Teen smokers are better at getting friends to start than nonsmokers are at getting friends to quit.“What we found is that social influence matters, it leads nonsmoking friends into smoking and nonsmoking friends can turn smoking friends into nonsmokers,
An awareness of our own death is potentially extremely distressing. Go ahead and contemplate your own mortality. How does it feel? Would you be surprised to learn that it can potentially improve your mental health to think about your death more often?
Oxytocin is released with a warm hug, a grasped hand, or a loving gaze, and it increases libido. The hormone kicks into high gear during and after childbirth, helping new mothers bond with and breastfeed their new babies. While oxytocin is found in both young boys and girls, it is not yet known when levels of the hormone start to decline in humans, and what levels are necessary for maintaining healthy tissues.
It’s often said that no-one really knows what sleep is for. Sometimes it’s as if this lack of surety means its functions are relatively unimportant or even vestigial, like an appendix to the story of our life. How we evaluate life has long since focused on the daytime – what we think and feel when we’re awake.
Factors such as sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress reduction, and spiritual connection provide the foundation for a strong immune response. Everything you do -- everything you touch, breathe, eat, and think affects your immunity. How you live your life is the most powerful resource...
- By Kat Duff
Our bodies change physiologically, continually altering the amount of sleep we need, the kind we get, and the time of day we are best able to get it as we progress through the life cycle. We assume and relinquish many responsibilities, encounter differing environmental conditions, and make lifestyle choices that impact...
For those of us who suffer from migraine disease, chronic stress can drain our energy and lead to adrenal crisis. Meditation, coupled with deep abdominal breathing, can be helpful in regulating our response to stressful situations, as well as in aborting and preventing migraine attacks and strengthening our kidneys.
Different measures of physical abilities can be assessed to determine how old someone is including walking speed, standing balance, the speed they can rise from sitting. We found that hand grip strength, a measure of upper-body strength, is consistently a good indicator of future mortality and susceptibility to disease.
There is a metal metabolism defect, often present in autism, which makes mercury especially toxic for autistic children. Even with a normal system, an infant can't handle mercury. Bile is needed for the process of eliminating mercury from the body, but an infant's liver does not produce bile.
Just as there is no single cause of cancer, there is no single remedy. Therefore when approaching a complex disease like cancer it is important to formulate a balanced protocol that addresses: the characteristics of the disease; diet, environment, and lifestyle; organ weaknesses and the overall deficiency or excess of the person.
Tai chi, a traditional Chinese form of exercise, may help older adults avoid getting shingles by increasing immunity to varicella-zoster virus and boosting the immune response to varicella vaccine, according to research supported by the National Institute on Aging and NCCAM.
At first glance, one would think that the causes of diseases are as numerous and diverse as the diseases themselves. However, careful observation will show that, fundamentally, all illnesses share one cause: the deterioration of the terrain, the body’s internal cellular environment...
- By Ray Filar
You are in bed, sweating and trembling, dosed up on a selection of painkillers and herbal tranquillizers. Noises outside make you jump. Your heart beats frantically, furiously, unremittingly. You sleep for brief periods, twenty minutes, ten minutes. A police siren goes past and you wake up with a start...
Big Pharma’s focus on blockbuster cancer drugs squeezes out research into potential treatments that are more affordable. Says one researcher: “What is scientific and sexy is driven by what can be monetized.”
- By Sarah Varcas
Despite the obvious challenges of recovering from a heart attack, the blessings of this bizarre sequence of events are greater than the drawbacks. Suddenly being awakened to the presence of my physical heart has triggered a process of what I can only describe as re-heartening...
There’s plenty of nonsense out there suggesting that we poor old menopausal biddies just can’t cope with the loss of our youth and fertility or our children leaving home — don’t buy into that for a minute. You haven’t gotten this far in life without...
- By Kat Duff
Occasional insomnia is not a serious problem because our bodies do their best to make it up as quickly as possible. However, several consecutive nights without enough sleep can begin to wreak havoc, especially for those who...
To reduce the frequency and severity of your migraine attacks, it’s important to identify your triggers. Triggers are the stimuli that excite oversensitive neurons and initiate the chain of events that lead to our migraine attacks. Although you may find...
The idea that Grace belonged to a group of “different minds” stayed with me. For a long time, I turned over in my head thoughts of famous artists and writers and actors who had seemed to exist at a different altitude, their senses keener and their experiences both sharper or more colorful and, often, more painful.
Raw fruit and vegetable juices are great immune system fortifiers, especially during an active infection with a cold or flu. This time of year, it's critical to get plenty of rest, drink lots of water, and bolster the immune system with freshly made juices rich in...
We all have the power to heal ourselves. The body heals itself all the time. By learning how to move energy in our body using his techniques, we can facilitate that healing.
- By Lynn Hodges
I think people who suffer the lows more than the highs will find it difficult to see bipolar as a friend. I know that when I am severely depressed, I hate the illness and see it as my enemy. Depression is such a wicked illness, leaving the person and everyone around them feeling helpless...
Stress is unavoidable and often goes overlooked until a point where you find yourself so stressed that you start thinking irrationally. Therefore it’s very essential to break through stress to ensure that your mind is at peace.