Five Natural Treatments for Stress

Stressed out has become part of our everyday language. Fifty years ago, had you told someone you were stressed out, they wouldn’t have known what you were talking about and might even have questioned your knowledge of grammar! Rare is the individual today who doesn’t get stressed out at least once a day. Stress can lead to severe health problems, particularly with the ‘type A’ personality. Besides, stress produces unpleasant feelings in the body, headaches, as well as causing us to snap at others without reason. While your doctor might prescribe a medication to calm you down, it’s always best to avoid prescription medicines if you can. Here we offer five natural treatments for stress. They all work, so you can pick and choose as the mood strikes you. Of course, if you’re really stressed out, do all five!

1. Physical exercise of any kind is one of the great treatments for stress. If it’s raining, get out the vacuum and give that rug the old one-two. Go over and over that rug until it’s sparkling clean and you’ve taken that stress factor out on it, not the kids or your spouse. Surely there’s a spot in the yard that needs to be weeded within an inch of it’s life. Other physical tasks, like cleaning out the hall closet, can prove sufficiently distracting so that you’ll be automatically diverted from whatever got you stressed. You also get satisfaction from how clean it is.

 

2. Journal writing is another of the time-honored treatments for stress. No, you don’t need to be a writer to take advantage of this treatment. Maybe it’s your boss or spouse who jumped on your case about whatever. Biting your tongue is what caused this stress, so now is the time to express yourself! Give that so-and-so all of your thoughts on the topic in your (private) journal. Works like a charm!

 

3. Lavender is an old time treatment for stress and is especially effective with stress headaches. For this remedy, there are several avenues. You can take a nap, lying on a lavender filled pillow, or you can make or buy a lavender filled eye cover. You can also take a few whiffs of essential oil of lavender and/or dab a drop on each of your temples.

 

4. Some treatments for stress should be interactive. Here’s a variation on the journal writing entries. Write an email to a good friend and vent. Tell your friend up front to take it with a grain of salt. After all, we shouldn’t take life too seriously too often. Have your venting. By the time you’re done, you’ll probably feel better already. You can send it or not, as your mood dictates. Ask for a funny joke or cartoon in their response. This way, you get a laugh too. Good for the soul.

 

5. Here’s the be all and end all of natural treatments for stress: every time you feel yourself getting stressed out, make a note, in your journal, of what triggered the event. After just a few weeks, you’ll see a pattern. Do you constantly worry about money? Your weight? Does someone at work drive you crazy? Not enough hours in the day? Once you’ve discovered your common stress triggers, implement a plan to eliminate these stress factors. Make a strict budget. Lose weight. Ignore, or make friends with that work mate. Whatever works.

 

These five natural treatments for stress do work. Try them, you’ll like them!

Effective Osteoarthritis Treatments That Go Beyond Pain Medications

Effective osteoarthritis treatments that go beyond pain medications

There are millions of people who suffer from osteoarthritis. This condition is painful, most commonly affecting the joints. Unlike rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis is described as a simple case of wearing out of the joints over time. While rheumatoid arthritis patients may be treated with medications, there are no conventional pharmaceutical medications which can alleviate or halt the progression of osteoarthritis. While rheumatoid arthritis is a systemic and progressive disease, with severe and lifelong complications, there are pharmaceutical drugs that can halt the progress of this disease.

Osteoarthritis is perhaps as debilitating, over the long term. The bad news for the osteoarthritic patient is that medical science has no cure. The current osteoarthritis treatments are limited to the alleviation of pain. If you are diagnosed with osteoarthritis, the standard osteoarthritis treatment is to prescribe a pain medication. Who wants to live under such a standard?

If you have been diagnosed with osteoarthritis and prescribed a pain pill as your only recourse, think again. With a good nutritional strategy, you can reap huge benefits, reducing pain within the space of a single week, eventually reversing your osteoarthritis, and improving your overall health for good.

Before we look at osteoarthritis treatment in terms of nutrition, it should be noted that, if you’re overweight, try to lose those unwanted pounds! The excess weight just puts additional and unnecessary stress on vulnerable joints. Drinking plenty of water, those 6-8 glasses a day we all know about, is also important. The water helps flush accumulated toxins from your body.

One of the most effective osteoarthritis treatments, among nutritional considerations, relates to the proper balance of calcium to magnesium. The ratio of calcium to magnesium intake for healthy bones and joints is roughly 2:3. Americans have one of the highest rates of osteoarthritis in the world, with the average calcium to magnesium ratio an unhealthy 10:1! In these ratios, a certain hormone is triggered to remove old dead bone tissue, while its counterpart hormone, which is supposed to channel new nutrients to bones and joints, is suppressed. This results in a net loss of bone, leading to osteoarthritis and osteoporosis.

Given these facts, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that perhaps an underlying cause of these conditions is not, in fact, due to ‘wear and tear’ joint degeneration, but rather an overload of calcium and a deficiency of magnesium.

One way to address this condition is to reduce your calcium intake and take a magnesium supplement of 600mg per day. Several clinical studies have shown that magnesium supplementation at this dosage has resulted in increased bone density and significant reduction of pain in as little as nine months, even in quite elderly patients! You may experience reduced pain in just a week! Now that’s an osteoarthritis treatment we can all applaud!

Other supplemental nutrients of value as osteoarthritis treatments include the B-complex vitamins as well as vitamins A, C and E and the trace mineral zinc.

There are many conditions which reflect years of nutritional deficiencies. As we age, many nutrients are not as readily absorbed, so it’s important to monitor any deficiencies to see if supplementation is advisable. Speak to your doctor about having lab tests which can determine nutritional deficiencies.

The importance of a good diet cannot be stressed enough. Young people can get away with poor dietary habits – for a while. However, over a lifetime, the body ultimately suffers the effects. Who knows how many chronic illnesses are preventable?

Alternative Health Debate

Many people are pretty polarized on the alternative health care debate. They are either completely for or completely against it. On the one hand, there are people who stand with tradition entirely and are unwilling to compromise. They believe that normal medical health is the highest level that the treatment of diseases has ever reached. They don’t believe in any alternative health treatment at all, viewing it as unscientific and probably unhelpful as well.

On the other hand, there are alternative health fanatics. I know some people who will only use holistic health services and nothing else. They won’t even take prescription drugs if they believe they can get better with herbs. They believe that science is overrated and that some things can’t be measured in numbers.

I always try to avoid either extreme in my own practices. I have had some great success with alternative health, and definitely wouldn’t give it up. On the other hand, I think that science is very valuable. Traditional Western medicine has done a lot of great things for us. It has brought us a new understanding of the physical body, excellent drugs and treatment options, incredible scans which allow us to see inside the body, and many other helpful technologies. To throw it all away based on a vague belief in the power of herbs is foolish.

That is why I use both alternative healing and traditional medicine. I think that improving your diet and taking health supplements can do great things for you, and is often a better solution than costly medications with side effects. When you are not treating something severe and acute, you shouldn’t put a lot of stress on your body during the treatment. Otherwise the cure can be worse than the illness. Using herbal treatments can remove the need to strain your body by introducing antibiotics and things like that into it.

On the other hand, I like to keep traditional medicine as an option. Sometimes, things get really bad and you just need a pretty strong treatment. You might not want to start with an operation or even prescription medication, but it might come to that in the end. This is why I have always viewed complimentary medicine as the best approach. It allows you to combine the best of both worlds. After all, the more tools you have, the more options you have for treatment.