Kegel Exercises - What is it?

Kegel exercises help tone and strengthen the pelvic floor muscles. These muscles are important for proper tone of the bladder, urethra, vagina, uterus and rectum. Kegel exercises should be done by all women, but especially after the delivery of an infant, as a treatment for urinary incontinence and pelvic relaxation that often comes with the aging process, and for improving sexual relations by improving pelvic floor control.

Multiple studies have been done with Kegel exercises showing success for urinary incontinence. A study in the Journal of Gerontology showed that "biofeedback and pelvic muscle exercises are efficacious for sphincteric incompetence in older women. Benefits are maintained and improvement continues for at least 6 months post-intervention. These therapies may be useful before considering invasive treatment." A recent study showed that pelvic floor exercises for urine incontinence, when successfully performed, had a 66% chance of favorable results for at least 10 years.

Unfortunately, women are poorly informed about the benefits of these exercises. Through proper teaching and continued practice, women can learn the correct technique. For optimal benefit, you need to perform Kegel exercises daily. The best part of these exercises is that they are free, painless, and can be done at any time of the day.

The proper technique relies upon finding the proper muscle group. Ask your physician about identifying this muscle group during your next gynecologic exam. Alternatively, you can find this muscle by inserting your finger into the vagina and squeezing around it. If you feel pressure around your finger, you have found the correct muscle. This is also the muscle used to voluntarily stop your stream of urine.

Try to isolate this muscle (the levator group of muscles) while relaxing your legs, back, and abdominal muscles. Practice will make perfect. Initially, do these exercises while lying down or sitting comfortably. When comfortable with the technique, you can do these while driving, watching television, during meals, etc. To avoid confusing the bladder muscle, do not perform repetitively while urinating.

The correct number of exercises per day is variable. Evidence suggests that at least 50 repetitions are helpful. A repetition consists of squeezing the levator muscle for 5 seconds and relaxing for 5 seconds. Performing 10 repetitions five times a day will achieve the minimum 50 repetitions. You should be able to build up to holding the levator muscle for 10 seconds with practice. Do not expect miracles over night. Most women find improvement in urine incontinence and sexual relations after 4-6 weeks of therapy.

One of the most important aspects of these exercises (like any form of exercise) is persistence and a daily routine. Try to pick activities during the day to remind you of the exercises. Upon awakening, with morning tea, driving to work, at lunch, driving home from work, watching television, and before bed are common times for women to perform these exercises. Keep a calendar and monitor your improvement.

With a little persistence and patience, these exercises can be very effective.

The Mighty Dandelion

Traditionally, dandelion has been used to cure breast illnesses, bloating, disorders of the gastrointestinal system, aching joints, and skin conditions. The leaves have large amounts of numerous vitamins, including A, C, D, and B-complexes, as well as minerals like iron, magnesium, zinc potassium, manganese, copper, choline, calcium, boron, and silicon.

General Information

For many people, dandelions are simply a yard pest. However, dandelions are very rich in nutrients. Traditionally, the roots and leaves of the plant have been used as medicines for breast maladies, bloating, digestive disorders, aching joints, fevers, and skin disorders. The leaves of the plant are very rich in vitamins, including A, C, D, and B-complex. They also have high levels of minerals like iron, magnesium, zinc potassium, manganese, copper, choline, calcium, boron, and silicon. The most active ingredient in dandelions, eudesmanolide and germacranolide, are found only in dandelions.

Dandelion Uses and Health Benefits

The leaves of the plant are very nutrient-rich, and so they make good supplements for women who are pregnant or elderly women. Dandelion can also be used as a gentle diuretic and can decrease serum cholesterol in some people. The root can be an appetite stimulant and it can treat some digestive disorders. Today, many herbal doctors use dandelion to purify the liver and gallbladder of toxins. Research indicates that dandelions can treat pneumonia, bronchitis, and other respiratory disorders. Dandelion can improve general health, and is beneficial to the kidneys, pancreas, spleen, stomach, and other organs. Dandelion is also recommended for the treatment of tinnitus, tonsillitis, osteoporosis, abscesses, anemia, boils, mammary tumors, cirrhosis, water retention, hepatitis, jaundice, rheumatism, and warts. Dandelion may also be effective in eliminating or averting age spots. Some people also use toasted dandelion root as a healthier alternative to coffee.

Dandelion Benefits also include:

It is a gentle diuretic

It can purify the bloodstream and liver, and it can stimulate the manufacture of bile

It can decrease the amounts of serum cholesterol and uric acid

It can maximize the performance of the kidneys, pancreas, spleen, and stomach

It is very beneficial to menopausal women

It is effective in treating abscesses, anemia, boils, breast tumors, and cirrhosis of the liver

It may avert the development of age spots or breast cancer

Dandelion Nutritional Content

Lactupicrine, a bitter principle, tannin, inulin and a latexlike substance, polysaccharides, carotene

Side Effects/Interactions

Some individuals experience stomach pain because of hyperacidity. It is safe to use with other drugs.

