MENSTRUAL PROBLEMS: HOW TO COPE-IN VARIOUS SITUATIONSC-AT HOME: LACK OF EXERCISE AND LACK OF MONEY

Getting sufficient exercise is a problem for a stay-at-home mother. Going for a walk with a toddler will exercise him, but it won’t do a lot for you except give you a breath of fresh air. It can be a real nuisance to be so tied, especially if you are one of those people who need regular exercise to help cure or prevent period pain. You can do the pelvic rock, of course, almost any time around the house. But that’s not the same thing as going to a disco, for example, or playing tennis or going ice skating, because you miss the company. Some of the new leisure and sports centres provide creches for mothers who want to use the sporting facilities, but they are costly. And so is using a babysitter, unless you belong to a baby-sitting group and help one another for free.

Lack of money-The bad thing about being your own boss is that you’re working without pay. And if you have been used to two salaries, and you suddenly have to learn to cope on one, you probably won’t be able to afford baby-sitters or creches very often, or even some of the food you would perhaps like. There’s really no reasonable answer to that. I could advise you to buy food instead of clothes, but I can hear the, hollow laughter of mothers who gave up buying clothes for themselves when their first babies were born and have been feeling the pinch ever since, despite all their sacrifices. The poverty of the young family in a society where so many women work and earn is a social problem we have hardly begun to consider, let alone solve.

The depression of the miseries is particularly hard to contend with when you are tied to the home day in and day out and you can’t afford outings or treats. Belonging to a group of parents can be a help—you’ll baby-sit for one another free for a start. Some groups run meetings in the evenings as well as during the day, and just to take an evening off now and then will help a great deal. An evening out with your husband is even better, while a week-end away is nicer still. No wonder British Rail’s ‘Golden Rail Breathers’ are overbooked. But I do know how difficult it is to arrange. Once you have children depending on you, you will soon find that nothing is simple any more, not even a short trip to the shops.

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ALTERNATIVE TREATMENTS THAT CAN HELP TO TREAT SCIATICA: HYPNOSIS AND HYPNOTHERAPY

These are two forms of treatment that are used quite commonly by both medical doctors as well as by alternative practitioners. Although these therapies would seem at first to have but little role to play in managing sciatica and back problems, they can help in a variety of ways, including:

They can help a patient bring about lifestyle changes indicated for improving his condition. For example, hypnosis can help someone stick to a diet.

Affect how the patient looks at and reacts to his difficulties. While hypnosis may perhaps make no difference to the extent of sciatica, it certainly can alter the way someone reacts to it when it happens, either by making him less aware of it or by increasing his level of tolerance to it. ? These therapies are also particularly useful for reducing stress and anxiety, these often being an exacerbating factor in all kinds of back-connected problems.

Hypnosis and hypnotherapy both depend on the power of suggestion, whether the suggestions originate from the practitioner or the patient himself. In fact, it is generally believed that no one is ever hypnotised by anyone else, and that what invariably happens is that the subject hypnotises himself, the hypnotist merely providing a conduit for this self-hypnosis.

Not every patient is a suitable subject for this approach, and there is considerable individual variation in the extent to which people respond to this technique, some falling almost immediately into a deep trance-like state at the first suggestion while others totally fail to respond. There is, however, no need for a subject to attain a deep hypnotic state before hypnosis can work, the very lightest of trances being enough to achieve results.

Hypnosis can be tried out at very little cost and with minimal risk by buying one or more of the self-hypnosis tapes that are commonly advertised in newspapers and magazines. These tapes, of course, are usually aimed at creating generally beneficial effects – such as inducing relaxation or reducing reaction to pain – but often can be adapted by the user so that the suggestions they contain become directly relevant to the problem. Many hypnotists will also provide patients with individualised tapes they can later use at home to reinforce suggestions made during previous treatment sessions.

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HOW REDUCING STRESS CAN ALLEVIATE BACK PAIN SYMPTOMS: WHERE TO START

The sensible way to begin any programme to reduce your stress level is to identify as fully as possible all the various things that contributed to creating it in the first place.

Stressors – that’s factors that cause stress – are divided into two main groups:

Stressors you can either avoid altogether or eliminate most of the time. For example, if you find that you always become highly irritated and ‘up-tight’ whenever you visit your in-laws, it would be sensible to perhaps see them less frequently; or if your temper rises to boiling point every time you can’t find a place to park your car in town, consider going in by bus or train instead.

Stressors about which you can do little, or at least not in the short term, and which are essentially beyond your control. Typical stressors of this type include work problems, money worries, or deteriorating family and marital relationships.

