Okra

Continuing my theme on unusual medicinal herbs I chose Okra, or ladies fingers as it is sometimes called. Okra is mostly used in stews perhaps African style, but has also been used as an alternative medication. The pods, shown above contain large amounts of vitamin A and C, calcium, phosphorus, potassium and magnesium. The plant is also rich in mucilaginous substances, which lubricate the intestines and are recommended for soothing duodenal ulcers and reducing high cholesterol levels.

Find out more about honey

Follow this link to find out more about the natural healing powers of honey. Treatment with honey is called apitherapy,which includes replenishing energy, enhancing physical stamina and improving immune systems. Honey also is considered to have a calming effect on the mind and promotes sleep. Honey also helps indigestion and has sometimes been used to treat cardiovascular disease and respiratory complaints. A thin coat of honey can be applied on the skin to disinfect and heal minor skin wounds and chapped lips. (more). Please let me know your experience with regard to honey.

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Check Out This Week's Grand Rounds

It's hosted by USA Today. It will appear serially in four separate postings throughout the day today. The four topical areas are:

• Health tips
• True stories
• Myth busters & controversies
• Healthcare costs

Cohabitation or Marriage: Which is Better for Your Health and Happiness?

My guess is that this study did not look at couples living with serious illness in one or both partners. I wonder what the findings would have been if they had? I'm not suggesting that marriage weathers the stress of illness better than cohabitation, or vice versa. Nor am I suggesting that the legal ties of marriage mean couples tend to stay together during illness (nor am I suggesting that staying together is the right thing for all couples). It's just interesting, and not surprising, to me that the inevitable period of illness in a long-term relationship is not part of a study like this.

What are your thoughts? The study summary is below:

Study finds few well-being advantages to marriage over cohabitation

Benefits of marriage reduce over time while cohabiting couples experience greater happiness and self esteem

A new study, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family reveals that married couples experience few advantages for psychological well-being, health, or social ties compared to unmarried couples who live together. While both marriage and cohabitation provide benefits over being single, these reduce over time following a honeymoon period.

"Marriage has long been an important social institution, but in recent decades western societies have experienced increases in cohabitation, before or instead of marriage, and increases in children born outside of marriage," said Dr Kelly Musick, Associate Professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University's College of Human Ecology. "These changes have blurred the boundaries of marriage, leading to questions about what difference marriage makes in comparison to alternatives."

Previous research has sought to prove a link between marriage and well-being, but many studies compared marriage to being single, or compared marriages and cohabitations at a single point in time.

This study compares marriage to cohabitation while using a fixed-effects approach that focuses on what changes when single men and women move into marriage or cohabitation and the extent to which any effects of marriage and cohabitation persist over time.

Dr Musick drew a study sample from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) of 2,737 single men and women, 896 of whom married or moved in with a partner over the course of 6 years. The study focused on key areas of well-being, considering questions on happiness, levels of depression, health, and social ties.

The results showed a spike in well-being immediately following both marriage and cohabitation as couples experienced a honeymoon period with higher levels of happiness and fewer depressive symptoms compared to singles. However, these advantages were short lived.

Marriage and cohabitation both resulted in less contact with parents and friends compared to remaining single – and these effects appeared to persist over time.

"We found that differences between marriage and cohabitation tend to be small and dissipate after a honeymoon period. Also while married couples experienced health gains – likely linked to the formal benefits of marriage such as shared healthcare plans – cohabiting couples experienced greater gains in happiness and self-esteem. For some, cohabitation may come with fewer unwanted obligations than marriage and allow for more flexibility, autonomy, and personal growth" said Musick.

"Compared to most industrial countries America continues to value marriage above other family forms," concluded Musick. "However our research shows that marriage is by no means unique in promoting well-being and that other forms of romantic relationships can provide many of the same benefits."

Natural Cure for pain

This may not work for you but many people believe that cures can be effected by certain people who have a power a healing power merely by touch or sometimes by thought. Cases have been attested through the centuries of "faith healing" or spiritual healing, although healers prefer to call it simply healing as no-one really knows how it works.


Its very simplicity makes healing make healing probably the simplest, safer and most natural of all methods of therapy, and there is more evidence in favor of the theraputic effects of hands on healing than any form of natural therapy, apart from Hypnotherapy.


Healing may well be connected in its efficacy with hypnotherapy in that clearly the relationship of the healer to patient is all important. The healer may be a person with special mental or spiritual powers many religious leaders are credited with " faith cures" and the patient has to believe in his powers for the treatment to be effective.


As the treatment does not manipulate the body in any way or involve ingesting any medicines of any kind, patients with any kind of pain, may be helped by the healing, but , because the personal qualities of the healer are what is supplying the healing, you may have to try several healers before you find the one that works for you.

Blog Ping

Does Lisa Swayze (wife of actor Patrick Swayze) Have Super Powers?

