Word: rectal
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...vessels can become so distended that they protrude, rupture and bleed. If piles develop near sensitive nerve endings, they can be extremely painful. No one is quite sure just what starts the swelling, but heredity seems to play an important role. Says Dr. Norman Nigro, chief of colon and rectal surgery at Detroit's Wayne State University: "Hemorrhoids run in families. People inherit veins that are apt to become dilated." Habit may also be a factor, including the "bathroom as library" syndrome. Explains Los Angeles Proctologist Michael Freilich: "We were not meant to sit on toilets, we were meant...
Last summer the Ainsworths' five-year-old son developed a persistent rectal disorder. The commune wanted to vote on whether the family should stay or go, but the Ainsworths balked at the notion of group control and left. Was that a proper Iron Age decision? Says Lindsay: "An Iron Age mother would have attended to her child, especially if it was a boy." A specialist later reported that the primitive diet had produced the ailment, which contemporary meals promptly cleared...
...those deaths might have been avoided had the cancer been diagnosed sooner. In its earliest stages, it can usually be arrested by prompt and aggressive surgery or radiation, or both. The catch is that early detection has so far proved difficult, not only because men too often avoid rectal examination by the physician's gloved finger, but because available blood tests turn up evidence of malignancy in only more advanced cases...
Laetrile has also been winning victories in the courts. A Kansas man who had rectal cancer testified that the compound, which releases cyanide in the body, is keeping him alive. A federal judge not only let him import the drug - available in Mexico, West Germany and other countries - but forced the reluctant FDA to hold its first public hearings on Laetrile. The two-day session in Kansas City, Mo., attracted 300 supporters, who continually booed and jeered the drug's critics...
...Fries in a health guide called Take Care of Yourself (Addison-Wesley; $9.95, hardcover; $5.95, paperback), "even the most elaborate checkups ... do not detect early and treatable diseases with any regularity." Dr. Russell Roth, a longtime Erie, Pa., urologist and former A.M.A. president, concurs. In 35 years of routine rectal examinations, he reports, he has discovered in only one patient an ailment that lent itself to treatment. Even if diseases could be easily detected in checkups, adds Dr. William Keith Morgan of West Virginia University's School of Medicine, "patients are probably better off not knowing they are going...