August 2010

Back pain is one of the most common and aggravating conditions in life and it takes a good daily regimen AND medicines to send it on its way. Luckily, these stretches and tips aren’t difficult to follow and using your prescription will make it a breeze! Find pleasure in a peaceful routine.

Morning Stretches

Stretch-1: 5-10 times

• Lie on your back with your knees bent so that your feet can rest flat on the floor.
• Grip the underside of your thighs with your hands.
• Pull your legs to your chest, or as close as you comfortably can.
• Hold this stretch for 15 seconds before returning to a resting position.

Stretch-2: 10 times

• Lie on your stomach, supporting your upper body with your elbows and forearms.
• Stretch your elbows and arms so that your back is extended and stretching.
• Hold at a gentle stretch for 15-20 seconds before returning to a rest.

Stretch-3: Once

• Start the same as Stretch-1: flat on your back, legs bent with feet flat against the ground.
• Lift your upper back off the ground using your abdominal muscles.
• Hold for a long 10 seconds if you can, then gently lower yourself back down.

Stretch-4: Until tired

• Sit in a chair, feet resting flat on the floor.
• Bend the back and neck until your chest rests again your thighs.
• Hold for 10 seconds before returning to the initial position. You should feel the stretch.

Good Posture

Posture might be the most important thing for backs. Short of walking around with a yard-stick in the back of your trousers, here is what you can do to fix your back.

When standing, hold your chest high, shoulders back (not tense), abs and butt tight, with your feet an even distance apart and sharing the weight. Your head should be looked straight ahead and your knees should never lock.

When sitting, rest your feet flat on the floor, back flat against the chair, chin tucked in a bit, shoulders relaxed, and back straight. Try to imagine a line shooting from your neck and head directly to the ceiling. It might help to cushion your lower back also.

What to Eat and Drink

There are some basic principles when deciding what to eat. High protein, high fiber, and high in minerals like magnesium, iron, and copper. With that in mind, here are some perfect foods for sufferers of back pain:

• Avocados
• Nuts, specifically Almonds and Pecans
• Soy Beans and Tofu
• Spinach, which is better for you cooked

You should also take a multivitamin.

Doing these stretches and taking good care of your back is really hard to do when your have near crippling pain preventing you from even thinking straight, never mind standing or sitting straight. That’s why so many people turn to Carisoprodol to ease their pain. It’s important to remember that you have to keep working at it once you’re on Carisoprodol in order to keep back pain at bay. And take it easy. You can’t be on Carisoprodol forever, but you can make your back feel at peace.

Television ads are always on the edge of the truth. Those that write the copy have to strike a balance. Their clients want a high sales trend following the ad campaign. “Tell ‘em whatever you need to get them to buy”, is the usual instruction. But there are these inconvenient Truth-in-Advertising Laws aimed at protecting those poor innocent consumers who might be taken in by all those lies. The idea is a simple one. Advertisers should not claim anything that cannot be substantiated. And in the background, the FTC is lurking, ready to pounce if the ads are considered deceptive. There can be expensive law suits and, worse, penalties if the ads are “unfair”.

So can hair loss drugs beat heredity? As always, the answer needs a little explanation. It starts easily enough. No drug on the market can prevent you from losing hair. Your body is designed to shed hairs everyday. Under normal circumstances, they grow back. Worse, as we age, more hair will drop out. That’s also unstoppable. So it does not look good for the drugs. Unlike heart disease where there are drugs to prevent the first symptoms from developing into the disease, nothing beats your body clock’s determination to shed hairs every day as you age.

What’s the genetic reality? As you probably know, men are XY and women are XX. When babies are made, each parent contributes half the genetic make-up of the child. Mothers can only give one of their X chromosomes so it’s the man who decides on the sex of the baby by either contributing an X or Y chromosome. Because of the work to analyze genes, we now know the genes controlling hair loss come in the X chromosome. That means whether you get to lose your hair early is decided by your mother’s family line. If there’s a bald maternal grandfather hiding just out of focus in old photographs, that’s probably going to be you.

How is this helping? Well, if you have the wrong genes, your hair follicles are going to react to the arrival of dihydrotestosterone (DHT) by slowing down the growth of hair. What does grow will emerge thinner and more likely to fall out of the roots. That’s why you start going bald. Hair that drops early tends not to regrow. DHT is produced in the adrenal gland and this is what keeps men male, i.e. it reinforces the usual male “characteristics”. With the wrong genes, this triggers hair loss on the scalp – not the rest of the body. This is where Propecia comes in. It prevents your adrenal gland from manufacturing DHT out of “ordinary” testosterone. Without there being the same level of DHT in your bloodstream, your hair keeps on growing. So Propecia does not beat heredity. Rather it carefully gets round it and lets you keep your hair. This makes the advertising so clever. It’s not unfair to claim a drug like Propecia can beat heredity. You beat someone or something by going around it. Winning is not always a battle to the death where one side batters the other into submission. Winning can be sneaky. That does not make the ads deceptive either. They are just elegantly playing with words to make you want to buy. Better still, the drug works so, if you buy, you are a winner!