Dr. Bassett

Allergy season in many areas of the US has had a big impact on all of allergy sufferers, particularly on children.  As children often spend a larger amount of time outdoors during the summertime they may be more so affected by the onslaught of daytime seasonal pollens and mold spores.  

 If one parent has allergies there is at least a 25 to 33 percent chance of the child developing allergies and the risk goes up over 50 to 75 percent if both parents are allergic sufferers.  So family history is a key factor in whether or not your children will develop seasonal allergies, indoor allergies and/or asthma.

 Recent studies have looked at impaired sleep as a result of poor breathing due to congested nasal and sinus passages during the night.  This may have a direct impact on daytime behavior and performance in the classroom.  Fatigue and daytime drowsiness may also be a sign of sleep disturbances that occur due to poorly controlled allergies.

Some suggestions I typically discuss with the parents of children suffering from seasonal allergies are:

  * Change clothes after spending time in the park where pollens are plentiful

  * Washing hair and taking a bath later in the day after being outside on a “high pollen day

  * Pre-treat to prevent daily symptoms during peak seasonal pollen periods

  * Vacation at peak allergy times by a body of water such as a lake, river or by the beach, where pollen levels are typically lower

* Ask your pediatrician or allergist if your child should be on “anti-inflammatory” nasal sprays to reduce congestion from seasonal allergies that may assist in better quality sleep at night

Be proactive and develop a sensible allergy management program for your child to successfully combat seasonal allergy triggers!  Learn more at www.acaai.org and www.aaaai.org.

 Dr. Clifford W. Bassett is an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the Long Island College Hospital and on the faculty of NYU School of Medicine.  He is the current vice chair for public education committee of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.  No information in this blog is intended to diagnose or treat any condition.

The late Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker in the newest Batman saga, “The Dark Knight,” helped push the movie into the record books, with a first-weekend take of more than $155 million.

Critics and audiences agree that Ledger brought life to the Joker as no one has before, making a comic book character seem real. That’s good news for Warner Brothers, the studio that made the movie.

That is good news for the movie industry, in general. And it is touted as good news for the Ledger family—whose grief might be tempered with understandable pride for an actor whose gifts will likely now be compared with another great artist who died tragically — James Dean.

 There is one problem, however, with all of the excitement. Ledger didn’t do nearly as good a job in his real-life role as a boyfriend and father, it turns out, as he did as an actor. His death has been ruled an accidental overdose of the anti-anxiety agents Valium and Xanax, the sleep aids Restoril and Unisom, and the painkillers OxyContin and hydrocodone (the active ingredient in Vicodin). This accident took place in the setting of Heath reportedly abusing these drugs—kind of like crashing into a wall while driving 100 miles an hour.

We don’t know why. We don’t know the demons that inhabited the conscious and unconscious parts of Ledger’s mind. But those demons require real courage and character to face and overcome. You can’t act your way around them.

Whatever painful dramas roiled Ledger’s psyche, he wasn’t willing or able to insulate his little daughter Matilda Rose from the grief now written into her life story. And there will be no audiences to applaud her performance in dealing with the loss of a parent, no Academy Award for how well she plays the role of brave girl and young woman, no $155 million in tickets to her wedding without a dad to walk her down the aisle.

In real life, you have to own your own suffering and come to terms with it in order to win the awards really worth winning — real self-possession and self-esteem and the certain knowledge that you have brought the best of yourself to those you love.

The entertainment industry understandably wants to turn Heath Ledger’s death into a kind of heroic poetry, a journey through a hall of mirrors in which an actor with demons plays a villain with demons and is lost forever in the maze. But that poetry misses one critical fact: In his role as a father, Heath Ledger walked off stage a long time ago, leaving a little girl to cry tears of grief that not even a Joker’s palette of makeup could turn into a smile.

A DVD of her dad’s full-screen image, maybe one with a colleague tearfully accepting the Oscar for him, might be something she can hold onto - but it won’t be the same. She won’t have a dad to hug and to hold.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s website at livingthetruth.com.

