Obesity

Obesity is a term used to describe somebody who is very overweight with a high degree of body fat.

There are a number of ways a person's weight can be assessed. The most widely used method is body mass index.

Body mass index (BMI) is your weight in kilograms divided by your height in metres squared. You can use the NHS Choices BMI healthy weight calculator to work out your own BMI:

    if your BMI is between 25 and 29, you would be considered overweight
    if your BMI is between 30 and 40, you would be considered obese
    if your BMI is over 40, you would be considered very obese (known as "morbidly obese")

Another useful method is to measure around your waist. People with very fat waists (94cm or more in men and 80cm or more in women) are more likely to develop obesity-related health problems.
The risks of obesity

Being obese increases your risk of developing a number of serious and potentially life-threatening diseases, such as:

    type 2 diabetes
    heart disease
    some types of cancer, such as breast cancer and colon cancer
    stroke

In addition, obesity can damage your quality of life and can often trigger depression.

Read more about the complications of obesity.
Obesity in children

Obesity is also an increasing problem in children, with around one in seven children classified as obese.

Read advice for parents of obese children.
Obesity and pregnancy

If you're pregnant, being very overweight can cause complications for you and your baby.

Find out more about obesity and pregnancy.
Treatment of obesity

There are four main goals in the treatment of obesity:

    preventing further weight gain
    gradually losing weight through a combination of a calorie-controlled diet and regular exercise
    avoiding regaining any lost weight
    improving general health and reducing the risk of obesity-related complications

Some people prefer a one-to-one consultation with a trainer or dietitian, while others prefer being part of a weight loss group, which can either be organised by local clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) or through commercial organisations. You may want to use an internet application such as the NHS BMI Tracker tool to monitor your weight.

A medication called orlistat can aid weight loss, but this should be used in combination with the steps mentioned above, not as an alternative. Your GP will be able to advise whether orlistat is suitable for you.

Many people will also need help examining and changing unhealthy patterns of thinking and behaviour.

Read more about the treatment of obesity.
Weight loss surgery

Weight loss surgery is used as a last resort to treat people who are dangerously obese. A gastric band or gastric bypass operation is only available on the NHS to treat people with potentially life-threatening obesity that does not respond to non-surgical treatments, such as lifestyle changes.

Read more about weight loss surgery for obesity.
Causes of obesity

Most cases of obesity are caused by a person eating more calories than they burn off, and the unused calories being turned into fat. Modern lifestyles also do not help:

    there is easy access to cheap, high energy food that is often marketed aggressively
    people's lifestyles and jobs are much less active than in the past – many leisure activities, such as watching television, playing video games and browsing the internet, are usually done sitting down
    people drive or use public transport and tend to walk a lot less than they used to

There are also a number of conditions that can cause weight gain, such as polycystic ovary syndrome.

Read more about the causes of obesity.
How many people are obese?

A survey published in 2012 found that just over a quarter of all adults (26%) in England are obese.
Outlook for obesity

There is no "magic wand" treatment for obesity. Weight loss programmes take commitment and can be challenging, but they are successful for people who stick with them.

Research looking at obese people who completed a commercial weight loss programme lasting 12 months found they lost around 5-10% of their body weight.

While this may not sound like a great amount, it is important to stress that even a modest reduction in weight brings important health benefits. Losing this amount of weight will significantly reduce your risk of developing conditions such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

( http://www.nhs.uk )

Top 10 tips for a healthy heart

by:Jessica Aldred

 There are many steps people can take to try to prevent heart disease. You can start by concentrating on key lifestyle areas such as eating, exercise, smoking and drinking, and considering other factors like family history, diabetes and stress. Here are 10 top tips for a healthy heart

