Health and medical information

One of the suspected causes of rheumatoid arthritis is infection by microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi, protozoa, or viruses. Studies in the early 1990s suggested that treatment with antibiotics known as tetracyclines might be beneficial for rheumatoid arthritis sufferers, and a number of clinical studies have confirmed this.

Minocycline, a member of this drug family, is the most commonly used for rheumatoid arthritis. This treatment has had a hard time gaining mainstream acceptance among doctors because the infection theory of rheumatoid arthritis is itself not widely accepted, and the supposed infectious organism has not been discovered.

There is still debate about exactly how the drug works, or what percentage of people with rheumatoid arthritis it works for. Clinical studies have found that antibiotic treatment decreases both inflammation and the amount of rheumatoid factor in the blood. Proponents of the microorganism theory believe that it works as an antibiotic. However, there are other possible mechanisms as well. For example, minocycline appears to directly protect joints against damaging enzymes. Its possible that the fact that minocycline is an antibiotic too is a coincidence.

Side effects commonly seen with minocycline include stomach upset and dizziness – rather tame reactions, compared to some of the rheumatoid arthritis drugs’ side effects.

*28/306/5*

Ruth Raymond Thone, author of Fat: A Fate Worse Than Death, asserts that if you’re a fat woman in America, you are essentially a second-class citizen: “Studies show that women do not get hired, do not get promoted, do not get grants…. There’s a prejudice against women who do not fit whatever the current description of attractive is. And it does mean sexually attractive. The other thing is people feel free to come up to you and say, ‘Look at that tummy. Don’t you think you better do something about that?’ People say terrible things to large women.”

Thone talks about her own struggle to live up to American standards of beauty and how far she and other women will gO  to meet the cultural ideal of attractiveness. She says that for most of her life she did feel attractive, but only because she managed to stay thin by chronically dieting. Dieting, it seemed, was automatically part of a woman’s life. “What I have done and what women do is very, very destructive to health, and, in fact, sometimes results in death, as you will find with anorexia and bulimia.”

Thone recalls the time a doctor told her that she needed to quit smoking. “I stopped for two weeks and started to gain weight. So I immediately went back to smoking. That is blatantly a choice to die of either lung cancer or emphysema rather than be heavy. That’s a really stupid choice. But it’s a clear choice that millions of women make every day. Stomach stapling, jaw wiring, surgery that’s conducted on faces and bodies—there’s a lot of life-threatening stuff that goes on in the name of what you look like. So it’s a life-and-death issue for women. It’s a huge issue that I don’t believe will be over in my lifetime. In fact, I think it’s getting worse.”

*57\233\8*