The videotape of Omar Khadr, then 16-years-old and being interrogated at Guantanamo, is difficult to watch.  Who among us with a heart, certainly any of us with a child, could help feeling badly for Khadr?  That is a tribute to our capacity as human beings and as Americans to care for others, especially given the facts that Khadr is now 21 and about to stand trial for murdering one U.S. serviceman and blinding another.

The tape, however, reveals more than Khadr’s desperation and more than our capacity for empathy.  It also reveals facts that should be reassuring to Americans, even amidst complex and pressing questions about how we should detain and how we should treat prisoners in a time of war.

Khadr was not physically abused in the tape.  He was not threatened with death.  He was not made to endure uncertainty about whether America will seek retribution on his family.  He was clothed.  He was told honestly that his questioners could not trade his cooperation for his freedom.

Khadr was not hallucinating.  He inflicted no harm upon himself.  He did not plead for his life or beg for food or for the beatings to stop.  Perhaps most revealing, he did not seem afraid of his interviewers, and seemingly had the capacity to withhold from them the information they seek.  Instead, he pleaded for medical help—when he had already been successfully treated for nearly lethal wounds sustained in combat.

Khadr’s lawyer reportedly stated that his client was psychologically abused at Guantanamo by being deprived of sleep and moved from cell to cell every three hours for weeks.  If he presents evidence to that effect in court, along with other evidence about Khadr’s detention, we will know more about the stress his client endured. 

This Guantanamo tape itself isn’t, however, the smoking gun many portray it to be.  While it makes us—as fathers and mothers and as Americans—feel for the young man accused of murder, it doesn’t prove that he was tortured.  What it does prove is that the war has been terribly painful, that it has brought suffering to millions of families and that we Americans have not lost our capacity for empathy in a time of war—even for our enemies.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s website at livingthetruth.com.

A Canadian woman died last year after stepping barefoot on several caterpillars, doctors reported in a teaching case published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

The 22-year old woman from Alberta died 10 days after stepping on five caterpillars while on a trip to northeastern Peru.

The woman felt immediate pain in her right foot, which spread to her thigh, and later developed a headache. The pain in her leg was worse when she walked on it.

The leg pain and headache disappeared within 12 hours so she did not seek treatment while in Peru, the doctors reported in their case study.

Doctors in Peru removed knives, nails, screws and other objects from the stomach of a metal-eating man, the Daily Mirror reported.

Luis Zarate, 38, went to doctors with severe stomach pain. Doctors were stunned when an X-ray revealed that the man had swallowed a knife, nails, screws, a watch and even barbed wire.

“There were 17 strange objects found at the level of his stomach and colon,” said Julio Acevedo, who performed Zarate’s surgery. “The objects had caused his stomach to expand.”

Zarate is recovering at the hospital in Trujillo, a coastal town in northwestern Peru.

The suicides of two stunningly successful individuals in two days should be enough to do away with the notion that great beauty or professional achievement or a treasured family and good friends can immunize anyone from the potential ravages of desperation and major depression. 

On June 28, supermodel Ruslana Korshunova plunged nine floors to her death from her apartment in Manhattan’s financial district.  She had just come back from a modeling gig in Paris.  A friend said she was “on top of the world.”

On June 30, Dr. Douglas Meyer, an esteemed physician at Manhattan’s Beth Israel Medical Center, described by a co-worker as “full of life,” leapt 17 stories to his death.

As a practicing psychiatrist for 15 years, I can tell you that these tragedies were a long time in the making.  The complete wearing away of self-esteem or shutting down of the ability to see any future other than darkness is more like a curtain slowly closing than a door swinging shut.  Indeed, the fragile sense of self that can give way to a free fall may be decades in the making.

Why did no one see it happening in these two cases?  Or why, if someone intuited that it could, was it not prevented?

