There are a lot of ways to avoid higher car insurance premiums. One of them is to simply know your vehicle. Understanding and addressing potential mechanical problems and safety issues will keep your car performing optimally and minimize the chance you’ll need to make repairs-or worse, get into an accident. As a driver, one of the best things to know about your car is how to interpret warning lights. These have many different meanings and can vary in their level of seriousness, so understanding the potential for danger is important.

Check Engine Light
The Check Engine light is connected to your car’s onboard diagnostics system, which monitors many different aspects of vehicle performance using sensors all over the car. There are thousands of reasons an engine light could come on. A common cause can be simply forgetting to fully-tighten your gas cap, leading to a loss of pressure. If retightening the cap does not work, however, you will need to find someone with an OBD2 diagnostic tool to plug into the car and find out exactly what the problem is. You should be able to find a place that will give you the error code for free; do not pay anyone a fee for it.

ABS Warning
An ABS light warning is a sign that something is seriously wrong with your vehicle brakes and it should be examined immediately. If the light is blinking then the problem is more likely to be extremely serious, and could indicate a malfunction or completely useless brakes.

Brake Warning
This light means something different for every vehicle, and can indicate a wide range of problems, from low brake fluid to an engaged parking brake to something more serious. Your user manual will offer more detailed information, but your brakes are not something you can afford to wait to fix.

Electrical Light
If your battery or alternator are damaged, the battery will no longer be recharged and will eventually die. When the battery ceases to receive charges it will simply run out, and you won’t be able to start your car without a jump from someone else’s vehicle.

Coolant Warning
Without coolant, your engine will overheat and rust, ultimately destroying your engine. Always be sure you have sufficient coolant in your car. If the light comes on, you should add coolant to your car. DO NOT OPEN THE RADIATOR CAP WHEN THE ENGINE IS HOT. The coolant is pressurized during vehicle operation and extremely hot; opening the radiator cap will result in boiling coolant bursting in your direction.

Oil Pressure
Oil pressure lights indicate low oil pressure, and they should be addressed as soon as possible. If your engine is not sufficiently lubricated with oil, it’s lifespan will be shortened. An engine with extremely low oil can be destroyed in minutes. Check your oil levels about once per tank of gas used, and more often if you have an older car or one that you know leaks or burns oil. (more…)

Thanks to Sarah Palin, we can now put verbs on either side of “baby” and still make perfect sense. In this case, we consumers all want there to be thousands of attorneys around to protect our interests when capitalist corporations sell us products that injure us. It can be a car that just will not stop no matter how hard we put our foot on the brake or a tomato that tries to kill us with salmonella. Just recently, even though we’re nowhere near Thanksgiving, 36 million pounds of turkey meat had to pulled from supermarket freezers around the country because it was dangerous. Cargill’s factory, where the meat was processed, has been closed down. Without attorneys to sue and get damages to cover the cost of our medical treatment, loss of earnings, and so on, we would pay for the product and then pay for our losses. Attorneys are wonderful human beings who deliver a great social service. Unless, that is, you listen to the GOP. To Republicans, attorneys are the spawn of the Devil who threaten to put good profit-earning companies out of business. The right wing believes attorneys are out of control and there must be limits placed on our right to sue those who injure us.

This is particularly hotly debated when it comes to the medical profession and the drugs they prescribe. The GOP wants limits on claims of professional negligence, and even suggests restricting the right to sue should people be injured by drugs or medical devices approved by the FDA. As to the latter, the argument goes that the FDA rigorously tests drugs and devices, and only licenses those that help more than harm patients. On the other side of the fence, we’ve recently had some interesting cases where attorneys have argued patients should be allowed to sue even though they ignored all the safety warnings in the leaflets sent out with the drugs. In one case, the patient acted as a complete idiot and not only took an outrageously high dose but did so for nearly a year. When he found the drug had damaged his stomach, he persuaded an attorney to sue. No one, he argued, can be expected to read and understand warnings put out by manufacturers. Everyone should be allowed to self-medicate and then sue if it goes wrong. Attorneys, you gotta love ‘em – always prepared to take on hopeless cases, gambling there will be prejudiced juries prepared to award damages against pharmaceutical companies. (more…)

If we see a sentence suggesting pain is good thing, most people would scratch their heads and think the author was playing a joke. Everyone knows pain is unpleasant and to be avoided at all costs. Indeed, it’s this attitude of wanting to avoid pain at all costs that’s lifted the US to the top of the world rankings. No matter what you might think of the competition, the US takes more painkillers per head of population than any other country in the world. It’s not clear exactly what the prize for winning is, but the obvious consequence is that we have more people abusing painkillers and so becoming dependent. This seriously complicates the treatment for the underlying cause. So let’s split this into two separate questions: why is pain a good thing? and why should we aim to treat pain without relying on drugs?

