Oregano for pain cramps and fever

Oregano may not be your first thought for treating any of these conditions, but this traditional Mediterranean herb that you probably add to your pasta sauces has a long been used to treat colds, fevers, sore throats, and coughs as well as menstrual pain. Medical studies have shown it has anti-microbial properties which helps it fight bugs such as MRSA and it helps digestion and soothes your stomach.

If you don’t fancy using the herb neat, which isn’t all that pleasant, then tea experts Whittards have put it into a herbal tea blend, along with apple pieces, rosehips and lemongrass which give a pleasant, rich flavour. Plus you get the added health benefits of added vitamin C from the other ingredients. Buy it for £3.90 for 125g from their shops or via their website at www.whittard.co.uk

Food to change your mood

Food is so closely associated with our emotions that we scarcely give it a thought. We overeat when unhappy or depressed, chomp chocolate to soothe a broken heart and celebrate with special foods to make an occasion memorable. However, it might help you to know that you can manipulate your moods to some extent by paying attention to your diet.

There are some foods in particular which trigger chemicals in the brain and these can have an effect for up to 3 hours on our emotions. I know this first hand because I wrote a book with a naturopath many years ago and she said she always knew when I had been eating chocolate – which I was doing a lot of at the time – because my mood was different and my responses not as fast or open. Knowing which foods can help, or hinder, your mood might be a useful tool to get you through any challenging situations that can arise. There are three neurotransmitters (chemicals) in our brain that affect our emotions: dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. Our brain produces them in different quantities depending on certain elements in our food so the more, or less, of these we eat then the more we will feel their influence.

Feeling Good:

We are fairly familiar with the effects of serotonin as it makes us feel calm and positive and modern anti depressants are based on enabling greater serotonin intake. Serotonin is manufactured in the body from the amino acid tryptophan, which is present in most protein-based foods. If you want a natural mood boost then add in some of its best sources: cheese, meat, soya beans, sesame seeds, oats, bananas, dried dates, milk and salmon. Plus of course my perennial favourite – chocolate.

However, given the fashion for high protein diets, please don’t ignore the important role of carbohydrates. If you have a very low, or no, carbodydrate diet then your serotonin production can just cease as the brain needs them to produce serotonin. You may be thinner, but your mood could plummet. In fact you may be doing yourself a disservice by cutting down on carbs as serotonin helps control the appetite by giving us the feeling we are full and stopping us from having that extra helping. If you need to calm down, then reach for a slice of bread, some whole grain cereal or pasta and that will increase your serotonin levels and balance your mood.

Women particularly need to pay attention to their serotonin levels as we have less than men do and therefore are more affected by a low-carb diet. In fact it can lead to symptoms similar to those of PMS, so if you feel any of those you might try just upping your carbs and seeing what difference that makes.

Feeling Alert:

If you are starting to slow down, or even want to have forty winks, and need a quick boost then the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine are the ones that can help increase your focus and alertness. That mid morning slump is often treated with coffee or a biscuit, but in fact for a temporary lift you would do better to head for protein. Having a steak in your coffee break isn’t always appropriate, so snack on something like tuna or eggs. Go to work on an egg was an old slogan, but keep a hard boiled egg handy and you will be as alert at 11am as you were at 9am.

Feeling lethargic:

Our energy levels do fluctuate during the day, but if yours are extreme then one remedy might be to switch to foods with a low Glycaemic Index (GI). These are digested more slowly and release their energy in a more measured fashion and so have much less impact on your blood sugar levels. Look for unprocessed foods, grains, and particular fruits and vegetables. The high GI foods are usually those that are more processed and include baked goods, sugar and that breakfast favourite – cornflakes. If you eat more low GI foods you should be able to contain those energy swings, and for a full view on how to do that there are plenty of excellent books on the subject on Amazon like: The Low GI Diet Cookbook: 100 Delicious Low GI Recipes to Help You Lose Weight and Keep It Off or GI High Energy Cookbook: Low-GI Recipes for Weight Loss, Health and Vitality

Paperless prescriptions on the way?

Where the US leads, we often follow – however reluctantly sometimes. Now the latest buzz in the states is the move towards online prescriptions and the end of that familiar pad. But just what is a paperless prescription? It’s when your doctor inputs your prescription into his email and it gets emailed straight to your chosen pharmacy. It could benefit us as patients as you would not run any risk of losing the piece of paper and theoretically should as it could be there waiting for you when you leave the surgery. The other great advantage is that electronic prescribing systems can flash an alert if the dose seems wrong or patient records show use of another drug that can dangerously interact.

