Tinnitus Relief and Medicine – Drugs That Sometimes Cause Tinnitus

October 31, 2009

If you’ve been suffering from tinnitus for a while, you have probably already discovered that there are lots of things that can cause your ringing ears. One of the more surprising potential causes of your tinnitus is the medicine you are taking. You read that correctly. It is actually possible that or more of the medicines you are currently taking could be the cause (or at least one of the causes of) your tinnitus.

This possible link between prescription medications (the drugs that are supposed to help us be healthy) and ringing ears was certainly a surprise to me. I learned of it when my nephew developed tinnitus from the powerful medications he was taking for bone cancer. The medications helped eliminate the cancer & cure him, but part of the price he paid for his cure was long-term, likely permanent hearing damage.

To help you figure out if your medications might be causing your tinnitus, let me give you a list of the types of medications that can cause tinnitus. Based on information from the Mayo Clinic, here are the types of drugs that have been known to sometimes cause tinnitus or worsen existing cases of ringing ears:

  • Antibiotics: Several antibiotics can cause problems, including chloramphenicol, erythromycin, tetracycline, vancomycin and bleomycin
  • Cancer medications: Some of these powerful medicines that can cause ringing ears include mechlorethamine and vincristine
  • Diuretics: Bumetanide, ethacrynic acid, and furosemide
  • Quinine medications and others (such as chloroquine) used to treat malaria
  • Aspirin: When taken in extremely high doses (12 or more per day)

If you have ringing in ears and are being treated with any one of the medications listed in this article, you need to talk to your doctors right away about a possible connection. They may be able to change the way they are treating you and provide you with tinnitus relief at the same time.

What could be a more natural cure for tinnitus than stopping taking one or more medications that cause your tinnitus as a side effect?

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Remove Stretch Marks with Care

October 31, 2009

Stretch Mark Removal System

Stretch marks are most prevalent during puberty and pregnancy – times when the body undergoes rapid weight changes. However, you may be questioning what exactly is the cause of stretch marks and how to fade stretch marks appearance once they form. As a general rule, stretch marks are formed on the body in regions that store large amounts of fat, and and develop in the dermis skin layer.

What are Stretch Marks

Stretch marks begin as actual tears in a thinned or technically atrophic skin, with fine dermal collagen bundles arranged in straight lines parallel to the surface. These tears are a response from your own body to try to heal the damaged skin. The fact is that stretch marks are actually scar tissue created by the body to heal damage caused by thin skin stretched beyond its limits.

Known by doctors as “striae” (usually “striae distensae” or, in the case of pregnancy , “striae gravidarum”) stretch marks typically develop after a period of rapid weight gain or loss. They are most common during pregnancy and the teen years, when growth spurts and increased levels of steroid hormones cause significant changes throughout the body. In fact, almost 90% of pregnant women develop stretch marks.

An interesting fact is that stretch marks are the most common types of skin lesions. Stretch marks, or Striae, are most commonly located on the breasts, hips, thighs, buttocks, abdomen, and flank. The good news is that stretch marks are perfectly normal and aren’t considered a medical concern. The dilemma is that they can become an appearance issue and affect a person’s self esteem.

Preventing Stretch Marks – Your First Line of Defense

A secret to prevent stretch marks from forming is to maintain moisture in the skin during periods of weight gain or loss. This will help reduce stretch marks and for those that do appear, repair themselve quicker. A regimen of exfoliation and massaging nutrient-rich natural oils into the skin ,such as wheatgerm, jojoba or vitamin E, will help rid stretch marks from your susceptible areas.

The Art of Stretch Mark Removal

The practice of massaging the stretch mark damaged skin is important and increases blood circulation to the affected area, also assisting the healing process. Exfoliation of the area will also help remove stretch marks by shedding dead skin cells and allowing the stretch mark removal cream to penetrate deeper into the damaged skin. A warning is warranted though – be careful not to overdo with the exfoliation as it may cause your already damaged skin to become extremely sensitive. Remember, the skin is already damaged so remove stretch marks with care!

