Digital Resource for Health

PMS is a burden that all women must share and though the intensity may be different for different women it is a curse we wish we could pass it onto men. The symptoms usually begin up to 14 days before your cycle begins and stop a few days after it ends. The causes of PMS lack a solid, scientific base though most evidence points towards the interaction between sex hormones and brain chemicals known as neurotransmitters. Symptoms of PMS include:

• Depression
• Anxiety
• Irritability
• Mood swings
• Trouble sleeping
• Changes in appetite and food cravings
• Hot flashes
• Joint aches
• Headaches
• Back pain
• Acne
• Bloating of abdomen
• Tiredness
• Increase in heartbeat
• Swollen and tender breasts
• Weight gain

PMS for many women is also accompanied with menstrual cramps that can range from mild to severe. Severe menstrual cramps can be so severe that it may interfere with a woman’s daily activities for several days. 

Unfortunately there is no cure for PMS but maintaining a healthy diet, exercise and taking pills may help. Be careful about the medicine you take since not all will suit you. The medicines can be over-the-counter or in some cases, require a doctor’s prescription. Doctor’s may also prescribe anti-depressants or birth control pills as anti-depressants may reduce irritability and depression while birth control pills help by evening out your hormone levels.

There are a few steps you can follow to ease your symptoms and make sure each month goes a little more smoothly. These are:

• Keeping a regular schedule of meals, exercise and sleep.
• Eating 6 small meals instead of 3 heavy ones.
• Avoid salt during your period as salt bloats you up and increases fluid retention
• Cut back on caffeine to reduce soreness of breasts
• Cut back on alcohol to reduce depression, anxiety and irritability
• Eat complex carbs such as cereals and whole grain products.
• Also eat lots of fiber, protein and food high on iron content
• Sleep well for at least 8 hours.
• Take vitamin and other supplements such as calcium

Of course, do consult your doctor especially regarding the vitamins and additional supplements as they may ending doing you more harm if not taken in the right proportion.

Nosebleeds are common for most of us and usually the sight is more frightening than the cause. Most nosebleeds can be cured at home however in some situations it is advisable to visit a doctor. The nosebleeds that need looking into are those caused by no visible external or internal injury. At these times it is best to go in for a medical check up to determine the cause.

Nosebleeds occurring due to internal causes could be due to the inability of the body to clot blood. Sometimes our blood thins because of medication or some liver related problems and in these cases, if the body is unable to clot the blood it will result in nosebleeds. A nasal cancer or leukemia could also be the reason behind nosebleeds and sometimes bleeding is caused if a blood vessel in your nose bursts. When nosebleeds stem from the vessels at the end of your nose it can be dangerous. This type of nosebleed is more common with the elderly due to high blood pressure, atherosclerosis or bleeding disorders.

In case of a nosebleed, sit down while leaning forward. By keeping you head above the heart can stop or at least slow the bleeding. Leaning forward will ensure than the blood is expelled through your nose since if lean back, the blood may flow through your throat and to your stomach. Next squeeze the soft portion of your nose with your thumb and index finger. The soft portion is located at between the end of your nose and the bridge of your nose.

For the normal nosebleeds, you can follow a few tips to avoid it. If nosebleeds are frequent and severe the best strategy for you would be to have a medical examination to find out the cause and if it is serious.

If you’re a parent you must know how important it is to keep your child hydrated. However, there are a few ways you could prevent your child from dehydrating themselves. Firstly, take into account the physical condition of your child as this plays an important role in the way their bodies adjust to the heat outside. If your child is overweight or hasn’t been involved in physical activities for a long time then they will be more prone to dehydration when exposed to the outdoor heat suddenly.

What you need to do is encourage your child to play games or exercise slowly and in a lesser degree so that their bodies can adjust to the external environment. Also, make sure that they play or exercise in cooler and shadier places in the beginning. This gradual process helps their body to learn how to sweat.

It is also important to ensure that they drink lots of water or energy drinks. Studies have shown that children need to drink plenty of water or juice before going to play and it is also necessary to make them drink fluids every 20 minutes even in between the game. This will keep then adequately hydrated. Also, be aware of the weather conditions. The hotter and more humid the weather is the more probability it is for dehydration. Try to encourage your child for early morning or evening activities. If you follow these simple tips you should be able to ensure that your child does not have to suffer from dehydration.

