Health and medicine – Page 8

Top Benefits To Eating Healthy

July 6, 2019 No Comments

As a human being it’s essential for us to look after our health and maintain a healthy lifestyle and although it’s not always possible to live like it day by day (were all allowed bad days) there are certain benefits that eating healthy can provide for us.

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You will find that having and maintaining a well-balanced diet will provide you with the energy you need for daily activities, the nutrients you need for stable growth and repair, it will help you to stay active and healthy, and it can also help you to prevent diet-related illness, such as some types of cancers. Have a look below at some of the top reasons to eat healthily.

Maintain A Healthy Weight

Yes, it can be off-putting with some of the BMI charts that you come across, especially when you’re feeling fantastic, eating well and still are showing as above the BMI suggests. Although the charts are there to give us a guide to the ideal weights concerning age, activity levels, height, and weight they will rarely be able to state if an individual is fit and healthy accurately. Keeping active with exercise and eating a healthy balanced diet is the key to helping maintain a healthy weight.

Boosts Your Immune System

Have you ever noticed that when you have a few days/weeks binging on bad foods; typically on vacation that you start to feel sluggish and often come down with a cold or bug of some kind? This isn’t a coincidence. If we’re eating healthy, we give our immune system the boost it needs to work properly and fight off infections if we don’t eat well we can often find ourselves lacking in critical nutrients such as vitamin A, B, C and E, and zinc and iron all of which can weaken the immune system.

Helps Strong Bones And Teeth

If you’re eating healthy, you are going to consuming foods in moderation, this includes a healthy dose of calcium, and a diet rich in calcium will be sure to keep your teeth and bones healthy. People who tend to have bad foods often need help from a cosmetic dentist to keep their smile looking it’s best. It’s a good idea to work a decent amount of dairy into your diet; however, you should make sure it’s considered a proper portion size and don’t overindulge.

Cut Down Your Risk Of Type Two Diabetes

Nobody likes to think about their diet resulting in a lifelong condition that they have to live with, but in reality, that is precisely what a bad diet could cause. This makes it essential to maintain a healthy weight, eat a balanced diet and include some exercise in your lifestyle. To help you should ideally be eating a food that’s low in saturated fats and high in fiber. You can find a good source of fiber from whole grain products.

Better Heart Health

Your heart is something that’s generally at the top of the list for a lot of people, often because it’s one of the most common things to go wrong from a poor eating lifestyle. A healthy diet that is high in fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy, and whole grains can dramatically help to reduce your risk of heart disease by maintaining proper blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

These are just a brief outline of the benefits of eating healthy, and it’s essential to research and trial what’s right and best for you. Nobody is the same but starting with a well-balanced diet, and some gentle exercise is an excellent place to start. Do you have any other tips that you could share? Please leave them in the comments section below.

Brain Wave, Health and medicine, Life in general

Hearing Health & Listening To Music: Everything You Need To Know

June 27, 2019 No Comments

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Listening to music is one of the simplest pleasures in life but can, unfortunately, be harmful to hearing health. However, it is possible to enjoy the music you love without causing damage to your hearing. Here’s what you need to know.

How does music harm hearing health?

The music itself is not the issue when it comes to hearing health; it’s the volume. Sounds over 85 decibels are considered to be harmful to hearing if exposure is prolonged; for reference, an average hair dryer will reach between 70 and 85 decibels when used at full power.

What problems can loud music cause?

Listening to music at loud volumes can cause two conditions: hearing loss (where the ability to hear is permanently reduced) and tinnitus (where a person “hears” sounds, such as ringing or beeping, that are not actually present). The damage is usually cumulative, and is usually identified in later life when people seek testing for tinnitus or attend a hearing test after noticing they may be experiencing the symptoms of hearing loss.

Is it possible to listen to music without damaging hearing?

Absolutely. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

Whenever you are listening to music, always keep the volume as low as you possibly can.
On occasions when you do want to increase the volume, do not exceed more than 60% of the total volume capacity available. Helpfully, many modern devices, such as smartphones, will warn you if you turn the volume up beyond a safe level.
How you listen to music is also an important consideration. If possible, avoid listening to music directly; instead, play your chosen songs via a computer or other electronic device that plays music to the entire room. In situations where this is not possible, use headphones rather than earbuds to help protect your ears.
Avoid listening to music for sustained periods of time, even when you have kept the volume within the safe limits. Turn the music off every hour or so in order to give your ears the chance to recover a little.
If you can, try to avoid listening to music a few days per week. While volume is the most significant factor, how frequently you listen to music can also influence the health of your hearing, so a few “days off” can give your ears the chance to recover.

What about attending live music events?

