Author: Linda Rider

  • Health Tips On How To Take Back Control Over Your Life While Fighting Addiction

    Health Tips On How To Take Back Control Over Your Life While Fighting Addiction

    Habit can come to feel like it’s controlling your lifetime, but you really do not have to let it. There are techniques you can choose to regain control and start off down the highway to recovery. Listed here are a several health and fitness recommendations on how to consider back again management around your lifetime though combating addiction.

    1. Go on an habit treatment program

    If you are struggling with dependancy, just one of the best things you can do is go to a procedure application. There are many sorts of packages offered, so you can locate a single that suits your needs. Systems give support and steerage even though you get the job done by way of your habit. They can also assist you master how to reside without the need of medication or liquor. You can uncover addiction treatment applications almost everywhere on line and browse some evaluations to obtain which one will suit you superior. By carrying out this, you would set by yourself a single stage ahead in the combat towards addiction. This is one of the most significant health tips on how to just take back again regulate around your daily life when fighting addiction.

    2. Locate a guidance group

    If you’re not rather completely ready for a formal therapy method, or if you want to continue on your recovery soon after finishing a software, discover a help team. There are groups obtainable for all varieties of addictions, as properly as for the family and good friends of people today with addictions. These teams give emotional support and useful information on how to offer with habit. They can also support you keep accountable and on track with your restoration. It can be helpful to attend group meetings often and share your activities with other people who comprehend what you are heading by means of. Whilst help teams really don’t offer you the very same level of help as a therapy application, they are a valuable useful resource for anybody battling addiction.

  • Break Child’s Fever Using Alternative Medicine

    Break Child’s Fever Using Alternative Medicine

    Fever from illness is a natural part of life and something any mother has dealt with multiple times. They can be worrisome and cause concern, but fevers will happen, and it’s important to know how to treat them. Fever is a sign of infection in the body and is an indication that your body’s immune system is fighting something off. In some cases, giving a child medicine for a fever isn’t even necessary, and using over-the-counter medicine for fevers makes your child more comfortable, but it doesn’t get rid of the fever.


    The concern with fever is if it gets too high or if it’s affecting your child too much. A long-lasting high fever can cause damage, but these are rare. They may cause your child to feel generally down, but there are things to try before turning to Tylenol. Healthy Children states that most fevers don’t need to be treated with medicine at all. If your child has a history of high fevers that lead to further complications, of course, treat the fever however your pediatrician or doctor advises.

    However, if your child handles fevers generally fine, OTC medicine doesn’t have to be the only option to get your child feeling better. Here are six alternative ways to break your child’s fever and keep them comfortable as their fever runs its course.


    Keep Your Child Hydrated


    mother-daughter-drinking-water-1
    Via Pexels

    We know that fluids are extremely important when sick and kids have a more difficult time maintaining hydration when sick. There’s an old saying to starve a fever, and most kids don’t have much of an appetite when they’re running a fever anyway. Your child doesn’t need to be eating a ton, but they need to stay hydrated. Have your child take small sips of water every 10-15 minutes. Sports drinks, popsicles, and ice are other great options to aid in hydration if water just isn’t cutting it.

    Give Them A Warm Bath


    pexels-cottonbro-7086467
    via Pexels/cottonbro

    A lukewarm bath can quickly bring down your child’s overall body temperature. Draw a bath that isn’t cold but isn’t hot and have them climb in. Use washcloths to lay on in their back or chest and let them relax until the water gets cool, or they want to get it out. You can give them a few baths a day if they need it. It isn’t necessary to wash them with soap every time but be sure to pay attention if their skin is getting too dry and use lotion if needed.


    Do not give your child an ice bath. This will only increase the fever because the body is trying to stay at a temperature that will help fight off the illness.

    Sponging


    washing-clothes-sink

    This is the same idea as a bath but done with washcloth or sponge while your child relaxes. Soak a sponge or washcloth in cool water, wring it out and placing on your child’s forehead for 15-20 minutes. Re-soak the sponge or cloth and repeat as many times as necessary. You can also place the sponge on their back, stomach, or upper legs to relieve some of their fever.