Now moving on to adults for a similar yet different problem, the problem of excessive sweating. Humans shed water through pores in the process known as perspiration. This is normal. What is not convenient however, is when even small activities like a walk in the park or climbing up the stairs cause you to sweat profusely.

Yet many of us especially men do suffer from this problem. It is a nuisance at best as you constantly have to so freshen up, wear dark clothes to hide the sweat stains and wear sweatpants even in summer. The best way to deal with this issue is to stay fit and this exactly the reason why athletes don’t even break a sweat for running short distances.

We all have things about ourselves that we would like to change. For many people this could involve losing some weight, eating healthier or even changing the colour of their hair. But for others there may be aspects that can‚it be changed with a small lifestyle choice or from a bottle bought at the chemist.

Physical attributes such as the structure of the face, condition of the skin or teeth or body shape are individual to us from birth and can often be the source of great embarrassment or low self-esteem. In the last thirty years, advancements have been made in surgical and dental techniques that have given hope to millions of people around the world.

The rise of cosmetic surgery has been meteoric and as many of the procedures have become more popular they have also fallen in price and become available to a wider range of people. The same can be said of cosmetic dentistry procedures, which were once reserved for the rich and famous but are now available to everyone in virtually every dentist across the UK. Procedures such as tooth whitening guide can radically alter the appearance of teeth, covering blemishes and discolouration in as little as half an hour and making the patient look younger and healthier.

General cosmetic surgery can also benefit the physical appearance. Popular cosmetic surgeries include breast augmentation and facial surgery, commonly known as facelifts. Another popular surgery is rhinoplasty surgery, which is commonly called nose surgery. This can be carried out for health reasons, such as unblocking the airways, but it can also be used to reshape the nose to improve the appearance of the face.

“You are what you eat” which is why it is so important to pay attention to what we feed ourselves. A healthy lifestyle incorporates a healthy diet. There are plenty of websites and books advising you what to eat but only you know your body best. Choose a diet suitable for your body type and avoid junk food at all costs. The first step is to read those labels well and there’s always more than meets the eye. 

Also, the labels can give you a good idea on the vitamin and mineral content so you can decide what is best for you. Make a habit of eating fruits. Substitute an apple or mango for your in between, junk food snacks. Fruits are a good substitute for other sugar based food as well since unlike the latter they don’t make you gain weight. Buy fresh vegetables instead of packed ones as they have more nutritional value. Go easy of fatty products and milk but completely avoiding either is not healthy either. And a tip to make sure you don’t eat excessively as any meal would be to eat some food appetizers, they reduce your appetite by filling you up a little.

For those of you trying to lose weight here are a few tips. Avoid oily food and when cooking in oil, use the one with low cholesterol value. What you also need to avoid are fruits such as bananas, dairy products like cheese or butter and also alcohol (unless you want to end up pot bellied). What you must do is drink lots of water as it increases you metabolism and burns calories, eat plenty of veggies, protein is great and of course, don’t forget to exercise. Whatever you do, don’t starve yourself as it’s just a sure fire way of harming your body.

Other aspects of maintaining a healthy body and healthy lifestyle are to get enough sleep and exercise. Yoga is great for keeping the mind and body in balance. For a normal adult, a minimum of 8 hours of sleep is necessary. Try to catch up on that or you could find yourself yawning though the entire day. Also, negative thinking has a great impact on how your body feels. Negative emotions and stress can zap all your energy and leave you inactive. Avoid smoking and drinking as these make you gain weight, age you sooner and kill your stamina. Eat well, nurture a healthy mind and you will find yourself enjoying life a lot more.

A pinched nerve can be a big problem and botheration for someone suffering from it, because the nerve begins to feel compressed and one will definitely feel uncomfortable with this kind of a condition. A pinched nerve is caused by a “misalignment” of the body that can lead to a complication in the nervous system that can cause a nerve to inflame. The inflammation of the nerve is what causes the sensation of a pinched nerve.