1. Stop smoking. Quitting smoking is the single most important thing a person can do to live longer. If you are a smoker, you are twice as likely to have a heart attack than a non-smoker. But from the moment you stop smoking, the risk of heart attack starts to reduce. With public smoking bans recently introduced, there has never been a better time to give up.
2. Cut down on salt. Too much salt can cause high blood pressure, which increases the risk of developing coronary heart disease. Avoid foods like crisps, salted nuts, canned and packet soups and sauces, baked beans and canned vegetables, pork pies, pizzas and ready meals. Many breakfast cereals and breads that appear healthy also contain high levels of salt, so keep your eye on these too.
3. Watch your diet. A healthy diet can help to reduce the risk of developing heart disease, and can also help increase the chances of survival after a heart attack. You should try to have a balanced diet, containing plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, oily fish, starchy foods such as wholegrain bread, pasta and rice. Avoid foods like biscuits, cakes, pastries and dairy products that are high in saturated fats and sugar.
4. Monitor your alcohol. Too much alcohol can damage the heart muscle, increase blood pressure and also lead to weight gain. Binge drinking will increase your risk of having a heart attack, so you should aim to limit your intake to one to two units a day.
5. Get active.The heart is a muscle and it needs exercise to keep fit so that it can pump blood efficiently round your body with each heart beat. You should aim for 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise a day. If this seems too daunting, start off gently and build up gradually. Keeping fit not only benefits your physical health - it improves your mental health and wellbeing too.
6. Manage your weight. The number of people who are overweight in Britain is rising fast - already more than half of the adult population is overweight or obese. Carrying a lot of extra weight as fat can greatly affect your health and increases the risk of life-threatening conditions such as coronary heart disease and diabetes. If you are overweight or obese, start by making small, but healthy changes to what you eat, and try to become more active.
7. Get your blood pressure and cholesterol levels checked by your GP. The higher your blood pressure, the shorter your life expectancy. People with high blood pressure run a higher risk of having a stroke or a heart attack. High levels of cholesterol in the blood - produced by the liver from saturated fats - can lead to fatty deposits in your coronary arteries that increase your risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, and diseases that affect the circulation. You can help lower your cholesterol level by exercising and eating high-fibre foods such as porridge, beans, pulses, lentils, nuts, fruits and vegetables.
8. Learn to manage your stress levels. If you find things are getting on top of you, you may fail to eat properly, smoke and drink too much and this may increase your risk of a heart attack.
9. Check your family history . If a close relative is at risk of developing coronary heart disease from smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, lack of physical activity, obesity and diabetes, then you could be at risk too.
10. Make sure you can recognise the early signs of coronary heart disease . Tightness or discomfort in the chest, neck, arm or stomach which comes on when you exert yourself but goes away with rest may be the first sign of angina, which can lead to a heart attack if left untreated.
· Health tips from the British Heart Foundation

( http://www.theguardian.com/society/2005/mar/17/NHS1 )

Seeing You Seeing Me The Trouble With ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’

By MANOHLA DARGIS

It was her derrière that first caught my eye. Specifically, it was the way the camera captured the pretty teenager’s rear end in “Blue Is the Warmest Color” so that it was centered and foregrounded in the frame. It is a lovely derrière, no question, round, compact and firm, and I became well acquainted with how it looked whether tucked into snug jeans or perched prettily in the air when Adèle, who’s 15 when the movie opens, lies splayed sleeping face down in bed, as young children often do. The director, Abdellatif Kechiche, I realized fairly quickly, likes a tight end.

Mind you, I thought the same about Mike Nichols, given the attention he lavished on Natalie Portman’s rear in his 2004 film, “Closer.” This observation was a data point that I stashed in my files, where I’ve also noted that Alfred Hitchcock preferred blondes, and Quentin Tarantino likes pretty feet. For the most part, this information doesn’t factor into my thinking about these filmmakers, even if it is unsettling to hear Tippi Hedren brand Hitchcock as a sexual predator. The truth is, if I were hung up about every predatory director or every degrading image of a woman, I couldn’t be a film critic. So I watch, loving movies that don’t necessarily love or even like women. 

Does it matter that Mr. Kechiche appears to have a thing for rear ends? Mr. Kechiche, after all, elevated one such rear into art, or so the consensus was in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where “Blue Is the Warmest Color” won the Palme d’Or. In an unusual move, the jury, led by Steven Spielberg, awarded the Palme to Mr. Kechiche and his stars, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos. This “exceptional step,” Mr. Spielberg said as he announced the winners, was taken to recognize “the achievements of three artists.” By asserting that the actresses were co-creators of the movie, the jury had acknowledged that movies are also made by their performers, an idea that gently chips away at auteurism, one of the critic’s favorite interpretive strategies. 