    RELATED: Are Cold Drinks & Foods Bad For Kids When They’re Sick?



    child going to sleep
    Via Pexels

    When your child has a fever, their body is working extra hard to fight off the illness they have. More likely than not, your kid will be more lethargic anyway so have them nap or just watch movies all day. Sleep and rest will help your child’s immune system do what it needs to do which is fight off this illness. Extra sleep is one of the simplest alternative recommendations for curing a child’s fever.

    While the body rests, it has the necessary time and energy to focus solely on fighting off the illness.

    Put Your Child In Wet Socks


    Quickest ways to winterize your home - socks on feet to keep warm
    Via Pexels/Taryn Elliott

    This alternative treatment is explained by Farmer’s Almanac, and they acknowledge it sounds strange. Warm your child’s feet in warm water then dry completely. Then soak a pair of thin cotton socks in cold water, put them on your child’s feet, then cover up with dry wool socks. The idea is that this encourages the immune system to activate and improves blood circulation. It’s certainly an old treatment developed before medicine, but it may just work if it’s been around this long.


    Make sure, however, that your child feels comfortable doing this. If they complain or say they are too cold, consider listening to them because they may be letting you know how their body feels and ultimately what it needs.

    Serve Warm Tea Or Warm Broth


    A Teapot And Cup Of Tea
    via Unsplash / Content Pixie

    Herbal teas without caffeine are safe for all ages and also another great alternative. Tea has healing properties and chamomile is a great choice for kids. According to Wellness Mama, chamomile has a slightly sweet apple flavor kids love. Some honey can give the tea a better test for kids if it isn’t their favorite. Bone broth is also a great choice for a feverish child. There is nutrition in the broth that can help them feel fuller. Both tea and bone broth are easy to digest and should be encouraged at least once a day while sick.

    Source: Healthy Children, Farmer’s Almanac, Wellness Mama


    child has fever
    Fever In Children: When Should You Worry?

    No one wants your child to be sick and a fever can be scary, but when should you worry? We break it down.

    Read Next


    About The Author

  • CBD use grows as does confusion over labels, health benefits

    CBD use grows as does confusion over labels, health benefits

    Ken Baker, Ph.D.

    CBD use grows as does confusion over labels, health benefits

    Driving by town, it occasionally looks like just about every 3rd retail retailer has a “CBD Bought Here” sign out front, and it does seem to be like nearly everybody is both by now a person or at least CBD-curious.

    And there is a ton to be curious about. What illnesses is CBD intended to handle? Are there significant variations in between obtainable professional preparations? How do you know how a lot to acquire?

    CBD, cannabidiol, is just one of around 500 substances that have been identified in vegetation belonging to the genus Hashish. Of these, some 113 to 144 (dependent on your reference) are categorized as “cannabinoids” of which the two most ample are THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinolan) and CBD.

    THC gets you higher, CBD does not. (They have an affect on various elements of the anxious technique.) Equally have perfectly-documented health and fitness positive aspects and both are touted by some as wonder remedy-alls for everything from most cancers to pimples, generating scientists and reputable manufacturers squirm in their seats.

  • Durham Queer Health Fair serving LGBTQ NCians

    Durham Queer Health Fair serving LGBTQ NCians


    By Elizabeth Thompson

    It was only about a decade ago when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first medication that provided pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to lower people’s risk of catching HIV, Truvada

    Scotty Elliot still remembers the stigma that followed people who chose to get on the medication.

    “Guys who took it were called ‘Truvada whores,’” said Elliot, an infectious disease social worker at Duke Academy for Health Professions Education and Academic Development. He said the disparagement was “just a horrible way to start a movement of getting care with people, so they are protected from HIV.” 

    That stigma against people with HIV and members of the LGBTQ community, which was disproportionately impacted by HIV, still exists, Elliot said. 

    However, as he stood holding a sign of two men kissing with big bold letters saying “DON’T WAIT, GET PrEP TODAY” in the heart of downtown Durham, Elliot marveled at the progress.