One reason is that we don’t like to think of ourselves—whether as associates or friends or family members—as parts of personal dramas that could be so dark.  We deploy a kind of denial about the lives of others that suggests things will “turn out alright,” that terrible tragedies of the kind that have visited the families of Korshunova and Meyer happen to other families, that the light in the lives of our loved ones could never be extinguished.

Another reason is that we mistake the ability to do one’s work in this world, and do it well, for well-being.  I have treated executives and politicians and health care providers who went to work on time and performed admirably, even brilliantly, while battling major depression and even delusional (psychotic) thinking.

And yet another reason is that we may fear that opening up a discussion about whether someone is actually “on the edge,” or “unsure of whether he or she can go on” will put us in a kind of psychological no-man’s land where we will be lost, over our heads, not knowing what to say or do. 

Here are a few things you can do:

1.      Be alert for major depression in people you care about.  The symptoms include low moods and tearfulness, but they also include trouble concentrating, trouble sleeping, changes in appetite, low self-esteem and dwelling on personal losses, even ones that took place in the distant past.  And, remember, major depression affects people of both genders, every age and every socioeconomic group, without exception.

2.      Listen a little like a psychiatrist.  That means if someone says something about life being “too hard” or the future not being “worth it,” it’s okay to pause and ask a nonjudgmental follow-up question.  No one will hold it against you.  “Are you saying you don’t see any sense in living?”  “Are you telling me you’ve thought about hurting yourself?” 

3.      Listen even more for the person’s answer.  Your patience and openness can literally be a lifeline.

4.      If someone opens up about feeling desperate, you can offer to take a walk over to an ER, to make a call for an appointment with a psychiatrist who comes highly recommended or to schedule a “right now” appointment with the person’s internist or family physician.

5.      Remind the person that he or she cannot judge, while depressed or desperate, where he or she will be, or how that person will feel, just a few weeks or a few months from then.  Depression is, arguably, the most treatable condition in all of psychiatry.  The vast, vast majority of patients get completely well—which is why it is so important to keep them safe when they can’t keep themselves safe.

6.      Share your own frailties.  Depressed or desperate people often feel completely alone.  They won’t be dragged further down by you speaking to times you’ve felt like all was lost, or like hiding or like you really needed help; they’ll be sustained by your openness.

7.      Don’t feel like you have to keep quiet about what feels like an impending crisis.  Call the person’s family or physician or both.  You’ll be forgiven, because you’ll be acting in good faith, trying to do what’s right.

Being a supermodel doesn’t make you too beautiful to hate yourself, and being a great doctor doesn’t make you stronger or smarter than mental illness.  No one is immune.  These couple of days reminds us of that, as they cost us two great talents and two good, vulnerable people.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s website at livingthetruth.com.

Yesterday, Neil Entwistle greeted his conviction for murdering his 27-year-old wife Rachel and their 9-month-old daughter Lillian Rose with a subtle shaking of his head, with no tears, no yelling out in disbelief, no terror, no collapse. 

The man whose mask of amiability and success had dissolved on January 20, 2006 -  revealing a killer capable of shooting his wife and his child pointblank with a Colt .22 -  was wearing the mask again.  He could have reacted the very same way to news that the dry cleaner didn’t have his shirts ready or that the Lakers had lost the NBA finals.  

Entwistle has had a long experience wearing what the great psychologist Hervey Cleckley called “the mask of sanity.”  He impressed teachers in his working class neighborhood in England, was one of the few to go on to college, landed a job as a computer programmer, won the love of a pretty woman, maintained friendships for decades and impressed neighbors with his intelligence and seeming success here in America.

When reality didn’t sustain his desire to be seen as smart and affluent, he tried to reinforce the mask with a kind of psychological Crazy Glue.  He lied about making a small fortune in Internet businesses that were really shams offering others the false promise of easy money and better sex (two things, it turns out, he dreamed about having himself).  He lied to friends, even after the murders, about owning the home he rented in Hopkinton, Mass.  He pretended to be happily married and satisfied with his family life when he was really addicted to porn and on the prowl for sex with strangers through AdultFriendFinder.com.