It is believed and many patients who have undergone such an experience might also be able to agree that treatment of a pinched nerve or an inflamed nerve is done best by an experienced chiropractor. As mentioned before, the most obvious cause ailment that leads to the nerve to pinch is the misalignment of the body that can best be fixed by a variety of chiropractic adjustments and treatments.

Not only are adjustments to the arms and neck and spine etc made, but usually for such a situation where you are suffering from a pinched nerve, a chiropractor also advises his or her patient to regularly exercise and undergo physiotherapy. Their therapy often also involves the use of ultrasound methods and electrotherapy treatments to lend a lot of relief to the area of the body where your nerve has been affected. However, with such a condition you cannot expect the inflammation of the nerve and therefore the pinched nerve feeling to go away very easily with only one sitting, you will have to visit your chiropractor more number of times than that to be completely relieved of any kind of problems that were caused to your nervous system due to the misalignment of your body.

The three best things that one such person can do to keep your body from being misaligned too often and then developing pinched nerves to trouble you all the time is to make sure that your diet is a healthy one, also that you are maintaining a healthy weight so that you are neither under weight or over weight and also that you are an active person. However, if you have such a tendency because of your body structure or any other similar reason, you will need an ongoing care from your chiropractor so that you do not develop such nervous affliction again.

Sweating as we all know is a necessary evil, a process that allows the body to excrete the unnecessary. However, sweating excessively is also a health issue and a medical problem that needs to be dealt with as soon as possible by you if you are suffering from it. Also, sweating excessively is also a major cause of embarrassment, as it is definitely not a desirable trait that one would want to see in other person. In public, you will always be aware of yourself because of the obvious sweat stains that you are aware of that can be easily visible by everyone around you. This can be a major cause of embarrassment no doubt, but what is more important is the fact that it is actually a medical condition. However, sweating excessively can indeed be controlled and here are some ways that will help you do so.

 There are some things that you can add to your regular diet for example that will help you reduce the amount that you sweat every day. For instance, adding grapes to your daily diet will help you do that. Even if you don’t feel like eating grapes, even grape juice can serve the purpose, because this fruit helps your body cool down considerably that in turn will help you sweat less during the day. You could also tomatoes in a larger quantity to your daily diet, in fact even tomato juice is a good idea to help you sweat less, drinking buttermilk also helps to a great extent.

Apart from only adding some specific foods to your diet there are also some direct physical things that you can do to help you sweat less than you normally do. For instance, make a solution out of water and baking soda and then soak some cotton woolen pads in that, you should then use that woolen pad to wipe your underarms so that the sweating is reduced considerably. Also, cider vinegar when applied to the underarms actually helps relieves excessive sweating to a great extent.

However, it has been proven that there are also times when excessive sweating is caused because of psychological problems as well, this could include anxiety and stress and other kinds of mental pressure. A good way of dealing with excessive sweating due to stress and anxiety therefore is by seeking some professional psychological help to combat depression. You might just discover that you sweat a lot less after you have received this kind of a treatment.

However, you must also realize that there is no way that you can actually stop your body from producing sweat completely. Not only is it hardly possible, but this is not something that is desirable no matter how badly you might feel about sweating. Sweating is a natural bodily process that might actually cause harm to your body if you try stopping it completely. However, excessive sweating is also not normal and has to be dealt with before it gets too bad to handle.

What you eat and how you eat it is often an area of health advice that people seek, but they ask for such advices when they suddenly realize that they need to shed those few extra pounds or they have heard of a new food group they could eat to keep their skin glowing and looking youthful. However, the fact is that good healthy food indulged in a well thought out diet is not actually great as far as their physical appearance is concerned but that such a diet can actually work wonders for your body even though you might not visually be able to notice the change. For instance, a healthy diet will surely have a healthy effect on your eyesight.

