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As children, we grow up knowing the acne thing is going to happen during our teen years. As parents we watch our kids pretending everything is cool while desperately looking in mirrors. It’s pointless to say acne is just “spots”. It’s cruel and unrealistic to blame our children for inflicting this emotional trauma on each other. It’s going to take a revolution to change society and make anything less than perfect skin acceptable. Except. . . Except it’s no longer just a teen problem. More adults now find acne never really goes away. Or perhaps it’s that more adults now ask for treatment. Either way, it’s estimated about 15% of adult women up to the age of 45 years now use an acne treatment. Why is this?

Well, experts (people who sound as if they know what they are talking about)discuss changes in lifestyle. They blame increased levels of stress, poor diets and too much exercise. OK, remember balancing myths against facts can be difficult. There may be a link between acne and eating food with too much fat in it, or drinking too much alcohol. Smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke can damage your skin. Changes in hormone levels can trigger the release of more oil in the skin, i.e. as testosterone levels rise in men and women. If your stomach and bladder are not working as well as they should, toxins can build up and encourage acne.

There’s clear evidence women are more likely to be affected by hormone shifts during adolescence, the menstrual cycle and pregnancy. Taking an oral contraceptive can even out the balance between hormones but some find this a difficult choice because of their religious convictions. During pregnancy, the safest course is simple over-the-counter products like benzoyl peroxide. A recent small-scale trial at Stanford University found an increase in acne during exam times. When anyone experiences stress, the adrenal gland produces more androgens. This makes skin problems more likely. Stress also reduces the effectiveness of your autoimmune system making your body in general and skin in particular more likely to be affected by infections. Read more…

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It’s a sad fact of modern life that rheumatism in all its many forms is increasingly common. As an inflammatory disease, it’s most likely to affect the joints and connective tissue, and it resists most forms of treatment, i.e. it slowly reduces mobility and causes chronic pain. In some forms such as Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), the damage goes beyond the joints with organs affected as well. It’s estimated that RA affects about 1% of the world’s population and it most often appears between the ages of 40 and 50. You will understand that 1% is about 670 million people and then you reduce that number to favor older people. Under normal circumstances, we would just tolerate the loss of mobility but there is a more serious problem. RA accelerates the onset of artherosclerosis, and there is very clear evidence to show a significant increase in the rate of people affected by strokes and heart attacks. Even with the full range of modern medicine brought to bear, RA reduces life expectancy. Worse, in its earliest phase, it is most likely to cause erectile dysfunction. With the damage to the arteries apparent in the smaller vessels first, the failure to produce an erection often demonstrates the presence of artherosclerosis.

In the Annual Scientific Meeting run by the American College of Rheumatology this year, a research team from St. James’s Hospital, Dublin reported their findings of a very strong link between RA and erectile dysfunction. The recommendation is that the use of erectile dysfunction as a harbinger should be expanded. Read more…