“Blue Is the Warmest Color,” which has now opened in the United States, is a sexual coming-of-age story about a French provincial voluptuary, Adèle (Ms. Exarchopoulos). She’s a teenager with strong appetites — she keeps sweets stashed under her bed — whose hunger has a distinctly carnal aspect and invokes an association between literal and sexual appetite that has probably been around since Eve took a bite of that troublesome apple. Adèle stuffs her mouth with food, even as she remains unnourished by her high school boyfriend. She’s only sated when later she falls for Emma (Ms. Seydoux), the blue-haired artist with whom she forms a bond as emotionally and psychologically intense as it is sexually pleasurable. They fall in love, move in together, and then it falls apart. 

I first saw “Blue Is the Warmest Color” at Cannes, where I wrote 399 dissenting words on the movie and raised some of the issues I had with it. I wrote that Mr. Kechiche was a self-indulgent filmmaker (the movie runs three hours), and mentioned a scene in which a man talks about art and female orgasms. Primarily, I questioned Mr. Kechiche’s representation of the female body. By keeping so close to Adèle, he seemed to be trying to convey her subjective experience, specifically with the hovering camerawork and frequent close-ups of her face. Yet, early on, this sense of the character’s interiority dissolves when the camera roves over her body even while she is sleeping. Is Adèle, I had wondered then, dreaming of her own hot body?

I received flak for my comments, which was unsurprising because I had criticized a movie that other people love, raising questions about pleasure and a director whose desire felt more at stake than that of his characters. Some critics decided that I was really complaining about pornography, which was surprising because, while the movie uses some of that genre’s conventions, it’s clear that the sex was pantomimed. In June, Owen Gleiberman, from Entertainment Weekly, wrote a long blog post in which he took issue with my comments and those of Julie Maroh, who wrote the graphic novel on which the movie is based. By that point, she had weighed in on Mr. Kechiche’s adaptation, calling it “coherent, justified and fluid.” 

But she also expressed unhappiness with the sex scenes with Adèle and Emma. “It appears to me that this was what was missing on the set: lesbians.” Mr. Gleiberman took this to mean that Ms. Maroh was saying that real lesbians should have played the roles, although that is not what she wrote. What she did write was that “except for a few passages — this is all that it brings to my mind: a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, and made me feel very ill at ease.”

Ms. Maroh saw a connection between the way Mr. Kechiche shot the sex scenes and another scene in which characters talk about what she called “the myth of the feminine orgasm” as “mystic and far superior to the masculine one.” She added: “But here we go, to sacralize once more womanhood in such ways. I find it dangerous.” She was raising a red flag about an essentialist view of female sexuality, in which women, with their holy orgasms, are thought to embody an innate and eternal mystery. In “The Second Sex,” Simone de Beauvoir termed this the mythic idea of “the eternal feminine,” one that does not account for the “multiple existence of women.” 

Ms. Maroh’s description of the sex scenes as both pornographic and conveying a sense that women are sacred might seem contradictory, except that both the pornographic and the sacred generally treat women as abstractions instead of flesh-and-blood individuals. Pornography involves real sex and has one blissfully obvious objective: to turn viewers on. “Blue” isn’t a blue movie; it’s just a formally standard example of European art cinema that comes with the usual ambitions, pleasure and art included. Even so, I can see why someone might find it pornographic given the visual conventions that Mr. Kechiche used, including close-ups that assert that, as a journalist, Liza Katzman, once said of pornography, “The drama of a woman’s pleasure is written not on her genitals, but her face.” 

 From the start, Mr. Kechiche puts us spatially close to Adèle, a proximity that I think is meant to create, to borrow a phrase from George Eliot, the “extension of our sympathies.” Yet if my sympathies didn’t extend, it’s partly because Mr. Kechiche employs a selective aesthetic that shows Adèle slurping her food (“You’re voracious,” Emma says) but, importantly, does not permit her a similarly sloppy appetite in bed, where the movie’s carefully constructed realism is jettisoned along with bodily excesses and excretions in favor of tasteful, decorous poses. This may be what Ms. Maroh meant when she said the sex scenes were missing lesbians; I’d go further and say they’re missing women of any kind. Adèle’s hunger is contained, prettified, aestheticized. 

