- By Kat Duff
We are too awake, rather than not sleepy enough. The result, combined with a genetic propensity toward anxiety, makes for a chronic insomniac. While most of us who struggle with sleep fall short of that label, I suspect the same...
One morning more than 26 years ago, Kathy Lubbers woke up and found that she could not bear to lift the sheet from her body because the pain was so great. Although she had been experiencing pain in both hands, nothing had prepared her for this.
Just as foods we are sensitive or allergic to can cause reactions in our digestive tract and lead to chronic inflammation, chemicals in our environment can also contribute to poor mood and physical problems. We have long known the correlation between neurological problems and toxic chemicals...
Chronic pain, defined as disabling pain that persists despite attempts at treatment and often without obvious cause, has become a serious challenge for health professionals. It is not surprising that someone suffering from this level of pain might become depressed, but most studies consider depression a “comorbidity”...
- By Nick Inman
There is a process going on inside me all the time that I don’t like to talk about, but which must be mentioned for the sake of completion. This is my identity of pain: the pattern of suffering that marks me out from everyone else as definitively as my fingerprints....
Can you imagine being so desperate for food that you would eat yourself to survive? Our cells do exactly this. When cells are deprived of energy and nutrients from their external environment, they look internally, packaging up and consuming their own components to survive until an energy source becomes available...
Today is the day you can ease your alarm about sudden memory gaps and quiet your fear that you’re on the cusp of dementia. Changes in memory and concentration at midlife are very common, but you don’t have to live with them. You can improve your...
Before I got sober, just shy of my twenty-fourth birthday, the last thing I felt was the freedom and happiness that the promises speak of. I was sick: not just physically sick from the amount of chemicals in my system, but soul-sick, completely bereft of a sense of...
Most American adults say that they believe in God and that their religious beliefs affect how they live their lives. However, people have different ideas about life after death, belief in miracles, and other religious beliefs...
Teen smokers are better at getting friends to start than nonsmokers are at getting friends to quit.“What we found is that social influence matters, it leads nonsmoking friends into smoking and nonsmoking friends can turn smoking friends into nonsmokers,
An awareness of our own death is potentially extremely distressing. Go ahead and contemplate your own mortality. How does it feel? Would you be surprised to learn that it can potentially improve your mental health to think about your death more often?
Oxytocin is released with a warm hug, a grasped hand, or a loving gaze, and it increases libido. The hormone kicks into high gear during and after childbirth, helping new mothers bond with and breastfeed their new babies. While oxytocin is found in both young boys and girls, it is not yet known when levels of the hormone start to decline in humans, and what levels are necessary for maintaining healthy tissues.
It’s often said that no-one really knows what sleep is for. Sometimes it’s as if this lack of surety means its functions are relatively unimportant or even vestigial, like an appendix to the story of our life. How we evaluate life has long since focused on the daytime – what we think and feel when we’re awake.
Factors such as sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress reduction, and spiritual connection provide the foundation for a strong immune response. Everything you do -- everything you touch, breathe, eat, and think affects your immunity. How you live your life is the most powerful resource...
- By Kat Duff
Our bodies change physiologically, continually altering the amount of sleep we need, the kind we get, and the time of day we are best able to get it as we progress through the life cycle. We assume and relinquish many responsibilities, encounter differing environmental conditions, and make lifestyle choices that impact...
For those of us who suffer from migraine disease, chronic stress can drain our energy and lead to adrenal crisis. Meditation, coupled with deep abdominal breathing, can be helpful in regulating our response to stressful situations, as well as in aborting and preventing migraine attacks and strengthening our kidneys.
Different measures of physical abilities can be assessed to determine how old someone is including walking speed, standing balance, the speed they can rise from sitting. We found that hand grip strength, a measure of upper-body strength, is consistently a good indicator of future mortality and susceptibility to disease.
There is a metal metabolism defect, often present in autism, which makes mercury especially toxic for autistic children. Even with a normal system, an infant can't handle mercury. Bile is needed for the process of eliminating mercury from the body, but an infant's liver does not produce bile.
Just as there is no single cause of cancer, there is no single remedy. Therefore when approaching a complex disease like cancer it is important to formulate a balanced protocol that addresses: the characteristics of the disease; diet, environment, and lifestyle; organ weaknesses and the overall deficiency or excess of the person.
Tai chi, a traditional Chinese form of exercise, may help older adults avoid getting shingles by increasing immunity to varicella-zoster virus and boosting the immune response to varicella vaccine, according to research supported by the National Institute on Aging and NCCAM.
At first glance, one would think that the causes of diseases are as numerous and diverse as the diseases themselves. However, careful observation will show that, fundamentally, all illnesses share one cause: the deterioration of the terrain, the body’s internal cellular environment...
- By Ray Filar
You are in bed, sweating and trembling, dosed up on a selection of painkillers and herbal tranquillizers. Noises outside make you jump. Your heart beats frantically, furiously, unremittingly. You sleep for brief periods, twenty minutes, ten minutes. A police siren goes past and you wake up with a start...
Big Pharma’s focus on blockbuster cancer drugs squeezes out research into potential treatments that are more affordable. Says one researcher: “What is scientific and sexy is driven by what can be monetized.”