    Scotty Elliott poses with a sign promoting PrEP to prevent HIV. Photo credit: Elizabeth Thompson

    “The last five people that have come up, I said, ‘Do you know about PrEP?’” Elliot said, “and they said, ‘Yeah.’”

    Elliot was out and about downtown as the LGBTQ Center of Durham held a Queer Health Fair on Sunday in an effort to bridge gaps in health care across the community. Advocates ranging from community workers in HIV and AIDs prevention, to yoga teachers, to culture-specific LGBTQ organizations came to represent how the LGBTQ community can access all aspects of health.

    Reducing the stigma around STIs

    From information on PrEP and a rapid sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing booth, the fair was full of resources to reduce stigma around STIs.

    Also available at the Queer Health Fair was free rapid HIV/STI testing. Photo credit: Elizabeth Thompson

    Having information out in the open is key to reducing stigma, said Matt Martin, grassroots advocacy manager at the NC AIDS Action Network.

    “I think events like this are a huge way [to reduce stigma] by just normalizing it, talking about it openly,” Martin said. “I think that we’re taught, especially here in the South, to not talk about these things and they become taboo.”

    One common misconception about HIV is that it only affects gay men. A 2018 CDC study found that 24 percent of new HIV diagnoses were among heterosexual people and 7 percent were among people who inject drugs. The rest, 69 percent, were among gay and bisexual men. 

    The NC AIDS Action Network is trying to raise awareness that women are also greatly impacted by HIV, and they can also access PrEP. Black women, in particular, are disproportionately impacted by HIV and make up nearly 60 percent of new HIV infections in U.S. women. 

    Conversations about health equity for people with HIV are about more than just their treatment, said Janeen Gingrich, interim executive director at NC AIDS Action Network.

    “Folks are so much more than just one singular diagnosis,” Martin said. “We have to take care of the person and their full health, mental health, physical health, not just their HIV.”

    Expanding health conversations

    Education about STIs is just one part of the health conversation for the LGBTQ community, Martin said, and the fair was a great way to see the full spectrum of health needs.

    LGBTQ people have been historically marginalized in medicine, and to this day, health isn’t as accessible to the LGBTQ community compared to other groups. Within the LGBTQ community, some people have easier access to the care they need than others.

    Organizations such as El Centro Hispano have programs to give support to LGBTQ people in the Latin community. Their programs include Mujeres en Accion, a program for lesbian and bisexual Latina women, Entre Nosotr@s, a social group for transgender Latina women in North Carolina and HOLA Latino, a program for gay and bisexual Latino men, said Oscar Pineda, El Centro Hispano’s community director.

    El Centro Hispano has programs for LGBTQ North Carolinians in the Latinx community. Photo credit: Elizabeth Thompson

    Transgender people can also be left out of healthcare when they have to fear being misgendered at the doctor’s office.

    Something as simple as providers asking people their pronouns makes health just a little bit safer and more accessible for the LGBTQ community, said Tatiana Cambio, a UNC Chapel Hill dentistry student at the fair’s UNC LGBTQIA+ Oral Health Booth.

    UNC Dentistry students help make oral health more accessible at the school’s Pride Clinic, Cambio said.

    “We really work with our volunteers to make sure that they’re using current pronouns,” Cambio said, “and that’s something that people who are not super well connected with the queer community need to use a lot more practice on or be more aware of.”

    Health is about more than physical health, which is why mental and spiritual health advocates were also present at the fair.

    Durham-based Global Breath, a yoga studio, offers free drop-in classes to Black, Indigenous and people of color, transgender and gender-nonconforming people in order give promote more accessible self-care and healing, said yoga teacher Devon Pelto, who is also part of the studio’s leadership team.

    Devon Pelto, yoga teacher and member of Global Breath’s leadership team. Photo credit: Elizabeth Thompson

    “Any opportunity we have to practice slowing down is really helpful,” Pelto said. “I teach trauma-informed yoga, so it’s just to help people be back in their bodies and feel their bodies and create that safe place feeling again, because a lot of us, that has been taken away.”

    Having a health fair devoted to LGBTQ people gives them a seat at the table, Martin said.