Live events can cause significant damage to hearing; rock concerts, for example, can easily exceed 100 decibels. To avoid hearing damage caused by live events, it’s usually best to invest in ear protection – earplugs and earmuffs can both work well in this regard, or combine both if you want an extra level of protection.

In conclusion

By following the advice above, you should be able to protect the health of your hearing and still indulge your love of music. However, it is still worth visiting a hearing health professional for hearing or tinnitus testing, just to ensure that the measures we have suggested above are protecting your hearing as you would expect.

Brain Wave, Health and medicine

Eyes, Ears, Mouth & Nose: Why Your Senses Need Your Attention

June 27, 2019 No Comments

While you’re working out this week, consider when the last time was that you looked after your senses. Our senses are what help us to navigate the world around us, and they do it so well. They’re a part of our instinctive behavior, allowing us to be receptive to the world around us and they allow us a sense of pleasure, too. No one can smell delicious food cooking and not be enticed simply because of how their nose inhales the scent. Maintaining your senses is vital for your overall health and well-being, and in this article, we’re going to explore how you can ensure that you look after your senses enough to live a full and healthy life.

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Eyes

From the moment we wake up in the morning until we head back to bed at night, we use our eyes. Our sense of sight is one of the most important in our sense arsenal, and taking care of them is vital for a good quality of life. Poor eyesight is noticeable once you schedule in an eye test with your doctor, and you can choose many methods to help your sight, from glasses to lenses and even Lasik, which can correct your eyesight for you. When your eyesight starts to deteriorate, you need more regular appointments to keep it in check, and you should attend these.

Ears

Another sense in action, whether we are asleep or not is our hearing. It protects us at night, alerting us to intruders, and it is something that allows us to enjoy day to day life without limits. We use our hearing to talk, laugh and listen to music, and it’s something that is important to use as you age, too. We always think of the elderly when we talk about a decline in hearing, but it’s not always the case. So, keep your hearing in check with hearing aid maintenance that is done regularly, and speak to an audiologist with any concerns. Your hearing needs to be of high quality so that you can live a healthy life and survive for longer.

Mouth

We taste everything around us all the time, and we notice changes to our tastes relatively quickly. The moment that we notice the delicious food no longer tastes delicious, we need to seek help as it can be because of anything from a mild illness like the cold to a severe condition. Support is always there for your taste buds!

Nose

The sense of smell that you have is essential for your daily living, and it’s one of the least focused of the senses. Here’s the thing: you need your sense of smell, because, without it, you can actually lose your sense of taste Not only that, you may miss out on smelling a gas leak or fire – it’s an essential part of your overall health and well-being.

Check your senses and don’t wait until the last minute to speak to someone if you need help.

Brain Wave, Health and medicine

3 Strange Ways Depression Affects You

June 26, 2019 No Comments

The statistics on depression are pretty clear. The vast majority of people in the world will experience it at some point in their lives, and for many people it will be an ongoing issue. One thing that you can say for depression, however, is that it varies dramatically. Where for one person it might be literally life-ending, for another it could merely be a persistent feeling of low mood and a flattened affect. There is still much that most people don’t understand about depression, and one area that is worth looking into is what kind of effects you might expect from depression. The illness of depression affects your body and mind in many ways. Here are three which you might not expect.

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Tinnitus

Depression can do all sorts of things, and one of the things it does for many is that it can cause tinnitus. This is where you experience a ringing in the ears, either one or both, or in the head, which persists and which you can’t seem to get rid of. This can be made worse by complete silence, and the more you focus on it, the worse it can get. Fortunately, there are solutions to tinnitus, and of course if yours is caused by depression then healing the depression will absolutely help. You might also need to get a tinnitus test, to ensure that that is really the problem, and then it might be a case of merely trying to sleep more and look after yourself to get rid of it. For most people, it gets better over time, so there is hope here.

Aches & Pains

Many people don’t realize that depression can cause a range of aches and pains in the body. However, anyone who has experienced a true depressive episode might well have noticed that suddenly their back hurts a lot, or that they are experiencing more headaches than usual, for instance. The way in which depression causes bodily pain is not quite clear to us yet, but it is certain that it does. It can help, if you are stuck in such a situation, to try and move around a little and get some exercise, as that can help to alleviate the depression while also soothing the bodily pain. Of course, to a depression individual, that might seem like a very hard thing to do.

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Insomnia

This one is clearer, especially to anyone who has experienced either insomnia or depression. The inability to sleep properly or deeply can be a cause and a symptom of depression, and it is for this reason that it is such a vicious cycle. Once you are in this cycle, it can be challenging to get out of it again – but it is always possible. Speaking with a therapist will help on the depression side of things, whereas taking steps to sleep better is obviously a wise idea too. So again, try to exercise more – and also ensure that you are not drinking too much coffee in the day, especially in the evening, as that is bound to inhibit your sleep.

