Self-help prevention for various conditions: anal fissure. anaemia

SELF-HELP PREVENTION FOR VARIOUS CONDITIONS: ANAL FISSURE. ANAEMIA

Anal fissure
It is an anal fissure is a painful crack in, or ulceration of, the skin at the opening of the back passage. It starts off as a small tear, which is then reopened every time the person opens his or her bowels.
What causes it?
Constipation. As hard, difficult-to-pass stools are forced through the delicate lining of the anus, the skin tears.
Prevention
• As for constipation.
• While the high-fibre diet is starting to act use a little lubricant on the bowel opening. Saliva will do, or you can buy some KY jelly from a chemist's. This enables the hard stools to pass more easily and reduces pain and bleeding a little.

Anaemia
Anaemia is a condition with many causes in which the oxygen-carrying power of the blood is reduced. By far the commonest cause is iron deficiency, which is still a very common condition indeed, even in westernized countries where one would imagine almost everyone had access to healthy foods. In the Third World much of the iron consumed is in relatively unusable forms and is bound to phytic acid in cereal fibre. The best sources of usable iron are red meat and poor people eat little red meat. In the Third World millions of people have intestinal worms that cause a continuous loss of blood from the digestive system.
Although iron has been known to be an essential nutrient since ancient times there is much that is not known about it and doctors still debate what iron deficiency is and how it should best be treated.
Iron is essential in the body mainly because without it red blood cells could not carry vital oxygen to the rest of the body. About two-thirds of the body's 4 g of iron are tied up in hemoglobin, the red blood-cell pigment. Some is stored in the liver and yet more in the muscles as myoglobin. Red cells live for about 120 days and are then broken down and some of the iron is re-used. Some, however, is totally lost and so needs to be replaced if the person is not to become anaemic.
Only about 10 per cent of the iron we eat is available to the body and some foods yield less than 5 per cent of their iron.
It is easy to see how people can end up eating too little iron when we see the foods that are rich in it. Meat and fish contain the most readily absorbed form of iron. Iron absorption, even from iron-containing foods that do not readily yield up their iron, is somewhat enhanced by including meat in the diet. But even in people eating iron-rich foods (see below) blood losses may outstrip what is eaten or absorbed. Women in their childbearing years are most at risk of developing iron-deficiency anaemia because of losses during pregnancy (into the baby) and in the monthly menstruation. Breast-feeding too makes heavy demands on a woman's iron stores. As if to combat these problems women are better able to absorb dietary iron than are men. (It is also interesting to note that the body of someone who is short of iron absorbs more of the element than does that of other people. A normal child or someone who is iron-deficient can absorb twice as much iron as a normal adult.)
But it is not only women who are susceptible to blood loss. Millions of people have bleeding piles, some have gastric and duodenal ulcers that bleed a little every day, and others take aspirin or anti-arthritis drugs which cause an increased loss of blood from the intestine.
Vitamin ? is now known to be essential in the absorption of iron. Copper too is an important co-factor -and most food refining removes copper fairly thoroughly.

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GENERAL HEALTH
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