SIMPLE YOGA POSES TO OVERCOME A BAD MOOD

When you’re having one of those days when you just can’t seem to shake off a bad mood and fume at every little thing, try doing yoga.

Here are a few yoga poses to get you back into a good mood, reports people.com:

 Open your heart with wheel pose: Sometimes when you’re in a bad mood, you just need to take deep breaths and oxygenate your body. Backbends are great heart-openers and they really boost your spirits. This pose will also get your heart rate up which energises you and helps with crankiness.

Go upside down with headstand: Headstand is another pose that you can try. It flips a switch in the brain letting all the blood flow in to the head.

 Challenge yourself with crow pose: One of the best ways to quit being cranky is to challenge yourself. When you hold yourself in an arm balance, you gain confidence and courage and it can help break your pattern of negative thinking.

A Simple Explanation Of Neuropathy For All Sufferers

Today's post from fosters.com (see link below) is something everybody learning to live with neuropathy should read - from beginners to those who've endured years of suffering. Strictly speaking it tells us nothing that can't be found in hundreds of other articles but it is so clearly written and so easily understood, it may well trigger several light-bulb moments in your brain and explain things you thought you knew and understood about the disease but really never got to the bottom of. Worth a read over your morning coffee.

Pain of neuropathy is sometimes treatable
By Karen Dandurant
news@seacoastonline.com
Posted May. 31, 2015

EXETER — Neuropathy, defined as a disease causing nerve pain, has many possible causes, but in more than half the cases it is associated with diabetes.
Dr. Geoffrey Starr, of Core Neurology at Exeter Hospital, said there are two types of neuropathy, polyneuropathy, meaning many nerves are affected, and peripheral neuropathy, dealing with pain in nerve endings.

“The most common is peripheral neuropathy, usually in the fingers and toes,” Starr said. “The patient can have numbness, tingling, a lack of sensation, cramps, muscle loss and imbalance and, in some cases, it affects the blood pressure.”

Starr said diabetes is the No. 1 cause and it affects people with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Other causes can be a thyroid problem, endocrine imbalances, a vitamin B12 deficiency or an excess of vitamin B6.

“Overuse of alcohol and smoking can cause neuropathy because of the toxins,” Starr said. “Chemotherapy can be another factor.”

For about 20 percent of the cases, there is no clear cause. Starr said it can be familial, genetic or age related.

Dr. Karen Lauze, a neurologist at Portsmouth Regional Hospital, said nerves have multiple functions in the body and which one is affected has a bearing on how treatable the disease is.

“The central nervous system controls the brain and the spine. Other systems control sensory perception, muscles and can be responsible for making the organs, like the heart, function. There are so many ways for nerves to be injured, so neuropathy is a very wide field.”

Lauze said a pinched nerve in the neck or carpal tunnel can cause the disease. Autoimmune diseases like lupus or rheumatoid arthritis can be responsible. Exposure to toxins such as heavy metals, imbalances in the B vitamins, Vitamin E or niacin, or a poor diet can be factors.

“If we can find the cause, we can usually treat it,” Starr said. “We may be able to correct it, control it or lessen the symptoms. We can deal with the pain. Tingling sensations do not respond well to medication but taking the pain away will help the person cope so the disease is not as functionally limiting.”
Diagnosing neuropathy involves sensory examination, assessing the nerve endings. Star said nerve conduction testing can be more definitive in sorting out the source of the problem.

“The initial signs are usually tingling in the fingers or toes,” Starr said. “People should seek help then, because addressing this early can have better results.”
Lauze said neuropathy usually starts with longer nerve fibers, because there is a larger area. That's why the feet are the most common initial site.
“Beside the pain and tingling, it can cause imbalances,” Lauze said. “That puts people at risk of falling and receiving other injuries.”

