Archive for the ‘back pain’ Category
My left calf stings a little with each step, and the muscles on the front of my shoulders refuse to let me reach behind my head.
But I love it.
I’m still sore from my workout from two days ago, a session with my personal trainer. The sessions have been a mix of weights and plyometrics training, designed to increase speed, power and agility (picture at left is a girl performing a box jump, one of the exercises I do).
He’s been careful never to push me so hard that I start to feel ill, which I respect. I’ve had trainers who operated with the philosophy that their job was to get me sick. That’s a good way to lose me as a client. I expect the workouts to make me sore, not make me pay.
I’ve been working with this new trainer once a week for about six weeks, and I’m just starting to see some results in my arms and shoulders.
Paying someone to make me sore? Absolutely. It’s worth every penny.
Homeopathy is a form of holistic healing. It believes not in treating symptoms but in treating the individual as a whole.
Homeopathy aims to deal with the actual cause of a disease and not just the outward symptoms.
Homeopathy believes in the natural law of healing. This states that healing occurs from inside to outside, from the important organs to less important organs and from the top to the bottom. Simply put, it means that unless the person is treated from the inside a disease or an ailment cannot be cured.
Just because the outward symptoms of a disease have been cured it does not mean that the disease has been cured. It is like trying to remove a weed by stripping its leaves. The leaves will simply come back.
Only when the weed is pulled out from its roots, can it be eliminated permanently. Once the roots of a disease or ailment are healed or removed, one can expect to be permanently cured.
Homeopathy does not aim at treating the ailment or the disease. It believes in trying to bring about a balance in the forces inside the body. A balanced body will heal itself faster and better.
But I didn’t realize there was an entire movement out there by researchers to dispel that widely-accepted belief.
“[Juice] is pretty much the same as sugar water. … There’s no need for any juice at all,” a researcher says in this story. Read on:
By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times
To many people, it’s a health food. To others, it’s simply soda in disguise.
That virtuous glass of juice is feeling the squeeze as doctors, scientists and public health authorities step up their efforts to reduce the nation’s girth.
It’s an awkward issue for the schools that peddle juice in their cafeterias and vending machines. It’s uncomfortable for advocates of a junk food tax, who say they can’t afford to target juice and alienate its legions of fans. It’s confusing for consumers who think they’re doing something good when they chug their morning OJ, sip a 22-ounce smoothie or pack a box of apple juice in their child’s lunch.
The inconvenient truth is that 100 percent fruit juice poses the same obesity-related health risks as Coke, Pepsi and other widely vilified beverages.
With so much focus on the outsized role that sugary drinks play in the country’s collective weight gain — and the accompanying rise in conditions including diabetes, heart disease and cancer — it’s time juice lost its wholesome image, some experts say.
“It’s pretty much the same as sugar water,” said Dr. Charles Billington, an appetite researcher at the University of Minnesota. In the modern diet, he said, “There’s no need for any juice at all.”
A glass of juice concentrates all the sugar from multiple pieces of fruit. Ounce per ounce, it contains more calories than soda, although it tends to be consumed in smaller servings. A cup of orange juice has 112 calories, apple juice has 114 and grape juice packs 152, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The same amount of Coke has 97 calories, and Pepsi has 100.
And just like soft drinks, juice is rich in fructose — the simple sugar that does the most to make food sweet.
University of California, Davis scientist Kimber Stanhope has found that consuming high levels of fructose increases risk factors for heart disease and Type 2 diabetes because it is converted into fat by the liver more readily than glucose. Her studies suggest that it doesn’t matter whether the fructose comes from soda or juice.
“Both are going to promote equal weight gain,” she said, adding that she’s perplexed by the fixation on the evils of sugar-sweetened beverages: “Why are they the only culprit?”
Juice is a relatively recent addition to the human diet. For thousands of years, people ate fruit and drank mostly water.
But in the early 1900s, citrus growers in Florida were harvesting more oranges than they could sell. Then they had an epiphany: Promote juice.
“You consume more oranges if you drink them than if you eat them whole,” said Alissa Hamilton, author of the book “Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice.”
The U.S. Army was instrumental in turning orange juice into a commercial product.
