Adult humans have 206 bones, while the skeleton of an infant contains 350 (the bones fuse together as you grow). More than half of your 206 bones are found in your hands and feet. No wonder joint care and pain relief is such big business. Imagine 206 bones moving together hour after hour, month after month and year after year. Cartilage, muscles, ligaments, and synovial membranes work together to protect and support the joints and allow you to execute various movements.

Without proper care, your joints can easily wear out and become inflamed and painful, a condition called arthritis. Should that happen, what can you do to relieve joint pain and improve your condition? Here are a few simple tips:

Massage
Use pure essential oils combined with mixing oil to massage the area which hurts. Lavender, for instance, has healing properties, while eucalyptus is soothing. Stroke in the direction of your heart.

Ice Therapy
As soon as you feel the pain beginning, you can apply ice packs hourly for 15 minutes each time. The following day, if the pain persists, you may continue with the ice packs for 15 minutes each time but reduce the hourly applications. Try doing this no more than half-a-dozen times that day.

Aromatic Warm Baths
Fill your bathtub with warm water and put in several drops of pure essential oils, like eucalyptus and lavender. Enjoy a nice, relaxing soak which will also help you to destress as well as relieve the pain.

Exercise
Low-impact activity such as walking, swimming and biking helps to build muscle around the joints to support them. Do this daily and you will probably lose weight too, which will reduce the burden and stress on your skeleton and joints, especially weight-bearing joints like the knees, feet, back and hips. My knees used to hurt terribly because of worn-out and inflamed joints. The pain was so excruciating that I couldn’t even get out of bed in the mornings. Going for regular walks helped me lose excess weight as well as build up the muscles around my joints. I’ve been pain-free for years now.

Nourish Your Joints and Connective Tissue
With age, glucosamine levels in the body declines. Glucosamine helps to keep cartilage and joints healthy. When the cartilage wears down, osteoarthritis results. Nutrients to support normal levels of synovial fluids, which help to lubricate the joints and tendons, are vital for joint health too. Feeding your body with antioxidants and nutrients which help to support your immune system also help to keep joint deterioration and pain at bay. Give your body the nutrients it needs for musculoskeletal health and healthy joints.

Walk Right
Are you wearing footwear which will support your joints and reduce impact when you walk? Is having the wrong gait causing your joints to wear out? The right footwear can help you correct your posture as well as the way you walk. Throw away shoes and sandals which don’t’ meet these criteria.

Watch Your Posture
Good posture helps to protect your back, legs and feet. Keep your spine straight and avoid lopsided positions.

Invest In Ergonomically-Designed Seating
Do you have at least one good ergonomically-designed chair at home or at work which supports your body correctly? Chairs which don’t support critical areas like your spine, legs, neck and arms can strain your joints and cause your body to ache. Low seats and chairs without armrests should also be avoided, as you may have to strain to get in and out of them.

Avoid Sudden Movements and Straining
Sudden twists and turns, stretching, lifting, jerking, pushing, pulling, bending, and reaching can hurt your joints and muscles. Keep your movements gentle, fluid and steady. Float like a butterfly.

Distribute The Pressure
Carrying a heavy plate? Use both your hands – palms and fingers- to distribute the weight. Avoid putting too much load on any single joint. Let the stronger joints and muscles of your body, like the shoulders and the arms, support a heavy load, rather than just trying to carry it with your hands. If you can sling it over your shoulders, please do so. In an episode of reality TV show, “The Amazing Race”. contestants (two per team) had to carry a full-grown pig on a pole for 200 yards. Those who tried to do so by using their hands only kept falling and dropping the carcass. On the other hand, one team – which included the oldest contestant – who put the pole across their shoulders managed to complete the task faster and with less effort.

Rest and Sleep
Healing is delayed when your body doesn’t get sufficient quality rest and sleep. Put your poor, aching feet up and give yourself a break!