Autonomic nerves can be affected, resulting in the heart racing, or fainting. Lauze said doctors have little control over that condition.
Michael Davidson, DO, of Endocrinology and Diabetes Consultants, affiliated with Wentworth-Douglass Health Partners in Dover, said his practice deals mostly with diabetics, representing the largest population of people suffering from neuropathy.

“Twenty-six percent of people, at the time they are diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, will have clinical manifestations of neuropathy,” Davidson said. “That's partly because type 2 diabetics are not diagnosed right away. Of the 29 million people with Type 2 diabetes in the U.S., it is estimated that 8 million do not know they have it. Neuropathy is often their first indication.”
Davidson said it is thought that neuropathy tingling is directly related to the length of time and the severity of blood sugar issues.

“Other factors can play a role, like high blood pressure, smoking and cholesterol, but blood sugar is the main factor,” Davidson said. “Diabetic amputations are directly related to neuropathy. If a patient cannot sense pain in their extremities, cannot feel temperature differences, or may not have a visual of the damage occurring, they may not respond appropriately. If they are not responding to the injury, or if another condition like heart failure is causing edema, that sensory deprivation and lack of self-care can be devastating.”
Davidson talked about a patient who had neuropathy and tended to wear Mary Jane style shoes. Her neuropathy got so bad, the strap of the shoe had cut right down to the bone. It sounds extreme, but he said he has had patients who have stepped on tacks and not discovered them for six months, after the damage has been done.

“Their symptoms are related to the distal nerves, farthest away from the body core,” Davidson said. “Generally it's the feet before the hands or legs. It travels in a predictable fashion.”

Treating diabetic neuropathy begins with treating blood sugar levels. Davidson said getting the blood sugar under control can lessen symptoms and will arrest the factors leading to the disease.

“For a diabetic, care of the feet is crucial,” Davidson said. “When patients come to see me, their shoes are off. Examination of the feet is always important. There is no way to stop nerve fibers from dying, but medication can change the perception of pain and calm the symptoms.”

Two drugs are approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat diabetic neuropathy. They are Cymbalta (duloxetine) and Lyrica (pregabalin). Davidson said sometimes the use of specific antidepressants can help.

“The antidepressants change the way the brain processes the signals,” Davidson said. “By treating the central nervous system, it changes how patients perceive the symptoms. Pain relievers like Tramadol can also help.”

Over-the-counter medications can be tried first, with less invasive impacts. Davidson said alphalipoic acid or vitamin D have been shown to be effective in some patients.

Opiods for pain are the last line of defense because of addiction concerns.
“We have some success with capsaicin, a cream for the feet,” Lauze said. “The cream sucks out a specific protein in the pain fibers (protein C). Basically, it depletes the the fiber's ability to feel pain. Antiseizure medication might help. The sooner we find the cause, the better for the patient.”

http://www.fosters.com/article/20150531/ENTERTAINMENTLIFE/150539991

Basics Of The Nervous System In Simple Terms Pt 1

Today's informative post from sunlightinwinter.com (see link below) is the first in a series of articles by this author explaining how the nervous system works. As he says; we can research all we like but sooner or later we'll come across terms we don't understand. In the main, that's not a problem because, if we get the idea of an explanation, that can often be enough to help us learn to live with it but when it comes to the basics about nerves and their problems, we really should try to build up an information source, so that we can at least talk intelligently to our doctors about what is happening to us when it goes wrong. This article goes a long way to providing exactly that sort of resource and is well-worth a read.
 

Nervous System Basics (Part 1)
Posted on February 8, 2015 by sunlight in winter

As I’ve said time and time again, I really feel that people living with chronic pain/fibromyalgia can benefit immensely from learning about how the body works. Even the feeling that you are just beginning to understand the complex processes making up your experience of pain can help give you a sense of control over things.

And reading about the new research that is being done on pain, even if you don’t completely understand every word, can sometimes give you a reason to remain hopeful at times when you’re feeling stuck.

With that in mind, I’m going to back way up and publish a post I’ve been meaning to write for a very long time. Here I’ll outline a few key terms and concepts about how the nervous system works. Hopefully it will be helpful to anyone who is interested in learning more about pain.

