A natural face lift

In keeping with helping you avoid the surgeon’s knife, I thought I would remind you that there is an alternative to botox, chemical peels and the trauma of a surgical face lift if you want to go the DIY route to preserve your looks – or even enhance them if you are lucky. Of course it won’t cost you as much – in fact it’s free – but it does require some of your time. This entirely natural facelift will improve circulation, eliminate toxins and reduce stress and tension so you will lookmore relaxed, and the skin will be smoother with more radiance and that helps you look younger.

HOW DOES IT WORK?
You are going to stimulate the acupressure points on the energy meridians of your face by using your fingers to apply firm pressure to each point and the whole thing shouldn’t take more than ten minutes. To eliminate crows’ feet and tone the eye area:

Place your middle fingers on the inside edges of your eyebrows. Apply light pressure going along your eyebrow, round to under the eye, pressing your fingers on the top of your cheekbones. Then continue to the inside corners of your eyes. Repeat in a circular motion around the eyes 30 times.

To soften fine linesand wrinkles around the eyes:

Put your fingers on the outside end of each eyebrow, then trace down until they are parallel with the centre of your eye. Lightly touch these points for three seconds, then release. Repeat 30 times. Now do the same for the points directly under your pupil on the top edge of your cheekbone.

There are also some other points to rejuvenate the rest of your face: For each of these points, again lightly touch them for three seconds and release, repeating 30 times.

* Either side of each nostril, on the face not the nose itself.

* The point between your top lip and nose, and the point between your bottom lip and tip of the chin. Touch both of these at the same time using your index and ring finger.

* Put your finger directly between your eyebrows, then trace up until just before you reach the slight bump in your forehead, about midway to your hairline. Massage this point gently with a circular motion to release tension. It might help to do these actions facing a mirror for the first few times so you can be sure you are pressing in the right place. Ten minutes a day, every day, and you should see results within a few weeks. No before and after photos please, I will be happy to just take your word for it!

Scarless surgery

Surgery is a big deal. It can seem scary, even when it’s essential for our health we can’t help worrying about what is going to happen, and if we are going to have a big ugly scar. Well the good news is that you can avoid the scar, if not the scare, by having what’s being called ‘Natural Orifice Surgery’.

You won’t be cut open, instead there are now at least two dozen Americans who have undergone a new operation designed to hurt less, get you back to work more quickly and leave no visible scars. For one patient, Albert Pagliuca, who needed his gallbladder removed, he nearly balked when told that doctors would pull it out through his mouth. Not unnaturally he was worried it might get stuck in his windpipe and he would choke, but after doctors guaranteed that it would not happen, he agreed – makes a frog in the throat seem quite normal doesn’t it?

This is not entirely new, as three years ago surgeons realised they could enter the body through natural openings with flexible endoscopes, which are routinely used for diagnostic purposes such as colon cancer screening. After experimenting for years on pigs and human cadavers, a team in India announced in 2005 the first successful procedure in humans.

To remove a gallbladder or an appendix through the mouth, surgeons give patients a general anaesthetic and slide an endoscope down the throat and into the stomach. They inflate the abdominal area to make it easier to see and sterilise the stomach. In addition to a camera that transmits images, the endoscope is equipped with a variety of small instruments, including a tiny scalpel that cuts a hole in the stomach wall, allowing the surgeon to snake the endoscope to the organ needing removal. Other instruments enable the surgeon to move the organ, cauterize bleeding blood vessels, suture and clip the internal incisions and pull out the organ.

Surgeons have now performed the procedures on more than 400 patients worldwide, mostly in South America and India. The technique has been used mostly to remove gallbladders through the mouth or the vagina. But a few patients have had appendectomies, and doctors are experimenting with stomach surgery for obesity and other conditions.

Doctors in Europe are also now experimenting with them, and many surgeons are already enthusiastic about the possibilities, but some question the need for the new procedures when safe, only slightly invasive alternatives exist. And they fear that doctors will rush ahead before they have perfected their techniques and made sure that the benefits are worth the risks.

