Search Podcasts
I’m not a gambler. In fact, I would be the first one to tell you that I would never last on the game show “Deal or No Deal.” As soon as the first offer was given, I would hit the red button and be done.
Yet, every day around 5:00 p.m. I find myself having an inner battle and betting the odds in terms of what I will find walking into my home.
You see, my husband has depression. Not the occasional, “I’m having a bad day” depression but the full-blown “I can barely function” depression, or as his psychologist and psychiatrist label it, “severe depression and high anxiety.” It didn’t start this way, and truthfully I’m not sure how we got here. I say “we” because while he may the one with the disease, I feel like I am the one suffering through it.
Saturday, 24 September 2016 14:59
10 Steps You Can Take to Improve Your Indoor Air Quality
Written byMost of us spend the majority of our time indoors.
In fact, researchers show that we actually spend somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of our day INSIDE. This percentage is shocking, considering just a few generations ago, our ancestors spent most of their time outdoors and their homes had more opportunities for outside air to filter in.
Because we spend so much time indoors, it’s very important that you are breathing the highest quality of air. Unfortunately, in most cases, quite the opposite is true. Study after study has shown that indoor air is more often than not less healthy than outdoor air.
How do you go about improving the indoor air you spend so much time breathing? There are many opportunities to do so, but the best ways are often the simplest and easiest day-to-day habits you can change.
We live in a time when many of us are working hard to change the way we eat, work and sleep, all in the name of a healthy lifestyle.
Many times the first thing individuals change is activity levels, next they change diets, then sleeping and working habits. As a last resort, we look at our home environment.
This is all backwards.
Really, you should be paying attention the environment that you live in FIRST. I’ve heard it said that in a way, our home and other environments are like a second skin for our bodies.
How exactly does a healthy home environment support a healthy body and promote a healthy lifestyle?
I was called up from the Reserves to active duty to serve as a medical officer for Operation Desert Storm, during which I broke my back. I was transferred to Wilford Hall in San Antonio, TX and was placed at bed rest in a large 10- bed ward.
Every day, I waited for that moment or two when the surgical team would round on me. Afterward, the nurses would help wheel my bed down to the hallway where the pay phone was located.
Back then there were no cell phones, so I would pop in a bunch of quarters and call my wife. The first question out of her mouth was always this: “What did the doctor say?”
Notice it was always the doctor. Not the team of specialists. Not the Red team or Trauma team. Not the surrogate for the internist.
I realized how much it meant to me and my family to hear directly from my doctor; I needed that update from him every day.
Pain is a massive problem that affects 125 million Americans who are spending close to $300 billion on pills, pot, procedures and natural remedies to find relief. These numbers are fueling a national conversation about pain relief and how it should be addressed.
With September being Pain Awareness Month, it’s a good time to exam why our bodies experience pain and other options for relief.
When you are in pain, the normal reaction for most people is to reach for the first thing that can help make that pain dissipate. Patients in pain are often looking for quick relief and frequently ask their doctor for a painkiller. It’s really important that doctors take the time to assess the root cause of the patient’s pain and explore the best protocol for immediate and long-term relief.
Pain is your body’s way of alerting you to an underlying problem that needs to be resolved, not masked. There are diet and lifestyle changes as well as natural remedies that can help pain sufferers get relief from some of the three most common pain complaints and reduce reliance on certain medications that have potential side effects.
Life as I knew it changed very drastically in 2005. Not once, but twice.
In August 2005, I gave birth to my beautiful daughter, Lily Rose. She was a true blessing, and my husband Cameron and I could not have been more excited. Three months in, we were still learning the ropes of parenthood; so excited and so blessed. The only problem was that I felt absolutely awful. I was losing weight, I couldn’t breathe... I knew something was wrong.
In November of 2005, I got my diagnosis: mesothelioma. Malignant pleural mesothelioma, to be specific. My husband saw the terror in my eyes when the words came from the doctor's mouth. From researching online, you can quickly find out that the prognosis of mesothelioma is grim. Most patients are given about 15 months to live after diagnosis. I knew that I couldn’t be a part of that statistic. I needed to beat this.
The United Nations declared 2016 as the International Year of Pulses.
The hope is to position pulses as a primary source of protein and other essential nutrients all over the world. By doing so, the goal is to promote broad discussion and cooperation at the national, regional and global levels to increase awareness and understanding of the challenges faced by pulse farmers.
If you’re scratching your head and wondering what are “pulses,” you’ll be pleased to know you are not alone.
We have been seeing evidence of cupping for years.
Gwyneth Paltrow famously sported the spots on the red carpet. And, more recently, Olympians have been showing the distinct signs of the ancient practice throughout Rio.
What is this fascination with cupping, and does it work?
In our eat-and-run, massive portion-sized culture, maintaining a healthy weight can be tough, and losing weight even tougher.
While there’s no easy fix to dropping pounds, there are plenty of steps you can take to develop a healthier relationship with food, curb emotional triggers that lead to overeating, and achieve lasting weight-loss success.
If your spouse has ever bought you ice cream to “reward” you after a week of hard workouts, if your friends and family have ever pressured you to eat or drink more, or if your job or commute is just too time-consuming to allow time for fitness, these “Home Remedies for Quick Weight Loss” may work for you.
The news is filled right now with reports of Zika, the virus carried and transmitted by bites from two main species of mosquitoes.
Zika virus was first discovered in monkeys in Uganda in 1947. Zika outbreaks did not occur outside of Africa until 2007, when it spread to South Pacific and later to South and Central Americas. The latest locally acquired cases are reported in Miami, Florida (around 15 diagnosed at the time of this writing, starting in June 2016).
The mosquitoes capable of carrying Zika have even made it as far North as Chicago.
One thing about Zika is that 80 percent of people who have it don’t even have symptoms. It is, for most people, a silent disease. Although the CDC is conducting testing to achieve more diagnoses, they are only testing people who show symptoms of fever, rash, joint pain and/or red eyes; these are generally on the mild side and last less than a week.
However, more deleterious complications can arise from the virus, including paralysis associated with Guillain-Barré Syndrome and, in pregnant women, birth defects in their newborns, including (but rarely) microcephaly.
Wearing contact lenses, instead of bulky prescription lenses, has been a choice available to eyeglass wearers for many decades. The downside to using these insertable lenses is they need more care than traditional eyeglasses.
For whatever reason, some people have some really odd ways they may treat, disinfect and take care of these devices.
For example, some people will use tap water or their own saliva to moisten lenses before inserting them back into their eyes. This can blur vision and repeated practice can cause a number of problems, including poor vision.
While the clouding of your eye’s lenses as a result of something like cataracts can be corrected with surgery, potential disease from bacteria transferred from tap water or your mouth to your eyes is a different case altogether.
Whether users simply ran out of regular disinfection solution, believe this bodily fluid is acceptable or they’re just being lazy, any excuse is dangerous for vision.
To avoid potential problems with your invaluable vision, please take notice of these five things you shouldn’t be doing as a wearer of contact lenses...
It’s quite impossible for a couple to have never experienced a bump in the relationship road. These blips come as a part of the package.
The tricky part is how you address them. Ignoring conflict and allowing it to cause irreparable damage can be extremely detrimental.
A once-stable relationship doesn’t break overnight; the signs show up fairly early… long before things get messy. When you deal with the initial signs the right way, you can nurture your relationship and get back on track.
A relationship requires daily care. Just like you water a plant and make sure it gets adequate sunlight, you need to sprinkle some love and shine a little more attention each day.
If you haven’t made any effort to fix things or don’t realize what went wrong, consider these seven factors.