Having Rheumatic Fever I was eleven years old when my oldest sister, Willie, was admitted into the hospital for heart problems. At that age, I didn't understand what was going on with her, but I knew she was very sick. By the time I reached my fifth-teen birthday, my sister was back in the ...

A Child's Asthma: Controlling or Controllable? Asthma is the most common chronic condition in children. Symptoms include repeated attacks of shortness of breath, wheezing, and coughing. An asthma attack occurs when the airways contract, swell, and clog up with mucus. Attacks can persist fo...

A Child's Asthma: Controlling or Controllable? Asthma is the most common chronic condition in children. Symptoms include repeated attacks of shortness of breath, wheezing, and coughing. An asthma attack occurs when the airways contract, swell, and clog up with mucus. Attacks can persist fo...

Asthma is a respiratory disorder marked by breathing difficulty caused by temporary narrowing of the bronchi, the airways branching from the trachea to the lungs. Attacks usually are brought on by allergic reaction to ANTIGENS such as grass and tree pollens, mold spores, fungi, animal dande...

Emotional Stress In our society of today, stress plays a big role in our daily lives. Stress is what moves us, and it can also be what harms us. Yes, stress is what motivates us to do things efficiently, but it is also what can cause serious diseases to occur such as heart disease or cancer. Str...

Every ten seconds a person dies from smoking cigarettes according to the World Heath Organization. 54 million Americans smoke cigarettes while 434,000 people die a year from it . There are over 430 billion cigarettes made each year in America (http://www.thetruth.com/html/index.cfm?id=250, 2002). Ci...

The Long Term Effects of Marijuana Marijuana is a drug that divides people. Some people claim it as the wonder drug of the '90s, capable of relieving the symptoms of many serious illnesses. Others curse the day the cannabis plant was ever discovered. From pain relief to stimulating the appetit...

The Phospholipid Bilayer Our cell membrane is made up of a dispersion of different proteins onto a 2 dimensional fluid of lipids, compounded mainly of phospholipids, a class of membrane lipids that are amphipathic in their properties, meaning that they are both hydrophilic and hydrophobic (Ratto, ...

LOVE YOUR SERVITUDE Pharmacologists are producing a great many wonder drugs where the cure is almost worse than the disease. Every year a new edition of medical text books contains a longer and longer chapter on what are called iatrogenic diseases, that is to say, diseases caused by doctors. --...

Steroids have become a very common term in athletic events. Steroids are a group of hormones, which the body naturally produces in small amounts. The body uses these hormones to help control metabolism, inflammation, immune function, salt and water balance, development of sexual characteristic...

By further highlighting events that occur during sleep, those that do not happen will simultaneously be highlighted on as well. Humans show a marked surge in growth hormone (hGH) production during the early part of sleep, making it the greatest natural release of this hormone over twenty-four hou...

Many Americans today expect that when they go to the doctor, for whatever that happens to be ailing them, that they will receive antibiotics. This is the general practice of many physicians, not because they are ignorant to the ramifications but rather because they do not want to take the time to at...

Lupus Definition of the Disease Lupus is a chronic inflammatory disease of unknown cause that can affect virtually any part of the body. The medical term for Lupus is Systemic Lupus Erythematosus or better known as SLE. With Lupus there is a malfunction in some of the cells of the imm...