Health News and Information

It would be ridiculous to suggest that old people do not have physical disabilities. Many more old people have osteoarthritis, a degenerate disease of the joints, than young people, and consequently find movement difficult or painful or both. Today, medicine can offer you help in coping with this uncomfortable disease but you need to start coping in middle age if you find that you have persisting pain in your joints or marked stiffness. If you are overweight, eat less and reduce your weight. Adjust your lifestyle to minimize the disability. See your doctor, who may prescribe drugs, the most useful and cheapest of which is aspirin. Unfortunately, osteoarthritis is slowly progressive, so that in old age your disability may increase. If your hip or knee joints are affected, modern surgery can make you mobile and without pain by replacing your damaged joints with plastic covers, or by fixing the joint in the most comfortable and useful position.

Most men, in their middle years, have married, have
had children, have established themselves in a job, and have purchased (or largely purchased) a house, a car, and the other household mechanical contrivances which modern society believes are necessities. Established in these ways, they might be expected to have reached an equilibrium in their emotional, sexual, and social lives, and be able to look forward to some years of enjoyable activity before the inevitability of old age slows them down.

Yet in our society many men in their middle years, between the ages of 40 and 65, are not in emotional balance. For many, some part of the middle years are years of emotional stress, anxiety, and instability. For others, the diseases of affluence, coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, and lung cancer may strike, often unexpectedly, and either kill the man or reduce his capacity for activity and enjoyment.

Of the many hazards in these years, four conditions seem to be the most common and the most important. All seem to be influenced by our way of life, as all are less common in developing countries, with different cultural values. They are the crisis of adjusting to middle age, coronary heart disease, high blood pressure (hypertension), and increasing obesity.

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In men, gonorrhoea is diagnosed by taking a specimen of the urethral discharge, and placing it on a slide. After appropriate staining, the slide is examined under a microscope, when clusters of bean-shaped gonococci, which seem to prefer to lie in pairs, are found inside pus cells. In women, the diagnosis is often more difficult and, when gonorrhoea is suspected, smears are usually taken from the woman’s urethra, upper vagina, and cervix. These smears are placed on special glass dishes which contain a nutrient material and the dishes are heated, or incubated, for two days. In this way, any gonococci present will grow, and the growth will be seen on the material in the dish. If a specimen from this material is then examined under a microscope the typical bean-shaped germs of gonorrhoea can be identified.

With the diagnosis made, treatment can be started. If you have acquired gonorrhoea, you can help stop the disease spreading by persuading the person who infected you to be seen by a doctor so that she (or he) may be treated.

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With the squeeze, the urge to ejaculate goes. The woman now waits until the man feels no desire to ejaculate, but still has an erection. Then, at his signal, she again stimulates his penis, again waiting for his signal to stop, and again preventing him from ejaculating by using the squeeze technique at the appropriate time.

The period of stimulation, then squeeze, then restimulation is made over 15 to 20 minutes of sex-play; until the man decides that he would like to go on to orgasm. Most couples manage quite quickly to ‘start and stop’ for four or five times before the man has an orgasm.

The objective of the stimulation-squeeze-restimulation is to help the man to identify a state of sexual excitement, which he can sustain, without the need to go into the next phase of sexual tension release, namely orgasm and ejaculation. In other words, it helps him to perceive when he reaches the late plateau phase, and to retrain his higher brain centre to re-establish control over the ejaculatory reflex.

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Not all men would agree! Because of their upbringing, which identified certain functions as appropriate for women and others for men, some men are afraid to become involved in this way, feeling it diminishes their masculinity.

Happily, more and more men are sharing with their pregnant partners the experiences, traumas, and joys of pregnancy and parenthood.

To meet the pregnant couple’s expectations, many hospitals and concerned organizations provide educational classes at which films of pregnancy and childbirth are shown and at which questions can be asked and answered. Books are available so that both expectant parents can read about the changes which occur during pregnancy and about the process of labour.

Expectant fathers are becoming increasingly supportive during pregnancy. In certain areas their support and understanding can aid their partner considerably and reduce her discomfort or anxiety.

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