Anorexia (Anorexia Nervosa)

Definition

Anorexia is an eating disorder. It occurs when a person's obsession with diet and exercise leads to extreme weight loss. The disorder is considered if a person refuses to maintain a body weight at or above 85% of their ideal body weight. It can be fatal.

Causes

The cause of anorexia is not known. It appears that genetics and environment play a role.

Risk Factors

A risk factor increases your chance of getting a disease or condition. Risk factors for anorexia include the following:

• Sex: female
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• Age: adolescence or early adulthood
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• Low self-esteem
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• Feelings of helplessness
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• Perfectionism
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• Fear of becoming overweight
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• Familial pressure to be thin
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• Families that are overprotective, rigid, under-involved, or in conflict
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• Family history of eating disorders
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• Emotional stress
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• Mood disorders such as depression or generalized anxiety disorder
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• Personality disorders
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• Susceptibility to social and fashion trends emphasizing or glamorizing thinness

Symptoms

Symptoms may include:

• Excessive weight loss
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• Obsession with food, calories, and fat content
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• Dieting even when thin
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• Intense fear of gaining weight, even when underweight
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• Body dysmorphia—distorted self-image of being overweight despite evidence to the contrary
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• Basing self-evaluation heavily on body weight or shape
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• Loss of menstrual periods (secondary amenorrhea) or delay in menarche (onset of periods)
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• Excessive exercising
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• Feeling cold, especially hands and feet
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• Being secretive about food
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• Hair loss and/or growth of fine hair on the body
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• Fainting 
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• Constipation
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• Depression and/or anxiety
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• Heart palpitations
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Anorexia often leads to a number of serious medical problems including:

• Amenorrhea (loss of periods)
• Osteoporosis
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• Cardiac problems—can be fatal

Body Dysmorphia

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History of Anorexia

The History of Anorexia is old. In ancient Rome during the period of feasting, people used to vomit food they ate. They even had particular place for it called “vomitorium”. There is a lot of remembrance about these events in ancient Rome books. Roman emperors Vitellius and Claudius were anorexic.

Some other cultures like ancient Egyptian culture purged themselves every month for three days in series, using clysters and emetics to preserve health. They considered that human diseases come from food.

In Europe during the middle ages purgation was used like a medicine for many diseases and was advocated by middle age physicians.

In ancient Arabia and Greece there were also descriptions in texts of purging and bingeing.

But all these ancient practices of purging and bingeing are alike but not the same as what we call “anorexia” now. There was no proof of a drive for thinness that is the obvious attribute in all modern anorexics; in fact skinny shape was not the normal shape for women.

From the proofs that have been reported it is clear that anorexia nervosa as it is presented now was an unknown disease until the late 20th century.

Anorexia Nervosa means “nervous loss of appetite”. This meaning is not on the whole right, since it is based on misunderstanding. The people who bear from Anorexia Nervosa do not at all have lack of need to eat; they are only afraid of putting on weight. Therefore, the term “self starving” would be more appropriate, or even better expressed “weightfobia”.

Anorexia Nervosa is very general today, than a century ago. There are different reasons for this:

• The thin principle has become “fashionable”; an ideal which almost all type’s of media supports. This leads people to think that this is the proper way to look, and the right way to live their life. Many people try various slimming methods, one after the other, and inappropriate slimming methods is the most regular factor which starts an eating disorder.
• Recent technology helps us so much that we do not need to apply our bodies physically as much as before. Most work is performed in a sitting position.
• The media also concentrates a lot on sport and exercise, which can lead to tremendous focus on one’s body, and on an almost unapproachable body ideal.

Eating disorders like Anorexia Nervosa have shown to happen more commonly in countries where these reasons are more noticeable in the daily life.

Anorexia Nervosa was described for the first time in 1684, but it was not identified and described with it’s diagnosis until 1870. The birth of the new illness was not only related to the new way to look at medicine, but also an effect of the changes in the society, and on the new model for young women. The history of Anorexia Nervosa is partially an effect of the culture that we live in, and partially an effect of the social structure in our society.

Although Anorexia Nervosa has been well-known from long time by psychologists and other behavioral scientists, at the end of the twentieth century the common public first got to know about the disease and its nature. It was not until the start of the 1970s, that the American media began to write about Anorexia Nervosa. In American media there were stories in 1974 about how young women refused to eat, but without really illumination how serious this illness could be. In 1984, during the American TV-show “Saturday night live”, the host started to joke about the disease and showed a proposal of how an anorectic cookbook could look like. Today, most of us have realized how serious is the disease and its processes.

After almost three decades of clinical research of Anorexia Nervosa in 1978, Hilde Bruch the psychologist printed and published a book about the disease. The book called as the golden cage is written on 70 real cases, where mostly young women’s testimonials are included. At the time when the book was published, Bruch claimed that the disease was so common that it had become a big problem in most American colleges and universities.

In 1970s a study based on clinical research showed that Anorexia Nervosa is a disease linked to the culture that we live in. This means that the disease is very common in the Western world, and a lot is depending on the various factors which have been described above.

From the 1980s until today there has been a great amount of literature published about Anorexia Nervosa (and about Bulimia Nervosa, which is a disease closely related to Anorexia Nervosa), and many scientists have published research on this disorder. Today, there are a lot of clinics around the world, with specialized psychiatrists and psychologists, in order to help women and men that suffer from Anorexia Nervosa.

TYPES OF EPILEPSY

Epileptic seizures are sometimes confused with psychogenic seizures, which are not due to abnormal electrical function. A psychogenic seizure may be a psychological response to stress, injury, emotional trauma, or other factors.