Up to now there has been a lot of resistance by US doctors to online prescribing – only 10% are currently signed up for it – that may be about to change. Medicare will give doctors who go over to online prescribing bonus payments from January but are warning that they will only do so up to 2012. After that any doctors who insist on sticking with their prescription pads will find their Medicare payments cut. It’s a move that has the backing of President-elect Barack Obama as his health-reform plans are based on saving millions of dollars a year by moving to computerized records for everything, including medical charts and not just prescriptions.

The Medicare incentive has encouraged a lot more doctors to sign up, and it will be interesting to see if we follow their lead. The US experience seems to indicate that electronic prescribing can also save money by doctors using more generic, and therefore cheaper, drugs but this system has two major drawbacks: up to last year in the US there were still 27% of independent pharmacies who did not have internet or email access and doctors also must use software recognized by the network. This has led to doctors printing out their online prescriptions and then faxing them to pharmacies who don’t have the right access or equipment. That doesn’t sound like a system that is saving time or money, but it could be the shape of things to come.

Oh Really?

Sorry, couldn’t resist this one – and although this piece of research confirms what we already know, it’s valuable to remember it at this stressful time of year. We know that stress is a powerful trigger for heart attacks and strokes, but apparently it is not the stress in and of itself that is the problem it is the unhealthy coping mechanisms that we often turn to that have been investigated by University College in London. When I talk about stress in my book ‘How To Cope Successfully With Stress’ I point out that stress is not always a bad thing; it is how you cope with it that is important. If you turn to healthy methods of dealing with it like meditation, exercise and changes in diet then you can handle it without adverse health effects.

However stress makes us reach for those comfort props whether that is food, alcohol, or smoking and those are the factors that impact on your health and can lead to heart disease or strokes. When we are stressed our good health resolutions often go by the board and we stop exercising and eating healthily and generally take less good care of ourselves. If you get stressed, try to maintain at least some healthy habits and make your ‘comfort’ blanket a little more active – swop it for a down filled coat and go for a walk.

Selenium has role in preventing high risk bladder cancer

Selenium is an essential trace element that we need for health, and now it seems it could play an important role in preventing high risk-bladder cancer for certain groups of people. Researchers from Dartmouth Medical School this month reported in a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research that although not true for everyone some groups who had been newly diagnosed with bladder cancer showed significant reductions in their cancer when they were found to have higher rates of selenium than average in their bodies. The groups affected were women, moderate smokers and those with p53 positive cancer. While other studies have shown a similar association between selenium and bladder cancer among women, this study is one of the first to show an association between selenium and p53 positive bladder cancer. Selenium is a trace element found widely in the environment and good food sources include Brazil nuts, bread, fish, meat and eggs Christmas excess – be prepared!.

Oh Really?

I don’t know, you do one of these items and along comes another – this one for the chaps. More in the category of ‘well we could have guessed that’ comes the news that men who were have an increased risk for prostate cancer are almost twice as likely to undergo screening for the disease if married or living with a partner. As most men are far more reluctant to consult doctors for anything, this is no surprise so if you want to have a healthy prostate don’t stay single seems to be the advice and comes from no less a body than the University of Michigan.

They found that although prostate cancer screening programmes specifically target men with a high risk for the disease, little is known about the factors that influence these men to take the decision to get tested. But, apparently, one of the factors that gets them to the screening is fear – no surprise there – and accompanied by a relationship where they are ‘persuaded’ (read nagged) into going for checkups is the most effective of all.

Breast cancer treatment optimism

News from Greece has confirmed that the new chemotherapy agents are cutting advanced breast cancer mortality in half. This reassuring news comes from a review of published studies, by John P. A. Ioannidis, M.D., of the University of Ioannina, and reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. They looked at 122 clinical trials involving 26,031 patients and 22 different types of therapy.

Their conclusion was that the advent of the new anthracycline drugs led to a 22% reduction in mortality risk compared with older nonanthracycline drugs, and that the introduction of taxanes resulted in a 33% risk reduction compared with older single-agent therapy. Taken together this means that the newer taxane-based combination treatments such as those involving capecitabine (Xeloda), or gemcitabine (Gemzar), have reduced mortality by 51% compared to the single-agent treatment in use 35 years ago.