This isn’t a question of “the male gaze,” an idea from feminist film theory and a phrase that has been thrown around a lot by admirers of the movie and that I purposely didn’t use in May. The movie has run-of-the mill representational problems, which is why I quoted the art critic John Berger’s useful axiom from his 1972 book, “Ways of Seeing.” “Men look at women,” Berger wrote. “Women watch themselves being looked at.” It’s a formulation that may not work for all men and all women, as many feminist film theorists have argued. But Berger’s comment retains its relevance, and it’s apt given the art lesson that a man delivers to some women in “Blue Is the Warmest Color.”

The lecture takes place during a party given by Adèle and Emma. Adèle has become Emma’s muse, a familiar division of labor that carries into the kitchen, where Adèle cooks the food. Later, with the party in full swing, a man begins talking about art and orgasms. “Ever since women have been shown in paintings, their ecstasy is shown more than men’s, whose is shown via woman,” he says without a hint of irony. “Men try desperately to depict it.” Three women offer short retorts, including that “it could be a fantasy.” Unstoppable, he adds, “Art by women never tackles female pleasure.” The women, including Emma, a former student at the École des Beaux-Arts, remain silent. None mention that historically, women were often barred from working with nude models.

The women’s silence is deafening and, like the sex scenes, punctures the movie’s realism. It isn’t that it’s inconceivable that a man, an art type whom Emma thinks could help her career, would yammer on at a party about representations and female orgasms to women who say little. It’s improbable but not unimaginable. The man’s words and the women’s silence are aesthetic choices, and as much a part of the movie’s meaning as the hand-held cinematography; Adèle’s appetite; her work with children; the absence of a score; and her silent, downward look after a man at the same party asks her what sex with Emma is like and then asks Adèle if she wants to be a mother. All these add information and at times serve as metacommentaries on the female body on display in “Blue.”

Watching the movie at Cannes, I couldn’t help thinking of the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s first feature, “Je Tu Il Elle,” which has a lengthy sex scene between two young women. Ms. Akerman, who plays the protagonist, filmed the scene in medium long shot without any of the visual codes (close-ups, fragmented bodies) used in mainstream pornography. It’s infrequent that you see female pleasure like this or even a shot like the one of Brad Pitt’s torso in “Thelma & Louise,” which shows you what Thelma sees before making love. There’s a banality to how a lot of directors represent female bodies and female pleasure, partly because they borrow from the industrial handbook of male-oriented pornography.

In truth, it isn’t sex per se that makes “Blue Is the Warmest Color” problematic; it’s the patriarchal anxieties about sex, female appetite and maternity that leach into its sights and sounds and the way it frames, with scrutinizing closeness, the female body. In the logic of the movie, Adèle’s body is a mystery that needs solving and, for a brief while, it seems as if Emma will help solve it. In “The Second Sex,” Beauvoir wrote that “the erotic experience is one that most poignantly discloses to human beings the ambiguity of their condition; in it they are aware of themselves as flesh and spirit, as the other and as the subject.” This is the ideal, but for Adèle, the erotic experience leads to despair, desperation, isolation. The body betrays her — just like a woman.

That wouldn’t be the first time that happened to a female character, though as it happens, as a movie critic, I spend more time looking at men’s bodies than women’s. Mainstream movies, especially from the big studios, are now overwhelmingly dominated by male-driven stories, made by men, for men. Feminists have taken issues with old Hollywood representations of women, but at least its star system provided a rich body of work, which is one reason you don’t often read feminists talking about movies outside academia and Jezebel.com. There’s not much to discuss. That’s another reason “Blue” is interesting: It’s a three-hour movie about women, a rare object of critical inquiry perhaps especially for American men working in the male-dominated field of movie critics. The truth is we need more women on screen, naked and not, hungry and not, to get this conversation really started. 

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/movies/the-trouble-with-blue-is-the-warmest-color.html?_r=0

Hemorrhoids Information and Treatment Solutions

 Hemorrhoids Information and Treatment Solutions

by Henry Riffiles

Hemorrhoids are one of the most colon diseases. It’s not usually a serious medical condition but it can be very painful and irritating to sufferers. What happens is that the veins in the anal region come under stress and sort of gets a blow out, causing a tiny bulge to form in the vein. Once the bulge forms, it then can come under further stress from passing stools, daily cleaning, sitting, and rubbing from clothes, all this irritation only helps to exacerbate the discomfort. Usually the hemorrhoids that are located at the opening of the anal canal are more subjected to these daily stresses while internal hemorrhoids are less painful.

