Headaches - to worry or not to worry

National Headache Week June 1 through 7 - can you believe we have a HEADACHE week !!

I worry about a lot of things but headaches are not front of brain for me but I have two clients for whom headaches and migraine are a big deal (make that very big deal). One has to stay home and forsake work because of migraines and the other finds looking after her children just about impossible difficult when the migraine strikes.

Learn more.

You have really bad headaches ( migraines) so what to do :

1. Exercise might help.
   
2. Eat regular meals and avoid foods (drinks) that trigger headaches. This is kind of obvious bit it leads onto knowing what triggers a headache attack.
3. Keep a regular sleeping schedule. This is standard advice but difficult to follow. Monday through Friday my alarm goes off at 5.15am and I'm out of the house by 5.35am. I just cannot make myself get up at 5.15am on Saturday and Sunday. It's really good advice if you are strong enough willed to follow it.
4. Reduce stress in your life. Great advice but there can be years when it's very, very hard.
5. Headache diary. I got a headache when and what had happened before.
6. Physical Therapy might help (nothing is guaranteed).
7. Who to believe ?
   

What do you need to know ?

• Find a good support group. Dealing with Headaches might be the support you need.
  

• Learn what to do.
• Omega-3 fish oil probably helps reduce frequency and severity of headaches.
• Vitamin B2 (riboflavin) might help but not yet proven. It will work for some but not everyone.
  
• The amino acid TYRAMINE might trigger migraines (but not every time). Many foods contain tyramine e.g. chocolate, nuts, fava beans, salami, chicken livers, olives - the list is very long - too long to be useful.
• Lot of care with what you eat.
  

Finally, have you thought that hypertension might mean fewer headaches - lets hear it for hypertension !

One book to read ?

A Patient's Handbook on Headache and Migraine

One web site to avoid: headache.org

This site is headache.org and the website name is for sale. It's just full of adverts.

Totally different to headaches.org (what a difference one 's' makes).


If all else fails try a Downward Dog.












You've got to laugh - try some headache humor.

Metabolic Syndrome - should I worry ?

Is there anything you can do about Metabolic Syndrome or even "Is it worth doing anything about it ?" 

Click on the image and expand in your browser if you want to study the whole sad story

This post isn't about the complicated medical story of why insulin resistance happens but what can you and might you do when you realize that Metabolic Syndrome is getting personal for you and your family.

Part of the answer is definitely amending eating habits. 

      Twenty years ago spagetti and meat balls would typically have been 500 calories for a god size plate - today the same dish is served up with 850 calories. The same super-sizing has happened with fries and burgers. Time to roll back the clock.

The effort in terms of exercise needed to change around the impact of Metabolic Syndrome can be daunting if you've so far lead a pleasant, relaxed couch-potato existence. 

The exercise goal is 6 or more hours a week - every week. During this time you are going to try and burn at least 2,000 calories. You might need to take 70,000 steps in a week to get through that number of calories. No question it's tough.

Should you just take a chance to stay on the couch or try dieting or maybe hope wonder treatment comes out in the next decade just in time to save you ? 

A few first steps to move off the couch without going totally crazy:

• buy a pedometer and start tracking how many steps you take a day. The Accusplit    Eagle 120XL  model is well liked by the medical profession because they do not count fidgety movements as steps - so you get a believable count at the end of the day. 
• start doing 10 to 15 minutes of hard exercise as home morning and evening. Ten to 15 minutes at a time can be squeezed into most busy schedules and does not get too boring. Hard means doing one exercise a minutes (so you get 10 to 15 done in the alloted time) and you push a weight (perhaps your own body weight) 10 to 15 times. Pushing the weight might take 20 to 30 seconds. Then you rest for the remainder of that minute and then go at it again. The exact exercise you do does not matter that much.
• think about buying a heart rate monitor to track how hard your are working out. The walking can be easy to moderate pace but the weights or resistance workout need to be pretty tough. Target and Walmart both sell heart rate monitors at around or below $40.

So should you worry about Metabolic Syndrome ? Probably yes if you have children or responsibilities because Metabolic Syndrome leads quickly on to either diabetes or heart disease.If you are unlucky with you genetics - both.

Barrrett's - one more thing to worry about

I know this picture of me is not my best angle but it is important to me. This is my esophagus (or oesophagus as I'd spell it if still living in Britain). The gastro-enterologist has casually annotated the picture with the word Barrett's.

Nothing for me to worry about until May 20th when I read Melinda Beck's article in the Wall Street Journal which starts:

"Got heartburn? Several times a week for five or more years? Then you're at increased risk for a form of esophageal cancer that, though rare, is the fastest-growing cancer in the U.S., particularly in white men over 50. It's also one of the most deadly, with a five-year survival rate of just 17%.

Doctors can sometimes see the cancer coming years earlier when acid reflux causes cells in the esophagus to mutate to become more like stomach tissue, a condition called Barrett's esophagus. In adenocarcinoma, the Barrett's cells keep mutating into cancer."