Posted: June 16th, 2009 under Antioxidants, Exercise & Fitness, Immune System Health, Joint Health, Rest & Sleep.
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Don’t you just love spending some time outdoors, enjoying a walk, filling your lungs with fresh air, letting the breeze caress your skin, and feeling the sun on your face? It’s a simple way to have a change of environment, get in some exercise and recharge.

I get out as often as I can each day, and try to make it at least 20 minutes each time. My sweet doggy, Ginger, gets walked twice daily, in the morning and at the end of the day. I also try to go out for short errands somewhere in between. It really affects my mood and my energy level when I’m cooped up indoors.

In recent years, we’ve been told that too much sunshine can kill. Actually, cancers in general kill far more people every year then skin cancer does. In fact, regular doses of sunlight have been shown to help in preventing most cancers. It is sun-burning, not sun-tanning, that may cause skin cancer. Many people living in urban societies spend an increasing amount of time indoors, in artificial lighting and hooked to the computer. Occasionally, they spend a day here or a weekend there baking at the beach or by the pool, or fry on vacation. Such sporadic and intense exposure to the blazing sun may be compared to taking all of one’s yearly intake of alcohol in a fortnight or so. No wonder sickness may result.

Some decades ago, Dr John Ott investigated the background to a report that children at a school in Illinois had five times the national rate of leukaemia. The schoolhouse was a plain, modern building with very large windows in every room, and all the pupils who developed leukaemia had been in two particular classrooms. In these two rooms the teachers always kept the large curtains completely drawn across the windows to reduce glare and distraction, and to keep the children’s attention on schoolwork. The indoor lighting was therefore on all the time, and this was ‘warm white’ fluorescent. The whole class spent its working day in light of twilight intensity, with no blue or UV light at all except at playtime – and in Illinois they have some hard winters, during which the children might not go out to play at all.

Several years later the two teachers in question left the school, and their replacements kept the classroom curtains open all the time. The lights were also replaced with cool white fluorescent ones, and of course needed to be used less. From then on there was not a single case of leukaemia in the school for as long as Dr Ott followed it up. No other explanation has been put forward for this remarkable mini-epidemic of leukaemia. It started Dr Ott thinking about the possibility of a link between sunlight and cancer.

In 1936, a report in The Lancet by Peller, a US Navy doctor, suggested an inverse relationship between skin cancer and all other cancers. He observed that Navy personnel had eight times the skin cancer rate of the rest of the population, but only forty per cent of the total death rate from cancer. He proposed that the obvious explanation for this was the greater amount of sunlight to which men serving in the Navy were exposed. Nowadays, many naval personnel probably spend their whole working lives at computer consoles, but in 1936 they naturally led an outdoor life and were in the sun a great deal.

Peller made the startling suggestion that by using high intensities of light, either sunlight or ultraviolet from a carbon arc lamp, we should actively induce skin cancers in patients, in order to protect them from other cancers. As cancers go, those skin cancers that have been clearly shown to be related to sunlight have obvious advantages; the most important of these is that they are visible at a much earlier stage, and can therefore be dealt with. In a strange way, if you had to choose which cancer to get, skin cancer would be an excellent choice.

Now, I’m not saying that you should try to get skin cancer in order to eliminate other kinds of cancer. Baking in the sun is a bad idea. However, the fact is that we need the sun’s energy for a wide range of life-giving processes, like the synthesis of vitamin D (a powerful antioxidant) in the skin to improve our absorption of minerals; the triggering of certain enzymes that repair our DNA; the activation of oils on our skin by sunlight to make them antiseptic and protective; the production of hormones in the skin, in response to sunlight, that stimulate our immune system, and a range of other mechanisms that science has yet to explain.

So what are you waiting for? Let some sun shine in your life everyday!

Posted: May 6th, 2009 under Antioxidants, Cancer, Enemies To Health, Exercise & Fitness, Health Basics 101.
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