Healthy appetites and bad hearts- Ambitious, punctual, successful - and at risk of a heart attack.

Dr Saad Al-Tamimy’s simple truths to avoid heart failure.

You can fight off the world’s greatest killer with a carrot. Forego the image of a dark, dripping alley for an every day life scene; you’ve just taken advantage of everyone’s howls of laughter at your latest witticism to discretely loosen your belt after a well-deserved Friday brunch - and now you take a first grateful drag of a cigarette. There’s nothing like good food and conversation at the end of the week. The visionary behind your doom is not an eccentric Bollywood director but Dr Saad Al-Tamimy, lnternalist and Cardiologist at lbn Al Nafees Hospital located in Mahooz. Read more....

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Why I’m Smiling again Publisher Rebecca Cooksey on the day she got her smile back.

I have always been brought up with that little voice in my head constantly reminding me, ‘If you lose your teeth, you’ll be ugly.’ My mother’s wonderful words of advice at the tender age of 15 in the hope of deterring me from sharing bottles of drink with strangers on New Years Eve in Trafalgar Square. It worked.

To this day I have always been very conscious of my teeth to the point that I actually brushed a small amount of enamel away from my front tooth through overzealous cleaning. But it had never really been an issue - until last year.

Every year I would visit my dentist who would coat my front tooth with a solution that would prevent further damage. It was so simple that I’d be in and out of the chair within half an hour. When my dentist returned to the Lebanon, I made the drastic mistake of visiting someone new who tapped into my vanity (not that difficult) and convinced me that my routine had become ‘so yesterday’. Everyone today, he said, has veneers. He made it sound so easy and painless that I wanted them there and then. Two hours - and what felt like a complete violation of my mouth - later the measurements for my veneers had been done and now all I had to do was wait for them to be made up.

They arrived and what was to follow was so traumatic that I actually came close to punching the dentist! After another three hours of having my mouth poked and prodded, I was asked to smile and what I saw was mortifying. I definitely was not looking at my teeth and they most definitely didn’t look better. In a nutshell were the measurements were all wrong as the thickness and colour. It completely changed the shape of my mouth and the look of my smile. read more....

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Inside the Cuckoo's Nest

When Jack Nicholson’s character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest agreed to enter an asylum instead of going to prison, he thought it was the easy option. As he soon discovered, it wasn’t; but what about the millions who live with mental health disorders everyday? One Confidential reader gives a very personal account of living with depression and other disorders.

For those who have not experienced the dull thud of depression that never stops or the eternal cutting glass of paranoia, questions pertaining to mental health can be a mine field of the unthinkable, the un-ask able and fear. No one wants to see their loved ones suffer but often it is impossible to know what is best to do, or even where to start. The above story is true, it was lived through by the person writing this article. There is far more to the story of course but as with many sufferers of depression or any of the countless other disorders of the mind, it is only when this kind of grand gesture is made that anyone - including the patient - knows that something is wrong.

No one is beyond the reach of mental disorders; celebrities such as Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain - despite their wealth - are not immune, but having celebrity poster boys and girls like these however, does little to ensure that the malaise is better understood.

We don’t see Britney Spears and think bi-polar, we see Britney Spears and think Car Crash: Amy Winehouse; junkie and Pete Doherty, worse. At times, society can seem uninterested in understanding that something might have caused these patterns of behaviour, something other than excesses of indulgence brought on by privilege; it attaches stigma to its sufferers, calling them mad or bad or both and creates fictions about both patients and carers that stop people from seeking help for fear of what might be said of them.

Society attaches stigma to patients with mental health issues and often they will not seek help because of them. “In this region especially”, Dr Omran asserts, “cultural norms often dictate that you will be branded as mad for talking to a psychiatrist; we are called quacks and people think that drugs we use will make everything worse.” The same is true throughout the world; the man on the beach did not seek any help until after waking in hospital, he thought be could deal with it himself, thought too that it would go away. And he self medicated, Read more

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“We are each of us angels with only one wing and we can only fly embracing each other.” Luciano de Crescenzo

A diagnosis of cancer brings with it a wide range of emotions that often includes shock, fear, denial, sadness and anger. Women diagnosed with breast cancer will experience this range of emotions as they go through different stages of healing. Although time may lessen the intensity of such feelings, it’s likely they may not ever go away completely. A strong social support network can help those with breast cancer address the long-term emotional impact of a breast cancer diagnosis. Research has shown that women deal with their disease when supported by others in similar situations whilst providing coping strategies making them a valuable resource and important part of recovery process.

This is the dream envisioned by two women working in Bahrain and hoping to bring something new and positive to breast cancer survivors on the island. With the recent awareness brought to breast cancer through the ‘Think Pink’ campaign, people’s perception of the disease has changed dramatically and it is no longer a shameful subject, one that was not to be uttered in public. Instead breast cancer is a disease which many women want to now talk about in order to help educate all women around the world.

Adriene Buck is a breast care nurse and lymph oedema practitioner specialising in breast cancer. While at a fundraising event for ‘Think Pink’, she was approached by the Director of World Beat Fitness Centre Jane Goodwin with regards to starting up some kind of support group for breast cancer survivors. The idea seemed practical as there was a great need for a support group in Bahrain. They discovered many breast cancer survivors were ready for such a support group. Adrienne discussed the possibility of a support group in Bahrain with Rula Al Saffar, head of Breast Cancer Support Group at the Bahrain Cancer Society who fully supported her and suggested the idea of an Arabic speaking support group to be held monthly also to accommodate a wider audience which is a wonderful opportunity for women. Read more