HIV Strikes Fast, Study Finds

By Zoe Elizabeth Buck, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.

Jul. 25--HIV infects and attacks the body within days -- much faster than previously thought -- drastically narrowing the window of time when intervention is possible, Duke University researchers have found.

This means clinicians must test more and sooner if they hope to catch an infection before it can be transmitted to someone else.

"We're just going to have to be much more aggressive in identifying the infection early on," said Dr. Peter Leone, the state's HIV/AIDS health director and an associate professor in the UNC-Chapel Hill schools of medicine and public health.

Knowledge of what goes on immediately after transmission of the virus is essential to understanding what kind of vaccine will be effective, a discovery especially important in the wake of two recent failed attempts to find a shot that works.

On Thursday, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the main federal agency in charge of AIDS research, called for scientists to return to a basic question: What happens when the virus is transmitted?

"Design of a vaccine that blocks HIV infection will require enormous intellectual leaps beyond present-day knowledge," concluded a broad team of institute researchers writing in today's edition of the journal Science. The team said the focus of research should be on discovery of a vaccine rather than on clinical trials for evaluating medicines that may or may not work.

The Duke results, which will be published in the August issue of the Journal of Virology, exemplify that type of scientific inquiry.

The research team was led by Dr. Barton Haynes, director of the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology. The center, a consortium of research institutions founded in 2005 with headquarters at Duke, was the beginning of a larger shift in HIV/AIDS research that culminated in Thursday's announcement by the federal institute, Haynes said.

Faster diagnoses

The center's research has significantly changed the way scientists look at HIV. For years, doctors thought the virus was a stealth infection and couldn't be diagnosed for months. Researchers at UNC-CH proved several years ago that the virus can be detected within weeks. Now the Duke team has whittled the time frame further, to days.

"It was stunning to see how quickly the immune system was affected," said Haynes, who is the lead author on the study.

To deal with the shrinking window, clinicians can check for the presence of HIV more often, but the potential for catching cases early enough for intervention looks bleak. The earliest and most infectious stage of HIV has vague and practically unnoticable symptoms.

"It looks like HIV does a lot of damage very early on," Haynes said. "Now we feel that the opportunity to intervene most effectively may range from about five to seven days after infection."

Doctors are going to have to start screening patients for the HIV virus even if they come in with what seems like a headache or a common cold, Leone said.

"We can narrow that window down, but we're never going to be able to identify all of these folks," Leone said. "We just can't."

HIV is the virus that causes AIDS. Worldwide, about 3 million cases of the disease are diagnosed each year.

North Carolina, which identifies about 2,000 cases of HIV a year, is ahead of the game in identifying the infection early. The state pioneered a program six years ago that tests for HIV in the genetic material of patients even if they pass an AIDS test.

Still, Leone said, clinicians need to be recognizing the infection earlier and routinely considering HIV when someone comes in with an illness.

Nailing down basics

The Duke results may seem unsettling, but experts agree that the scientific building blocks of the disease need to be fully understood. In the past, global pressure has pushed vaccines into testing stages too quickly.

"There's tremendous pressure to develop a bio-agent that is effective," said Dr. Myron Cohen, leader of the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology's clinical division and a UNC-Chapel Hill professor. "Candidate products may have been pushed forward faster than they would have in a situation with less gravity."

Sacrificing depth of understanding for speed has had consequences. A drug taken to trials by the pharmaceutical giant Merck not only failed to prevent the contraction of HIV but appeared to have increased recipients' chances of infection. The trial was abruptly halted last fall.

And just last week, another vaccine trial was killed because not enough was known about how the virus attacks the immune system.

In March, in the wake of the failed Merck trial, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases held a summit on the future of vaccine research. Basic scientific research, like that behind the Duke discovery, could "yield greater understanding of how a successful HIV vaccine might be designed," the federal institute said in its Thursday news release.

"We are learning what a vaccine needs to do that is different from existing vaccines," Haynes said. "Unlike measles, mumps, rubella, HIV puts its genetic material among the chromosomes of your genetic material, and we need to stop it before that occurs.

"HIV gets a head start on everyone before the body gets a chance to fight back."

10 Things Doctors Say - (and what they really mean)

We don’t know how it works, but it works

It suppresses symptoms in the short term, but it may result in your penis dropping off in ten years’ time.

You don’t need it anyway.

We don’t really understand the function of this particular organ.

I’ve been a doctor for 30 years.

I’ve been making the same mistakes for 30 years and nobody else has ever complained.

