. Needless to say, our Rangers have closed down the campsite and quarantined the area.

So let’s get technical. You all remember those boring history classes in school. Europe and the Black Death, Bubonic Plague and lots of people dying in the Middle Ages. That seemed all so yesterday, something to doze through and remember for the sake of passing the test. But the plague is very real and it’s alive and well and living in California. That said, the closure of the forest site is preventative. Keeping people away, reduces the risk. The plague is spread when we are bitten by the fleas carried by rodents and cuddly small mammals. So if one of your children touches a squirrel or lies on the grass near a tree or burrow, fleas can jump on to feed. One of the problems is that the symptoms don’t show for between 2 and 10 days, so you could be miles away before you realize. Then it’s a quick dose of Doxycycline. For maximum effect, you should take this antibiotic within the first 24 hours of the symptoms appearing. If there’s a delay, the death rate exceeds 50%. Reassuring, huh!

Keeping this article real, actual cases of the plague in the US are rare. It’s found in Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. All hospitals and clinics in the country areas hold stocks of Doxycycline ready for immediate treatment. But there are only a few cases and, in the last 20 years, there have been no deaths. That’s down to the effectiveness of Doxycycline. But don’t mistake the seriousness of this. The Rangers do not close off a part of the forested areas including campsites without a very good reason. So, if you and the family are camping, avoid squirrels and chipmunks. No matter how cute you may think they look, their fleas have a potentially fatal bite. For older couples, no outside recreational activities on the grass where fallen fleas may be waiting for new hosts. It’s not worth the risk.

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Attack with needles
Author:
• Wednesday, December 08th, 2010

The US box office is currently under assault from Saw 3D – presumably the last in the series. There’s something vaguely disturbing about the idea of not only being able to watch people perform surgery on themselves, but also to see them do it in 3D with body parts flying out of the screen at you. In this, there’s a big irony because Saw is getting all the headlines while, lurking away in the art houses, you also have 127 Hours which is a true story. You can watch a mountain climber who, when he got trapped in an isolated canyon, cut off his arm to escape.

We tell you this, not to promote self-treatment, but to introduce the idea of acupuncture. Here specialists take a set of long needles and then drive them into your skin. Unfortunately, those of you who like horror movies will be disappointed at the outcome. Instead of rivers of blood erupting from gaping wounds like the oil from a gusher, nothing appears to happen. The victims lie calmly watching the needles go in, all the while chatting about the latest fashions or the current World Series with the expert. It’s all very disappointing except, if you talk to any of the millions of people in China or South East Asia where acupuncture is a routine part of medicine, they all report excellent results from the treatment.

Indeed, in China, acupuncture is used alongside conventional anesthetic. Patients going through surgery remain conscious and discuss the finer points of the surgeon’s technique with the theater nurses. To those of us in the West, this is taking things too far. The very idea of it really does seem like the plot from a horror movie. So we are not asking you to believe in anything so extreme. Rather we come down a few notches in ambition and report the latest results of a clinical trial in Seattle. A team of dedicated scientists gathered a group of 650 people, all of whom had serious lower back pain with loss of mobility. They were divided into four groups. One received genuine acupuncture from an expert. The second was pricked by toothpicks in all the right places. The third was pricked with needles at random (faintly disconcerting). While the final group was given conventional physical therapy.

In follow-up interviews over the next twelve months, the participants were asked about the level of pain and whether there were any improvements in mobility. Less than half those receiving physical therapy reported any significant change in their condition. But 60% of those receiving the “acupuncture” treatments reported significant and lasting improvements. So the results show a very strong placebo effect for both real and simulated acupuncture. The participants were prepared to believe they were going to find relief, and that’s what they got. This strongly suggests the mind is a key player when it comes to lower back pain and, if people believe in the treatment, they get up to twelve months of benefit. For those who cannot believe, there’s always Ultram which offers the mind relief through chemistry. It works. Your choice: needles or Ultram? No contest!

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