Brain Wave, Health and medicine, Life in general

The Pressure Zone: Keeping Calm In Demanding Situations

February 27, 2019 No Comments

Throughout history, the ability to remain calm and collected, even in the face of a great threat, has always been a valued trait for someone to have. Making it far easier to work in a host of roles, it’s always worth pushing yourself to ensure that you are being as brave as you can be. Of course, though, this isn’t always the easiest approach to take. To help you out with it, this post will be exploring some of the work which can go into keeping calm when you find yourself in a demanding situation. As time goes on, this will only get easier and easier.

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Learning

This sort of process will always have to start with a little bit of learning. Even if you’ve had to deal with tricky situations before, it makes sense to start from a position of a complete novice. This way, you will avoid missing out on anything important, while also making yourself feel more confident when you find that you’ve already been going down the right track. The sort of learning you do depends on your current position. Ideally, being able to learn from someone else is the best way to go through something like this.

It doesn’t have to stop with the people around you, though, and you can always looks for further tuition in this area. Emergency management diplomas are great for those who want to be able to run a business or act as a manager. Not only do they teach you how to handle emergency situations, but they will also strengthen your ability to think on your feet and get things done quickly. As time goes on, having these skills will only become more and more critical, especially as businesses of all sizes are having to deal with increasingly complex challenges.

As the last bit of learning it can be worth doing, getting a better grip on the field which you’re part of can be an excellent way to make yourself feel more confident. Taking a short online course is the best way to achieve something like this. Of course, though, this will only be worth it if you haven’t studied much in the past, as you will be learning the same things over and over, otherwise. It’s surprising how much you can learn when you go to school rather than teaching yourself.

Exposure

When it comes to something like stress and pressure, learning how to deal with things which make a situation hard is best done through experience. When you make mistakes, you will remember what you’ve done for the future, and this will open the doors to handling the same thing better. Of course, you can work to create a safe environment for this in your current role, all by building simple hypothetical situations and having others rate how you would deal with them. This is only the start, though, and you can often take this much further.

With businesses all over the world recognising the importance of being able to remain calm when the heat is on, more and more specialised training centers are opening which are designed to help people to understand stress. Playing a game of football in extreme weather conditions is a great example of this, as it will teach you how to make decisions when you have a lot of other things distracting you. Stress is often a simple collection of small issues which are weighing down on you, making it can easy emotion to control with the right time and effort.

Safety

There are few situations in life which will leave you completely vulnerable. As long as you do the work beforehand, protecting yourself against chaos can often be as simple as signing up for the right service. In the case of an injured customer, for example, having the right insurance in place would ensure that you company could help the person, without having to risk losing money in court. When you find yourself in a position which forces you to choose between keeping yourself safe or doing the right thing, it will be hard to deal with the pressure you feel.

Taking this further is a simple matter of looking for some people to help you, and this will become essential if you’re running a growing business. Legal support comes in loads of shapes and sizes, nowadays, with some companies offering far more affordable support than you used to be able to get through traditional means. Having someone on hand to offer advice when you find yourself in a scary position can be utterly invaluable. Of course, though, it will be worth reading some reviews before you choose who you’d like to work with.

Staying Calm

A lot of the time, we find that pressure builds and we become increasingly stressed in situations we perceive as stressful because we don’t stay calm. Now, there are multiple ways you can tackle this. You can practice breathing exercises. You can reassure yourself. You can try out calming products, such as CBD oils – you can find CBD oil reviews from High Times if this is something you’re interested in trying out yourself! But what’s most important is simply taking a step back and analysing the situation. Is there really anything to fear? What’s really the worst that can happen? Generally speaking, things going wrong wouldn’t be all too bad. So, do your best to avoid worrying about it!

Self-Confidence

Finally, as the last area to consider, it’s time to think about the way that you look at yourself in all of this. When you’ve had to face challenges in the past and failed, it can be easy to assume that you’re doomed to keep going down the same route. If you fall into this trap, though, you will never be able to overcome the issues you face, and this makes it crucial that you feel self-confident. This will come very naturally for some people, though you may find that you have to work a little harder.

One of the best ways to achieve this is through a little bit of acting. By forcing yourself to pretend that you are confident, especially in social situations, you will slowly build then necessary habits and mannerisms to convince yourself that you’re nice and brave. While this may sound like a simple approach, it has worked for people for hundreds of years, and is one of the only ways to move yourself from feeling shy to being able to talk to anyone.

With all of this in mind, you should be feeling ready to take on the challenge of keeping calm when the pressure is on. A lot of people struggle with this sort of work, finding it hard to know how to make themselves into a more confident person. As time goes on, though, this sort of skill could prove very important in your personal and professional lives, making it worth putting some time into it.

