Health care solutions

Recently I had a young man, who was an AML survivor, present with a triglyceride level of 5800. Usually, my first thought would be that there was a genetic abnormality leading to ineffective cholesterol metabolism. But, I was aware of breast cancer survivors being at risk for dyslipidemia and I began to wonder about leukemics. I then went on a literature search. What I found was quite interesting.

AML has a cure rate of nearly 97%. Therefore, most patients who get it live to tell about it. In terms of what their mortality is after their cure, the literature shows it is divided between heart disease and new malignancies.

In terms of heart disease, they are at risk from dyslipidemia and the metabolic syndrome. Even more interesting is that patients who have had a bone marrow transplant are particularly at risk. In a review article from the journal "Bone Marrow Transplantation"( Majhail et al. June 2008), 86 bone marrow transplant patients were followed. 49% of them were found to have metabolic syndrome. The rate of hypertension and hypertriglyceridemia was significantly higher in them as well. Therefore, I have hypothesized that this young man's high triglyceride level was related to his bone marrow transplant.

The patient and his family ended up calling his transplant center and they agreed that this is a known potential side effect.

I think this case points to the importance of primary care follow up of all cancer survivors. Often cancer patients have to deal with so many issues regarding their cancer that regular primary care issues take the back burner. They take the back burner, that is, until these regular primary care issues land them in the hospital!

If you have found that your quality of life is being affected by migraine then you will want to know what the best remedy is. Migraine is a problem that is often hard for others to understand; it can result in serious difficulty doing anything, even communicating with friends and loved ones. A good migraine cure will address the actual cause of the condition rather than just providing temporary relief.

Today, you may want to try out an alternative or natural treatment rather than go for strong prescription drugs that are likely to produce nasty side effects. Now there are a greater range of options available then ever before.

Many migraine sufferers have found a degree of comfort through acupuncture. This ancient method of healing has been used in the Far East for thousands of years to treat various disorders. It works by aligning the energy flows in your body by sticking pins into specific pressure points. The procedure is relatively pain free and over a number of sittings can reduce the occurrence so greatly that migraines become a memory.

There are various herbal supplements that claim to help in preventing migraines. Typically such products will work by cleansing the blood and improving circulation. A correctly functioning metabolism can go a large way towards preventing the occurrence of migraines.

It is vital that we have all the essential minerals necessary for our brain and other organs to function correctly. It is known that magnesium can be consumed to provide relief from headaches. Often through taking a course of multi-vitamins for a month you will discover that the migraines completely vanish. The trick is to then alter your diet so that you are consuming the right compounds naturally.

If you are under a course of medication then perhaps this is the reason for the frequent headaches. If you have concerns then speak to your doctor about switching your prescription.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand emotions and base your own actions on that general understanding. With training and practice this can be a powerful tool in controlling stress and emotions.

The idea of emotional intelligence has been around since the 1930's in different forms. The power of EI is to not only identify and assess your own emotions but also to be able to evaluate the emotions of others. One of the early forms of EI was social intelligence that was the ability to understand and manage other people's emotions. Therefore understanding one's own emotions and desires along with others emotions builds a strong foundation to today's EI.

John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey are the 2 leading researcher of emotional intelligence. They have developed a model with 4 abilities.

• · The ability to perceive emotions in others by looking at their faces or hearing their voices, also to perceive one's own emotions. This ability opens the door to the other abilities.
• · The ability to use your emotions to accomplish what ever you are trying to do.
• · The ability to understand the history of emotions and act accordingly to that.
• · The ability to use emotions to fulfill your own tasks

The real power in emotional intelligence is in the ability to perceive other's emotions and to use that intelligence to your advantage. What it all seems to come down to is to be able to guess how people are going to react to certain environments and situations. This knowledge before hand is very powerful.

While many medical professionals will deal with a patient's eczema problem on a topical basis, from a 'natural treatment' point of view, it is often better to treat the condition on a 'holistic' whole body basis. Put another way, it is always more effective to deal with a medical condition or problem from the inside out, rather than the other way around, and dealing with eczema is no exception.

There are many foodstuffs that are believed to exacerbate eczema. It is therefore logical to consider changing your diet to remove any of the foodstuffs that are believed to bring on eczema or to make the condition worse.

Before doing so, it is nevertheless necessary to understand that eczema is a condition which affects everybody differently. There is no way that you can know for a fact which of these foodstuffs will affect you in a detrimental way personally, because every individual reacts differently to their own diet.

As the saying puts it, 'one man's meat is another man's poison'. Consequently, there is no way that you can remove any particular type of food from your diet with 100% certainty that doing so will help to alleviate your eczema problem.

Nevertheless, it is generally believed that many of the foods in the following list can make your eczema considerably worse. What you therefore need to do is experiment, and try removing certain foods from your diet or from the diet of your children if it is they that suffer from eczema.

However, you should remove certain foods from your diet or from that of your family gradually, because if you try to change everything at the same time and you see a marked improvement, you will have little idea of what foodstuffs were previously causing the problem.

While it might be a little frustrating having to be patient while changing your diet, to gain any meaningful results from your 'diet change experiment', you have to change one thing at a time.

This is often referred to as following an elimination diet, where you remove one particular group of foods from your diet and keep that food group out of your diet for a period of least two or three weeks. During this time, you should keep a detailed diary so that you can record what is happening in terms of eczema flare-ups, and other possible problems.

These are the food groups to work on:

Wheat based products: Foods like bread, biscuits and pretzels contain wheat flour which is usually rich in gluten. As with all of the other foodstuffs in this list, gluten is believed to cause eczema flare-ups, so experiment by removing gluten-based products from your diet for a period of time. Beverages such is coffee substitutes, beer and root beer may also contain grain as well as yeast, which is another constituent of most bread products as well.

Yeast is a fungus, one that has sometimes been indicated to be a potential cause of eczema. Try removing yeast based products from your diet to see what difference (if any) doing so makes.

Dairy products: Perhaps the food group that is most commonly associated with causing eczema is the dairy product family, substances like milk (cows, goats or sheep), as well as foods that contain milk such as yoghurt, cheese and ice cream. It is even suggested that processed foods that contain milk, like chocolate, pastries and soups, should also be avoided because it is so widely accepted that dairy products are often one of the major causes of eczema.