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A High School Student Experiences Alcohol Poisoning

October 30, 2009

Jeffrey was a high school freshman who usually seemed to be living on the edge. Jeffrey had a daring personality and frequently wanted to do what his older brothers were doing. The essential glitch with this was that all three of his brothers were at least 21 years old and were consequently legally allowed to operate a truck or car and to consume alcohol.

Jeffrey, then again, had a rough time understanding the fact that as a fifteen-year-old youth he should not be drinking. In fact, then again, Jeffrey normally drank with his friends after school, especially on the weekends.

One weekend, Jeffrey decided to drive around with some of his older guy friends. One of his guy friends was old enough to buy alcohol. After buying some wine coolers, wine, and beer, Jeffrey and his friends went to a public recreational area and drank for approximately three hours.

A Young Man Passes Out

After drinking around ten glasses of wine, Jeffrey started to feel nauseous and then vomited. When he became unconscious on the baseball field, one of his friends called 911 for assistance. It was fortunate that the call for medical assistance was made because when his buddies went to the hospital to see Jeffrey, they discovered that Jeffrey had been showing evidence of alcohol poisoning symptoms. In a word, That is, Jeffrey had overdosed on alcohol.

When Your Cronies Drink Abusively

Jeffrey had heard that drinking too much can result in alcohol poisoning but he never thought that this could affect him. After all, some of his pals over and over again bragged that they could drink two or three six packs of beer in a few hours without going through any serious problems.

Armed with this information, Jeffrey was truthfully astonished to gather that he had overdosed on alcohol because he “only” had approximately ten alcoholic beverages. When he told this to the attending physicain at the hospital, in spite of this, the doctor informed Jeffrey that drinking ten alcoholic beverages over a two or three hour time frame could certainly be significantly more alcohol than can be processed by the body. The healthcare professional further articulated how significant amounts of alcohol can cause the brain to shut down a person’s respiratory system and that when this transpires, a person can perish.

The First Sign of Hazardous Drinking

This was the first indication to Jeffrey that he was drinking in a dangerous fashion and that there are ramifications for such activities. The healthcare practitioner told Jeffrey that he was a lucky person because he almost lost his life from an alcohol overdose the previous night.

The physicain also spoke to Jeffrey’s parents and suggested that they get alcohol treatment for Jeffrey. His parents were elated that Jeffrey was safe and notified the healthcare professional that they would follow through on getting Jeffrey alcohol treatment.

While talking to his parents, Jeffrey told them that there must be a good reason why he did not expire and that he felt thankful that he was still alive. He also informed his parents that the weirdest part about the entire drinking episode was that he had learned about alcohol poisoning the previous week in health class at school.

When Learning Something in Class Can Change Your Life

At the time, what his health instructor, Mr. Franklin, was teaching didn’t seem to make a lot of sense to Jeffrey. Due to the fact that he almost passed away, however, he felt that he should have listened more conscientiously in health class and applied what he had learned to his life.

Jeffrey notified his parents that he couldn’t wait to go to school and apologize to Mr. Franklin for not paying better attention to a subject that was as noteworthy as learning about alcohol abuse and how to avoid an alcohol overdose.

His parents smiled at Jeffrey and said that they were elated with the way he was being responsible for his harmful drinking actions. All he had to do now was to let this life threatening experience make an impact his life in a productive manner so that he would never again go through an alcohol overdose.

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Improve your Memory – Link Method for Memory Improvement

October 30, 2009

Poor memory is not something for just the aged or mature adult, poor memory can affect anyone of any age.  There are many techniques that are available to help improve your memory, however not all are as easy as they like to make it claim to be.  Some require a lot of time, which in reality is partially the reason people tend to have poor memory, lack of time to pay adequate attention to things they need to store in their memory bank. 

Recall is a developed technique that happens within our brain functioning from an early age.  If honed on, it can be quite sharp.  If one is lackey daisy about their memory, as in saying, I will have to make a mental note of that and although their brain may have taken note, they have not sufficiently gave it enough information for recall later when needed; the old memory bank will fail when drawing upon that particular information at a later date.

