Whether this person is you or someone you care about, know that concern is on other side of these words and help is all around.

Everyone, for any number of reasons, feels down at times. The cause can be as major as grief for a lost one, presence of an illness or shattering of a personal dream. It can be as "minor" as a disagreement, a speeding ticket or stubborn extra pounds. Usually events such as these require time to "heal", then if healing was complete, you begin feeling more like yourself.

However, if feelings are more than just "the blues" time will make you feel worse rather than better. Clinical Depression is more than a passing phase and does not just disappear on its own. It affects more than 19 million Americans each year, and numbers are steadily climbing. Given fact that this illness is very debilitating and gravely affects every aspect of sufferer's life, it is amazing that less than half of these people even seek help!

A contributing factor to this is believed to be a failure to recognize symptoms. People generally think, "This will pass. I'm just down..." Infuriatingly enough, many females suffer from erroneous claim that their feelings are due to H word, "hormones". The cynic in me believes that one day, every ill in world will be attributed to hormones!

Rant aside, let's look closely at symptoms of depression. First of all, promise me you'll make a point of never misusing this word ever again. How many of us attach "depresion" name tag to everything from a bad mood to side effects of a rainy-day. People suffer from and deal with this illness on a daily basis. Overusing name lessens it's importance and misusing it makes lines between "blues" and "depression" hazier.

--Signs of Depression

An everpresent feeling of sadness and emptiness. You feel often as though there are tears behind your eyes, just waiting to well up.

My response: "Then you probably haven't." Nerve conduction studies are generally memorable. And it's not because they're particularly painful or otherwise unpleasant. (They're not.) Rather, it's because they're completely unlike any other medical test in existence.

The uniqueness of nerve conduction studies is also their advantage. They have ability to look at certain medical conditions from a point of view completely different from that of other tests, and can therefore discover and pinpoint problems that are invisible to other tests.

Nerve conduction studies are usually requested to help diagnose nerve and muscle disorders. They are often paired with electromyographic (EMG) studies, performed during same testing session by same physician and making use of same equipment.

Nerve conduction studies evaluate physiology and functioning of peripheral nerves. Unlike scans or x-rays that evaluate anatomy and structure, nerve conduction studies look at nerves' performance.

How is this done? In a nutshell, a brief electrical pulse or shock is applied through a pair of electrode probes to skin overlying a nerve, generating a precisely timed set of nerve-impulses. With another electrode taped to skin over another portion of same nerve or over a muscle connected to nerve being studied, physician can measure how quickly nerve-impulses travel from point of stimulation to point of recording.

In healthy nerves nerve-impulses travel at a rate of 40-60 meters per second (120-180 feet per second) so that only a few thousandths of a second are required to cover a distance of several inches. In order to capture a signal traveling that fast, an oscilloscope is required.

The two most important features of recording are length of time required to traverse nerve-segment in question and size or amplitude of resulting electrical response. Electrical responses recorded from nerves are typically 2-50 millionths of a volt in amplitude, while responses from muscles are typically 1-20 thousandths of a volt.