It originally served a powdered lemonade to ensure soldiers got enough vitamin C, but it tasted “like battery acid,” Hamilton said. So, during World War II, the Army commissioned scientists to invent a system for freezing OJ in a concentrated form. The patent wound up with Minute Maid, which sold cans of frozen juice concentrate in grocery stores.
Body builder Jack LaLanne and other health gurus touted juice as a natural medicine, and decades of advertising helped secure its place at the breakfast table. Today, about half of all Americans consume juice regularly, according to NPD Group, a market research outfit.
The Juice Products Association emphasizes the value of the vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients in juice — especially when so many American eat so little fresh produce.
“If someone can add a glass of fruit juice at breakfast, that’s an important addition to the diet,” said Sarah Wally, a dietitian for the trade group.
But scientists increasingly are questioning whether the benefits outweigh the sugar and calories that come with them. “The upside of juice consumption is so infinitesimal compared to the downside that we shouldn’t even be having this discussion,” said Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco.
Several researchers have linked juice to more healthful diets and lower weights. But many experts say the data simply reflect a correlation between juice and healthful diets.
“Kids who drink more juice are more likely to be eating breakfast, and kids who eat breakfast tend to weigh less than kids who don’t,” said Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University.
“Having apple juice and eating an apple are not the same,” said Billington, the University of Minnesota appetite researcher.
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By Kate Kelland
LONDON (Reuters) – Overuse of antibiotics in Europe is building widespread resistance and threatening to halt vital medical treatments such as hip replacements, intensive care for premature babies and cancer therapies, health experts say.
Dominique Monnet of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control's (ECDC) scientific advice unit said the "whole span of modern medicine" is under threat because bugs are become resistant to antibiotics, rendering the drugs useless.
"If this wave of antibiotic resistance gets over us, we will not be able to do organ transplants, hip replacements, cancer chemotherapy, intensive care and neonatal care for premature babies," he told reporters at a briefing.
Antibiotics are needed in all these treatments to prevent bacterial infection. But drug-resistant bacteria are a growing problem in hospitals worldwide, marked by the rise of superbugs such as methicillin-resistant Staphyloccus aureus (MRSA).
Such infections kill about 25,000 people a year in Europe and around 19,000 in the United States. On top of the risks to future treatments, Monnet said the costs of antibiotic resistance were already hurting — and may hit healthcare budgets across the European Union yet harder if the problem is not addressed.
The six most common multi-drug-resistant bacteria — often referred to as superbugs — cause around 400,000 infections a year in Europe, killing around 25,000 people and using 2.5 million hospital days a year.
The ECDC, which monitors and advises on disease in EU, calculates that with a hospital day costing an average of 366 euros ($548), superbug infections are already sucking up 900 million euros a year in extra hospital costs, and a further 600 million euros a year in lost productivity.
"Across the European Union the number of patients infected by resistant bacteria is increasing and that antibiotic resistance is a major threat to public health," the ECDC said.
Britain's government was criticized by a parliamentary committee on Tuesday for failing to tackle the majority of hospital-acquired infections by narrowing its focus to two high profile ones — MRSA and Clostridium difficult.
The ECDC is planning an "antibiotic awareness" campaign on November 18 to urge doctors to stop overprescribing antibiotics.
Patients demanding antibiotics for viral infections often are not aware that they will not work, it said, but doctors are and should stop giving in to pressure.
Sarah Earnshaw of the ECDC's communications unit, pointed to a 2002 survey that showed 60 percent of patients do not know that antibiotics do not work against viruses like flu and colds.
"Patients often demand antibiotics," she said. And doctors often think, she said, that giving in is a quicker way to deal with demanding patients than persuading them otherwise.
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, part of the Institutes of Health, will fund a one million dollar joint study by the Center for Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharishi University of Management Research Institute and Columbia University Medical Center to determine whether the stress-reducing Transcendental Meditation technique (TM) can help patients with coronary heart disease avoid future heart attacks and strokes.
Maharishi University of Management
Researchers studied football players, linemen in particular, to determine whether they have greater high blood pressure, high cholesterol and high fasting blood-glucose levels — risk factors for cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes. The study was presented recently at the annual meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology in San Diego
According to the London Daily Mail, an Oxford University study found that after just nine days, rats fed a high-fat diet made errors on a maze test and could only run 50 percent as far as rodents that ate regular, low-fat food.
Professor Kieran Clarke, who headed up the research team, told the Daily Mail the short-term results of a high-fat diet were “startling.”
