How can stress, as a diagnosis made by my GP, be treated?
There are four ways to treat stress:
• The obvious, most successful, but hardest to achieve, is removing the cause of the stress. If your mortgage repayments are in arrears, winning the Pools will solve your problems and remove the stress, but this is a solution for the minority, not the majority. Marriage stress is probably one of the most difficult forms of stress to remove, as bitterness and wrangling over children and property may last for many years after a divorce.
• The next and most practical way to deal with stress is to rationalize it. This can involve a combination of several different techniques. Talking is an excellent way of relieving anxiety. Discuss the problem with your spouse, relatives, friends, doctor, work mates or anyone else who will listen. Problems often do not appear as insurmountable once bought into the open. Writing down the details of the problem is another excellent way of relieving anxiety. An insurmountable problem in your mind often appears more manageable on paper, particularly when all your possible options are diagrammatically attached, to enable a rational view of the situation to be obtained.
• Professional assistance in discussing your problems is also very helpful. This may be given by your own general practitioner (who can often be a friend as well as counselor), a psychiatrist (not because you may be insane, but because they have specialist skills in this area), a psychologist, marriage guidance counselor, child guidance officer or social worker. Many people are reluctant to seek this type of assistance, but it is far preferable to the fourth type of treatment for stress.
• Drugs that alter your mood, sedate or relieve anxiety are very successful in dealing with stress, but should only be used in a crisis, intermittently or for short periods of time. Some antidepressant drugs and treatments for psychiatric conditions are designed for long term use, but most of the anxiety relieving drugs can cause dependency if used regularly. When prescribed and taken correctly they act as a very useful crutch to help patients through a few weeks of extreme stress, and allow them to cope until such time that the cause of the stress is removed or counseling can be started.

After having a heart attack, my brother has been left with no sense of smell for hot foods. Doctors have come up with all sorts of suggestions to explain this, but no help. He is getting despondent and I hope you can help.
Your sense of smell comes from a nerve that sends tiny sensitive hairs into the top of your nose. These detect certain different odours, and convey the sensation back down the nerve to the part of the brain that can recognise them as particular smells.
During a heart attack, the heart stops working as an effective pump, and some parts of the body may be deprived of an adequate blood supply. When this happens, the more sensitive parts of the body (eg. the brain) may be permanently damaged.
It is also possible for a small stroke to accompany a heart attack.
In either case, it is probable that the part of your brother’s brain that is responsible for the sense of smell has been partly damaged, so that he can no longer smell as well as he could previously.
Unfortunately, brain damage is usually permanent, and although some recovery may occur by new nerves taking on old tasks, once a few months has passed, no further improvement can be expected. There is no effective treatment available.

Everything I eat and drink tastes of salt. Chocolate is the worst. The only thing that is not bad is milk. Have you ever heard of a case like this?
I must admit that I haven’t heard of a case like this, so I have been scouring my . medical texts and cross examining my colleagues to find some answers for you. A wide range of conditions have come to my attention, some very rare, some probably too simple to account for your symptoms, but I will list them all for you.
The most likely cause is the side effects from a medication, and this includes many herbal and ‘natural’ preparations. These medications, or their breakdown products, can be secreted as a salt in your saliva, and the more you salivate (eg. with something tasty like chocolate) the saltier the taste.
Tongue infections such as thrush can alter your taste sensations.
A chronic postnasal drip can affect taste as the phlegm slides down the throat past the back of the tongue.
Poisoning from heavy metals such as lead and mercury can cause abnormal tastes. If you have ever worked with these metals (eg. in a battery factory) you should have the levels of these metals in your blood checked.
There are a number of rare diseases that can affect taste including liver failure and the syndrome of inappropriate antidiuretic hormone secretion (SIADH), which causes a build up of the salt levels in your body.
You will need to discuss these options with your own general practitioner to have them investigated, excluded or treated.