Now I know chemotherapy is not the favoured option for many people and they choose to go on any of the alternative routes from Chinese Medicine to Spiritual healing, however, if you are undergoing chemotherapy there is an excellent homoeopathic remedy that can help alleviate some of the side effects. Many homoeopathic chemists have their own variation so ask locally or I can recommend an excellent chemist in Dorset who make their own tablets and are happy to speak with you on the phone about your requirements. They are the Galen pharmacy and their telephone number is 01305 263996 or if you would like to read more about natural treatments for cancer a book I recommend is Say No to Cancer by Patrick Holford and an interesting website to check out is www.cancertruth.net which is American but will give you some food for thought.

PS – if you or someone you know has been affected by cancer, then here’s a chance to walk, jog, run and have fun at 5k events across the UK, to help raise as much money as possible to beat cancer. Women only can run, but men are very welcome as supporters, coaches and fundraisers at Cancer Research UK’s Race for Life events taking place in 2009. If you are interested, they are open for entries on 19 January and for more information visit www.raceforlife.org or call 0871 641 2282

What’s In Your Lip Balm?

Now the winter winds are biting, and you are probably licking your lips more than usual to keep them moist, many people use a lipbalm. There are literally hundreds on the market, but some of them contain an ingredient which can actually make your dry lips worse. Why? Because then you have to keep using the lip balm to keep your lips moisturized. Clever, huh?

So what’s the mystery ingredient? It’s phenol and as it is an antibacterial agent you might think that was a good thing, but unfortunately it can also destroy the top layer of skin on your lips and you will be trapped into keeping using it so keep your lips moist and supple.

Healthier alternatives abound, so look for non-phenol balms with ingredients like coconut oil, honey, jojoba oil, and shea butter. A great site for organic lip balms, and I couldn’t resist because they are called Naturally Barmy, will give you plenty of lip -smacking ideas and they even have a kit for making your own. Get cracking now and you can have 10 complete balms in gift tins as stocking fillers.

Visit their website at www.naturallybalmy.co.uk

Meditation is best for depression – Say Om, not Ah

If the Christmas season does not fill you with cheer and you find yourself getting low then, rather than head to the doctor, do heed a new piece of research. Published this week in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology it has found that meditation beats antidepressants both short and long-term. Professor Willem Kuyken, from the Mood Disorders Centre at the University of Exeter, found that Buddhist meditation techniques (which are similar to mindfulness-based cognitive therapy) can be just as effective at not only combating depression but enabling participants to have lower rates of relapse than those on medication.

The aim of all such meditation is to keep your focus in the present, not dwelling on the past or future. The trial lasted 8 weeks, and fifteen months afterwards they found that 47%pc of people with long-term depression (who had done the meditation) had relapsed, compared to 60% of those taking anti-depressant drugs. What those people gained from just 8 weeks of meditation was life skills that powerfully supported them to stay well.

For details of a group in your area, contact the network of buddhist organisations in the UK who may be able to help. Their website is www.nbo.org.uk and if you don’t have access locally, or prefer to meditate at home, you might find my mediation CD useful. It’s in the marketplace section of my website at www.catalystonline.co.uk/potential.htm and contains a simple everyday meditation (Blue Sky) to help you stay focused in the present and let go of any worries and anxieties you may have.

Fruit drinks and chemicals

Well it’s nice to be a world leader, but not when it comes to being up there because we have some of the highest levels of pesticides in fruit-based soft drinks. Spanish researchers checked drinks in many European countries and the USA and we came joint first with Spain, and the USA – usually home of the additives – came out well, as did Russia.

The study was reported in the December 15 issue of the journal Analytical Chemistry, and has revealed a basic flaw in the regulatory system for pesticides. Although levels of pesticides are strictly regulated in fresh fruit, vegetables, and drinking water there has been no follow through on fruit-based soft drinks.

The scientists measured the levels of a wide range of common pesticides in more than 100 fruit-based soft drink samples from 15 different countries. Pesticides they tested were those that are applied to crops after harvest and are known to still be able to be present during any processing methods. These included carbendazim, thiabendazole, imazalil, and malathion, and were found in fairly large concentrations in most of the samples analyzed.

The main concern is for children as their systems are more vulnerable to these chemicals, and they tend to have more fruit-based soft drinks than adults do. Until there is legislation in place it would be sensible to limit such drinks or make sure they come only from organic sources – make your own by buying organic apple juice concentrate and diluting it with water.

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