Worryingly, other surgeons agree: “That’s exactly what’s going to happen,” said Ira J. Kodner, a surgery professor and a bioethicist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “Those who haven’t been trained are going to go out and do it. They are going to take a weekend course and start offering it. It’s going to happen. I guarantee it.”

The idea of a ‘weekend course’ is frightening enough in itself, and I find myself sympathetic to the views of David Cronin, an associate professor of surgery at the Medical College of Wisconsin who said: “Not every idea is a good idea. I’ve been following this one with clenched teeth.”

Laparoscopic surgeries in the early 1990s were also hailed as a great innovation, but caused medical complications so this time round there is a call for making sure that patient safety is paramount and the technique developed in a responsible and careful manner. For the most part, the benefit is there’s no visible hole on the patient’s body but there is a risk that the incision in the stomach wall might leak, you may perforate an organ and cause a patient a really serious complication such as a life-threatening infection. All this just to avoid a cosmetic scar, and you have to ask if it’s worth it.

One patient who had no doubts is Awilda Sanchez of New York, who went home the same day she had her gallbladder removed through her vagina in March. She said: “I think everybody should get this. Now when it’s bikini time, I won’t have to worry about a scar. I think it’s great.” On the other hand, Colleen Caddell, from Oregan was not so thrilled as she described experiencing several days of throat pain so intense and excruciating she could barely swallow, and a week of vomiting, after having her gallbladder removed through her mouth.

One more optimist is Marc Bessler, director of laparoscopic surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital who said: “So far it doesn’t seem to be risky, the patients definitely have a cosmetic benefit, recovery seems to be better, and they seem to have less pain. If we can get to recovery-free, pain-free, and scar-free surgery, then that would be a revolution.”

My concern, given the very high value US society places on physical beauty and fast response, is the desire for quick, no-scarring surgery could move too fast for safety. So don’t ask your surgeon for it just yet!

Celery and the brain

Researchers at the University of Illinois report that a plant compound found in abundance in celery and green peppers can disrupt a key component of the inflammatory response in the brain. This could be important news for the research on ageing, and on diseases such as Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis.

Inflammation plays a key role in many neurodegenerative diseases and also is implicated in the memory and behaviour problems that can arise as we get older. Inflammation is not always a bad thing; it is a critical part of the body’s immune response that in normal circumstances reduces injury and promotes healing, but when it goes wrong then it can lead to serious physical and mental problems.

The new study looked at luteolin, a plant flavonoid in celery and green peppers which is known to impede the inflammatory response in several types of cells outside the central nervous system. Herbalists have known about the cooling properties of celery for decades and prescribe it for arthritis and hot flushes, but now it seems scientists are also taking it seriously. Add celery and green peppers to your diet and you will whizzing through the crossword in record time. If you don’t like the taste of them – and I know some people who don’t – then if you have a juicer add it to your mix. I juice celery regularly with apples and carrot to boost my immune system and help with arthritis and even celery-haters love the taste of the juice.

Aspartame – The sweet deception

I know I have mentioned aspartame before – probably too often – but I can’t emphasise strongly enough that sweeteners do you no favour, especially if you are trying to lose weight. Your body does not recognise a sweetener as sugar, and so you unconsciously seek it out in other ways. Many experts now believe that Aspartame is one of the most dangerous substances ever added to food, not only because it has been proven to make you fatter, but because of its links to serious health problems such as cancer and neurological diseases.

Why am I mentioning it now? Because many people just don’t think it’s true, or that I am a scaremongering killjoy (only on Halloween and never when it concerns your health!) Can I just point out that Aspartame has brought more complaints to the Food and Drug Agency in the USA than any other additive-ever. It’s responsible for a staggering 75% of the complaints they receive and from 10,000 consumer complaints, the FDA compiled a list of 92 symptoms, including death.

