How to Understand and Avoid Arthritis

Arthritis is actually a general term for any of about one hundred different diseases that cause swelling, stiffness and pain in the joints. It is the top cause of disability in the United States, affecting about 40 million people, or forty percent of the population. While primarily considered a disease of age, arthritis also affects almost 300,000 children in the U.S. Arthritis crosses all boundaries of social strata; economic status, gender, geographic location and race.

What exactly is arthritis and how can we avoid and treat it?

In a normal joint, cartilage cushions the area where the bones meet. Cartilage is a strong, smooth, elastic tissue, which, along with the bone ends is encased in a joint capsule. The joint capsule is filled with synovial fluid, which secretes from the synovial membrane lining the capsule and further cushions the joint. Arthritis is experienced when anything goes wrong with this system, and pain results.

Osteoarthritis (OA), also known as degenerative joint disease, is the most common form. It is most common in people over 55 and affects approximately 20 million Americans. OA is created by the breakdown of the cartilage cushion between the bones, creating friction at the bone ends, which manifests as pain and swelling. In some cases bone spurs will also develop, exacerbating the problem. It is most commonly found in the large, weight bearing joints of the knees and hips, but is also common in the spine, hands and feet. It can however, affect any joint in the body.

Rheumatoid, or inflammatory arthritis is somewhat different from OA. Here, the synovial membrane becomes inflamed and swollen causing the pain and stiffness. Blood flow is increased to the area because of chemicals released by the inflamed tissue and this can cause the joint to appear red and feel hot. Inflammatory arthritis may be caused by immune system deficiencies, crystal deposits in the joints, or infection.

In any case, the patient will tend to favor the painful area, often holding it stiffly to ease the pain. This can cause the supporting muscles to weaken from disuse and also create serious tightness in the tendons that support them. All of this combined can cause the joints to contract or change shape and may result in complete loss of movement in the affected joint.

Doctors who treat arthritis, called rheumatologists, have a variety of diagnostic tools to use to determine the type and severity of a patient's arthritis. As there is currently no known cure, treatment is applied to ease pain and increase mobility. Various pain killing and anti-inflammatory drugs; rest and exercise are tools available to aid the patient. There are a few drugs for specific types of arthritis that can slow the advance of the disease.

Regular, light exercise is a most important key to not just treating, but avoiding arthritis. For patients with arthritis an excellent exercise is swimming, as it allows activity with little joint pressure. Exercise, plenty of rest, a constant intake of fluids to keep well hydrated and a good diet with supplementation can all help to prevent arthritis.

Women & Joint Pain

The top five health concerns of women are breast cancer, osteoporosis, heart disease, depression, and autoimmune disorders such as multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, and lupus in which the body attacks itself. Although the most common cause of disability for women in the United States is arthritic disease.

What Is Arthritis?

Arthritis is a condition that causes damage to the joints of the body. There are different forms of arthritis and each has a different cause; however, the most common form is osteoarthritis (degenerative joint disease) that results when a joint is injured or becomes infected. While its origin is uncertain, rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a painful autoimmune disorder that leads to chronic inflammation at the joints. Osteoarthritis is a more common illness caused by a gradual breakdown of cartilage in the joints. Any form of arthritis typically worsens with age, but ironically, almost two-thirds of people with arthritis are under age 65, and more than 60 percent are women.

Who Is At Risk?

Arthritic disease affects 46 million Americans, or more than 21 percent of the adult population. The disease affects Caucasians and African-Americans equally. That number and the costs associated with treating the disease is expected to rise even higher as baby boomers age. Currently, arthritis treatment costs Americans more than $128 billion a year in lost earnings and medical care. Those who are overweight are especially prone to having arthritis due to the extra stress that obesity places on the joints.

How can holistic therapy help women with common arthritis?
Experts advise staying active and keeping your weight under control to help prevent or treat arthritis.  If you lose as little as ten pounds, you can decrease pain in the knees and hips by 50 percent. With exercise, you can decrease the progression of the disease. Chiropractic care has similar positive effects. If you suffer with low back pain or neck pain you may benefit from gentle spinal care to facilitate mobility and reduce stress.  Related conditions such as fibromyalgia, lupus, carpal tunnel syndrome, and rheumatic/giant cell arteritis may also be helped with chiropractic care.

