It’s a preschool. There is the school nurse who has had a bit of psychology training too; what kind of problem does she usually have – maybe a kid with a boo-boo, perhaps a headache; the psychology training could come in handy for a child who won’t sit still in class, a child who insists on chewing the copybook instead of writing in it, or perhaps – a child with clinical depression? But average children have uncomplicated lives – they don’t even get depressed, leave alone clinically depressed. Kindergartens and preschools are more and more beginning to deal with depression among their pupils. Is this for real, or is this possibly just more psychobabble from psychiatrists with too much time on their hands?
There are all kinds of questions that come up here. Children at that age grow rapidly. Does it really make sense to diagnose a young child with a psychological disease when everything is in such flux? Or is it possible that the idea that young children can get depressed can really take root the way Oppositional Defiant Disorder or ADHD have?
Everyday people can be pretty clear about this – the very idea is preposterous, and they don’t feel there’s anything more to it. Unfortunately, psychiatrists are beginning to agree with one another that little kids dealing with depression really is within the realm of the possible. And kids who do get diagnosed with depression have their parents come in often and say that one of them had the problem when they were little too – they just didn’t have a name for it back then in so small a child. It’s the way everyone thought in the 80s about the new idea that was taking root then – that teenagers could get depressed. It was just too ridiculous to even be funny.
For little three year-old kids, dealing with depression can be difficult, as dealing with it often can be for anyone. Really strong emotion can be particularly difficult wfor children. This isn’t a reason to go into denial though. There are proven things about children with depression – they are likely three out of four times to suffer from depression once they become adults; and they are also likely to have at least one other disorder – obsessive-compulsive, ADHD, or any other. The good news is, that the earlier these are diagnosed, the better the child’s chances of getting spared and coping later in life. In treating children, they respond so much better than adults ever would. The treatment that has the most currency now is called Parent-Child Interaction Therapy; they teach the child and parent to cope better with everyday situations over the course of a week, and it becomes better right away.
Clostridium difficile, or c-diff, is the name of the bug. If it seems kind of obscure, you want it to stay that way. It is one of the worst bugs to cause diarrhea ever. There are a number of these around that no treatment for diarrhea will work on. The victims of diarrhea caused by these bacteria can lose all their body weight and practically die of it. Unless they find a doctor who is willing to try something completely new – something like bacteriotherapy that tries to fight fire with fire.
It’s the latest in treatment for diarrhea. When a patient comes in with a completely stubborn case that just won’t yield to any antibiotics, they call in a close family member, ask for a stool sample from them, mix it in with saline and inject it into a part of the patient’s body, usually the colon. When that happens, the patient’s body seems to get a dose of healthy bacteria that seem to be able to fight Clostridium difficile.
The method has been used to perhaps 10 times over the last 10 years in this country. A patient with this kind of bacterial infection usually has no natural gut flora (the natural bacteria that usually inhabit your intestines and keep harmful ones out). These days, doctors quickly take up a survey of all the bacteria that do exist in a patient’s gut right before the treatment is offered, find out the genetic make up of all the bacteria, work out the right ones into the patient’s gut for the job.
Even scientists who make a regular living studying the bacteria that inhabit our bodies are always impressed at how wonderfully the system works. And they are always impressed at the number of bacteria that live in our bodies and perform essential functions. In fact, we have far more bacteria in our bodies than cells. When the cells of an organ are outnumbered 10 to 1 by bacterial cells that live in and around it, you have to begin to wonder if these bacteria are the real organs, and our bodily organs have a supporting role. They call these bacteria that live in us and make life possible, the microbiome. They exist in places like the insides of our lungs in large numbers – in place that scientists always thought were sterile.
We need bacteria not just as a treatment for diarrhea though; we need them in our stomachs to help with the preliminary digestion of our food. We need them because our bodies just are unable to create the enzymes that we need for digestion. They’ve found that people who are fat have different kinds of bacteria in the gut than people who are thin. This could turn out not just to be a great scientific path to trace for the treatment of diarrhea, but for every disease on earth.
It might be the stuff of comedy bits on TV showing what happens to people when they take medicine that was originally intended for their pet; but people can go pretty far out when it comes to what they are willing to do to lose weight. Enter the drug Clenbuterol, a substance used to treat asthma in horses, something you usually find in the veterinarian’s drug cabinet. The reason anyone believes it works is that clenbuterol stimulates the heart to work more quickly. That is something that helps burn more fat. Still, the body grows to be immune to it after a while, and clenbuterol doesn’t stay as effective. The thing is though that the FDA doesn’t believe that this is a drug people should be taking. The only way to get your hands on some of this would be through illegal methods. And of course, getting your heart to race for no particular reason, all in pursuit of losing weight quickly, can easily kill people.
Up next on our list of crazy things people will try to start losing weight quickly is a hormone found in the pee of pregnant women. They distill a hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin out of the pee of pregnant women and administer it to people who wish to lose weight through an injection. The hormone is used naturally in the bodies of pregnant women to help them burn fat to release energy for the baby. The hope is that it’ll help burn fat in people who are not pregnant too if they take the hormone in by injection. It’s also a great appetite suppressant. It works of course, but the FDA does not approve of it and it can be unsafe for your general well-being to lose weight as quickly as this hormone makes it possible.
Last up, is another bizarre theory. And it has to do with parasite eggs. This is a technique that was discovered in and is pretty popular in the Far East, in places like Hong Kong. With this method, people keen on losing weight quickly swallow the eggs of Ascaris worms. They do this because Ascaris, or roundworms, in common parlance, establish camp in your intestines and eat up all the food that goes into your tummy. When your body gets less food to use up, it just does what it can and starts to burn up your store of fat. The truth about this crazy method is that roundworms are deadly. They grow to a full foot in length, and can block the digestive passages in the body. If they happen to block your bile ducts, that could get fatal. And worms that can lay hundreds of thousands of eggs, will usually leave behind a legacy in the form of worms for you to deal with. Of course, they can eat their way right through your body too. The things some people will try!