A diet that is high on fat and sugar can actually directly cause harm to your eyes even though you might know it yet. This kind of fat or sugar can clog up the blood vessels, the retina in your eyes that will eventually lead to a lack of oxygen supply to your eyes. This of course means big trouble as far as your eyesight is concerned and so this diet can actually lead to a loss of your eyesight. So just like a sugar filled diet can cause you to contract diabetes it might as well be causing you to suffer from a cataract very soon. There are also some other particular foods such as white rice or white bread and the likes that has a very high risk of increasing the sugar content in your blood that will again lead to a similar problem in your eyesight. This kind of food therefore is as bad for your overall health as you might already have been hearing as it is for your eyesight. In comparison, it is the wholegrain products that are actually healthier to handle than the other kinds of carbohydrates mentioned above.

In fact something that might be a part of your diet already can be working to your eyesight’s detriment. For instance, the consumption of alcohol on a high level will actually affect your eyesight. The main reason for this is because it is the liver that converts the beta carotene into the Vitamin A that is such an important nutrient to keep your eye healthy. It is however the liver that excessive alcohol consumption affects. If the liver therefore is put under the kind of stress that alcohol puts it under, the production of Vitamin A will be affected that will eventually affect the health of your eye as well unfortunately.

In fact there are researchers who have even found a direct link between smoking and the health of the eye. Smoking is another part of a person’s daily lifestyle that many people cannot get rid of but is a very unhealthy feature of their diet. Among the various harms that a smoking habit can cause to the body, damaging the blood vessels of the eye is also one of them.

Believe it or not, bees might actually do a lot for your health if you can make use of them in the right way- that is to say that they give you honey and honey is being proved at being very good for health. Honey being researched on has proved in many ways of being a healer for people in many health issues and their healing and medicinal value is increasing day by day. There are indeed ways in which those six legged creatures could actually help you out.

In fact among the medical things that honey is best at curing is supposed to be burns. Of course this refers to the medium burns that anybody can get accidentally at home if they have been cooking or from a candle etc. Honey is said to have the capacity of being able to soothe a burnt wound and thus might even be more helpful as a treatment for a burn than other kinds of dressings and ointments that people generally use. The healing process of the burn is supposed to become faster if honey is used in the right way.

There is also a certain kind of honey, known as Manuka honey that is found in New Zealand that is supposed to work wonders on leg wounds and leg ulcers caused due to infection. However, even though you might be excited with the prospect of downing some of that tasty honey, the healing process actually does not work that way. The honey is actually combined with the dressing for the wound and is pretty much applied to the area on your skin. This particular honey is supposed to contain a certain kind of component that helps reduce the effect of the infection.

There were actually studies carried out where they compared honey and certain cough medicines for proof and found that honey actually worked better to reduce cough. Therefore f it can actually be proved that honey works much better at combating cough than over the counter medicines then one can only imagine the prospects that this tasty natural medicine will have against the mostly bitter cough syrups etc.

In fact already because of the harmful side effects that many of these cough drugs caused, children below two years of age are banned from being treated with these cough medicines. In situations therefore where your one year old might be suffering from cough, what better medicine to give your child to stop the coughs than a spoonful of honey, which will cause no harm or side effects whatsoever.

Women of every age like to feel good about their bodies. Breast Implants is one way to either enhance a woman’s features or give them the lift that they need. Age is always a factor when undergoing any type of surgery, cosmetic or otherwise. The ideal age category for having breast augmentation surgery is between the ages of 18 and 50.

Teenagers will often request a breast augmentation surgery even before graduation day appears for them. During teen years girls are often very self conscious about their bodies and many believe that bigger or fuller breasts will help. Since their bodies are still changing and will continue to throughout their teen years most cosmetic surgeons will turn away people under the age of 18. The FDA suggests that breast augmentation patients should be at least 18 years of age because of the risks and that the body is still growing but they do not have a restriction on it set in stone. One of the requirements to have a breast augmentation surgery is that the girl’s breasts are fully developed. Also, the earlier the surgery is performed on a woman the higher chances are of developing stretch marks and sagging later on in life.

Many older and elderly women are now looking into breast implant surgery for themselves. While women over 50 have a higher risk of complications from breast augmentation some of the cosmetic surgery operations are still performed on them if their doctor believes that they are still in good health. One concern about women over the age of 50 and having breast implants are the required mammograms. While women with implants can still have mammograms it does make the screening a bit more difficult. Since the breasts are squeezed flat during a mammogram, rupturing of the breast implant is also a concern.