Most people do not know that arthritic pain symptoms often appear as a result of food allergies. Food sensitivities often manifest in a delayed matter, which means that something you ate in the previous 24 to 48 hours may be the culprit. Keeping a food diary or having a ALCAT (food and chemical sensitivity/intolerance test) will help you determine a cause. The most common foods that trigger arthritis pain are:

Beans      
Beef         
Corn      
Nightshades  (potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, onions, eggplant) 
Nuts       
Salicylates  (naturally-occurring chemicals found in some fruits and vegetables)
Soy            
Wheat       
Yeast       

By avoiding foods the body is allergic or sensitive to, arthritic symptoms may be eliminated. Even if there is wear and tear of the joints, pain is dramatically reduced.  During my 17 years of treating people with food allergies, I have seen arthritic symptoms disappear through natural holistic therapy.  While the joints may appear the same, the pain is relieved. My hope is that you find help to relieve your joint pain.

Sore Joints and Food Allergies - Is Your Diet Making Your Joints Ache?

Might you have a food intolerance that makes your joints ache?
 
If you thought your joints felt achy after a meal, only to doubt yourself after hearing that no evidence links food allergies to rheumatoid arthritis, you're not alone. Until now science offered little evidence to support this connection.
 
Most studies have focused on antibodies (proteins that attack foreign substances) in the blood, but that focus may have been wrong. Food-related antibodies may not show up in the blood but in the gut of people with rheumatoid arthritis, and that's just where researchers at the University of Oslo, Norway, looked. They found that, in test tubes at least, the intestinal fluid of people with rheumatoid arthritis had higher levels of antibodies to proteins from milk, cereal, eggs, cod and pork than in people without rheumatoid arthritis.
 
Gut to Brain: Here Come the Allergies
Since your gut welcomes food first, the gut's immune system is the first to recognize potential substances that cause allergic reactions.  
 
Food allergies occur when your immune system mistakenly believes that something you ate is harmful. To protect you, the immune system produces immunoglobulin E  -  also called IgE antibodies -  against that food. The antibodies set off a chain reaction that causes symptoms. 
 
In some people, the antibodies and proteins bind together and form immune complexes in the intestine. These immune complexes then circulate and get into every nook and cranny of the body, including the joints, where they may contribute to inflammation.  Once antibodies are made against a particular food, the body instantly recognizes that food the next time it is consumed, and the cycle begins again.
 
Do Certain Foods Make Your Arthritis Worse?
If you think certain foods affect your arthritis, you could try eating the standard Stone Age Diet, which includes only fruit, vegetables, meat and fish, for one month, or follow the elimination diet, which is discussed in the book The Real Life Diet. Studies have shown that if a person is food-sensitive, this type of diet can help reduce morning stiffness and pain, improve range of motion and lower inflammatory mediators in the blood.
 
In a recent study British researchers noted that when on The Real Life Diet, more than one-third of participants with rheumatoid arthritis felt better and had less morning stiffness. A few study patients were able to return to walking and all other previous activities.
 
Investigate the Food Detective for Food Intolerance
Self-diagnosis by diet alone can be difficult, as food intolerances often have a delayed onset. This means that symptoms can arise hours, days or weeks after you've eaten a problem food.
 
An alternative way to check whether you have food intolerance is to use a new test called the Food Detective. A first in the world, the test can be done at home with a simple pinprick of blood, which will yield a result in 30-40 minutes.
The test results will show which food(s) you should eliminate from your diet to alleviate your symptoms. These foods include gluten, rice, cocoa beans, mushrooms, yeast, nuts, soya, shellfish, eggs and dairy products. More than 70% of testers who eliminated offending food groups from their diets experienced an improvement of their ailments.
 
If you're suffering with aches and pains or diagnosed arthritis, it might be worth it to eliminate the guesswork and get yourself properly tested. If you have food intolerance the symptoms can range from anxiety, constipation and diarrhoea to insomnia, migraines, arthritis, asthma and chronic fatigue syndrome.
 
The Food Detective is a useful tool and not very expensive, which makes it even more attractive as it takes much of the guesswork out of the process. Once you've identified the foods that may be causing the problem, it's ideal to omit those from your diet for a month, making sure you have plenty of alternatives to replace the missing nutrients. Within a month or two you should notice a significant difference to your symptoms, if it's diet-related.

