How to Protect Your Back While Working at a Computer

If you start to think about how much time you spend sitting in front of the computer, you will probably feel guilty for reading the rest of this article as it will require even more of your time. By all means – get up and walk around a little bit. That is an easy way to take care of your back while sitting at a computer. So go ahead, go get a glass of water (properly hydrating will always contribute positively to pain management), but make sure to come back and read the rest to pick up some valuable tips:

• Lumbar Support – Everyone's back is different, but everyone's back needs some sort of lumbar support. This does not require some sort of spongy pillow or an improvised, crumpled-up jacket. Actually, many people (including myself) prefer a hard, straight-backed chair, such as a dining room table chair. Next time you sit down for dinner, try to keep your lower back pressed flat against the back of the chair. Like chairs around the table, a computer chair's back inclines at a gradual angle away from you; engaging your abs and bracing your lower back flat against the base of the chair will make you sit straight – also useful for avoiding a chiding Mother at dinner.
• Avoid Eyestrain – Believe it – eyestrain will affect your back and here's how. Tension developed in the head and neck through ocular strain will cause your shoulders to tense up. Most people also have their hands extended towards the keyboard and mouse and rest their forearms on the desk in front of the keyboard. Basically, this is tension in the shoulder girdle, which attaches to the scapula and the back of the thoracic rib cage. This method of helping back pain already alluded to, but getting up or gazing out the window or at your office crush will contribute to a less painful back. 
• Relax – You do not need me to tell you that working is stressful. Healthcare professionals conclude that stress has a measurable and real effect on your body's health. Make sure you do something to relax while working: a favorite Pandora station, listening to a random baseball game on MLB.com, or making fun plans for after work always helps me to relax. 
• Exercise – So, this one is not readily done while at the computer, although it is a great idea to move your legs around. Keeping your knees pent past 90 degrees for a long time can lead to back pain because the resulting knee pain will affect the way you walk. Straightening your legs out and flexing your feet at the ankle joint is a great way to keep your calves loose. Otherwise, you really need to have an exercise program in order to keep your back muscles strong. Abdominal exercises are great for keeping your back healthy, but make sure to strengthen your lower back and external oblique muscles just as much. For your upper back, exercises that involve rolling or pulling your shoulders back are great after extending your arms for so long towards the computer. Rowing machines and bent over rows (I suggest using a straight bar rather then an Olympic bar or dumbbells) are great for back strength. Know your limits though, and for those strong men out there, it’s a good rule of thumb to never lift over your body weight – even when deadlifting. Avoid injury at all costs.

Spinal Fusion Surgery on the Rise, But is the Risky Procedure Necessary?

A study released in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found spinal fusion surgeries are on the rise. Unfortunately, these risky and complicated surgeries are not necessary for many patients receiving them. The study found this procedure is often performed on patients suffering lower back problems connected to aging and arthritis -- patients who may not be good candidates for the procedure.

Instead, the procedure is designed for patients suffering from fractured vertebrae or damage caused by scoliosis or tumors. Such misuse of the procedure could lead to an increase in spinal cord injuries.

Spinal fusion is a type of surgery that permanently joins two or more vertebrae in the spine. This is done by grafting bone material into part of the spine, generally held in place by metal rods, screws, plates or cages until the grafts are fully incorporated into the spine.

The 6 Types of Pills Big Pharma Wants You Hooked On for Life

By Dr. Mercola

What would you say if you knew someone had killed 60,000 people? Would you call it a felony of the worst kind, times 60,000? If you totaled up the value of all those lives in criminal court, what would you say they're worth?

Billions? Trillions?

Or—how about a measly $321 million in exchange for a guilty plea to a misdemeanor? When you consider that this involves the second-largest drug maker in the U.S.—Merck—and its deadly drug Vioxx, then you'll probably agree that a misdemeanor and a $321 million fine amounts to nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

Business analysts were estimating a $25 billion judgment when the drug was taken off the market, but even when combined with the $4.85 billion in payouts to patients who suffered heart attacks and strokesⁱ, the final bill is nowhere close to original estimates of the damage.

Yet that's the plea agreement Merck recently made with a federal court in Boston on April 19ⁱⁱ, after being charged with illegal promotion of Vioxx for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, before it was approved for that use.

The sad tale brings up memories of what I tried to warn readers about in 1999, when I showed that people taking this drug were at a massively increased risk of dying from heart disease and stroke. It's tragic that Vioxx was removed only AFTER 60,000 people died.

