Monday, October 25, 2010

Does Fasting Work?

Fasting is one of the widely used therapeutic procedures that help in complete detoxification of the body. The body will be purified due to fasting. The duration of the fast depends on the nature of disease, and amount and variety of drugs used and the important one is the age of the patient. Fasting must be done under the guidance of a natural therapist and correct mode of living and a balanced diet after the fasting for a week or so will make a person to get vitality and vigor and regeneration of tissues or the body.

Fasting is advised in stomach diseases, intestinal diseases, kidney diseases, lever diseases and skin diseases. It should not be done in diabetes, tuberculosis, extreme neaurasthenia. Fasting for a long time in these diseases will be not at all good.

The best and the most effective fasting is juice therapy. Fasting will make the body burn and excretes large quantity of accumulated wastes; elimination of inorganic acid and uric acid will be done. Fruit juices will promote strength in the heart muscle. So it is safe therapy. Vitamins, enzymes minerals and trace elements present in fruit juices and vegetables juices will be beneficial to body. Before or during the fasting enema is resorted to eliminate the morbid materials or toxins from the body. Fruit juices every two hours along with lukewarm water must be given for a week. The total fruit juice per day would be 5 to 10 glasses. The complete bed rest mental and physical is essential for the patient, as he will become week after expulsion and excretion of toxins from the body.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Help Cure Your Fatigue

Fatigue Symptoms

Fatigue symptoms can be accompanied by or manifest in a range of other physical and emotional complaints. These include:

* Constant tiredness or sleepiness
* Lack of energy
* Desire to sleep more
* Headaches
* Aching muscles or joints
* Muscle weakness
* Slower reflexes and responses rates
* Indecision and poor judgment
* Low mood, irritability or depression
* Changes in appetite
* Lowered immune system functioning
* Problems with short term memory
* Attention difficulties and poor concentration
* Poor motivation

Help for Fatigue

Fatigue will be treated according to the underlying cause. In some cases, simply adjusting your life-style to include appropriate dietary, exercise and sleep needs will be enough to combat fatigue. In other cases where medical causes are at play, treating the medical illness is the first plan of action.

Natural herbal and homeopathic remedies can be a great help when trying to combat fatigue. Certain herbs are known for their tonic effect on systemic functioning as well as their ability to increase strength and endurance, while energizing both mind and body.

Herbs such as Siberian Ginseng, Olea europea (extract of olive leaf) and Centella asiatica are commonly used to fight fatigue and boost energy without negative side effects - like those possible with pharmaceutical or dietary stimulants.

These herbal ingredients can be taken to naturally assist overall systemic functioning, help to balance all body systems naturally and are often taken by athletes, those recovering from illness or those that need the extra boost to help manage a busy life-style.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Fighting Fatigue

What is Fatigue?

Fatigue is a symptom rather than a specific illness or disorder. While it is common to have the occasional day where you feel tired and less energetic than usual, people suffering with fatigue feel tired and lethargic all the time and seem to lack energy.

Affecting both body and mind, long periods of fatigue can seriously impair your daily functioning and make even the simplest of life’s responsibilities difficult to cope with. Both physical and mental fatigue are the first signs that the body is being damaged and placed under unhealthy stress.

While many cases of fatigue can be rectified by changes in nutrition, environment, stress levels or sleep patterns, it may also be a symptom of a more serious problem. Because it is such a common complaint, it is often overlooked and relatively few people seek medical advice or take the necessary steps to changing an unhealthy lifestyle.

If you have been suffering with chronic fatigue it is important to examine your life-style and take action. If your fatigue continues, a medical evaluation is recommended.

Is Fatigue a Serious Problem?

If fatigue becomes an ongoing problem it is important to address it. The first step is to take a look at life-style factors that may be contributing to your feelings of fatigue.

If however the fatigue continues or you feel that you don’t have the energy to address life-style problems, it is advisable to seek medical advice to rule out any serious conditions and explore treatment options.

