Natural Health Care

What do toe pain, mid-foot pain, heel pain, ankle pain, knee pain, hip pain, lower back pain, mid-back pain, upper back pain, and headaches all have in common?

You guessed it - they can all be caused by wearing high heels on a regular basis.

Experiencing your best health as you age doesn't have to be complicated. Actually, the secrets to staying healthy as you age are profoundly simple. But don't expect the majority of licensed physicians to share this opinion.

Some health practitioners understand that using complicated medical jargon tends to establish themselves as authority figures who should be respected and obeyed. Explaining simple truths on how to stay healthy isn't a good technique for building a reputation as a brilliant physician.

Female night shift workers have a higher risk of developing breast cancer than the rest of the female population. An interesting study in the December 1, 2005 issue of Cancer Research provides new information that might partly explain why this is.

Researchers found that sleeping for several hours in nighttime darkness promotes a healthy blood level of a hormone called melatonin, which can significantly suppress the growth and proliferation of breast tumours.

Is it true that each food that you eat can cause your blood to become more alkaline or acidic?

The answer is: not really. The pH of your blood is tightly regulated by a complex system of buffers that are continuously at work to maintain a range of 7.35 to 7.45, which is slightly more alkaline than pure water.

With few exceptions, disease and dysfunction do not develop quickly. Disease and dysfunction tend to develop slowly, usually over many years as subtle and overt signs that mark loss of health are ignored.

I have found that many people feel that they are fine until they get diagnosed with a named condition like diabetes or hypertension. The reality is that degeneration is a fact of life - with each passing day, we lose some of our health potential. It's the pace at which our bodies degenerate that we influence through our daily choices. By understanding the main causes of disease and dysfunction, we can make dietary and lifestyle choices that promote longevity.

The main causes of acceleration of disease and dysfunction can be categorized into three groups:

Is fasting one day a week good for your health? To answer this question, let's take a look at what happens in your body when you begin to eat and drink nothing but water.

Although it's been close to 15 years since I dissected my first cadaver in anatomy class, I still remember being surprised when I got my first glance at a pair of kidneys - they were much smaller than I had expected. Up until that point, I had imagined the kidneys to be quite large, given the amount of work that they are responsible for.

Each of your kidneys is about 4 to 5 inches long and about 1 inch thick, weighing in at about 4.5 to 5 ounces. To put it into easy-to-visualize terms, each of your kidneys is a bit larger than a deck of cards.

The next time that you experience a cold or the flu, remember this: giving your body plenty of rest while allowing the cold or flu to run its course is good for your health.

Conventional medicine and the pharmaceutical industry would have you believe that there is no "cure" for the common cold, that you should protect yourself against the flu with a vaccine that is laden with toxic chemicals, and that during the midst of a cold or flu, it is favorable to ease your discomfort with a variety of medications that can suppress your symptoms.

Unfortunately, all three of these positions represent a lack of understanding of what colds and flus really are, and what they mean to your body.

Colds and flus are causes by viruses. So to understand what colds and flus do at a cellular level, you have to understand what viruses do at a cellular level.

The World Wide Web has made it easier than ever to learn about health and what you can do to address specific health challenges. Unfortunately, the accuracy of a lot of health information on the web is questionable, since anyone with access to the internet can publish health-related material.

I recently worked with a client whose chief complaint was muscle weakness. More specifically, he was concerned with his increasing tendency to drop light objects at work and home. He wasn't a clumsy person by nature, so he found it puzzling that he frequently experienced momentary flashes of grip weakness.

A thorough neurological evaluation was mostly unremarkable. The only noteworthy findings were as follows: