Humor is healthy

The repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a goal of Nebraska’s Republican Congressmen. Unfortunately, these GOP loyalists have been working so fervently on their own improved, cost efficient, and comprehensive, post repeal health care plans (wink, cough) that they have neglected to enumerate the many compelling reasons for repeal itself. Here are a few that they have failed to pass on to their constituents.

1. Repeal will establish the status quo. Tough minded private insurers can again deny health coverage to people who have been careless, inconsiderate, irresponsible, and neglectful by contracting those disgusting and avoidable medical conditions such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.

2. Some discrimination is good. Take for example the applicant for a health care policy whose medical records show a history of back problems, recurring stomach disorders, and some rascally hemorrhoids. Action taken? Insurer advises applicant to sit up straight, take Prilosec, and start scratching because the policy will not cover these problems–medical exclusions at their very best.

3. Families will be reunited. Faced with a $150,000 student loan, no job, bleeding ulcers and being removed from their parents’ health insurance policy, young people from 18 to 26 years of age will make reservations to move back into mom and pop’s basement.

4. Population control. With over 20,000 Americans dying every year due to lack of health insurance, just imagine how many more will die when the ever-rising uninsured soar past the 50 million mark–a population explosion alarmist’s dream scenario.

5. Scrapping the Care Act is charitable. When the individual mandate requiring all Americans to acquire health care is stricken by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional, we can continue to subsidize our enterprising, emergency room visiting, friends who save 20 percent of their earnings by not purchasing health insurance. How satisfying to know that our ever-increasing premium rates are contributing to good will and charity.

6. Be gone dull care! Sixty-two percent of bankruptcies in America are a result of calamitous health care costs. But why fret over catastrophic charges and permanent loss of your credit rating when insurance companies assure us that it is better to lose the farm than to die and pass on the costs to your families. Insurance companies really do prioritize customer benefits over profits–God bless them.

But not all is well. With the annulment of Obamacare (please stand and remove your hats and place them over your heart) comes the realization that many, deserving, caring lobbyists who look after our best interests will lose their jobs when repeal is consummated. It is then that the dreadful domino effect will deprive our beloved Republican Congressmen of thousands of dollars in revenue and campaign funds. And may the wind be always at their back.

Their particular Treatment As well as Prevention

Piles, also known as piles, are the dilatation, the particular stretching outside of normal size of radicles of anal veins inside anal channel. In this instance any radicle is the smallest branch of a blood abnormal vein hemorrhoids. Veins are weak compared to arteries because of the thin walls, therefore problematic veins can become drained and turned with any kind of great rear pressure. Veins have one-way valves to avoid back flow. The three anal veins are named appropriately superior, center and substandard rectal problematic veins. Obstructions or perhaps pressure boost in these problematic veins cause piles.

Piles, or perhaps hemorrhoids, appear in two types, bodily and mental. External piles are away from anus and so are skin protected. Their shade may be brown or black. Because anxiety are so loaded in the arschfick area a hemorrhoid is very painful.

The next type, internal hemorrhoids come in the interior from the anal channel, internal to the anus. They may be purple or perhaps red and have a mucous membrane protecting. They are usually uncomplicated. It isn’t uncommon for a person to own both bodily and mental hemorrhoids as well.

Hemorrhoids, any familial ailment, tend to arise among people in a family, may also be blamed on genetics. The only wildlife that get piles are those in which stand on 2 legs. Almost certainly this is as a result of rectal abnormal vein congestion because of the pull of gravity. People who are chronically irregular often have piles problems. Fighting off the urge to move your bowels at your body’s indication can bring about constipation and then piles how to get rid of hemorrhoids.

A high ingestion of beef, chicken, shrimp, hot foods and more lead to piles. The people very least likely to get piles are the types who have an increased percentage of fruit and vegetables and fibrous food within their diet. Some women get hemorrhoids during pregnancy because of the womb compressing the particular rectal problematic veins. Rectal cancer lesions may well bring about piles through preventing blood flow.

With external hemorrhoids any protuberance can be seen and also felt throughout the anus. You will see pain and discomfort inside the anal location. While stressing to discharge a stool the anguish will be even worse.

Early on, internal hemorrhoids cannot be felt. Subsequently, in advancement of the disease, the particular hemorrhoids will certainly protrude being a stool can be expelled and then retreat independently. When the problem worsens the particular protruded hemorrhoids will not likely go back.

Blood loss isn’t uncommon for sometimes type hemorrhoid. However, whenever an internal hemorrhoid is rolled away it could hemorrhage internally, into the rectum. Blood loss occurs in splashes whilst pushing in order to expel a stool. In some cases the particular bleeding may be quite bountiful. With equally types of piles there may be any mucus discharge and it will itch throughout the anus.

Hope in herbs on the rise

Despite end of the doctor's seven-week strike in which government-owned hospitals shut their doors against patients, Lagosians still patronize herbal clinics.

During the period, many patients resorted to use of herbs to treat ailments.

In Lagos State, , herbal medicine men boldly came out en masse from the cocoons of their simple 'clinics' to gain street limelight promoting many products, which gained new heights in patronage by people of different ages, gender, education and income levels.

At Mushin, Agege, Ojo, Badagry and Mile 12, areas which Daily Independent visited, scores of herbal drug marketers were seen displaying processed and semi-processed medicines which they claimed could cure pile, hypertension, diabetes, malaria, hernia, diarrhoea, gonorrheoea, infertility and many other ailments.

Sule Wonaka, indigene of Zamfara State, who has been marketing herbal drugs in Lagos since 2000, boasted the power of herbs to cure all ailments. According to the 30-year-old, who said he inherited knowledge about traditional medicine from his grandfather, who taught him, "herbal remedies for irregular menstruation, ovarian cysts, tooth ache, deafness, skin diseases, fibroids and barreness." Confidently, he added: "I can use the root of plantain, extracts from cabbage leaves and bitter leaf to treat obesity and diabetes."

All the herbal medicine traders have bottles loaded with pieces of wood and medicinal powder which they stated if blended with water, lime, lemon juice, citrus or strong spirit become therapeutic wonder.

A co-trader, who plies his trade at the popular Mile 12 Market, is Ibrahim Borno. He explained that the bark, wood and latex of Iroko, a popular tree in the rain forest of Nigeria, can be used for the treatment of hernia while its powdered bark is used as antiseptic or for wound or dressing. Bark of oak, teak, acacia, bramble, nim, shea butter and rubber trees are said to be raw materials for health-giving drugs.

Middle-aged Fatimo Salawu was holding a jar of herbal drug bought at Iyana Oba, Ojo, Lagos, when Daily Independent accosted her a fortnight ago. The mother of four disclosed that her ailment was painful monthly periods which western medicine could not alleviate satisfactorily. "But since I started taking this herb about six months ago, I enjoy comfort and peace whenever my 'visitor' arrives," she said.

But the medical challenge of 38-year-old Queen Okafor, who lives at Idi-Oro, Mushin, Lagos, is not related with body pain, but infertility, an emotional trauma, especially in a society such as ours that cherishes children and considers infertile women almost as social misfits. Even though she bought herbal drug, she confided in the reporter that she just wanted to experiment or test its efficacy because doctors had tried their best possible on her health in the past eight years, but no cheery result yet. "I have been married for eight years now, but I have never been able to conceive despite visiting many hospitals and doing many tests which have proved that my general condition was satisfactory, my pelvic examination normal; even my husband's semen analysis showed no abnormality," she sadly told Daily Independent.

Not only trado-medical practitioners believe that herbs can make an infertile woman fecund, but men of God quote Ezekiel 47:12, Genesis 1:29 and Revelation 22:2, verses of the holy book that attest that plant are created for sustenance and improving health. In his book on the efficacy of herbs in healing entitled Nature Power, Reverend Father Anselm Adodo stated that kola pods, raw eggs, juice of lime, water and honey can be used to produce herbal remedy for infertility. Some herbalists have also claimed that the seed of cherry can be useful in curing impotence.

New Book Raises Question: Was Gandhi Gay?

More than six decades after his death, Mahatma Gandhi remains a polarizing figure—either revered or despised. So the arrival of a new book on him is a chance for those with well-formed unflattering opinions of Gandhi to trot out all his trespasses, as those on the other end of the spectrum leap to his defense.

Which is exactly what they did in reactions to a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Lelyveld "Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India," officially out in the U.S. on Tuesday.

Of course, it's not often a book on Gandhi—even the many revisionist books, plays and films that have come out in recent years and that have highlighted his unkindness to his wife, his remoteness as a father and his odd ways of testing his sexual self-control—has suggested that he might have been gay, or at least had one gay relationship.

The book, published in the U.S. by Knopf, part of Random House Inc., is not yet available in India. A local bookstore said the book was to be released by Random House in India, though a date hadn't yet been set. But a spokeswoman for Random House India said the company didn't have the India rights and could provide no further information. For now, readers in India will have to be content with what they can glean from the overseas reviews of the book.

Most have quoted these words written by Gandhi to one Hermann Kallenbach from Mr. Lelyveld's book: "How completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance."

A rather inflammatory review in this newspaper included mention of the passages and quotes relating to Kallenbach as part of a larger polemic on Gandhi that concluded with the suggestion that the man credited with being the architect of India's freedom struggle didn't really achieve all that much since the British were sick of India and departing anyway.

"As Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi's organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908," wrote Andrew Roberts, in a review of the book that categorizes a long list of Gandhi's failings, managing even to work in a mention of the fact that he (Gandhi, not Mr. Roberts, we hasten to add) once suffered from hemorrhoids.

At one point Mr. Roberts notes: "Gandhi denounced lawyers, railways and parliamentary politics, even though he was a professional lawyer who constantly used railways to get to meetings to argue that India deserved its own parliament." Oh, the hypocrisy.

In India, meanwhile, Gandhi relatives and historians have said they are upset by the interpretation of Gandhi's letters to Kallenbach, although it's not clear whether they're upset by the suggestion of homosexuality or by the suggestion that he was cheating on his loyal wife. There has been less reaction to quotes in the book in which Gandhi expresses racist attitudes to black South Africans.

The Mail Today quoted Tushar Gandhi, a great-grandson, as saying Western writers have a "morbid fascination" with Gandhi's sexuality—although this is no doubt because of Gandhi's own repressive attitude towards sex and his adoption of celibacy even though he was married.

"It also helps that no matter what you write about him, there are no repercussions. Let them write such things about a Muslim or a Dalit leader," said Mr. Gandhi. "It is always open season with Gandhi."

In another piece in the same paper, writer Sourish Bhattacharyya quoted from a letter in which a jailed Gandhi expressed distress over his inability to come and help his ill wife to conclude that "these are not the words of a man who had deserted his wife to be with his ‘male lover.'" (It is not clear to this writer why feeling concern for his wife's health would be conclusive proof against a relationship with Kallenbach.)

The Mail Today is a collaboration between weekly magazine India Today and the Daily Mail tabloid of the U.K.