I’m just going to take a few pictures.

This is the first of a battery of tests.

This drug has no adverse effects.

I seem to have temporarily misplaced my Physician’s Desk Reference.

I’ll be monitoring your progress closely over the next few months.

I need the extra money to pay for my new Bungalow in Runda.

It’s probably caused by a virus.

I don’t know what causes it.

Any responsible parent would do the same.

I vaccinated my child, so what’s your problem?

I’ll be utilising the latest surgical technology.

I’ve been watching one of my colleagues do this procedure for the last month and I’m itching to have a go myself.

Where on earth did you read that?

One of these days I’m going to drop a bomb on those people at What Doctors Don’t Tell You!

10 SITUATIONS WHERE YOU DON’T USUALLY NEED A MEDICAL DOCTOR

1. Backache. Research demonstrates that for most cases of lower back pain, chiropractic or osteopathy works far better than any thing medicine has to offer.

2. Ear ache. In most cases, time, mullein oil, a woolly hat or a hot water bottle works far better than antibiotics in curing ear ache, according to numerous studies.

3. Fever. Fever is your body’s extremely clever method of killing foreign bugs of all varieties and shouldn’t be suppressed. Rather than worrying about the exact degrees, it’s more important to deter mine whether the problem is serious — s ay, meningitis. Fevers for ordinary viral and bacterial infections won’t exceed 105 degrees, which isn’t dangerous.

4. Infection. For common or garden infection s, first try working with a herbalist, who will prescribe Echinacea or Berberis, rather than antibiotic s.

5. Just in case checkups, particularly if you are over 50. If you have nothing blatantly wrong with you, going to a doctor won’t necessarily protect you but is likely to unleash the entire arsenal of his testing apparatus.

6. Menopause. Unless you are among the very small percentage of women who don’t respond to other measures, holistic measures (diet, homeopathy, herbs) will help you through the change in a safer way than any doctor.

7. Chronic but not life - threatening diseases. Eczema, psoriasis, non-life-threatening asthma all respond better to alternative measures than drugs, which only suppress symptoms.

8. Slimming. All a doctor usually has to offer is drugs, and numerous slimming drugs have been found to be life-threatening. Allergies are one of the major causes of over weight, as are calorie-poor slimming diets.

9. Colds and flu. Unless you are elderly and your immune system is compromised in some way, there is nothing your doctor can give you or your child that will improve a cold or flu. Bed rest, plenty of fluids, lemon and honey drinks and homoeopathy help; antibiotics cannot.

10. Acne. Again, all your doctor has is drugs with horrendous side effects to offer you. Try diet and allergy treatment first.

Multivitamins: The new spin that claims they are killers

A new war front is emerging in the Medical field between drug Manufacturers and Nutritionists like me…hehehehe.

Its emerging that the more and more people take vitamins the less they are likely to fall sick. And especially after a Harvard Research in Tanzania showed that the progress of the AIDS disease was dramatically slowed after pregnant HIV-Positive mothers were given vitamin supplement.

Now Medical researchers are tying themselves up in knots in order to get people off nutritional solutions. The latest comes from Harvard, which claims that multi-vitamins may be bad for us – and could even cause cancer.Despite numerous studies that have found that antioxidants found in Vitamins are vital for good long-term health, the Harvard research team concludes that antioxidant supplements not only don’t protect against heart disease or cancer, they also “in some cases may actually do more harm than good.”Turning to the B vitamins – B6, B12 and folic acid – the researchers say the B vitamins don’t prevent heart disease and, worse, folic acid may cause cancer. They point to a study of men who were taking 1000 mcg of folic acid – more than twice the recommended daily amount – and they developed more colorectal adenoma and prostate cancers than those taking a placebo. However, every participant was already at high risk of developing colorectal cancer before the trial began.

Of course these guys are going to win and we will lose and we shall continue using their highly toxic drugs to treat pathogens some of which are resistant to the drugs.

Surely the NEW WORLD ORDER is here.

Broccoli: Why it’s so good for us

It’s called the king of vegetables, and scientists are getting closer to understanding just exactly why broccoli has so many health-giving qualities. Broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables can boost the immune system, and fight the free radicals that damage our cells.

Broccoli’s secret ingredient is a chemical called sulforaphane, which can switch on a set of antioxidant genes and enzymes in immune cells that help fight disease and the effects of ageing.Our bodies lose their natural disease-fighting abilities as we age, and so vegetables such as broccoli can help replace that which the years have taken away.

Researchers from the School of Medicine at UCLA have discovered that sulforaphane in broccoli reverses the decline in cellular immune function in a test on mice. The chemical was especially effective in kick-starting the dendritic cells, which also improve immune functioning.

(Source: University of California – Los Angeles, March 10, 2008).