MY UNFORGETTABLE CASES ( This column is updated regularly )

I am an India-based Pediatrician, running a rural health clinic for the past 30 years.
Although qualified in Pediatrics, I have also read Ayurveda, Homeopathy, Vedic Astrology, Yoga & Herbal Medicine.

I now use Alternative Therapy to suplement my Allopathic treatment, often with the most interesting results!

In this column, I shall be describing real-life cases which I have seen and treated in the course of my practice.
I shall be updating this column regularly, so stay tuned!
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GENITO-URINARY INFECTIONS IN WOMEN.

A surprising number of girls and women suffer from mild to moderate
infection of the genital organs and / or bladder and urethra.

Many of the cases I come across have a rather chronic infection or a repeated one.

Surprising also, is the fact that most cases are usually treated with a
rather powerfulantibiotic, which controls the current infection, but doesn't really treat the problem.

I am a Pediatrician, so I get to see these cases rather 'laterally',
never directly, as it were.
During a consultation for her child, a mother often asks about her own problem. Some mothers ask if I would help out a girl or lady in her family, and so on.

If it's about a genito-urinary thing, I can hardly refuse, seeing that
there are very few lady doctors in my vicinity!

So by default, as it were, I've learned that in such cases:

* It is necessary to look for and treat a concurrent vaginal infection, which is often the CAUSE of a urinary infection. This means that vaginal pessaries ( also called suppositories ) are needed, often on a long-term basis, for some days every month.
* Herbal medicines which contain some of the following : Sepia,
Punarnava, Berberis, Sabal serrulata, Echinacea purpura, Cantharis,
Butea frondosa ( and many others ) should be used concurrently with any
allopathic treatment, for a quicker and better cure.

As an Illustration, I am describing this case which I saw in the summer
of 2005:

Sarita bai, a 40+ lady and mother of two, who works as a maid in my neighbour's house, sought my help a couple of years ago.
She had been suffering from bouts of painful and frequent urination for
about a week.

Enquiry revealed that she had been getting this complaint off and on
for the past one year.
She was given a potent antibiotic every time by the Doctor at the local
Government hospital. This would stop the complaint in a day or two, and
she would be okay until her next bout of infection.

This time however, the antibiotic didn't work like usual and she came
to me, asking what she should do.

Her urine showed plenty of pus cells. She also gave a history of a white discharge from her vagina, with a lot of itch.

I gave her a combination of Butea frondosa, Punarnava, Sepia and
Berberis and told her to take the antibiotic for a few days more.
I also asked her to use a vaginal pessary with Clotriamzole,
metronidazole and an antiseptic in it.

She had never heard of vaginal pessaries before and I had to explain how to use them. She was astonished at the idea!

This confirmed my suspicion that many girls and women were quite
unaware that this form of treatment existed. So I went down to our local college and carried out an informal survey by talking to first and second-year college girls. I found more than 75% of them hadn't heard of vaginal pessaries and out of some who had, a few thought they had to do with family planning!

Sarita bai's symptoms reduced the next day so I continued the same treatment, stopping the antibiotic after a few days.
She took the herbal formula for about a month.

When she gets a vaginal discharge or itch ( her husband is okay and has
never had any symptoms - I got him examined too ), she uses the pessaries for a week or so.

Her urine is clear and she has not had urinary problems sinc then.

I would like to emphasise that pessaries often help tremendously in genito-urinary infections and so do many herbs! Also, many women in India are still not aware that an easy treatment for vaginal
infections, in the form of pessaries, is available.

Allopathic doctors are aware of pessaries, no doubt but I feel a wider
campaign of awareness is needed, including among doctors of non-allopathic disciplines.

Gynaecologists.....are you listening?

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Sumedha, a girl of 3 years, was extremely impatient by nature.

She would begin to cry at the slightest provocation and everytime there was a delay of more than a few seconds to fullfil her demands, she would open her mouth to cry loudly and then.....hold her breath, turn blue and limp.

That is, she would get what are called classical 'breath-holding spells'.

Her frightened parents had tried many medicines, but nothing seemed to work.

I put her on 'Impatiens', a Bach flower remedy, along with extracts of 'Passiflora' and 'Chamomilla'.

Initially, there was an aggravation of the symptoms, which I controlled with Phenobarbitone, a prescription medicine, which was discontinued after 3 weeks, when the aggravation subsided.

Her impatience, which was the root cause of her Hyperactivity, showed a remarkable reduction.

She has been on this medication for the past two years, with excellent results.
However, a temporary discontinuation of medication causes her to relapse, so we have put her on this regimen on a long-term basis.

Because these remedies have absolutely no side-effects, they can safely be given on a long-term basis.