Now I think death is a pretty serious symptom – so if you are addicted to diet drinks and sweeteners, could you at least cut down and stop me worrying about you?

Criminals watch your diet!

This story is irresistible to a woman who writes so often about the effects of diet on health. What I didn’t realise is that what you eat could also get you banged up! Dr John Bond, a researcher at the University of Leicester and scientific support officer at Northamptonshire Police, is the inventor of a revolutionary forensic fingerprint technique that will help put unhealthy criminals behind bars.

He claims that criminals who eat processed foods are more likely to be discovered by police because their fingerprint sweat corrodes metal – just shows you what fast food does to your stomach if just the sweat can eat away an external surface like that! Apparently the police already love consumers of processed foods as they tend to be leave better fingerprints for the police to identify.

It’s down to the fact that sweaty fingerprint marks made more of a corrosive impression on metal if they had a high salt content – and processed food, fish and chips and burgers tend to be high in salt as a preservative. The body needs to excrete excess salt, which comes out as sweat through the pores in our fingers, and so when you touch a surface it will be high in salt if you eat a lot of processed foods – the higher the salt, the better the corrosion of the metal.

Not sure whether I should be encouraging fast food diets in criminals, to aid their capture, or encourage them to switch to the Mediterranean diet!

Diabetes and memory loss solution

Another story that interested me this week, also came from Canada and the Baycrest Center. This time they were reporting on the link between diabetes, high-fat foods and memory loss.

Apparently, adults with type 2 diabetes who eat unhealthy, high-fat, meals can suffer from some reduction in their ability to remember things immediately after eating such a meal. Possibly because they have fallen asleep while digesting such a heavy meal, but there is hope as the temporary memory loss can be offset by taking antioxidant vitamins C and E with the meal.

It is already known that diabetes is linked to the ability to retain information, but now it seems that adults with type 2 diabetes are especially vulnerable to acute memory loss after eating unhealthy foods. The new findings appeared in a recent issue of Nutrition Research, a professional peer-reviewed journal, and suggests that taking high doses of antioxidant vitamins C and E with the meal may help minimize those memory slumps.

Type 2 diabetes is associated with chronic oxidative stress, a major contributor to cognitive decline and Alzheimer disease. If you have an unhealthy diet, then that raises your level of free radicals and those unstable molecules can damage tissue, including brain tissue. These destructive molecule reactions typically occur over a one-to-three hour period after you have eaten but don’t think that popping a supplement pill will do the trick on its own. It’s a place to start, and the study used vitamin C of 100mg and vitamin E of 800 mg taken with the meal, but do check with your doctor as there are contraindications for taking high doses.

Specifically, tell your doctor if you are taking warfarin as you may not be able to take vitamin E without special monitoring during treatment, and also consult your doctor if you are pregnant or breast-feeding a baby.

Ideally you will change your diet to one that is high in antioxidants to chase down those free radicals – look back at the article on the Mediterranean Diet as it is generally accepted to be one of the most health-giving there is.

Using your head after trauma

One of the most worrying concerns for patients who suffered a head trauma is how well they will recover. Now there may be increased hope for them and their families, as a new study shows that our brain can adapt to help improve our ability to cope with mental tasks, we just have to use more of it than before the trauma.

Canada’s Baycrest Center for Geriatric Care is an academic health sciences centre, internationally-renowned for its aging brain research, clinical treatments and cognitive rehabilitation strategies. Their latest research has found that brain injury patients used more of their brains for similar performance on mental tasks compared with healthy participants that they studied as a control.

Traumatic brain injury often results in impaired working memory, particularly executive control, as we have seen in previous reports, and in this study the patients completed a series of tasks that tested how they performed specific tasks. The patients underwent a series of trials in which they were asked to maintain or alphabetize a set of letters. They performed the tasks as well as the healthy control group, but they were using different areas of the brain to access the information and process it. They were, it is true, processing information more slowly, but this seemed to have no significant difference in their overall ability to perform the task in roughly the same time frame as the control group.