Identify your own personal stressors by making a list of those events, situations, and other factors that you know make you feel stressed. In this list also include seemingly minor problems that bother you frequently as it’s not uncommon for these – if they come up often – to be a cumulative source of stress whose total effect is considerably more powerful than you might expect.

Divide your list into two parts: the stressors you can avoid or eliminate and those which you’ll have to grin and bear, at least for the immediately foreseeable future. Review your list carefully, considering each item in turn and thinking about what you can do about it to make things better for yourself. As you go through this exercise, you’re likely to be surprised by how much stress you can avoid by making the simplest of adjustments to your lifestyle or environment. Naturally, you’ll be reducing your total stress level every time you find a way to avoid or reduce the impact of a stressor.

Extremely useful though this eliminatory approach can be, it may still not be enough to bring your stress down to an acceptable level as there will probably still remain a number of major stressors which will not disappear or change overnight. What can be done, however, is to change the intensity with which you react to these ‘permanent’ stressors, so reducing their impact upon you and making their effects less harmful to you in the long term.

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MENSTRUAL CYCLE-CREATURE COMFORTS: HAIR AND SKIN

Greasy hair is a problem at period time too. I’m not going to advise you to wash your hair every day, although I know many girls do. It’s a good idea to keep it clean, but if you subject it to a daily dose of hot water, you could be forcing it to produce even more grease than it would anyway. So my advice would be to cut down the shampooing to once or twice a week and then to make sure that you wash in warm rather than hot water and that the final rise is a cold one.

Skin-If you suffer from spots, boils or styes, then obviously you must keep your skin as clean as possible. It’s probably better to use cotton wool pads than a flannel, which can spread the infection. Failing cotton wool, you can clean your face very efficiently with pure soap and water and your fingertips.

Fingertip massage while you wash, in fact. Some people prefer to use a gentle cream rather than soap. Be specially careful how you clean your eyes: the gentlest make-up remover and a separate cotton wool pad for each eye. Skin irritation can be provoked by some anti-perspirants or deodorants, or even highly perfumed talcum powder. If you get skin irritation in your armpits it makes good sense not to shave when you’re low and to avoid anti-perspirants and deodorants altogether. Stick to baby powder. In other words, treat your skin with great tenderness when it’s vulnerable.

Sadly, the one skin trouble that won’t respond to a careful diet and scrupulous cleanliness is acne, probably the most distressing of all the infections you’re likely to suffer at period time. Acne is in a class by itself, as sufferers know. The trouble is that when your body first starts producing sex hormones it doesn’t always get the balance right. So some people produce more grease than they need and their pores get clogged with it. Cleanliness will help it not to get any worse but it won’t cure it. Only time will do that, which isn’t much help to you if you’re already suffering from all those spots and blackheads, or if your skin has already been scarred by them. Fortunately the amount of grease you produce will be inhibited by better supplies of oestrogen and many girls who go on the Pill report that one of its pleasant side-effects is that it clears up their acne.

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BETTER QUALITY SLEEP TO EASE AND PREVENT BACK TROUBLE: WHAT SLEEPING POSITIONS ARE BEST?

This is another one of those seemingly simple questions for which there’s no simple answer, especially when you consider that no matter what position you choose as you drift into sleep is not going to be maintained throughout the night as you move about.

However, while you have relatively little control over what positions your body will adopt of its own volition while you’re asleep, there are some things you can do that will help ensure that your back is going to derive the maximum benefit from your night’s rest. Here are some suggestions from the NBPA and other experts:

A good supportive pillow is important. Remember, that the main purpose of a pillow is to provide support for the neck rather than the head, and ideally your pillow should be such that it helps keep the neck vertebrae in a straight line with the vertebrae of the back. While most people do need a pillow, one that is too thick or too many of them can provoke neck pain.

Back pain sufferers may find that lying on their side with a thin pillow or a special pad lodged between their knees can considerably ease back discomfort.

If (as far as you know or from what your bed partner may have told you) you lie mostly on your back while you’re asleep, you may find that you get a better night’s rest by placing a pillow under your knees or supporting your legs from the knees down with cushions.

If you spend any time awake in bed, do change positions now and then.

Getting in and out of bed requires special care as it’s quite easy to set off back pain by doing this too hastily. The NBPA recommends: “When getting into bed, sit on the edge, lower your body onto the elbow and shoulder, draw up your knees until your feet are on the mattress, then roll your body over to face the ceiling. Reverse the procedure when getting out – and bend both knees.” Naturally, always move slowly and deliberately, and particularly so when getting up in the morning. Your back is often at its most vulnerable at that time because joints do tend to stiffen when they are not being used. While rest can help your spine in many ways, being mainly immobile while asleep can also leave it very stiff and perhaps painful when you wake.