What Are The Definitive Shingles Symptoms I Can Expect?

Shingles symptoms often begin with a mild but persistent headache, sensitivity to light and flu-like sensations. Soon after, a rash begins to develop that can be accompanied by extreme pain in the rash area. Tingling and dizziness may be present.

As the pain intensifies, bright red lesions develop, which gradually fill with fluid. As soon as a crust forms over the blisters, the person is no longer contagious. These lesions most commonly develop over the torso and face, and usually confine themselves to one half of the body. Other symptoms that may be present are a feeling of general unhealthiness, lymphatic swelling, joint pain, hearing loss, abdominal pains or genital lesions.

Shingles treatment often involves treating the symptoms and letting the lesions clear up on their own, which they will do in two to three weeks with a very small chance of recurrence. Since the pain is sometimes very intense, it is often necessary to treat it with painkillers during a shingles episode. Sometimes steroids are prescribed for this end, but these have been linked to impairing the immune system and their helpfulness in shingles treatment has never been proven.

Calamine lotion is sometimes said to reduce the pain that is one of shingles symptoms. Vitamins C and E are also said to help relieve pain and speed the healing process; either a topical cream or an oral supplement may be helpful. Cool dressings on the affected area can also be incredibly effective shingles treatment. A topical ointment made out of two crushed aspirins and two tablespoons of chloroform has routinely been found to alleviate pain and speed healing by many people with shingles. Lysine cream is an amino acid which impairs the growth of the herpes virus which causes a shingles outbreak; application of a lysine cream once or twice daily may help your body heal faster.

Symptoms of shingles are often a sign that the body has been weakened by age, stress or other infection. Therefore, keeping your body healthy can reduce the risk of a shingles outbreak or speed up recovery. If you have been exposed to the chickenpox virus (through a vaccine or by coming down with chickenpox) then you are a host of the virus that causes shingle symptoms. It stays dormant in the body and may never impair you, until your immune system falters due to cancer treatment, fatigue or any other extreme stresses. It is then that it can flare up and reactivate, leading to an outbreak of shingles.

Eating a lot of vitamin-rich fruits and vegetables can help keep you immune system strong enough to prevent reactivation of the virus, and consuming raw fruits and veggies during a shingles episode may speed the recovery process. Reducing stress and exercising regularly are also good ways to keep you immune system working hard for you and minimizing the likelihood of an outbreak and shingles symptoms.

If you think you have developed any symptoms of shingles, you should be sure to talk to your doctor before beginning any treatment.

Jaw Pain Home Remedies

This disorder puts incessant stress on your jaw. Learning the way to relax your jaw will help the agony to vanish fairly quickly. But this is typically simpler said than done. It's natural for you to tighten your jaw. Clenching your teeth is not unusual for folk with TMJ.

There are many home cures that you'll be able to find on the web. A mouth guard is just one of the possible solutions. In order to make this effective you'll be wanting to soak the mouth guard in hot water for a little while. It's best to use this method right before you go to bed at night and leave the guard in as you are sleeping. This is a useful method to eliminate the discomfort. There are a few things that you need to begin doing instantly like eating foods that are soft, taking small bites, stop dental gum, shifting sides that you chew your food and many others.

Searching the internet for different ways to dump the agony in your jaw will help you to uncover a range of techniques. Using warm and cold compresses will help in reducing the soreness in your jaw.

TMJ Jaw Pain Causes

Waking up with agony in your jaw, painfully chewing your food or merely severe agony in your jaw can be more than your willing to handle. There are a variety of causes, but often these are the most common causes - rheumatism, TMJ, sinus infections, ear illnesses and a spread of other minor causes. There'll be a range of symptoms that you'll feel if TMJ is the cause of your pain,eg ringing in the ear, sinus pressure, clicking in your jaw when eating, and headaches.

Going to a dentist and debating about the discomfort you are experiencing will help you to expose the underlying cause of your pain, which is the most effective way to help to find the correct treatment to get rid of or at the least scale back the level of distress or discomfort that you are experiencing. The dentist will examine your bite, and your teeth and debate a variety of issues with you like stress, food habits and your general fitness. The solutions to these questions will help them to reveal the cause of the pain in your jaw.