It's even more tragic that a court would consider Merck's illegal promotion of the drug a misdemeanor rather than a felony, since this tactic clearly exposed far more people to the dangerous drug than it would have otherwise. And, adding insult to injury, instead of the billions that Merck anticipated paying out, it got away with such a paltry sum.

Hired Writers Responsible for Some of Merck's Vioxx Studies?

An Essential Guide for Scoliosis and a Healthy Pregnancy USA Edition

About Dr Kevin Lau

Dr Kevin Lau DC is the founder of Health In Your Hands, a series of tools for Scoliosis prevention and treatment. The set includes his book Your Plan for Natural Scoliosis Prevention and Treatment, a companion Scoliosis Exercises for Prevention and Correction DVD and the innovative new iPhone application ScolioTrack. Dr Kevin Lau is a graduate in Doctor of Chiropractic from RMIT University in Melbourne Australia and Masters in Holistic Nutrition. He is a member of International Society On Scoliosis Orthopaedic and Rehabilitation Treatment (SOSORT), the leading international society on conservative treatment of spinal deformities. In 2006 I was awarded the "Best Health-care Provider Awards" by the largest Newspaper publication in Singapore on October 18 2006 as well as being interviewed on Primetime Channel News Asia as well as other TV and Radio. For more information on Dr Kevin Lau, watch his interviews or get a free sneak peek of his book, go to: http://www.hiyh.info.

Yogurt diet leads to ‘swaggering’ mice with larger testicles

Researchers who recently undertook a study with mice in hopes of confirming earlier reports that eating yogurt can help prevent age-related weight gain have discovered a number of unexpected side-effects in their rodent subjects.

First, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists realized that the yogurt-eating mice had shinier, silkier, and thicker coats than the non-yogurt-eating control mice. Then they noticed that the male mice were walking with a “mouse swagger,” which turned out to be due to testicles that were 5% heavier than those of mice fed a standard mouse diet and a full 15% heavier than those of mice forced to live on high-fat, low-nutrient junk food.

And finally they conducted mating experiments and found that yogurt-eating males “inseminated their partners faster and produced more offspring,” while yogurt-eating females gave birth to larger litters and were more successful in raising them to the age of weaning.

Researchers Susan Erdman and Eric Alm have not yet determined the source of yogurt’s ability to enhance rodent sexuality, but they toldScientific American that they “think that the probiotic microbes in the yogurt help to make the animals leaner and healthier, which indirectly improves sexual machismo.”

A team of Harvard researchers has already begun investigating whether yogurt can also improve semen quality in human males and reports that “so far our preliminary findings are consistent with what they see in the mice.”

Photo by Steve Beger (originally posted to Flickr as Albino Mouse) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Exercise Keeps Muscles Young, Even in Elderly Heart Patients

A new study shows that contrary to previous belief, even elderly heart patients can benefit from regular exercise.

Dr. Stephan Gielen, deputy director of cardiology at the University Halle/Wittenberg in Germany, and his colleagues say that physical activity can help protect heart patients over age 70 from muscle wasting, a condition that in many cases can worsen these patients’ health and impede their recovery.

Over the course of a lifetime, muscle is constantly made and degraded, and with age, the deterioration becomes dominant, leading to weakness and difficulty in maintaining cardiac and respiratory health. In previous studies, Gielen and his colleagues showed that inflammation, which can occur after heart failure, can accelerate the wasting of muscle, so in the current study, they wanted to document what effect, if any, exercise might have on this process.

Gielen and his team recruited 60 patients with heart failure and 60 healthy controls, each in two age groups: people 55 years old and younger, and those 65 and older. Half the participants in each age group were assigned to a four-week aerobic exercise program of stationary cycling; each participant cycled for 20 minutes, four times a day on weekdays, and also had a 60-minute group exercise session involving walking and calisthenics. The other half received the usual clinical care by their physicians.

To study changes in muscle physiology, the researchers took biopsies of muscle from each participant’s leg and analyzed them for certain enzymes related to muscle maintenance. After the four weeks, as the researchers report in the journal Circulation, those in the exercise group showed marked improvement in their muscle enzymes; they showed lower levels of a muscle breakdown protein than those who didn’t exercise, even though the heart patients had higher levels of this protein to start.