One method in helping develop a great memory is using a technique called the Link Method.It helps you to recall stored information better due to the way you packed it away at first.  The Link method involves the use of mnemonics, an association between two things or items.  This gives the brain clues to later use in recall of that stored information.  This can be done in word association or by story association. 

Say you are studying for a test, any class, and you have to be able to recall all the bones in the foot.  First, you would write out a list of all the bones in the foot.  After writing the list out which would look something like this:  5 metatarsals for each foot, 14 phalanges for each foot (3 phalanges for each toe per foot except the hallux, which only has 2), Talus, Calcaneus, Navicular, Cuboid, Internal cuneiform, Middle cuneiform, and the External cuneiform for a total of 26 bones per foot. 

Next, you would take the words and put them either in a story form or in a word association form, which ever is easier for you to recall.  In a word association it may be something like 5 metatarsals = 5 mega parcels = I am getting 5 mega parcels (metatarsals) tomorrow from 14 philanders = 14 phalanges.  You would continue in this fashion with word association until you have covered all the necessary words in the list. 

In story association, you tell a story using a combination of word association and a story theme.  It may go something like this:  Five little metatarsals took off on a walk when out of the blue 14 scary looking fanged phalanges jumped out of a bush.  Each had three fangs except the little one, Hallux, who only had two.  Again, you would carry on similar to this until you have used all the listed words.  This is what is known as the Link Method.

The Link Method can be a reliable way to recall things, though it depends on the person remembering the story or the word associations.  However, this method with a combination of other methods can drastically help you improve your memory.  If you are having recall problems, improve your memory by learning valuable memory techniques at Memory Improvement

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What I Learned About Alcohol and Drug Abuse in High School

October 29, 2009

When I was a sophomore in high school, I enrolled into a drug abuse class. At that time, I did not understand that alcohol abuse in point of fact was a sub division of drug abuse. While taking this class and learning more about drug and alcohol abuse and especially about alcohol side effects, I read a lot about Alcoholic Anonymous, their meetings, how their programs have twelve steps, and how successful the Alcoholics Anonymous recovery program has been for individuals throughout the world. I also learned quite a bit about alcohol treatment and the different alcohol rehab clinics that are normally available to problem drinkers.

Damaging Effects That are Associated With Alcohol Addiction and Alcohol Abuse

Some of the detrimental end results related to alcoholism and alcohol abuse that I learned about in this class undeniably worried me. The ruined lives and abundant serious issues experienced by most alcohol dependent individuals made me feel like I never wanted to drink alcohol when I became old enough. That is, I did not want to face the wreckage and destruction that alcohol addicted individuals almost always experience.

Think about this for a moment. What fifteen-year-old teenager wants to face premature death due to his or her drinking behavior? What young person wants to become so out-of-control regarding his or her drinking that ingesting alcohol becomes the object of one’s life? What teen wants to go to one of the local alcoholic rehabilitation centers to deal with alcohol-related problems before he or she becomes twenty-one?

What youth wants to deal with alcohol withdrawals when he or she tries to quit drinking? Why would an individual engage in drinking to such an extent that it would cause difficulties in every area of his or her life? Drinking later in life after an individual has a career, a family, and develops personal responsibilities makes sense. But why would a young person want to sacrifice his or her education, employment, finances, and relationships for a life that centers on irresponsible drinking?

These issues were so significant that I talked about some of them in class during the school year. What was completely amazing to me was the number of students who simply didn’t care about the negative consequences of irresponsible drinking that I talked about. It was almost as if they couldn’t be troubled with reality and how these results can ruin their lives. For the first time in my life I started to grasp a saying that my grandfather used to articulate throughout my teen and pre-teen years: you can lead a horse to water but you can’t force it to drink.

It’s Important, Beneficial, and Enlivening to Stay Away From the Damaging and Unhealthy Consequences of Alcohol and Drug Abuse

And even at my young age, I also started to understand how important, liberating, and beneficial it is in life to keep yourself from the unhealthy and damaging outcomes of drug and alcohol abuse.

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