Anxiety is normal, say psychiatrists. Anxiety disorders are not. The most common mental illness in the U.S., anxiety disorders afflict 40 million adults—twice as many women as men—and take a toll on the economy of more than $40 billion each year due to health-care costs and lost productivity.

People with anxiety are often at greater risk for suicide than depressed patients, because the latter usually lack the energy and motivation to kill themselves. “Anxiety, however, drives people to do things to get rid of the discomfort,” says Kenneth Robbins, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Read the rest of this entry »

Ricky Gervais Live 2: Politics divx Although therapy and antidepressant medication are the most effective treatments for depression, home treatment is also important. There are many steps you can take to help yourself during a depressive episode and to prevent future episodes. Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb move Why it matters: Many foods, especially those that contain tyramine (the product of an amino acid breaking down), can trigger migraines in people who are susceptible to them. Tyramine, for example, is thought to contribute to the constriction and dilation of blood vessels. Read the rest of this entry »

Why do some people suffer from the agonizing head pain of migraines—and the nausea and sensitivity to light that can accompany them—while others don’t? The answer, at the biochemical level, is complicated, but probably boils down to this: Migraine sufferers’ brains are simply more sensitive to outside stimuli than are other people’s brains. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s critical to identify which type of headache you suffer from—tension, cluster, sinus, rebound, or migraine—so that the correct treatment can be prescribed. In one 2004 study, 80% of patients with a recent history of self-described or doctor-diagnosed sinus headache—but none of the signs of sinus infection—actually met the criteria for migraine. And two-thirds of those patients expressed dissatisfaction with the medications they were using to treat their headaches. Here’s a cheat sheet to help you put a name to your pain. Read the rest of this entry »

The Libertine release Good chronic pain treatment can be hard to find. A chronic pain patient has every right to believe that his or her doctor will listen sympathetically and prescribe the appropriate treatment, but that is not always the reality. Truth is, many doctors have not been trained to deal with the complex, changing area of chronic pain treatment. One 2001 survey of primary care physicians’ attitudes toward prescribing certain medications found that only 15% said they enjoyed working with patients who have chronic pain. Read the rest of this entry »

Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls dvd It can be surprisingly difficult to describe how pain feels. Each of us experiences our pain differently, making it highly subjective—and that makes it a challenge for a doctor to evaluate.

Many doctors use a 0-to-10 pain scale. A 0 rating means you have nothing to discuss, 10 is off-the-charts, I-can’t-stand-it agony. This can be a good starting point. But it has its limitations. One person’s 8 can be another person’s 4. Read the rest of this entry »

Christmas in South Park buy The Voyage That Shook the World ipod The Day the Earth Stood Still dvd In some cases, chronic pain develops after an injury or illness. The pain continues even after you have recovered from the injury or illness. For example, many people who have had a limb amputated report feeling chronic pain in the missing limb (phantom limb pain). Chronic pain can also develop even though you have not had an injury or illness. The result, however, is often the same—a cycle of sleeplessness, inactivity, irritability, depression, and more pain.
Read the rest of this entry »

Acute pain comes on quickly, often following an injury or infection. And it usually goes away quickly with painkillers or antibiotics. Chronic pain persists. For some people it can occur out of the blue, with no evident triggering injury or illness. It can be experienced as headaches, back pain, joint pain, nerve pain, or a myriad of other localized conditions. And it’s much more common than many realize: One 2004 study estimated that approximately one-third of Americans had experienced chronic pain in the past year. Read the rest of this entry »

Oral cannabis (a form of medical marijuana) was ineffective in treating certain types of acute pain and actually increased sensitivity to some other kinds of discomfort, say researchers at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria.

Their study included 18 healthy women who were given oral cannabis or a placebo. The women were then evaluated for heat and electrical pain thresholds in skin areas that had induced sunburn. This is an accepted method of assessing response to acute pain. Read the rest of this entry »