The exercise participants also showed lower levels of inflammation in the muscle, and increased muscle strength. This translated to physiological benefits as well; the heart failure patients under age 55 increased their peak oxygen intake by 25%, while those over age 65 increased this measure by 27%. The key is an enzyme system that monitors the balance between muscle strengthening and degradation, and exercise can tip the balance in favor of muscle strengthening.

“What surprised us was the speed of onset of these effects,” says Gielen. “We believed that with a short term program of four weeks, the effects would be much more limited. But it was surprising for us that we got nearly all the effects of exercise training after just four weeks. So this is a very rapid system, and even at advanced ages, there is a high plasticity of the muscle system.”

That means that regardless of age, says Gielen, heart patients can benefit from exercise, and rather than worsening their condition, as doctors intuitively thought for decades, physical activity actually improves their health and may even speed their recovery. Gielen and his team studied the benefits only of aerobic exercise on muscle mass, but other studies have also hinted that weight-bearing or resistance training can also help elderly patients maintain their muscular strength.

Having a potential regulatory pathway also makes it possible to develop drug targets that may boost muscle conditioning, says Gielen, if additional studies confirm these results. “This plasticity of the muscle system is underused in medicine at the moment,” he says. But perhaps not for much longer.

Alice Park is a writer at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @aliceparkny. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/05/08/exercise-keeps-muscles-young-even-in-elderly-heart-patients/?xid=rss-topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+time%2Ftopstories+%28TIME%3A+Top+Stories%29#ixzz1ucAInoy2

'One in six cancers worldwide are caused by infection'

By Michelle RobertsHealth editor, BBC News online

One in six cancers - two million a year globally - are caused by largely treatable or preventable infections, new estimates suggest.

The Lancet Oncology review, which looked at incidence rates for 27 cancers in 184 countries, found four main infections are responsible.

These four - human papillomaviruses, Helicobacter pylori and hepatitis B and C viruses - account for 1.9m cases of cervical, gut and liver cancers.

Most cases are in the developing world.

The team from the International Agency for Research on Cancer in France, part of the World Health Organization, says more efforts are needed to tackle these avoidable cases and recognise cancer as a communicable disease.

'Preventable'

The proportion of cancers related to infection is about three times higher in parts of the developing world, such as east Asia, than in developed countries like the UK - 22.9% versus 7.4%, respectively.

Nearly a third of cases occur in people younger than 50 years.

Among women, cancer of the cervix accounted for about half of the infection-related cancers. In men, more than 80% were liver and gastric cancers.

Drs Catherine de Martel and Martyn Plummer, who led the research, said: "Infections with certain viruses, bacteria, and parasites are some of the biggest and preventable causes of cancer worldwide

"Application of existing public-health methods for infection prevention, such as vaccination, safer injection practice, or antimicrobial treatments, could have a substantial effect on the future burden of cancer worldwide."

Vaccines are available to protect against human papillomavirus (HPV) - which is linked to cancer of the cervix - and hepatitis B virus - an established cause of liver cancer.

And experts know that stomach cancer can be avoided by clearing the bacterial infection H. pylori from the gut using a course of antibiotics.

Commenting on the work, Dr Goodarz Danaei from Harvard School of Public Medicine in Boston, the US, said: "Since effective and relatively low-cost vaccines for HPV and HBV are available, increasing coverage should be a priority for health systems in high-burden countries."

Jessica Harris of Cancer Research UK said: "It's important that authorities worldwide make every effort to reduce the number of infection-related cancers, especially when many of these infections can be prevented. In the UK, infections are thought to be responsible for 3% of cancers, or around 9,700 cases each year.

"Vaccination against HPV, which causes cervical cancer, should go a long way towards reducing rates of this disease in the UK. But it's important that uptake of the vaccination remains high. At a global level, if the vaccine were available in more countries, many thousands more cases could be prevented."

Scoliosis Treatment - New Exercise Solution!

About Dr Kevin Lau

Dr Kevin Lau DC is the founder of Health In Your Hands, a series of tools for Scoliosis prevention and treatment. The set includes his book Your Plan for Natural Scoliosis Prevention and Treatment, a companion Scoliosis Exercises for Prevention and Correction DVD and the innovative new iPhone application ScolioTrack. Dr Kevin Lau is a graduate in Doctor of Chiropractic from RMIT University in Melbourne Australia and Masters in Holistic Nutrition. He is a member of International Society On Scoliosis Orthopaedic and Rehabilitation Treatment (SOSORT), the leading international society on conservative treatment of spinal deformities. In 2006 I was awarded the "Best Health-care Provider Awards" by the largest Newspaper publication in Singapore on October 18 2006 as well as being interviewed on Primetime Channel News Asia as well as other TV and Radio. For more information on Dr Kevin Lau, watch his interviews or get a free sneak peek of his book, go to: http://www.hiyh.info.