So let’s get started.

The nervous system can be divided into two main branches.

The central nervous system consists of the brain and spinal cord, and is shown in pink in the diagram above.

The peripheral nervous system consists of all the nerves in the body, and is shown in yellow.

The brain is the command center for your body, and it is where your experience of pain is processed. It is where you think consciously, but it also controls many unconscious functions, such as breathing, your sense of balance, and the ability to orient your body in space.

The spinal cord is the relay system for messages between the brain and the peripheral nerves. (It can also play a role in affecting how strong your ultimate experience of pain is, but we’ll talk more about that later).

The peripheral nerves have two main jobs:

Sensory: Sensory nerves send signals to the central nervous system about what you are feeling physically. When you stub your toe or get a papercut, it’s sensory nerves that send that signal up your spinal cord to your brain.

Motor: This is (to me) a kind of funny scientific word. It really just means “movement.” The motor nerves of the peripheral nervous system are what tell your muscles to move, as well as tell your organs to perform specific functions.

Pain

When people talk about how pain works, they are generally talking about the relationship between the sensory nerves, the spinal cord, and the brain. The sensory nerves send signals up to the brain about any damage that may have occurred, and the brain decides how to interpret those signals.

But Pain is a Two-Way Street

Historically, people considered this pain pathway to be a very consistent, cut-and-dry system that always worked the same way every time. If a person was in a lot of pain, they had to have a lot of physical damage/injury. If they weren’t in very much pain, they must not have a very serious physical problem.

However, scientific advances in the past few decades have shown that pain is actually much more complicated than that. It turns out that the severity of a person’s pain does not always reflect accurately the amount of physical injury they have experienced.

You can have soldiers in battle who do not even realize they’ve been shot– their peripheral nerves are sending very strong messages of “damage” up to their brains, but their brains tune those signals out because they need to focus on survival.

Conversely, you can have people with chronic pain, who– due to a number of potential factors—can experience excruciating pain in response to a very minor injury, or in fact no injury at all.

Central Sensitization

At the risk of boring my long-time readers, let me define one of my most favorite terms again. Central sensitization is the process responsible for this last phenomenon, where people can develop an increased sensitivity to pain.

The term refers to a series of changes that can take place in the central nervous system (the brain and the spinal cord) which can ultimately make a person much more sensitive to pain. In some cases, central sensitization can become a self-perpetuating phenomenon, in which a person continues to feel pain long after their initial injury has healed.

Central sensitization is such a fascinating topic. There is still much research to be done on it, but so far it is believed to play a role in such seemingly-diverse conditions as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, temporomandibular disorder, and many others.

One Last Thing

When I first started trying to understand the amazing, interesting new research that’s being done in pain, I kept hitting this one term that mystified me. The dorsal horn. What the heck is a dorsal horn? I was so confused by this for a long time, and it really held me back from understanding a lot of articles.

Turns out, the term dorsal horn refers to an area in the back of the spinal cord. The back of the spinal cord is where the sensory nerves meet with the spinal cord, so their messages can continue on up to the brain. It’s pretty simple actually– the sensory nerves connect with the back of the spinal cord, and motor nerves connect in the front. So when people talk about the dorsal horn, they are talking about where sensory information is entering the spinal cord and then being relayed on up to the brain.

For more info

If you want a really great overview of the divisions of the nervous system, I highly recommend this video.


Conclusion

I really hope you’ve enjoyed this post! As you can see, it’s written in a very different tone, and for a very different target audience, than my previous post. I’m still in the process of figuring out what type of post works best on this blog. I really want to be able to write about advanced scientific concepts for every day people, and I’ll probably be trying to figure out the best way to do that for a while. Your thoughts/comments/suggestions are always welcome, so please let me know if you have any! Thanks!

https://sunlightinwinter.com/2015/02/08/nervous-system-basics/