Fat has a far-reaching effect on performance.
Nutritionist Elizabeth Somer, author of “Eat Your Way to Happiness,” says eating high-fat snacks and meals means that your system has to divert blood away from the brain and toward the tummy to digest it all.
“It makes a person dumb since it reduces the amount of oxygen that can get to the brain tissues,” Somer says.
If it takes only days for fat to make you dumber, experts say it would take about a month for a switch to a lower-fat diet to get you feeling sharper again.
Obesity isn’t the only negative side effect of excessive television watching. A new study from the American College of Sports Medicine suggests that young adults who tune in to two hours or more of TV per day have poor muscular fitness.
Researchers Niko Paalanne and Tuija Tammelin of Finland studied more than 870 Finnish young men and women around 19 years of age. Subjects’ muscular fitness was measured using trunk rotation, trunk flexion, press strength and jumping height. Those who watched the most television – at least two hours per day – performed significantly worse in the tests. “One of the most startling findings in our research was that about half of the young adults studied were watching TV at least two hours per day,” Paalanne said. “That equates to nearly 15 hours per week – time that could be spent doing healthy, productive activities.” The problem may be further magnified for American adults who, according to Nielsen ratings, watch approximately 142 hours of television per month on average, equating to more than four hours per day. Another significant finding in the Finnish study was that young adults with high levels of TV viewing time had low levels of muscular fitness regardless of their overall physical activity level. “To our knowledge, our study is the first to report such an association,” Tammelin said. “More research needs to be done to further investigate this correlation. It’s possible that some young adults are doing basic levels of aerobic physical activity but leaving out the important strength training element.” ACSM recommends strength training twice per week, in addition to at least 150 minutes per week of aerobic activity, easily achieved in 30-minute segments five days per week. SourceAmerican College of Sports Medicine
It’s more proof that what you eat and drink affects health, researchers say
(HealthDay News) — A diet high in salt or artificially sweetened drinks increases the risk of kidney function decline, two studies show.
“There are currently limited data on the role of diet in kidney disease,” researcher Dr. Julie Lin, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said in a news release. “While more study is needed, our research suggests that higher sodium and artificially sweetened soda intake are associated with greater rate of decline in kidney function.”
The first study looked at diet and kidney function decline in more than 3,000 women enrolled in the national Nurses’ Health Study. The researchers found that “in women with well-preserved kidney function, higher dietary sodium intake was associated with greater kidney function decline, which is consistent with experimental animal data that high sodium intake promotes progressive kidney disease.”
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The second study looked at the association between sugar- and artificially-sweetened beverages and kidney function decline in the same group of women. The researchers found an association between two or more servings per day of artificially sweetened soda and a two-fold increased risk of faster kidney function decline. There was no connection between sugar-sweetened beverages and kidney function decline.
The association between artificially sweetened beverages and kidney function decline persisted after Lin and colleague Dr. Gary Curhan accounted for other factors, such as age, obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, smoking, physical activity, caloric intake and cardiovascular disease.
Further study is needed to better understand how artificial sweeteners influence kidney function decline, the researchers said.
The studies were to be presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Society of Nephrology, in San Diego.
More information
The U.S. National Kidney Disease Education Program offers tips on how to keep your kidneys healthy.
SOURCE: American Society of Nephrology, news release, Oct. 31, 2009
The living organism cannot exist without light. Only in the presence of light do the plants accomplish photosynthesis and the human body synthesize the Vitamin D, essential component for the calcium retention in the bones.
The light not only that sustains life but it can also heal.
The recent studies have shown that the depression, especially the one related to the cold season, can be treated by daily exposure to the white light.
The light therapy is administrated usually through a certain device called light box, a metallic structure containing a tube of fluorescent light put behind a screen.
The dosage of light exposure is calculated by measuring the intensity and the length of the exposure. Most of the studies monitoring to the light therapy, recommend an exposure of two to six hours a day. At a certain level the intensity of light is reversed as proportion to the time of exposure.
The light therapy used for treating depression is best applied very early in the morning after the patient has woken up. Under no circumstances should it be performed before going to bed because it is known to cause insomnia.
The younger persons are the ones responding the best to the light. Also the light therapy has a higher efficiency rate in the somnolence and large appetite treatment or in the case a person gains weight with no reason.