Scoliosis & Nutrition - Case Study from a researcher and sufferer!

Today I received an email from a scoliosis researcher and sufferer... I know nutrition is an important factor in scoliosis development and am happy to find another person who also sees the value in it. Looking forward to furthering research in this field and happy to have found a colleague committed to the same cause... its time to rethink scoliosis and start researching the cause rather than merely researching better surgical or bracing techniques! Stop masking symptoms and start treating the cause. Below is the email:

Dear Dr. Lau,

I am a scoliosis patient and I have also spent several years assisting with scoliosis research in Canada. Some of the projects I assisted in involved melatonin and scoliosis in chickens. I came across your book and website today, and I am very interested in your theories on nutrition.

I believe nutrition has played a very large role in the progression of my scoliosis. I have had 7 scoliosis surgeries, 6 of which I had when I was a teenager, and one again a few years ago, approximately 9 years later. Every time I needed surgery it was due to a failed fusion. I wore a boston brace for three years prior to my first surgery. I was also a rhythmic gymnast at the time and was very flexible and thin. I had a 98 degree curve before my first surgery. I had some complications from the most recent surgery, and I had to have my shoulder blade fused to my ribs. This fusion consequently failed twice as well. I have had lots of time in the past few years to think about my scoliosis, and during this time I also began to really pay attention to my body. I noticed things that I didn't think were normal. I looked up what I had noticed and found that they were likely from vitamin and nutrient deficiencies. I asked my doctor to test some of my vitamin levels, and I found out that I had a severe vitamin D and phosphorus deficiency. Since I have been taking vitamin D, I have not had any more problems in over a year. I have spent several hours looking up journal articles, and I have come up with several of the same factors that you mentioned in your book that I think are important, including zinc, copper, magnesium, vitamin d, calcium, and low estrogen. I was very excited to find someone who had found the same things as I had! I recently found a record of my weight as a baby, and realized that I was very underweight, at only 22 pounds at age 2.5 years. My Mother said I was a sick baby, and didn't like to eat. When I got older I also never ate much, and I especially never like to eat meat (as I understand this is a sign of a zinc deficiency). Scoliosis does run in our family, but I believe this poor diet as a child set me up for a much worse curvature than anyone else in my family has experienced.

ScolioTrack Research Validates the Use of iPhone for Monitoring Scoliosis

Use of the iPhone for Cobb angle measurement in scoliosis.

Shaw M, Adam CJ, Izatt MT, Licina P, Askin GN.

Source

Paediatric Spine Research Group, Queensland University of Technology and Mater Health Services, Brisbane, Australia.

Abstract

PURPOSE:

The Cobb technique is the universally accepted method for measuring the severity of spinal deformities. Traditionally, Cobb angles have been measured using protractor and pencil on hardcopy radiographic films. The new generation of mobile 'smartphones' make accurate angle measurement possible using an integrated accelerometer, providing a potentially useful clinical tool for assessing Cobb angles. The purpose of this study was to compare Cobb angle measurements performed using a smartphone and traditional protractor in a series of 20 adolescent idiopathic scoliosis patients.

METHODS:

Seven observers measured major Cobb angles on 20 pre-operative postero-anterior radiographs of Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis patients with both a standard protractor and using an Apple iPhone. Five of the observers repeated the measurements at least a week after the original measurements.

RESULTS:

The mean absolute difference between pairs of smartphone/protractor measurements was 2.1°, with a small (1°) bias toward lower Cobb angles with the iPhone. 95% confidence intervals for intra-observer variability were ±3.3° for the protractor and ±3.9° for the iPhone. 95% confidence intervals for inter-observer variability were ±8.3° for the iPhone and ±7.1° for the protractor. Both of these confidence intervals were within the range of previously published Cobb measurement studies.

CONCLUSIONS:

We conclude that the iPhone is an equivalent Cobb measurement tool to the manual protractor, and measurement times are about 15% less. The widespread availability of inclinometer-equipped mobile phones and the ability to store measurements in later versions of the angle measurement software may make these new technologies attractive for clinical measurement applications.

PMID:

22065167

[PubMed - as supplied by publisher]