General Health

Drugs developed from the rauwolfia plant have long been used in treating this condition.

Unfortunately, they may make the person drowsy and can induce depression. Recently, they have come under suspicion of causing breast cancer and so are not often used in women.

There are a great number of drugs available to treat hypertension and this very number indicates that no one drug is satisfactory in all cases. New drugs are continually being introduced. Some are abandoned as new ones appear and others retain their usefulness but in a limited way.

The thiazide diuretics may be used alone or in combination. These drugs wash sodium, and so water, out of the body. They are used in congestive heart failure to rid the body of oedema and can lower the blood pressure in mild hypertension.

As well as sodium and water, they also rid the body of potassium and this can cause problems, leading to tiredness, cramps or heart irregularities. Extra potassium may need to be taken as tablets, so as to replace this loss or other drugs which retain potassium may be combined with the diuretic.

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Now let’s look at the numbers for heart disease from that same report. Estrogen replacement therapy cuts that same 50-year-old woman’s risk of heart disease from 46.1% to 34.2%. Since the risk of heart disease is so great to begin with, this reduction is important and could save many lives. Some say the reduction in heart disease risk with estrogen therapy is even greater than these numbers indicate (perhaps as much as 50%!), but at this point there is no solid proof But before you get too excited, consider this: if you add progesterone to the hormone therapy, which many do (for reasons to be discussed below), the heart disease benefits are blunted. By how much, no one knows for sure. All we do know is that some of the benefits that estrogen confers on heart health, such as reducing cholesterol, are partially negated by progesterone. The PEPI study mentioned earlier suggests that the negative impact of progesterone on heart disease risk is quite small, however and that when natural progesterone is used instead of a synthetic form, the cardiovascular benefits are almost as good as with estrogen alone.

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Indomethacin, mainly used in the rheumatic disorders, is of some benefit to others, and cyproheptadine, an anti-allergy drug, can also produce benefit.
Lithium, used to treat manic depressive disorders and some cases of reactive depression, can also help some sufferers.

Pain-relieving drugs for the acute attack do offer some relief but the pain is usually so severe it may not respond except to the narcotic drugs and this can pose a problem of dependence.

Ergotamine, the mainstay of the treatment of acute migraine, is also of value in cutting short the pain of cluster headache, if taken early enough.
For those who fail to respond to these measures, surgery has been used to cut the sensory nerves carrying the pain-sensitive fibres.

Breathing in pure oxygen for several minutes may also be of value in aborting an attack and some sufferers have found relief by having an oxygen cylinder at home for this purpose.

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Colchicine extracted from a plant has been used to treat gout from about the sixth century. It is still used and is effective. Unfortunately, it may cause vomiting and diarrhoea and has been superseded by more effective drugs.

The anti-inflammatory drugs used with such success in the rheumatic disorders are also effective in gout. These include phenylbutazone, in-domethicin and ibuprofen.

If given in proper dosage, they should start to relieve the pain within hours and bring total relief within 48 to 72 hours.
Once the diagnosis has been made and the level of uric acid in the blood found to be elevated, a decision about long-term treatment must be made. If the blood level is only moderate, the decision can be delayed but, if the level is high, treatment to lower it is required to prevent long-term risks.

The problem with gout is that either too much uric acid is produced or too little is excreted by the kidneys. It is possible to determine which by estimating the excretion over 24 hours.

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General health