Brain Wave, Health and medicine, Work at Home

4 Great Healthcare Jobs You Can Do From Home

January 3, 2019 No Comments

There’s nothing worse than finishing a day’s work and feeling that for all our hard work and effort that we didn’t really contribute anything of value. A rewarding job should leave you feeling at the end of every day as though you’ve made the world a tiny bit better than it was at the start of your shift. For those who want a profession that makes a difference, the field of healthcare is most certainly an avenue worth pursuing.

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However, if you have grown accustomed to the life of remote work, you’ll be delighted to know that there are a plethora of jobs which allow you to make a positive contribution to the lives of others and help to improve their health from the comfort of your own home with the flexibility that comes with working remotely…

Remote nursing

The world of nursing has been aided enormously by digital technologies. For a start, remote learning has enabled nurses to learn new skills, hone their craft and create new career opportunities for themselves through programs like the RN to BSN. What many may not be aware of, however, is that there are a number of healthcare companies who employ nurses who work remotely, usually from home. Here are just a few.

Medical coder

Medical coding is the transformation of medical data including healthcare diagnoses, medical procedures, medical services, and equipment into universal medical alphanumeric codes. Medical coding professionals play a vital role in helping to ensure that insurance companies are properly billed for healthcare provision. They help to ensure that the codes are applied correctly during the billing process, including abstracting the information from a range of documentation, assigning the appropriate codes, and creating a claim to be paid by the patient’s insurance carriers.

Patient advocate

The role of patient advocate is extremely rewarding and allows you to give support to those undergoing long-term periods of illness. When we are ill we can find it difficult to apply the same critical thinking as when we are well and in many cases our judgement may become impaired.

A patient advocate is there to represent the interests of the patient and help them to navigate the potentially confusing intricacies of the healthcare system. They act as a liaison between patients, healthcare providers and insurance companies and inform them of their legal rights and responsibilities.

Clinical program manager

Clinical program managers and directors co-ordinate the activities of workers engaged in clinical research projects. Their primary responsibility is to ensure that the research is compliant with necessary protocols and overall clinical objectives. They will plan, direct, and coordinate clinical research projects and will usually be involved in the collation, evaluation and analysis of clinical data. They tend to be in charge of the management of research budgets and the dispersal of funds. They may also participate in quality assurance audits. These are usually conducted by study sponsors, external agencies, or designated peer review groups.

If you’re looking for a rewarding career that you can do from home, a career that really makes a difference, you’ll find more opportunities in the healthcare industry than virtually any other field.

Brain Wave, Health and medicine, Self-Care Corner

The Best Fat Burning Cardio Exercises

October 17, 2018 No Comments

Excess fat in one’s body has proved to be dangerous on several occasions. It can lead to conditions like high blood pressure, strokes and heart attacks. Lifestyle conditions like diabetes and cancer can also be triggered by excess fat in one’s body. Working out turns to be one of the best ways you can get rid of excess fat in your body. Apart from shedding pounds, you also gain an increase in muscle mass.

Combining your workouts with supplements like musclesfax will help you achieve more gains. Cardio exercises are also useful in helping one shed off those extra pounds. These are exercises meant to increase one’s heart rate and even metabolism. There are various cardio workouts that help burn excess body fat you can try out. They include:

Rope Jumping

It is one of the best, and easiest cardio exercises you can try out. This exercise involves jumping over a rope slowly as you increase your speed. Common among athletes, it helps improve one’s foot speed and also movements. You get to burn more fat within a short period with this type of exercise. You should try it because of how cheap and effective it is.

Stair Climbing

It is another effective way to burn more calories within a short period. It also helps make your leg muscles stronger because they are the most used in such exercises. You need to find some stairs or steep area where you can carry out this type of training. Remember to monitor your progress.

Cycling

You also get to burn more calories through cycling. One can try out this exercise using the cycling machine which is stationary, or you can use a real bicycle. You get to use more energy which is vital when it comes to burning body fat. It is also good for your knees and the joints found in your ankle area.

Elliptical

It is a form of stationary workout which can help you lose a lot of fat within a short period. This type of exercise involves the use of an elliptical machine which works by simulating running. It is best known for cardio workouts that are of low impact. Common in many gyms, you can try them out to get quality results within a short period.

Running

This is a simple cardio exercise you can try out anytime and in different environments. You don’t need to go to the gym because you can do it in an open space near you. Morning jogs help one burn more calories. In the gym, you can try out different equipment that can help you monitor your progress. The treadmill is the best for this type of exercise.

Swimming

One can also shed off some extra pounds as they entertain themselves. Swimming is one type of exercise that can keep you occupied as you also gain some health benefits. Fast swimming will help you burn a lot of calories fast. One can also do it at several intervals and wait for some quality results.

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