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TRUE HEALING – PRACTICAL ADVICE /DIET – MINIMISING THE INTAKE OF TOXINS: HOW TO DO IT?

Vegetarian cuisine

Discussing benefits of pure vegetarian (vegan) cuisine as well as recipes is yet again a quite substantial topic and exceeds the scope of this book. For information about the vegetarian cuisine please read books by Ch. Lehman or M.Diamond listed in the References.

Microwaves

Using microwave radiation to cook or heat food changes the molecular structure of food. There is a consistent scientific evidence, that such food is harder to metabolise. We should avoid microwave cooking if possible.

How much to eat ?

This is also a very important question. The answer is quite simple . as little as possible to feel active and comfortable. Note, that eating too much is equivalent to overloading your body with additional duties, related to the processing and disposal of extra waste. Your mind is engaged too, reducing your intellectual and spiritual abilities.

During fasting, you will learn, that the feeling of hunger, as well as the tendency to overeat are typical reactions of a toxic body. If the body is pure and you try not to poison it excessively, your body will always tell you when you have had enough food. Just pay careful attention to what your body is telling you. That’s all.

It is easier to receive and understand such messages, when you eat slowly and chew your food well.

When should we eat ?

In the mountains of Georgia, where people live well beyond 100 years and even make babies at 100, they have a saying:

“Eat breakfast yourself share lunch with your friend, and give dinner to your enemy”.

I cannot help admiring the beauty and wisdom of this ancient proverb. What it says is that we should take food before the activities of the day, and to not take any food before going to bed for the whole night. Doing so, we feel energetic during the day, and we greatly assist our mind-body system in the night’s rest, freeing the resources necessary for everyday healing, repairs, maintenance, as well as for spiritual development.

Note, that most people do exactly the opposite: dinner is their main meal. They all wonder why their health is deteriorating quickly with age.

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TRUE HEALING – PRACTICAL ADVICE /DIET – MINIMISING THE INTAKE OF TOXINS: WHY WE SHOULD AVOID EATING MEAT

We should also avoid eating animal flesh. Comprehensive analysis of this topic could easily be a subject of a separate book, so below I give only a summary of the reasons taken from a single point of view: the poisoning of our body.

Animals consume large amounts of food, before they become killed for meat. For example, a cow eats about 30 kg of food each day. By the time it is 3 years old it has consumed at least 30 tonnes of food. A cow’s body makes every attempt to excrete toxins. As with us humans, not all toxins become excreted. Those which are deposited around the body are of the worst kind: everything easy to metabolise would have already been excreted. As a result, a 100 kg of meat contains the worst combination of toxins, concentrated from about 30 tonnes of food. Summarising, meat contains hundreds of times higher concentration of toxins, than contained in the initial food the animal has eaten.

Drugs like anabolic steroids, antibiotics, growth hormones, and other chemicals are added to animal food to “enhance” the production of meat. Most of such drugs and chemicals are illegal for human use. I would bet, that you would not want to try such food. And yet, resulting animal meat contains hundreds of times greater concentration of worst toxins than the initial animal food.

Animals get sick. You do not know what sicknesses an animal had developed before it was killed for meat. The combination of bacteria and parasite activity in a sick animal produces toxic cocktails you do not want to hear about. The meat from such animal contains a full cocktail, because the animal stopped living before it had a chance to metabolise and excrete any part of it.

Animals have parasites, living in various stages in various parts of their bodies. All parasites have a very complex life cycle comprising many stages. This simply speaking ensures their survival. Meat of course contains parasites in various stages, some of which are very difficult to detect and eliminate, even in the cooking process. You do not want to hear just what animal parasites are capable of doing to your body.

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TRUE HEALING – PRACTICAL ADVICE / DIET – MINIMISING THE INTAKE OF TOXINS: WHAT SHOUL YOU DO?

Even if you do not plan to change anything else in your diet, for social, business or other reasons, improve the quality of the water you drink. Drink at least 2 or 3 litres of it every day.

The latest research indicates, that it is not only the purity of water that is important, but also its molecular structure. To be particular, a 20 molecule liquid crystal water structure, first predicted by a Nobel Prize laureate Linus Pauling in his famous book The Hydrogen Bond seems to be very important. Such structures are formed by a phenomenon known as “hydrophobic hydration” and cause changes in the surface tension, heat capacity and other properties of the water. Water liquid crystals occur naturally in some spring water high in the mountains, and are also formed in the water inside living cells. Water impurities practically eliminate any trace of water liquid crystals.

Note, that nearly every civilisation in the past had tales, related to “living water”, which was to be found only in inaccessible locations high in the mountains. In view of the current scientific research (Flanagans) it is quite possible, that such tales were based on real experiences.

Seek fresh air as much as possible. Even if you live in the city, and you are forced to breathe polluted air, make an effort to go to the country, forest or at least to a park as often as possible. Trees and other plants purify the air for us there. Use an ozone generating lamp to purify the air in your home, if the air outside is worse than inside. You can leave the lamp on when you are away.

With regard to other ingredients of the diet, again there is remarkable agreement found in wisdom of many civilisations. They all agree, that we should eat PURE FRESH FOOD. Note for example, that “kosher” means “pure” in Hebrew. (Be careful here: the modern definition of “kosher” food should be carefully examined, because it most likely has lost its exact meaning over the centuries, similarly to fasting in other cultures)

Again, the emphasis should be on purity. The best foods from such a point of view are fresh fruits and vegetables. Even if grown in quite polluted environment, fruits accumulate very little pollutants- They are created from simple inorganic compounds with the aid of photosynthesis. Their content is mostly water.

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THE FIRST SEIZURE AND THE DIAGNOSIS OF EPILEPSY

A common story is for parents to be woken by the stertorous breathing or grunting of a child in the next bedroom. They go to him, thinking usually that he is having a bad dream, and find him staring, unresponsive, convulsing, and perhaps blue. Few if any parents can cope calmly with such a scene. It is usual for the family doctor to be telephoned at once, and, if there is any delay in his arrival, for an ambulance to be summoned as well. Many parents subsequently confess that they thought their child was dying, so they are acting in an entirely rational way. Almost invariably, however, by the time the family doctor or ambulance has arrived, the seizure is over, the child is sleeping peacefully, and the adults are making tea. But they will not sleep again that night. Many—though not all—are immediately aware of the nature of what they have just seen.

Although the first seizure can occur anywhere and at any time, another common scenario is for the first seizure to occur in a young woman in the company of her friends or at work. In this case, the lack of ready access to the family doctor, whose name and telephone number is unlikely to be known to the bystanders, results in an ambulance being almost invariably called, and the unfortunate young woman being rushed off to hospital. She will recover consciousness either in the ambulance or in the Accident and Emergency Department of the hospital. To the confusion invariably consequent to the generalized seizure must be added the feeling of ‘What on earth has happened to me, and how have I finished up here on a stretcher with strangers peering at me?’ Obviously, therefore, although ambulance services are rather prickly on this point, a friend should accompany her to hospital—not only to provide moral support when recovery of consciousness occurs but also to give an accurate account of events to the hospital staff. In this case, the diagnosis of a tonic-clonic seizure is clear, but in others matters are not so straightforward. It is important to distinguish between an epileptic seizure and some other event which may initially seem to be one. Patients may speak in terms of a ‘black-out’, ‘funny turn’, or ‘blank spell’, and we have to do our best to analyse the cause.

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EFFECTIVE TREATMENTS FOR BACK PAIN AND SCIATICA: FLOATATION OR ‘FLOATING’

This is one of the newest weapons in the battle against back problems. Essentially, as defined by a pre-eminent scientist, floating is ‘a method of attaining the deepest rest that humankind has ever experienced’, and this is accomplished by spending an hour or so lying quietly in the dark, suspended in a warm solution of Epsom salts, about 10″ deep, and so dense that you float without effort.

According to its proponents, floating can bring many benefits:

In the gravity-free environment the body balances and heals internally as all the senses are rested. It is claimed that one hour of floating has the restorative effects of four hours of sleep.

Old injuries and aches – and especially backache – experience relief as floating helps blood circulation.

Additionally, research has shown that floating measurably reduces both blood pressure and the heart rate while at the same time also lowering the levels of stress-related chemicals in the body.

Studies having shown that during a float, people produce slower brain-waves patterns, known as the theta waves and normally experienced only during deep meditation or just before falling asleep. This is usually accompanied by vivid imagery, very clear, creative thoughts, sudden insights and inspirations or feelings of profound peace and joy, induced by the release of endorphins, the body’s natural opiates.

Just how good a treatment for sciatica or other back problems floating is, still remains to be fully proven. As it’s a comparatively new approach, there just aren’t enough documented case histories to provide meaningful statistics. However, as it is a therapy that is unlikely to do harm and may help a lot, it may well be worth a try.

Floating, however, doesn’t suit everybody as it requires a willingness on your part to let go and see what happens, and you may need to float a few times before you are able to relax completely, both physically and mentally. Incidentally, your skin won’t wrinkle like a prune when you float because the water contains high salt levels and therefore doesn’t rob your skin of salt, which is what causes wrinkling. Instead, floating leaves your skin soft and silky.

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