Types of epilepsy

There are many types of epilepsy. All types cause seizures. It can be difficult to determine what type of epilepsy you have because of the numerous possible causes, because different types of seizures can occur in the same person, and because the types may affect each person differently.
Some specific types of epilepsy are:

• Benign focal childhood epilepsy, which causes muscles all over the body to stiffen and jerk. These usually occur at night.
• Childhood and juvenile absence epilepsy, which causes staring into space, eye fluttering, and slight muscle jerks.
• Infantile spasms (West syndrome), which causes muscle spasms that affect a child's head, torso, and limbs. Infantile spasms usually begin before the age of 6 months.
• Juvenile myoclonic epilepsy, which causes jerking in the shoulders or arms.
• Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, which causes frequent and several different types of seizures to occur. This syndrome can lead to falls during a seizure, which can cause an injury.
• Temporal lobe epilepsy (the most common type of epilepsy in adults), which causes smacking of the lips or rubbing the hands together, emotional or thought disturbances, and hallucinations of sounds, smells, or tastes.

Epilepsy is not a form of intellectual disability or mental illness. Although a few forms of childhood epilepsy are associated with below-average intelligence and problems with physical and mental development, epilepsy does not cause these problems. Seizures may look scary or strange, but they do not make a person crazy, violent, or dangerous.

Not everyone who has a seizure has epilepsy. Seizures that are not epileptic may result from several different medical conditions such as poisoning, fever, fainting, or alcohol or drug withdrawal. Seizures that occur at the time of a disease, injury, or illness and stop when the condition improves are not related to epilepsy. But if seizures occur repeatedly (become chronic), occurring weeks, months, or even years after the injury or illness, you have developed epilepsy as a result of the condition.
There are several other conditions with similar symptoms, such as fainting or seizures caused by high fevers.

SITOPHOBIA

DO YOU HAVE A FEAR OF FOOD OR EATING??????? If you have fear of food or eating then you have SITOPHOBIA

FEAR OF FOOD OR EATING 

What is Sitophobia?

Sitophobia is the term used for people who have food fear, eating fear, food phobia, eating phobia, fear of food, fear of eating, phobia of eating and phobia of food.The origin of the word Sito is Greek (meaning food) and phobia is Greek (meaning fear).Sitophobia is also known as Sitiophobia and Cibophobia.

What are the causes?

It is generally accepted that phobias arise from a combination of external events (i.e. traumatic events) and internal predispositions (i.e. heredity or genetics). Many specific phobias can be traced back to a specific triggering event, usually a traumatic experience at an early age. Social phobias and agoraphobia have more complex causes that are not entirely known at this time. It is believed that heredity, genetics, and brain chemistry combine with life-experiences to play a major role in the development of phobias.

What are the symptoms?

As with any phobia, the symptoms vary by person depending on their level of fear. The symptoms typically include extreme anxiety, dread and anything associated with panic such as shortness of breath, rapid breathing, irregular heartbeat, sweating, excessive sweating, nausea, dry mouth, nausea, inability to articulate words or sentences, dry mouth and shaking.

If you have one of this or more than one symptoms, you might also one of the people who suffer from this phobia.

Nausea,one of the Sitophobia symptoms

Can I take medicine?

Medicine can be prescribed, but please note that these medications can have side effects and/or withdrawal systems that can be severe. It is also importation to note that medicines do not cure phobias, at best they only temporarily suppress the systems. However, there are treatments for phobias, which include counseling, hypnotherapy, psychotherapy, and Neuro-Linguistic programming.

I'm afraid of BOOKS!!!!!

Have you ever heard of BIBLIOPHOBIA before????Bibliophobia????What is that??Is it some kind food or something????

Bibliophobia is an unusual fear that might be defined as fear of books or hatred of books. Generally the former definition is more accurate. This phobia can be confined to certain books; for instance those fearing witchcraft might view the Harry Potter series in a bibliophobic sense, or it can be more specific to things like reading aloud, which for a person with bibliophobia may be an extraordinarily painful exercise.


Symptoms of bibliophobia may progress to full panic. They could include sweating, rapid breathing or heart rate and panic attacks. More often, the bibliophobic person, especially when asked to read aloud, would be unable to do so, or would express extreme emotion like crying.  

There are a number of conditions in early childhood that could create bibliophobia. These would include learning disabilities, especially undiagnosed ones, which could make reading silently or aloud very difficult. Conditions like dyslexia come to mind. Others things like hidden illiteracy could make people express a profound distaste for reading, and they might fear discovery of their inability to read. Fear of discovery doesn’t always mean a person is bibliophobic, but shame about illiteracy could very well make these people hate books.


Most phobias are irrational fears, meaning they are not based on rational thought. In this, bibliophobia is no exception. It is a pronounced fear that may have no logical justification, though it could spring from early incidents in childhood. However, some cases can’t be directly connected to fear of reading aloud in school or at work.

As with most fears, this condition can create serious problems. Most people are required to read at some point, whether in books, on the Internet or even the newspaper, and bibliophobia, when defined as fear of reading, could mean leaving a world of information unavailable to the phobic person. On the other hand, different sources of reading material, such as Internet or magazines might be the way a bibliophobic gets information without ever having to turn to books.

                                  failure in exam may be due to the phobia


There are ways to treat this condition, and they usually involve a process called desensitization therapy. In this therapy, people who suffer from this fear are gradually invited to overcome it by brief exposure to books. As therapy progresses, patients might touch books, view pictures of them, and eventually handle them, all at a pace comfortable for the person with the fear. Ultimately, patients could read from books, and once they have established a regular pattern of being able to do so, they may have conquered their fear. Along the way though, they learn coping strategies to help them when confronted with needing to read or with large amounts of books as might be present in a bookstore or library.










references:

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-bibliophobia.htm

http://www.phobia-fear-release.com/types-of-phobia.html