Pain works in exactly the same way as a burglar alarm. You fit one to your home and if someone enters without your consent, you get a warning. Well, it’s the same with pain. If a virus or bacterium gets into your body, you need something to tell you there’s a problem. If you get into an accident, you need pain to tell you exactly what injuries you have, whether you can walk or need an ambulance, and what treatment you are likely to need. Without pain, you might never know if you were falling ill, and you might make an injury worse if you continued to move with, say, strained muscles or broken bones. That makes pain very useful. The problem comes because once you know you are ill or have an injury, you want the pain to stop. Well that’s just plain wrong. Suppose you hurt your leg. Do you want to feel no pain so that, if you pick up something that’s too hot, you have to wait for the burning smell before you drop it? No! If one part of the body is hurt, you want want to know if the pain is spreading or growing worse. The pattern of the pain helps you monitor whether you are getting better or worse. (more…)

It might look slightly odd to put stress and acne together as if this is something new. In fact, everyone who has suffered acne knows all about stress. No matter whether those around us were considered friends or enemies, the appearance of acne converts everyone into a potential enemy to self-confidence. It can be a look that lingers just a little too long, or looks exchanged between people as you pass by, and that’s before you start hearing the comments. It would not be so bad if it happened to everyone at the same time. That way everyone would be the same. But some people start young. Others seem to have avoided the problem only to find it coming on years after everyone else has finished. These differences mean there is a steady supply of targets for cruelty. Those who recover the most quickly have the longest time to take their revenge on all those who follow them.

Yet look beyond the obvious connection and there are some very important questions. Suppose there’s a real link so that stress of anticipating the arrival of acne encourages it to come. Or that the stress of all the taunting slows down the recovery and makes the whole problem last longer. If either or both of these links was real, all children and teens would benefit from learning relaxation techniques. Yes, we can all smile and say there would be resistance. But if there was clear medical evidence that stress-busting was a cure for acne, this might encourage your children to be a little more calm and pleasant to live with.

Unfortunately, we now come to a major conflict of interest. There has been no significant research into proving or disproving the link. When you think about it, this is an extraordinary failure. Yet it’s easily explained. At present, Big Pharma and the cosmetics industry make several billion dollars a year out of selling drugs and various products to “help” those with acne. If all people had to do to cure acne was to meditate and relax, just think what would happen to all those profits. So we have to be sold the message that it’s medically necessary to treat acne as if it was a major disease and spend vast amounts of money on covering up the problem until it goes away. (more…)

There comes a point in the treatment of any problem when the doctors decide nothing more can be done. Let’s say you were unlucky in a traffic accident and, despite surgery and physical therapy, you will be left with a limp. At first, the pain was severe but, with constant attention to the underlying cause, it has eased a little. Now is the time for a change in the medical team. The problem remaining to be treated is the pain. The best people to treat it are those doctors who specialize in pain management. That’s what happens in other countries. It does not happen here but we can come back to this lack of specialists in another article. First, what is pain management?

Once you have decided to treat the pain as if it was a completely separate illness in its own right, the first step is for the pain specialists to review all the treatment to date. A fresh set of eyes is needed to make absolutely sure nothing has been overlooked. Why is this necessary? Well, let’s say you have been treated for your injuries by the orthopedic surgery department. They have patched you up and sewn you back together. But these are doctors who specialize in the skeleton, joints and muscles. They might not have noticed if you were growing depressed and this was having a negative effect on your perception of pain. So the first step in pain management is to review everything done so far and, if anything has been missed, this can be put right first. Only when the pain specialists are confident nothing more can be done to treat the underlying cause can they focus on the pain itself.

Now comes the team approach. Pain is partly physical and partly psychological. Some people find any continuing pain a threat to their quality of life. They feel unable to cope unless there’s a high dosage of painkillers. Even with the help of medication, they retreat into themselves and turn themselves into invalids. Others have a positive attitude and, even though there’s a little pain, they work round it to enjoy life. In other words, unless you treat the person and understand how each individual responds to pain, there’s little chance of a successful outcome. This highlights one of the difficulties in the conventional hospital department. Even though you can get to see the doctor or surgeon responsible for your treatment, it tends to be only for a few minutes. There’s little tine to discuss your problems in detail and the most usual outcome is a prescription for a painkiller. (more…)