setback | The Health Sessions

Before Diagnosis: What Can You Do While Doctors Figure Out What’s Wrong with You?

When you’re generally healthy and you become sick, you expect to go to the doctor’s, get a physical examination and then go home with a diagnosis and a prescription. But things aren’t always that clear-cut.

Sometimes symptoms can be vague, fitting many different diagnostic criteria. Or maybe your test results come back inconclusive, or not even show that something is wrong at all – while you’re obviously not doing fine.

But getting the right diagnosis is often the first step towards finding a cure or managing your symptoms. In the meantime, how do you handle being sick? What can you do to deal with the pain, fatigue, anxiety, stress and practical problems?

Before diagnosis, is there anything helpful you can do while doctors figure out what’s wrong with you?

Spoonie Problems: How to Decide When to Push Through and When to Stop and Rest

It’s probably a familiar scenario: you’ve been looking forward to going out all week, and then your illness messes up your plans, again. One of the characteristics of chronic illness is that symptoms can flare up at any time. Of course there’s never a good moment to feel sick, but it’s especially discouraging when you have … Read more >

How to Reset Your Internal Clock | The Health Sessions

10 Natural Ways to Reset Your Internal Clock

This blog post contains affiliate links to resources you might find helpful, at no extra costs to you.

You know how you often feel tired and groggy in the afternoon? That’s your internal clock at work.

You might be more in tune with your work schedule than your body rhythm, but all of us are governed by a biological schedule. Circadian rhythm refers to the countless changes your body experiences over a 24-hour period. From your sleep-wake cycle to hormone production and daily fluctuations of alertness, circadian rhythms affect every aspect of your functioning.

The master internal clock that controls the different clocks throughout your body is a group of nerves in the hypothalamus called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). Each morning, light enters your eyes and travels along the optic nerve to signal to the SCN that it’s time to start the day’s circadian cycle.

For thousands of years, humans organized their days around their biological clock. But now that we are no longer getting up at sunrise, spending our days outdoors and going to bed when it gets dark, our body clocks get disrupted. And this can cause serious troubles. Research has linked disturbed internal clocks to anything from an increased chance at injuries and accidents to chronic health problems like obesity, heart disease and cognitive decline.

8 Natural Ways to Optimize Your Immunity

Your immune system works around the clock to ward off bacteria, viruses and other disease-causing microorganisms. But sometimes it fails: a germ slips through your defense systems and you get sick.

Or worse: in reaction to an unknown trigger, the body sometimes produces antibodies that mistakenly attack its own tissues. This type of overactive immune reaction is what happens in auto-immune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes and lupus.

Although scientifically speaking “boosting your immunity” makes little sense, common habits like chronic stress, a fast food diet and sleep deprivation are known to decrease your body’s ability to fight off foreign invaders. So what can you do to keep your immune system strong – besides washing your hands and practicing good cooking hygiene?

Of course you can’t always prevent getting sick. But a healthy lifestyle does support the functioning of your immune system, keeping your defenses up and running as good as possible.

Have a look at these 8 natural ways to optimize your immunity and fight off the flu.

7 Best Tips to Use Massage Therapy as a Source of Injury Prevention

This is a guest post by Stacey Connor from Foot Massager Advisor.

Massage therapy has long been seen as an effective means to assist people who were suffering from some kind of injury, no matter what kind of injury they have. Even those who have had broken bones find that massage therapy can be beneficial in assisting them so that they can have stronger more durable muscles that are able to assist in the strengthening of the bone.

It is clear that massage therapy can have tremendous benefits for those who have already suffered an injury. But you may be unaware of the fact that it can be as equally helpful in preventing injuries from occurring at all. In fact, even if you are a fitness geek, you may find that by visiting a massage therapist on a regular basis you may prevent injuries from ever having a chance to occur.

Here are seven tips you should know about using massage therapy as a source of injury prevention.