    “Queer folks are often left out of health conversations,” Martin said. “So I think it’s really important for the community to take control of their own personal health.”

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  • Health Tips: Breast cancer care that includes integrative therapies saves lives

    Health Tips: Breast cancer care that includes integrative therapies saves lives

    Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Mike Roizen

    Much more than half of physicians’ places of work in the U.S. have encouraged at the very least a single complementary well being intervention, these kinds of as Alexander approach, acupuncture, aromatherapy or yoga, to their individuals, according to a January 2020 study. The intention is to assist decrease worry and/or nervousness, ease melancholy, lessen discomfort, improve balance and posture, lessen weight and fortify bones and muscle tissues.

    The use of integrative therapies to complement standard Western medicine has even expanded into most cancers treatment, and sufferers are benefiting enormously. A study in the Journal of Oncology looked at breast cancer people and their 5-12 months results based on whether or not or not their cancer care middle offered any of 12 sorts of complementary guidance.

    The scientists located that when standard cancer care was merged with medium or higher stages of integrative therapies, breast cancer people were at the very least a few instances a lot more most likely to survive than clients who went to facilities with very little or no integrative plans and assist. The cancer care establishments with the most integrative choices (and best results for their clients) targeted on nourishment and physical exercise consultation, affected individual assist groups, spiritual expert services, meditation/mindfulness and psycho-oncology guidance.

    So, if you have a option about where to get most cancers treatment (no matter what variety of most cancers you have), decide for a centre that delivers you details on and accessibility to integrative therapies. If that’s not attainable, discuss with your oncologist about what varieties of integrative plans might assistance you bodily and emotionally, and who in your place you could go to obtain the included guidance.

    Extra coffee magic: This time it’s cholesterol-reducing powers

    Sofia Vergara, Gloria on “Modern Spouse and children,” is a critical espresso lover. “I grew up with a South American family, and if there is one factor I strictly don’t forget finding out from a younger age, it is the electrical power of coffee. I like it black. I like it potent, I do not set sugar or anything at all in it.”

    Vergara is wise in so many ways — specially when it comes to matters of the coronary heart. Not only is it coronary heart-friendly to keep away from adding inflammatory sugar and saturated-body fat-loaded milk to your cuppa Joe, the caffeine in coffee is actually superior for your cardiovascular procedure.

    Exploration posted in Nature Communications exhibits that caffeine (as observed in filtered espresso) lowers lousy LDL cholesterol by blocking the outcomes of a distinct protein (CSK9). When left unchecked, that protein decreases the liver’s potential to approach surplus LDL. But without the need of its interference, much more LDL cholesterol can be quickly removed from the bloodstream via an LDL receptor which is on the surface of liver cells. The end result — a heart that is much less possible to put up with dysfunction.

    This will come on the heels of reports that display consuming all-around two to 3 cups of espresso a working day — and getting 400 to 600 milligrams of caffeine — lessens the risk of loss of life from cardiovascular illness, and ingesting six cups decreases your hazard of dementia and slows the rate of progression of present dementia. So delight in black tea and espresso. FYI: If that’s uncomplicated for you like it is for me, which is mainly because you have a gene that would make bitter flavors truly pleasing.

  • How My Drinking Was Used to Deny Me Treatment for Depression

    How My Drinking Was Used to Deny Me Treatment for Depression

    Five many years ago, I called the hotline for adult psychological providers at a important college hospital’s psychiatry office. Following completing a 50 percent-hour ingestion, throughout which I experienced disclosed problematic alcohol consumption, I was knowledgeable I could not acquire treatment method for my crippling melancholy mainly because I will have to to start with “graduate” from addiction cure. They swiftly me routed into team providers for alcohol use condition.

    I obtained a dual prognosis, but the answer to each of them was evidently to cease ingesting. By the department’s reasoning, I could not get worried about staying frustrated if I was useless from alcoholic beverages use. This was a unusual logic I had been suicidally frustrated considering the fact that I was 11, and at occasions alcoholic beverages was the only tether tying me to this Earth—a pressure of vitality, joy and desire amidst my anhedonia.