I'm white and over 50 and the just 17% survival rate has an unpleasant ring to it.

The Wall Street Journal article includes a video which is well worth listening to (it's worth putting up with the advert which precedes it).

The story starts several years ago when once in a while food got stuck in my throat. Usually it was a whole grain bread sandwich or something similar. A lump of food would just not go all the way down. I wasn't choking because I could still breathe but if I tried to drink anything my esophagus would fill up with the liquid and run back out. If any got down into my lungs I'd cough crazily.

Eventually I had it checked out and the reason turned out to be a Hiatal Hernia.

Look at these equally attractive pictures of me.

The first - to the right is the before picture - you can see that the esophagus (food tube ) is narrowed and a big dry lump of food could easily get stuck. Just like a toilet getting blocked and backing up.



Then comes the after picture - on the left. It's easy to see that the hole is bigger and food should slide down so much more smoothly.

The procedure worked. I haven't had a choking attack since.

So far so good until I read that Barrett's can be much more severe than I'd originally thought.

I take one Nexium tablet every morning to reduce stomach acid so that the chance of cancer is reduced. My thought had been to try and persuade the doctor to agree that I'd taken enough Nexium for a life time.

Maybe I'll not push to hard with the risk of something really serious around the corner.

Does a Sun Tan reduce Breast Cancer ?

Does a sun tan reduce breast cancer ?

Exposure to the sun triggers the skin to protect itself by creating the darker color that we call a sun tan. The skin also makes Vitamin D. The tan takes a while to develop while Vitamin D is made almost straight away - within 20 minutes at most. The amazing point out of the research from researchers at the Moores Cancer Center at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine is that:

• more sunlight - less breast cancer
  
• less sunlight - more breast cancer.

Read an abstract of the article in Breast Journal May 2008.

The California researchers looked at cancer data from around the world and correlated this with latitude ( and by inference the amount of sun on average women were getting). The results were simple: more sun less breast cancer. The UV-B component of sun-light causes the skin to make Vitamin D. High levels of Vitamin D is apparently protective against breast cancer.

I've blog'd on Vitamin D several times. Of course there is the skin cancer risk but getting some exposure to sun but not enough to burn is important. It is possible to over-dose on Vitamin D taken in through supplements (some foods have Vitamin D added) but Vitamin D manufactured through exposure to sun will not cause a Vitamin D excess. Your skin will just stop producing Vitamin D when there is sufficient circulating in your blood.

WELLNESS - is it different to being healthy ?

The lubrication in my knee seems to be working but now my left ankle is hurting and making me limp. I do not like limping - it makes me feel old. I remember Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy making a limp look sexy but it's not for me. My left shoulder still hurts once in a while after I fell off a high bar and landed on one shoulder. Altogether this has given a new importance to an old interest in wellness.


The New York Times has an excellent Wellness site.
The healthy heart quiz is a must for anyone.
Knees and ankles are a big interest currently and the advice on arthritis makes a lot of sense.

You'd assume that there must be a Wellness Institute and so there is in the shape of the National Wellness Institute. Remember that it's a commercial organization, not a government thing, but it's been around 30 years and that says something for it. Their wellness quiz's are well worth the time.

Real Age operate along similar but much more commercial lines. The idea behind real age is to find out your 'biological' age as compared to your chronological age - less is better. To do this Real Age has a long and quite complicated questionnaire which is a real test of honesty in answering it.

Of course there is a difference between getting back to being healthy and a genuine long-term quest for wellness. Wellness.com - The Healthy Living Community does both and then goes the extra step to include pets as well.

Going back a long way, wellness and alternative medicine pretty much meant the same thing. As main stream medicine has increased its scientific content [ i.e. the number of time doctors prescribe the pink medicine placebo seems to be down sharply], wellness and alternative medicine (and alternative nutrition) are fast going in different directions.

There must be thousands of doctors blogging but many, perhaps most, are daily forced to face the organization of health care and so blog on the difficulties they face. James Gaulte is a retired doctor and this seems to allow him much more freedom to write about wellness as well as unhealthy.

In Sickness and in Health is right over the line towards dealing with sickness but does it very well.

In Search of a Healthy Life
It has to be more than healthy eating or healthy exercise or even just avoiding accidents but it's not easy.

Barbara Mendez at Lifestyle Nutrients does a good job of bridging the gap between therapies and prevention but for me is just a tad to enthusiastic about detoxifying the digestive system.

Knees and Knee Lubrication

The third lubrication injection was carried out on Thursday May1st with Hyalgan.

Thus far the results have been less than hoped for. The doctor says that it could take 4 to 6 weeks to achieve full effectiveness.

So for a week at least I've gone back to taking an anti-inflammatory - Piroxicam 20mg once a day with food dose. I have been trying to make sure that I get enough sun so that my body's Vitamin D production is at high, healthy levels. It turns out that the skin becomes more sensitive to sunlight and that avoidance of sun light is recommended when taking Piroxicam from Pfizer.