 However, if internal hemorrhoids get so swollen that they begin to protrude from the anal opening, this is considered a complication called prolapsed and may then become more painful. Common symptoms of external hemorrhoids include bleeding, itching, swelling, and burning, while internal hemorrhoids may only have bleeding as a symptom.

The good news about hemorrhoids is that for most patients if they are caught early enough and treated then complications can be avoided and symptoms minimized. There are a lot of excellent hemroid treatment creams readily available at most drug stores that can help quite a bit with minor hemorrhoid symptoms. Another excellent solution for dealing with minor hemorrhoids is to start with an improved diet high in fiber. Fiber will help control constipation and reduce straining while using the rest room which is the most common cause of hemorrhoids.

If diet and non-prescription creams alone aren’t enough to get your hemorrhoids under control then more aggressive treatment may be required. Once a hemorrhoid get to a Grade III or IV then prescription strength medications or surgery may be the only option. The key is to start treating your symptoms ASAP in the hopes that your condition won’t get this serious, but this is not always possible. If you do end up in the small minority of hemroid surgery, the good news is that there are excellent office procedures such as the rubber band ligation that offer excellent results with a minimum of risk. These newer procedures can be done outside a hospital, patients experience a minimum of pain and the recovery times are must faster than with the traditional hemorrhoidectomy.

Source: http://www.freearticlezines.com/2013/10/your-aching-back/

Male-organ-problems-and-anemia-avoiding-loss-of-function

When a man feels tired, it can affect everything about him, including the perkiness of his male organ. Since most men will do just about anything to avoid male organ problems, taking steps to avoid anemia, which can have a negative impact on  com/What_is_M1MO.php">male organ health , is strongly advised.

So what exactly is anemia anyway?

Simply put, anemia occurs when a person doesn’t have enough healthy red blood cells. Sometimes the problem is that there aren’t enough blood cells; sometimes it’s that the ones that are there aren’t healthy; and sometimes it’s a combination of both.

The red blood cells are the heavy lifters in carrying oxygen around to the body, so if they’re missing or defective, a body simply doesn’t get the oxygen it needs. No oxygen means no energy.

What causes anemia?

Anemia can be caused by a number of things, including:

• Loss of blood. This is one of those no--brainers: if a person loses blood, he loses red blood cells, so if he loses too much blood, he’s going to have anemia. Fortunately, this kind of anemia is temporary (unless a guy just keeps on losing blood, in which case there may be a significant problem that needs to be treated.)

• Genetics. Some people are born with inherited conditions, such as sickle cell anemia and thalassemia, that can affect the body’s ability to create healthy red blood cells. In these instances, the anemia can be long term and lasting, unless proper treatment is received.

• Autoimmune problems. Sometimes, the body gets its signals mixed up and starts destroying perfectly healthy red blood cells faster than it can create new ones, creating an autoimmune issue.

• Iron deficiency. This is a fairly common cause of anemia. Iron plays a part in creating hemoglobin, which is the substance in red blood cells that does the actual carrying of oxygen. So if the body is low on iron, it’s going to be low on oxygen as well.

• Vitamin deficiency. As might be expected, this kind of anemia results when a person is lacking in the vitamins – folate, B12 and C – that play a role in creating healthy red blood cells.

What male organ problems might anemia cause?

• The most common effect that anemia can have on a guy’s manhood is male dysfunction. The male organ is dependent upon a good supply of oxygen-rich blood to function properly. If that is lacking, it can dampen the degree of tumescence; in severe cases, it can be a significant effect.

• Beyond the degree of firmness, anemia can also affect stamina. A lack of oxygen not only affects how long the male organ will remain in prime condition; it also affects a man’s overall energy and ability to engage in intimacy: the arms get weak, the hips don’t thrust with the same vigor, etc.

• Anemia also just has a deleterious effect on the general health of the male organ, aside from its performance. A healthy male organ is one that is well oxygenated.

Fighting anemia

Some types of anemia require prolonged treatment under a doctor’s care. Fortunately, the more common iron deficiency and vitamin deficiency anemias can usually be treated through dietary changes.

Obviously, getting more iron in the diet is key to curing (or avoiding) iron deficiency anemia. One can try to take an iron supplement, or simply add more iron-rich foods to meals: beef, ham, spinach, broccoli, tofu, sweet potatoes, watermelon, kale – the list goes on and on.

