To Your Good Health

I am very sorry for your wife’s diagnosis. Many symptoms found in people with cancer can be caused either by the cancer or by its treatment, and it can be very hard to determine which is causing the symptoms.

Reactions to vaccines are common, but they were much more common 64 years ago, when the purity of vaccines was far less than what it is now.

Although advanced imaging like CT and MRI scans have led physicians to be able to make more precise diagnoses than before, there is an issue of what to do with “incidental” findings.

The Watchman device is placed to reduce the risk of stroke in people with atrial fibrillation, a rhythm disturbance of the heart. Its placement has no bearing on her driving, but AFib potentially does.

The first issue is whether statins increase the risk of an Achilles tendon rupture, and I can’t answer that with certainty, because there is some evidence it does.

A cardiac stent is a device placed into an artery of the heart after it is re-opened, usually by a balloon in a procedure called an angioplasty. Stents help reduce the risk of the artery closing off after the procedure.

Iberogast is a combination of nine medicinal plant extracts. Studies in Germany and Austria, where it is most commonly used, have shown the medication to be about as effective as one common prescription in the treatment of functional dyspepsia and irritable bowel disease.

Also called an esophageal or paraoesophageal hernia, a hiatal hernia is when the hole in the diaphragm through which the esophagus passes is larger than normal, so other abdominal organs, especially the stomach, can slide through the hole from the abdomen into the chest.

With even one episode of incontinence, I would consider medication if the person wanted it after a discussion. There are herbal treatments — such as saw palmetto, South African star grass, stinging nettle and African plum — for an enlarged prostate with recurring symptoms.

The aorta, the largest blood vessel in the body, comes directly off the heart, ascends to form an arch, and then descends through the chest into the abdomen.

Both men and women who get recurrent urinary infections are sometimes treated with prophylactic antibiotics. The main risk is not toxicity of the medicine, it is that you might acquire a bacterial strain that is resistant to the antibiotic treatment.

The quality of drinking water in nearly all of Canada and the United States is outstanding, and bacterial contamination is exceedingly rare.

All proteins, such as whey and collagen, are long strands of amino acids. A peptide is two or more amino acids connected, while a polypeptide is 20 or more amino acids. A protein is a polypeptide that has a function in the organism.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the first question about how long to continue hormone treatment for symptoms of menopause.

Medical professionals have been attempting to screen for lung cancer for decades. Chest X-rays proved insensitive: By the time cancer could be seen on X-ray, it was usually too late to do anything about it.