It gives hope to those suffering traumatic brain injury that recovery of normal tasks and abilities can be achieved although the authors were cautious in saying that such injury is often associated with chronic pain, depression, and anxiety, and that can influence the rate and extent of recovery.

Blue light for cancer treatment

A blue curing light used to harden dental fillings also may stunt tumour growth, according to researchers at the Medical College of Georgia in the USA. Before you rush off to your dentist to request a quick blast, this research has so far only been tried on mice.

So what are they basing this on? According to a quartet of professors at the College, the light dentists use sends wavelengths of blue-violet light to the composite used in your filling, and it then, which triggers it to set and harden. Or in professor-speak “The light waves produce free radicals that activate the catalyst and speed up polymerization of the composite resin” The important thing is that in oral cancer cells, those radicals cause damage that decreases cell growth and increases cell death.” Or in other words, it can stop the tumour from growing and kill off cancerous cells.

The results so far indicate an approximate 10% increase in cell death in tumours treated with the blue light and almost 80% decrease in cell growth. It also appears that the non-cancerous cells appear unaffected at light doses that kill tumour cells and this could mean using this method alongside conventional cancer therapy so that patients could receive lower doses of chemotherapy – and reduce the unpleasant side effects that such exposure can bring.

Mediterranean magic

It’s not up to date news, just a reminder of something that will substantially improve your health – and is enjoyable as well. I am off on a Mediterranean cruise calling near to Florence in a few weeks, so when a piece of research from that area came in it caught my attention. The British Medical Journal this week published a study from the University of Florence that showed that people who followed an authentic Mediterranean diet lived longer and suffered few serious diseases.

The so-called Mediterranean Diet had great favour a few years ago, but sadly it is no longer followed as strictly or by as many people – even in the Mediterranean itself. So what are the benefits? Well research done on an extremely large scale and across Mediterranean populations and others in the U.S., Northern Europe, and a group of Europeans living in Australia gave impressive results.

Dr Sofi of the University of Florence and colleagues followed the diets of 1,574,299 individuals for intervals of three to 18 years, and showed that those who followed the dietary rules got all this:

** a 9% lower overall death rate

** a 9% lower risk of dying from heart disease

** a 6% lower incidence of contracting, or dying from cancer

** a 13% lower risk of contracting Parkinson’s disease

** a 13% lower risk of contracting Alzheimer’s disease

And what do you have to suffer to achieve these impressive improvements in your health and longevity? The Mediterranean diet is rich in vegetables, fruits, legumes, cereals, fish, nuts, olive oil, and a moderate intake of red wine during meals. So that’s no hardship is it? On the downside the diet is also low in red meat, dairy products, and alcohol in large quantities BUT the key word is low. You don’t have to give them up altogether just eat moderately in comparison to the other elements of the diet – we may not have much Mediterranean sunshine at the moment, but we can at least benefit from their dietary habits!

DVT risk from pollution

We have become used to the idea that being immobile for long periods such as on a long-haul flight, or sitting in the same position at a desk for hours, may pose a risk for DVT (deep vein thrombosis), but now it seems that the air pollution produced by the burning of fossil fuels can drastically increase the risk of developing these potentially fatal blood clots as well. Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health did some research on the air pollution levels in the Lombardy region of Italy. They chose an area where 870 known DVT patients lived, along with their 1200 healthy neighbours. When they analysed the air pollution they found that for every 10 microgram per square meter increase in particulate concentration, a person’s risk of DVT increased by a staggering 70%.

I don’t know if Lombardy is particularly polluted, but if you live in an industrial area, it would pay you to know about the warning signs for DVT – though it has to be said sometimes, there are none at all. The first sign can be chest pain or discomfort which usually gets worse when you take a deep breath or when you cough. You might have get an unexplained sudden onset of shortness of breath, which is the most common symptom, or feel lightheaded, dizzy or even a bit anxious. If you are at all concerned, please consult your doctor, and if it is a severe chest pain get immediate help.

Next Page »