It is especially important to call your general health practitioner if you present with other symptoms.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

The Medical Application of Aromatherapy

Really, the medical, therapeutic applications of essential oils (repeat: aroma-therapy!) are making huge advances in acceptance in the scientific community -- among the labs and scientists that do independent and educationally funded research. Important studies are released every month showing the strong efficacy of certain essential oils in treating serious bacterial infections. Try a Pub Med search on 'staphylococcus' and 'essential oil' or 'tea tree', or 'mrsa' and 'essential oil'. You'll find pages of results. The big test will be whether these result in protocols for medical use. The most important factor in this may be how much we all demand that natural 'alternatives' are available in the main-stream, as the profit-driven conventional medical system is just not designed to utilize very low cost natural treatments.

There's a huge body of data affirming the strong anti-tumorial effects of essential oils. Linalool has been shown to completely destroy certain liver cancers. Frankincense has other powerful anticancer action -- cellular toxicity that's specific to tumors! (One of the great challenges of chemotherapy is killing the cancer cells without killing the rest of the human). Lemongrass too has "promising anticancer activity". Search for yourself and you'll find more pages than you can get through any time soon.

While its easy to snub aromatherapy as New-Agey and soft, it's so much more helpful to really know the score. We're talking about medicines with huge curative potentials, and limited side effects. And they smell good -- how many medicines have THAT going for them? Now it the time to change the miss-perception of natural medicine in general, and the therapeutic use of essential oils in particular. Educate yourself on the valuable research being performed. Use the term 'aroma-medicine' instead. Clarify that aromatherapy is really the therapeutic use of medicinal plant extracts, and while some folks appreciate the smell, that's just the surface of the entire branch of this healing modality. A little noise from us can change the way the graciously uninformed think about the healing potential of these wonderful oils.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

The Science Behind Aromatherapy

The image problem of aromatherapy has everything to do with the prevailing idea that the practice is all about 'smelling things', whereas the science really about 'things that smell'. Smelling things is very subjective, and may have little medical effect at all (though we'll see that it MAY as well). Aromatherapy is defined as the complete practice of the branch of natural medicine using the volatile liquids distilled from plants. Authors of the hard-science aromatherapy texts available today, professionally-trained aromatherapists (one with a PhD in Chemistry) note that the future of aroma medicine is with the treatment of serious infectious illnesses and cancer treatment. You don't even have to smell them for them to work! Other effects of essential oils also being successfully investigated include speeding wound healing, reducing inflammation, and acting as analgesics.

You can read these research abstracts yourself by Googling 'Pub Med', and searching for 'essential oil' and things like 'cancer' or 'staphylococcus' or 'axiolytic'. You'll find a few studies too that were inconclusive, like inhalation of a certain oil did not change the immune system stress marker researchers use. But there's also another showing that EVERY OTHER marker of stress WAS changed. It may be the study chose the right oil, or the study population was better treated with the selected oil in some studies and not in others (one showed a stress reduction in women from lavender essential oil, but not in men). You'll find a full page of results showing a statistically significant effect on stress from lavender and linalool. Try other combinations of pharmaceutical preparations and see if there are more significant results than that!

Friday, October 1, 2010

Essential Oils for Medicine

Searching for the term 'Aromatherapy' brings up several pages claiming aromatherapy is a fraud of some sort. That essential oil manufacturers and retailers are making 'dubious' claims of the efficacy of essential oils. These folks don't seem to have done their homework, or compared the validity of scientific inquiry to that produced by conventional medicine, which in fact could easily be claimed as 'dubious' using the same criteria. Ok, well actually there are no criteria used, just a few blurbs that present aromatherapy as a soft science, on that should be neglected along with everything else that's every been found under the heading of 'new age'.

How about we'll start be agreeing on this: That SOME of aromatherapy is in-fact a 'soft science'? That SOME people may feel more relaxed when inhaling Lavender, for example, and some will not? Aromatherapists will not disagree on this point -- they will however put up a defense when the medical applications of essential oils are thrown out with the soft side of 'aroma' therapy. Science IS BACKING UP many of aromatherapy's claims with valid data, even on the 'soft-science' of the practice.