Lisa Niemi Swayze has written a book about her experiences loving and losing her husband Patrick Swayze after a 21 month battle with pancreatic cancer. The book is titled: Worth Fighting For.

One review I read said:

"...The memoir reveals just how much one woman can change, when forced to confront the horrors of illness and the inevitability of those final moments. We witness the transformation of Lisa from a terrified creature who begs her just-diagnosed husband ‘Please don’t make me do this’, to the superwoman who refuses to give in, confronts every grim aspect of his nursing care and brings him home to die..."

They were two exceptional and normal people, as we all are, who loved each other and did the best they could. I confess I find it unfair to Lisa, and to the rest of us, to characterize her as a "superwoman." This makes it seem that her efforts came from some special source of rare super power she has access to, as opposed to the power that naturally derives from love and empathy - and that she is in a different class of being than the rest of us who live in the realm of illness with our partner.

What do you think?

The chest infection that will not go away

As you will know I started with a chest infection around Christmas 2010, and my mucus was coloured green. I had three different antibiotics to try and clear the infection, this helped my breathing, but my mucus remained green and it is still green more than twelve months later. So does this mean I have had an infection for more than one year. I have been treating myself using natural treatment during this time using Manuka honey +5 and high doses of vitamin c. I think this is holding the infection in place but not curing it. I have had a sputum test at the hospital which confirms I have a chest infection and was given the same antibiotics that I was first given. I have not taken these.

So what do I do now?. I have been looking for a natural cure for my chest infection, and I could get the +15 dose of Manuka honey, other than that I have not found a cure. I will go back to my GP and advise them that I am not getting anywhere, and keep looking for a natural way I can treat this problem. I will keep you posted on my progress.

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Why I feel great !

Yesterday I went for a foot detox, it was totally amazing. My feet where emerged in about 5cm of clear water, in a detox spa, the water was quite warm. After about 10 minutes I noticed that there was a cloudy solution coming from the centre of the spa. After about 20 minutes I noticed that the water was turning a dirty colour which resembled urine, like a dark dirty yellow. During this time I had been drinking 1litre of clear tap water. So all the toxins where coming out of my body. In total the foot detox lasted 30 minutes.

By the end of the day I felt really horrible, I felt tired and irritable, however I got one of the best nights sleep I have ever had, and the next day I felt really great, I felt that I had lots of energy I could concentrate, and my thought was quick. I was advised to have a foot detox once every two weeks.

Has anyone else had positive results from a foot detox?.

A call for vitamin D in food.

There has been a call for vitamin D to be more in food after an increase in the number of cases of childhood rickets. Sunlight provides us with vitamin D, which protects against such diseases like rickets, and as more children are protected from sunlight with sun block cream children and adults recieve less vitamin D into their body. There is a natural way to ensure you recieve the correct amount of vitamin D and that is by taking a supplement.

As followers will know from my previous posts I use vitamin D supplements to boost my immune system, it is also known to protect from certain cancers.

Report by the BBC >

Rickets was a disease that had almost disappeared in the UK by the 1940's, but the number of cases has risen rapidly over the last 15 years.
Health campaigners say this is evidence that people are not getting enough vitamin D and have voiced concerns that there will also be an increase in related diseases.
See more here
 

One Illness; Two Victims

This comment just came in on an older post. I think it is well worth re-posting:

Married 36 years and the last 7 years my husband has been a paraplegic due to a mass on his spinal cord. There are TWO victims here. Him and I, and I feel like I am paralyzed right in the middle of my life. I wish I were the one dying or dead. I was not happily married to him before his surgery and I was waiting for the kids to at least be in college before I left the marriage. Now I am stuck taking care of a man who hit me and verbally abused me up until the day he got sick. Now I do it to myself because I am too much of a wimp to leave him. Thank you for letting me say this out loud, my mom died 6 years ago and I have no one to hear my pain.

I have found readers of this blog to be very sensitive to the complexities of living with illness as part of your relationship. Solutions can be elusive. Problems are complicated and simple advice that usually has the word "just" in it (like - "why don't you just leave him" or "why don't you just eat less and get some exercise) often isn't substantive enough to be of real help.

What thinking can you offer the writer of the comment above? What have you learned from your experiences as ill partner or well, caretaking partner that you can share with this author?

Natural cure for an un-healthy person

Its new years day and I have just been for a four mile walk,and although I feel tied my breathing is better. My weight yesterday was 11st 2ils, heavier than I have ever been, its the mnce pies I know. I should have lost a little weight today. So the first natural cure for an unhealthy person is to get out their and get walking.

After your walk you may want to take a power nap. An afternoon snooze can help to cut the risk of heart problems and keep your energy levels revved. This does not mean sleeping all afternoon, just twenty minutes is fine. Sleeping for long periods during the day could result in problems with insomnia and this could effect our well being.