    The procedure plan, the improvement of which I was not involved in, had a secondary aim on SSRIs and cognitive behavioral therapy. The precedence was obtaining me sober. Even now, I attended the recommended teams and lessons. Above the study course of the up coming handful of months, I lowered my liquor intake as effectively as improving my mental health.

    But though I felt I was generating progress, the remedy suppliers disagreed. They grew to become progressively frustrated that my objective was to regulate my liquor use fairly than abstaining that I continued to use marijuana with no target of modifying that actions at all and that I experienced also begun to pursue self-healing with psychedelics.

    Cannabis had never caused me damage or brought any repercussions to my wellbeing. No a single in my lifetime was involved about it. Why would I stop? Regular medicines hadn’t brought me aid from my melancholy or alcoholic beverages cravings, and psychedelics seemed to assure that. Why wouldn’t I try out a little something new?

    In the long run, I was discharged for non-compliance with the therapy strategy.

    The clinician I was operating with instructed I enroll in a psychedelics research research, but almost everything I could locate excluded participants with “comorbidities” like despair or substance use. It was the same reasoning the department by itself gave me when I first accessed services: that a affliction can only be evaluated and handled when it’s isolated as a single variable.

    Since I couldn’t entry psychedelics in a therapeutic environment, I pursued them on my have. Finally, I was discharged for non-compliance with the therapy strategy.

    In what other region of drugs would a affected individual be denied all health-related providers because of to their partial non-compliance with a approved therapy, or use of an substitute treatment? Diabetic issues care is not withheld mainly because a client ate dessert. Antibiotics would not be denied to someone who’s also trying homeopathics or a salt lamp at dwelling. And still substance use is regarded a legitimate motive to deny professional medical treatment method, such as therapy for material use ailments.

    Disclosing material use alternatively of lying about it disqualified me from cure of what was, in my scenario, the root cause. The stereotype is that men and women who use medicines are manipulative liars, but often the wellness treatment system leaves us no other alternative.

    When alcohol use disorder was stamped on to my medical records, together with non-problematic consumption of two of the minimum-stigmatized managed substances, medical appointments hardly ever concentrated on something else. It didn’t issue if the visit was for an ear infection. I’d greet the provider as a man or woman, and then my health care report would renovate me into an “addict.”

    I try to remember the search in a person psychiatrist’s eye when I explained to him I’d relapsed. I have hardly ever viewed much more glee.

    I’ve labored with excellent providers, but they have not been my predominant expertise. Most essential a confessional, unwilling to shift on from the alcohol use problem part of my healthcare record right up until I’d happy them with a salacious story.

    I came to understand which anecdotes and term possibilities bought the major reactions for the minimum emotional labor. About the decades I made a restricted program, as though I was a touring street comedian who tells dim jokes at which no just one laughs. It feels honest to say that the persistence with which clinicians pursued and felt entitled to these preconceived narratives stored me mired in my addiction.

    Sufferers should really not be compelled to relive (or invent) addiction-related traumas throughout each and every scientific encounter prior to they can be provided treatment. I try to remember the glance in one particular certain dependancy psychiatrist’s eye when I explained to him I’d relapsed above the weekend. I have never noticed much more glee. He furiously scribbled a script for Antabuse. “This’ll educate ya! I’m gonna make you so sick from liquor, you are going to in no way want it yet again!”

    Yet another used the bulk of our interactions inquiring about just about every conceivable occasion in which hashish may well have triggered me hurt, looking for signs to justify a diagnosis that didn’t exist. At some point, he gave up and declared that I was lying or in denial.

    Necessary treatment method is regarded to be harmful, not beneficial. It requires adherence to a prohibitionist code under which medicines are affiliated with satisfaction, producing all abstinence virtuous and all use damaging with out enabling for nuance or personal working experience.

    The cure strategy that would later on get the job done for me ended up currently being psychedelic use, and treatment from a queer-targeted practice. Which would make feeling, mainly because these have been the factors that I had selected and pursued in accordance to my wants.

     


     

    Photograph by jarmoluk via Pixabay