10.05.07
BABY with the EVENING COLIC
Recently I was called upon to examine a baby about a month old, who used to cry ( scream, actually ) towards late evening.
He was otherwise a very healthy and placid baby, born of a normal delivery and a normal pregnancy.
He was being adequately nursed by his mother, and had a normal sleep pattern. As a rule, he was an uncomplaining child, happy to be in the world he had just come into.
But something seemed to overtake him at sunset, for every evening, he would refuse to sleep, and instead would begin screaming, intermittently and angrily at first, progressing over an hour to a constant barrage of piteous screams, which it seemed would never stop!
But stop they did, when night fell, out of exhaustion or relief, his mother did not know.

I observed this behviour one evening and it was apparent to me that all this hullabaloo was on account of 'evening colic', a euphemistic medical term that hides behind it the fact that medical science is not fully agreed upon what causes it and what it actually is all about.
We only know that there seems to be some 'colicky pain' in a baby's tummy, which stops on its own by the time the baby grows to about 3 months or so.
But until it gets to that age, it's a daily drama of a varying spell of tightly-clenched fisty screaming!

Well, I have found that giving chamomilla and stopping all other medicines often gives the best results.
So I told this baby's mother to put away the dozen or so bottles of prescription and other medicines which she'd acquired over the past one month, and give instead, a globule of chamomilla ( 6 x potency ) dissolved in 5 ml water, 1 ml at a time, every 10 mins, until the baby stopped screaming and unclenched his fists.

As expected, the baby stopped his incessant crying after about 30 mins.
I told her to give this remedy every day until required.
A week later she phoned in to say that the baby was quite all right and hardly needed any treatment now!

01.05.07
THE OLD MAN AND HIS KNEES A few years ago, an old man brought his grandson to me for treatment. Getting up to leave after I had finished treating the boy, he casually asked me if I could give him something for his painful knees.
I was loathe to give him a prescription medicine in view of his advanced age ( he must have been around eighty ). Instead, I thought of a remedy I had only read about but never used until then and I told him to cover his swollen knees with the fresh leaves of Calotropis gigantea, a shrub which grows abundantly all over India, and leave them on overnight.
He did that, and when he brought his grandson for his follow-up a week later, reported a very satisfactory reduction of both pain and swelling in his knees.
Ever since, I have been advocating this non-invasive and very cheap ( as a matter of fact, free ) method of treating swollen and painful joints, to whichever patients of arthritis I get to see.
Some follow it, and get better without any hassle whatsoever.
Others, who feel that I am stretching the limits of their credibility, don't, and so miss out on a very simple and effective method of arthritis-control. I feel sorry for them.
You could try this treatment too, if you ever need it and are able to get the leaves of this plant, where you live.

30.04.07
SMOKE FROM THE 'CHULHA', or the wooden stove used for cooking all over rural India causes distressing eye problems for many women working in poorly-ventilated mud homes.
As a result, I get to see young and old women with red eyes and puffy eyelids, quite often.

Smoke from burning firewood causes conjunctival inflammation, which sometimes progresses to chronic lachrymal sac infection, a persistent condition often needing surgery, because medicines are said to give only a temporary and partial relief.

However, about ten years ago, I came across a bottle of eyedrops containing a herb called [EUPHRASIA OFFICINALIS[/B] and thought of trying it out in a particularly resistent case of lachrymal sac infection.
To my delight, it worked very well.
The old lady's eyes cleared within a week and remained free of infection for as long as she used the eye drops.

Since then, I have used Euphrasia eye drops in many cases, always with good result.
Many an operation has been prevented by these eye drops, certainly.

26.04.07
RAMCHANDRA, who couldn't stop coughing at night...

This boy of eight years is usually quite healthy. He has a good appetite and has hardly ever fallen ill.
Last month however, he began to cough, mostly at night, while he was asleep.
Clinically, he was found to be quite normal.
He was given all the routine medicines one would give in such a case, for symptomatic relief, but they gave him no relief. In fact, his nocturnal spasms increased in frequency and duration, and he began to sleep very poorly because of them.
Investigations turned in negative reports.

Finally, more out of having run out of medicines to give him, I gave him a potentised herbal extract of Artemisia vulgaris, called Cina in Homeopathy, as a routine de-worming exercise.
From the next day, he began to pass bunches of small wriggling worms from his anus. By the end of the week he must have passed more than two hundred of them! ( And mind you, he had been given a course of Mebendazole, a worm medicine, barely a month before ).

Simultaneously, the nocturnal spasms reduced and a week later, the cough stopped altogether.

In this case, the cough was due to the larvae of thread ( pin ) worms, which used to migrate through his lungs and moult at night, thus causing irritation in his windpipes and lung cells!
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KAMALA, who came limping in....