You may expose a spread of methods of treatments to relieve the discomfort like a hot or cold compress on your jaw will help to reduce the discomfort, using a mouth guard at night and soaking it in hot water for an extended period will help.

You'll learn about assorted other reasons behind jaw pain by doing a search on the internet, or by setting up an appointment with your dentist. You can read more about TMJ Jaw Pain Treatments [http://www.tmj.org/treatments.asp] here.

There are several natural remedies available which are worth investigating, ranging from self-help books to over-the-counter mouth guards. These inexpensive solutions are worth pursuing.

Erasing Joint Pain: Energy Clearing

Wouldn't it be nice if you could take an eraser and rub out your pain?

Like a pencil mark on a paper, pain is very noticeable. But once you erase that mark, you can forget about it completely. It no longer grabs your attention. And when a pain goes away, we easily forget it was ever there.

But how can you erase a pain?

One way, which is probably the most popular one, is to mask the pain with drugs. But that does not really solve the problem.

Another, which is our subject here, is to remove the cause of the pain and then the pain must vanish.

The Cause of Joint Pain

In order to remove the cause of the pain, you must know the cause of the pain. And this is where it gets interesting!

You may think of the cause of your joint pain as an athletic injury or the repeated stress and microtrauma of sitting at a computer or standing for long hours. You may say you cannot undo the injury and you cannot go back and undo all your years of typing or working on your job. And you can't even stop now or you would lose your job. So how can you remove the cause of the pain?

The Hidden Cause

While you may not be able to stop or reverse the mechanical cause of your pain, there is another approach that can help. There is another cause of pain which usually goes undetected and unaddressed. It is a more subtle cause and so it requires a more subtle technique. But the results are often as dramatic as taking a painkiller.

This hidden cause of much of your pain is conflicted energy. Like static on a radio or a virus on a computer, energy conflict within a system causes that system to fail. It simply cannot function properly. But once you tune in that radio station or clean up those computer files, everything can go back to optimal functioning.

A Viable Alternative

There are many energy workers using a variety of techniques that can help you with your joint pain. They can open the way for true healing in your joints. Find someone who inspires confidence. You will probably do best when you work with someone with whom you resonate well. Once the dynamic life force flows through you in an unconflicted way, you may very well notice an instant diminishment of your pain. In time it can completely disappear. For some, this process is very fast. For others it can take an extended period of time.

Erasing the Pain

The joints of the body create the most exquisite movements of human expression. But when they hurt they can cause some of the most excruciating moments in your life.

When you seek out an energy worker to help you with your joints, you are not masking the pain. You are erasing the pain by correcting the cause. And when you're dancing again, you probably won't even remember the pain at all.

Jumping On A Trampoline - The Miraculous Way To Get In Shape!

Jumping basically requires flinging you about on a trampoline the way children do. And this way you loose the weight as well. Not only is this but it's a great activity for blood circulation, varicose veins and cellulite.

Trampoline is basically a net bed or elastic canvas, a spring rubber suspension anchors the bed to a metal frame of table height & exercise kit is ready. Rebounding energizes the inner working of cell system and increases the blood circulation. It adds forces in vertical direction. Accelerate and decelerate to the gravitational pull.

As far as safety is concerned, this requires certain precautions to be followed every time a person rebounds. Otherwise, it's an enjoyable exercise for anyone.

It is a great full body's work out, along with being non-jarring to the joints. For example, if you exercise on a hard surface, a lot of forces go into the body. This is not always good for body joints and can cause painful joints. But with a trampoline, mats absorb any jerk and reduce any bad effect on knees and waist joints.

A trampoline exercise works like a vacuum. As vacuum cleaner creates a vacuum at the end of the hose, where air rushes into fill the space same way rebounding cells are forced to the bottom of the bounce, to squeeze the toxins, poisons and trash out from around the cellular tissue spaces, making it easy for lymphatic to vacuum them up and clean the body. As it is said, if the lymphatic function properly, we are healthy. Otherwise, we are prone towards being ill.

So what is the best way to use a trampoline? Just to have fun, what else? But if you really want to know what the best way is, here is it:

1. Concentrate on pushing down the balls of the feet.

2. going up is natural; you do not need to do anything.

3. Keep abdominal in and maintain the correct posture throughout the work out.

And you'll enjoy every moment spent on your trampoline, the healthier way.