Diseases & Conditions

    Diseases usually affect people not only physically, but also emotionally, as contracting and living with many diseases can alter one's perspective on life, and their personality.
 A disease is an abnormal condition affecting the body of an organism. It is often construed to be a medical condition associated with specific symptoms and signs.
 
    It may be caused by external factors, such as infectious disease, or it may be caused by internal dysfunctions, such as autoimmune diseases. In humans, "disease" is often used more broadly to refer to any condition that causes pain, dysfunction, distress, social problems, and/or death to the person afflicted, or similar problems for those in contact with the person. In this broader sense, it sometimes includes injuries, disabilities, disorders, syndromes, infections, isolated symptoms, deviant behaviors, and atypical variations of structure and function, while in other contexts and for other purposes these may be considered distinguishable categories.

    There are four main types of disease: pathogenic disease, deficiency disease, hereditary disease, and physiological disease.

  Death due to disease is called death by natural causes.

  Abnormality, in the vivid sense of something deviating from the normal or differing from the typical (such as an aberration), is a subjectively defined behavioral characteristic, assigned to those with rare or dysfunctional conditions

 A symptom is a departure from normal function or feeling which is noticed by a patient, indicating the presence of disease or abnormality.

   Infectious diseases, also known as communicable diseases, contagious diseases or transmissible diseases comprise clinically evident illness (i.e., characteristic medical signs and/or symptoms of disease) resulting from the infection, presence and growth of pathogenic biological agents in an individual host organism. In certain cases, infectious diseases may be asymtomatic for much or all of their course. Infectious pathogens include some viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, multicellular parasites, and aberrant proteins known as prions. These pathogens are the cause of disease epidemics, in the sense that without the pathogen, no infectious epidemic occurs.

In medicine and psychology, a syndrome is the association of several clinically recognizable features, signs (observed by a physician), symptoms (reported by the patient), phenomena or characteristics that often occur together, so that the presence of one or more features alerts the physician to the possible presence of the others. Specific syndromes tend to have a range of possible etiologies or diseases that could create such a set of circumstances. I.e. there is an important distinction between Parkinson's disease and a Parkinsonian syndrome, whereby the latter could be caused by the former, but also by other conditions such as a progressive supranuclear palsy or multiple system atrophy. In other words, in a medical setting, a syndrome might narrow down the possible diseases a patient may possess, just as speaking English might focus a guess as to the country in which that person originates.



5 Tips for Surviving Shots
Do shots make you nervous? You're not alone. Lots of people dread them because they have a very real fear of needles. So next time your doc asks you to roll up your sleeve, try these tips:

Distract yourself while you're waiting. Bring along a game, book, music, or movie player — something you'll get completely caught up in so you're not sitting in the waiting room thinking about the shot. Some doctors' offices schedule "shot clinics" where they do nothing but give shots so the wait time is shorter.
Concentrate on taking slow, deep breaths. Breathe all the way down into your belly. Deep breathing can help people relax — and concentrating on something other than the shot can take your mind off it.
Focus intently on something in the room. Find a picture, poster, or a sign on the wall. Concentrate on the details: If you're looking at a painting, for example, try counting the number of flowers in the garden, cows in the field, or other images. Or create as many new words as you can using the lettering on a sign. Think about how the message on a health awareness poster might affect you. Whatever it takes, keep focusing on something other than the shot until it's over.
Cough. Research shows that coughing as the needle goes in can help some people feel less pain.
Relax your arm. If you're tense — especially if you tense up the area where you're getting the shot — it can make a shot hurt more.
Sometimes people feel lightheaded or faint after getting a shot. If you feel funny, sit down and rest for 15 minutes.