Talk about health

Few people can be immune from the current blaze of publicity and new-found political clarity about glogbal warming. The media is working overtime to bring us pictures and stories of just what it is doing to the climate. Wretched weather and extreme temperatures, blurring of seasonal changes and the misery caused by torrential rain or no rainat all. Great sections of the world population simply cannot cope.

It brings me to what you think you could or should do about it - if anything! At Heathrow Airport in London, protestors are trying to stop the building of a new runway. I don't imagine they will succeed, but stranger things have happened.

Their view is that we should take a long, hard look at our travel habits. In the UK many people fly all round the world for holidays and business. But, with computer technology and instant communications, is business travel really as essential as before? And as responsible citizens, should we fly quite so frequently just to spend a few days in the sun?

Or, and it's a big OR, should we spend millions of dollars trying to make travel more environmentally friendly? Can we invent or develop the means to travel without destroying the ozone layer or producing tons of carbon dioxide in the process?

Maybe we should be doing something in each direction - going back to holidaying nearer home, making air travel more costly so we can't afford to fly as often, finding efficient travel methods, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and anything else we can think of.

Each option has its afficionados and detractors. But by working together an answer or conglomerate answer may come sooner than if everyone works alone.

Although this is not stricly a health problem, if we do nothing then all of our health problems will eventually go away as the earth dies!

I've chosen to hightlight this today because there are parallels to draw with health issues. Should we be preventing disease by trying to reverse the advances of the last century, namely going back to growing your own fruit and vegetables, and changing life style to how our parents lived?

OR do we accept where we are here and now, and try to adapt our current lifestyle given we eat the wrong food and don't exercise enough, and rely on the magic bullets of the pharmaceutical industry to treat all our man-made and lifestyle induced disease?

I suppose the answer is somewhere in between.

The problem is that, as I see it, it is much simpler to change our lifestyle to a less complex and more empirical existence. Stay at home more, appreciate the benefits of cultivating a few vegetables, exercise a little more and relax a bit, too. Then you'll avoid the worst the drug industry can throw at you by keeping well for longer.

We don't need to work 20 hours a day so we can afford four foreign holidays a year, a big house with low maintenance garden, a car for each adult, shopping as a hobby, child minders and nurseries for our children. It's a treadmill that we fall off - dead. Where's the enjoyment of this life - the only chance we get?

They're probably looking for the magic bullet for a long life right now. But, will you be around to take advantage of it?

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Wishing you the best of health.

Nothing is simple in this world. Especially when it comes to health matters. If you're at all interested in your health and begin to look around for useful pointers to helping maintain good health in the face of a complex and fast-moving world, you will quickly become confused.

Starting with the media. They report whatever they want and give the stories the slant that suits the editorial team at that time. Nobody says that they should give a balanced view of anything. Or that they might join the relating stories together over a period of time.

The result? One day the TV tell us that a particular complementary therapy has been found wanting. Someone has taken the conclusions from a series of badly constructed trials over the past ten years and said this proves the case. No mention that the trials were poorly thought out, relied on the memory of the subjects ( what did you have for breakfast five weeks ago? for instance), and were paid for by a pharmaceutical company selling a rival drug.

That is bad enough, but then, next day the same TV company reports that a homeopathic remedy has been found to successfully treat a chronic condition. All change! Now the complementary therapy, using properly devised trials has had good results which have been published.

Perhaps this is good reporting. At least it fills the alloted slots and keeps the reporters gainfully employed. The down side is that the average person doesn't know what to believe. Is homepathy good or bad? Do complementary threapies have a place in modern medicine? How can you discover the truth?

After all, you might be the very person considering what treatment could help you! Given some joined-up thinking from some independent source, the answer might become clear. the mists of doubt will part. Your eyes will open wide and a cure might be just round the corner.

You may think this is some kind of fairy tale. But it's not. The media have their good points and can play a significant part in spreading the word. But I can't get away from the old adage that reporters don't let the facts get in the way of a good story!

My advice? There are people around who can give you sensible, independant advice on health, conventional and complementary therapies. I happen to be just one, but there are many health sites you could choose from. I subscribe to a few myself just to keep me up to date and give me points of view to consider.

The basic fact is that when it comes to health, no treatment or therapy is successful for everyone. Human beings are uniquely different, with different genes, metabolisms, weaknesses and susceptibilities. Each of us reacts differently to stresses, foods, work, environments and so on. So there can never be a single simple answer to any health situation.

Fortunately, there are averages and so many things help many people. But there are always some people who are not helped. You need to think outside conventional medicine now and again.

In fact, I recommend you try to get as wide a picture as possible of both conventional and complementary therapies. Then you will see how some combination of these may be better for your specific situation that one or other alone. Combining aspects of conventional and alternative therapies might be more successful in finding a cure.

Don't ignore the media treatment of health, just see them as giving pointers for further research or discussion. That is what I try to do and I might clarify things for you, if you take the chance.

Why not subscribe to my newsletter at http://www.healthexplored.co.uk (you'll get a free bonus tips booklet) and read some of the articles and newsletters posted there. You can ask any questions on health you like and I'll try to give you my considered opinion. Or post your thoughts here.

When it comes to your health, don't rely on just one possiblity for treatment. Look around.

Wishing you the best of health.

I had a chat with one of my clients/friends this week about someone who had been advised to try a herbal pain remedy. She asked me about it and my thoughts on the subject. The thing was that the person in pain had recently undergone a complicated 'plating and pinning' operation on a broken wrist. Now, three days later, she was still in a lot of pain and wondered whether adding another pain killer would be a good thing.

As it happened, the herb in question was not advised to be taken unless under professional supervision, but could be applied as a cream to help bruising etc. In this situation the cream idea could not be used either as the operation involved healing wounds and stitches, not to mention an external splint.

The conclusion was that the lady in question should get back to her surgeon/doctor for a progress check-up and a request for appropriate conventional analgesics.

My reaon for telling you this story is to point out where conventional medicine has the last word. I spend a lot of my time writing about the deficiencies of conventional medicine - the life long drug taking, the blinkered attitudes, the box-ticking doctors uncaring of their patients and so on.

But when it comes to medical emergencies - the heart attack, stroke and accident - conventional medicine wins most of the time. The techniques of such crises are second to none and simply don't exist in the alternative world. You can't beat how surgeons and consultants deal with the physical traumas involved in everyday accidents and organ failures.

So it is with the lady's wrist. The operation to stabilise and fix a broken wrist must have been traumatic and painful. (My toes are curling at the very thought.) I can well understand her worry that the extreme pain was not subsiding as quickly as she hoped. But, given some effective pain killing drugs for a few days, I'm sure she will recover fairly quickly.

Alternative therapies will come to the fore once she has got over the initial stresses of the operation. After the acute pain of the procedure and its aftermath, and when it all settles down, she will have time to consider her position more carefully.

Then some of the many alternative therapies, either alone or in combination, may well have something to offer. For instance, a pain killing remedy from the herbal range, or a homepathic remedy could help. An appropriate Flower remedy migh be useful. Acupuncture could help wipe out the last of the pain and some massage may restore movement to the affected joint.

I know that this may not be what the patient wants to hear - she only wants rid of the pain. But I can't offer her anything else right now. A few days wll surely make all the difference, although they will seem like an eternity to her.

After that, however, it is possible that conventional medicine will pass on to the next patient, leaving her behind to cope with the aftermath. That's when alternatives come into their own.

What I try to show is that you need to consider what's best for you at the time. convention may be ideal in some situations while alternative hold sway at other times. But whatever place you find yourself take an overview before choosing.

Always keep your options open!

Wishing you the best of health.

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