But like every web of lies, Entwistle’s could not be sustained.  The truth always wins.  His real limitations—interpersonally or emotionally or creatively or intellectually—translated into being unemployed, his shady businesses unsuccessful, and his financial situation perilous to the point of bankruptcy.  People weren’t “buying” Neil Entwistle.  He was about to be revealed as a failure.  Perhaps his wife had already learned that he was a fraud.  And that much reality he could not bear.  That made him want to clear the stage of the actors he had cast in leading roles in his fake life, to hit the “reset” button on the psychological cat-and-mouse game he was playing. 

Because the subsoil of Entwistle’s psyche is likely nothing more than chaos, a black hole of self-hatred and seemingly unanswerable questions (though they always are, with the right help) about whether he has any worth at all and any level of manhood to speak of, never mind the raw, sexual kind that he kept watching graphically play itself out on the Internet.

Men like Entwistle — the Scott Petersons of this world — feel like stripping their masks away is tantamount to killing them, because they believe those thin, synthetic disguises are all that keep them from dissolving into nothingness and feeling the full weight of unspeakable emotional turmoil, with roots that always reach deep into their pasts.

Neil Entwistle will be jailed for life.  But, as he showed yesterday in a Massachusetts courtroom where genuine sorrow and love resided in the hearts of Rachel Entwistle’s family, he won’t even be present in the cell.  His real self is but a distant echo in his mind and soul, very nearly as lifeless as his victims.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s website at livingthetruth.com.

Oops, they did it again. Major retail outlets are sexualizing young girls.This past spring, Kmart sold cropped sweatpants flashing the words “True Love Waits” across the derriere. The pants are no longer available in stores or online, but they have reignited the debate on how we’re dressing our children.

Whether they are wearing it or stating it, are we pimping our youth with sexual messaging? And if so, who is to blame?

Parents have long been dealing with the problem most recently tagged the “Britney Syndrome.” While the pop princess and her counterparts Beyoncé, Christina and Jessica have been pegged for corrupting American youth, it seems every decade has an icon who challenges our fashion tastes.

For my generation, it was Madonna. I remember longing to emulate the Material Girl’s netted, cut-off tops, lacy tights, short skirts and rubber bracelets. I begged and pleaded with my mother to let me do so. I could be super cool, and dance just like Madonna, if only I could bare my stomach with a midriff top. But my mum firmly said, “No.” Go figure — I was only 10.

Janelle Perry, a grandmother from Queensland, Australia, has given birth to naturally conceived triplet boys in a ‘one-in-a-million’ delivery at Brisbane’s Mater Mothers’ Hospital.

Janelle and husband Robert’s tiny trio - Cooper, Kyle and Jordan - were born at 34 weeks’ gestation by caesarean section last week.

Doctors are “99.9 percent certain” the boys are identical. Perry, who turns 47 next week, now has eight children. She said she is adamant that is enough.Perry has four children in their 20s from a previous marriage, a daughter, Rebecca, 4, with Robert, and two grandchildren.

The Perrys, of Logan, south of Brisbane, sold all their baby things last October after trying unsuccessfully for two years to have more children.

A test that can detect Down’s syndrome from the blood of pregnant women, which would be the first reliable noninvasive prenatal test for the chromosomal disorder, has raised the prospect of routine screening for the condition for every expectant mother who wants it.

The experimental procedure, developed in Hong Kong, has been shown to diagnose 90 percent of Down’s syndrome cases in a small trial, while also correctly identifying 97 percent of fetuses that do not have the condition.

If its accuracy can be improved and it is validated in larger patient trials, which scientists believe should take three to five years, it would transform prenatal testing for Down’s.

At present this is provided only for women at high risk of having a Down’s baby because the current procedure is invasive and can cause a miscarriage. It requires amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling (CVS), which involve inserting a needle into the womb to remove amniotic fluid surrounding the fetus, or a small piece of the placenta.