Medical Questions & Answers

Question: The palms of my hands and the soles of my feet have turned yellow. My husband says I eat too many paw paws. Could this be the cause?
Carotenaemia, also known as hypervitaminosis A, is a relatively common condition amongst health food freaks and others who overindulge in vitamin A supplements and yellow colored foods such as pawpaw, pumpkin and carrot. The kidneys and liver are unable to remove the excess levels of carorene (the yellow pigment that gives these foods their color) from the blood stream, and it deposits in the thick-skinned areas of the soles and palms. Eventually the whole body may become yellow, and this condition may be confused with hepatitis. The liver is also damaged in this process. The only treatment is avoidance of the offending vitamins and foods. Over several months, the body’s waste removal system recovers sufficiently to remove the deposits and your color returns to normal.
Diets should never concentrate on one type of food product, and just because a small vitamin supplement is good for you, it does not mean that large amounts of vitamins are better.

Question: I have found it progressively more difficult to write over the past few years to the point where I now either type or write with my left hand. A doctor did electrical tests and said that my nerves weren’t working and I needed an operation. Now, if I try to use my right hand, my first three fingers remain straight and cannot be bent. Should I have the operation?
Yes! And don’t waste any more time about it or your hand may be permanently damaged. A nerve is almost certainly being trapped and damaged, and if the damage becomes severe, the nerve may never recover.
Nerves send messages to the muscles telling them to do what the brain wishes. If the nerve is trapped or compressed, the message cannot pass, so the muscles supplied by that nerve become weak and eventually fail to work. The probability is that the nerves supplying your fingers are being squashed as they pass through your wrist in a congested area known as the carpal tunnel.
The carpal tunnel syndrome causes tingling, numbness and then weakness of the muscles beyond the wrist. The problem can be easily and rapidly corrected by a simple operation that requires only one day (or sometimes only a few hours) in hospital. In the operation, the tissue pressing on the nerve is cut, and once free, the nerve resumes its normal function, providing it has not already been damaged too severely.
See your general practitioner immediately for a referral to an orthopedic surgeon as soon as possible.

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