Similarly, vitamin deficiency anemia is treated by supplements or foods that contain the vitamins in which a person is determined to be deficient – usually one or more of the following: folate, vitamin B12, vitamin C.

Avoiding anemia-related male organ problems also means just keeping the male organ in prime condition all around, and for that, use of a superior male organ vitamin cream (health professionals recommend Man 1 Man Oil)should be a part of every man’s daily routine. Since lack of vitamin C is often a cause of anemia, pick a cream that includes this important vitamin, along with such other wonders as vitamins A and D. Further protect against anemia-related manhood issues by applying a cream with L-arginine, which will keep blood vessels expanded and healthy.

 For additional information on most common male organ health issues, tips on improving male organ sensitivity, and what to do to maintain a healthy male organ, visit:  http://www.man1health.com. John Dugan is a professional writer who specializes in men's health issues and is an ongoing contributing writer to numerous online web sites.

Article Source: Article Directory -http://www.freearticleforyou.com

10 Reasons To Change Your Doctor

We will never find the perfect doctor, as they are all human
and none of them are perfect. It comes as no surprise to
most of us that they call their profession "the practice of
medicine." One of the leading causes of death and injury in
the United States is medical mistakes.

It is calculated by the Institute of Medicine that medical
errors actually kill anywhere from 44,000 to 90,000 people
in U.S. hospitals each year. This figure is more than those
who are killed by automobile accidents or those who succumb
to breast cancer.

Regardless of whether you are generally healthy, or live
with a chronic illness, you still need a physician you can
trust. Though an occasional small mistake may occur, it is
especially important that you have a doctor who is eager to
be part of your medical team for both short-term and
long-term treatment.

Are there some definite signs you should not listen to your
doctors, seek a second opinion, or even change doctors? Yes!

1. Your doctor is quick to speak and slow to listen, rarely
hearing all of your symptoms or asking questions about them.
He quickly records his interpretation of what you are saying
before you have begun to explain your symptoms or the
situation.

2. Your doctor is persistent about prescribing medicines
that are recently available. He does not explain what the
medication is, why you need it, how it will help your
situation, long-term effects, or if there is a plan to get
you off of it. You can see the promotional items for the
medication around his office.

3. Your doctor acts as if he knows less about your condition
that even you do. You leave the appointments feeling like all
you did was report in your latest symptoms while he took
notes.

4. Your doctor doesn't have confidence to treat you, rarely
providing actual advice or instructions, but rather says,
"What do you think we should do?" or "You do whatever you
think is best."

5. Your doctor is swift to request tests or procedures that
could have a negative bearing on your current health or
illness. He doesn't seem to understand that tests that may
be of minor influence on the body of a healthy person can be a
major factor in your well-being. The best doctor will keep
all of your body in mind when making choices about tests,
not just the area that he is a specialist for.

6. Your doctor seems to humor you, looks at you as if he
doubts your symptoms, and smiles and writes notes. You feel
like he is being condescending rather than a part of your
medical team.

7. Your doctor refuses to let you see the medical records he
has on you and your condition. If you request them he says
he will send them to another physician, but he seems to go
out of his way to make sure you don't personally receive
them. At some point you may apply for disability financial
support and the social security disability review doctors
will want to review your medical history. It is important
the records are accurate.

8. Your doctor is never accessible when you need him the
most. On the rare occasion when you have an emergency he is
unable to provide you with an appointment promptly. Your
prescriptions are not refilled when requested. He rarely has
his office return your calls and he is unable to be reached
for hours even when he is paged for an urgent situation.

9. Your doctor does not believe you are in the amount of
pain you claim you are in. He seems reluctant about prescribing
you with pain medication, despite the severity of the pain,
and your proven responsibility with medications.

10. Your doctor is never open to consulting other medical
professionals or faxing his notes over to your other
physicians. He thinks he can solve all of your medical needs
and feels threatened when you want to consult with another
source, specialist, or someone else on your medical team.

The best doctor will listen to you thoroughly, take good
notes, explain the benefits and drawbacks of medications,
and make you feel like you are an integral part of your
medical team.

While there may be no such thing as the perfect physician
and it may take a few referrals to find the best doctor to
meet your medical needs and be a good personality fit, don't
give up. Never sacrifice your health just because you don't
want to hurt a doctor's feelings by leaving him and seeking
health care elsewhere.