Last Tuesday, as I was about to close for the day, I suddenly heard loud wailing coming from the corner of the road where my Clinic is located.
Going out to investigate, I saw the spectacle of a girl of about ten years, being ( very reluctantly ) dragged in the direction of my clinic.
She was limping, or rather, hopping along on one foot, being supported on either side by two people who I assumed were her parents.

They hauled her in, screaming and protesting and I saw an abscess on the undersurface of her affected foot : she had stepped barefoot, into a thorny bush some 7 days ago and a fistful of very tiny thorns had lodged themselves in the sole of the foot.
She wouldn't let me touch it, or even get anywhere near her foot, nor even talk to me. All she would tell me, between sobs, was that her name was Kamala. I felt sorry for her.

I managed to give her an injection of tetanus toxoid, but that is all she would let me do.
The thorns were so tiny that it wouldn't have been possible to draw them out one by one, anyway.

So I gave her an antibiotic ( to help treat the infection ), some analgesics and a few globules of Ledum palustre, the wonder herb which I knew would help extrude the thorns of their own.
Advising them to wash the affected foot as often as they could, I then sent them home, telling them to return the next morning.

They didn't come the next morning. Nor the morning after that, either.
I had almost forgotten Kamala, when all of a sudden, this morning, a bright and chirpy girl bounced into my clinic. She was followed by her smiling mother.

It was obvious that Ledum had done its work beautifully. The wound had healed almost completely and there was no pain and swelling at all, which meant there was no thorn left in it.

Her mother handed me my fees and thanked me profusely.
And I, on my part, sent up a silent prayer of thanksgiving to Mother Nature! (19-04-2007)
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SWATI, the Obese Bride :

Swati is an Indian Mother-of-two, living now in the US, a stay-at-home Mom and wife of an Engineer working in one of USA's top Software companies.
She is well-settled and very happy today, but she wasn't always happy, nor did she have hopes of being 'well-settled' ( as the Indian saying goes ) in life.... in fact, during her college years, her middle class parents in India used to worry whether they would ever find a groom for their overweight, yet pretty, daughter!

For you see, right since her early childhood, Swati was what we euphemistically call 'a bonny baby'. This look suited her in primary school, where she was looked upon as a 'healthy' girl.
Since she was good at games, nobody, least of all her parents, thought her 'slight overweight' abnormal.

Swati always had a voracious appetite. The more she played on her school ground, the hungrier she got, and the more she ate.
So she ate her way to 52 kg ( 114 pounds ) by the time she was ten.
And her weight continued to increase alarmingly through her teens, too.

Being bright academically, she took up the Science stream in College and graduated in Zoology with a first class. Now she was twenty years old, and her weight was nearing 90 kg, though she tried her best to fight weight increase by trying different diets ( a different one every month! ), regular visits to the gym ( which made her more hungry at dinner time )and solitary walks in the park, during which she used to draw derisive comments and sniggers from boys of her age and other passers-by.

She was the only child of her parents and the apple of their eye. They despaired for her and wondered how they were ever going to be able to get a suitable groom for her.
Loathe though they were to do it, they looked for 'matching weight' grooms, too. But to no avail. They soon discovered that obese grooms were unwilling to look at obese brides!

So they considered medical treatment, as a last resort. Unfortunately for them, anti-obesity drugs did not suit Swati, for she they caused a lot of side-effects in her.
So they looked around for alternatives, and this search led them to me.......

I put Swati on a regimen of FUCUS VESICULOSIS, initially in a high dose and told her to continue her weight-reduction exercises as usual.
Within 3 months, she had begun to loose weight and now she was not so afraid of standing on the weighing machine!

Her confidence in this regimen increased and she got into it body and spirit. Now I suggested some 'Pranayam' and Yoga too, which she did faithfully every day.

Well, after one year, her weight was a more acceptable 80 kg ( 176 lbs ).
She was now 22 years old, and doing her MBA.

By the time she finished her MBA course, Swati was an attractive 67 kg...... and cut a very favourable impression on people with her pleasing personality.
She was now working in a Multinational Bank, and was often on the Net.
She met her future groom ( Ashish ) on the Net, in a marriage forum for Indians, where he was looking for an Indian bride.

They got talking to each other and met up in Mumbai, when he flew down a few months later.
Draped in a beautiful saree, she captured his heart, too.
Their parents gave their approval, and soon Swati and Ashish were married in style, at a gala ceremony, in his native town in South India.

After a few months, after her visa was cleared, Ashish proudly took his bride to the US!

Post script : Swati's weight hovers in the 62-67 kg range and she still takes Fucus vesiculosis, intermittently, when she feels she needs it. ( 20-04-2007 )