Personal Health Care

Mumps is an illness caused by a virus. It typically causes painful swelling of the parotid glands, salivary glands located below the ear at the angle of the jaw. It is highly contagious and the virus spreads by droplets from the mouth, nose or throat when an infected person coughs or sneezes. It is most contagious three days before to four days after the onset of swelling.

What are mumps signs and symptoms?

It takes between 12 - 25 days after contact with an infected person for symptoms to start.

Some people with mumps have no symptoms, others may experience :
*Fever
*Headache
*Dry mouth, loss of appetite
*Pain upon opening mouth or eating
*Tiredness
*Swelling of one or both parotid glands which are situated at the angle of the jaw.

Symptoms usually resolve in 10 - 12 days.

Is it always a mild disease?
Although most people recover fully, rare complications may occur, these include :

*Encephalitis (inflammation of the brain)
*Meningitis (inflammation of the lining of the brain)
*Pancreatitis (inflammation of the pancreas)
*Orchitis (inflammation of the testis) in adolescent or adult males
*Deafness

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It is a sensation of uncomfortable tingling or prickling, usually felt in the hands or feet. The effected area is sometimes said to have fallen asleep. The medical name for pins and needles is paraesthesia and it is caused bu blocked blood flow to a pressed nerve. Paraesthesia is a sign that sensory nerves in the area of the tingly sensation are being irritated (rather than motor nerves which control movement).

Pins and needles Causes

A common cause is leaning or lying awkwardly on a limb, which either presses against the nerves or reduces the blood supply to the local area. For example, if you sit too long in an awkward position, you may press hard enough on a nerve to interrupt its signaling to the brain, causing your feet to go numb or fall asleep.

Pins and needles prevention

Changing position quickly restores normal feeling. Any numbness is soon replaced by a tingling and prickling sensation, as the nerves start sending messages again to the brain and spinal cord.

The occasional bout of pins and needles is a harmless event. However,chronic pins and needles can be symptomatic of some other underlying disorder. Always see your doctor for a thorough medical treatments if you experience persistent of frequent episodes of numbness or pins and needles. Personal health care also play important to prevent pins and needles.

Back pain treatment is a hotly debated topic for your personal health care. Every week you can read a least one research study that claims a popular, conventional back pain treatment is ineffective. Even the most established treatments such as physical therapy do not escape the headlines. Only recently researchers at Warwick University (UK) found that one session just offering advice to back pain sufferers achieved the same results as six weeks of physiotherapy!

Of course, conducting such a large study is difficult as there are many factors that need to be taken into consideration. What sort of back pain treatment was given? What was the quality and experience of the therapists used? Did the subject all have the same cause of back pain? Did they carry out the exercises or advice as instructed?

This last question is the big one in my view. All courses of back pain treatment usually involve some sort of exercise or instruction on how to sit, stand or move to reduce the stress on the back. But are we capable of following this advice? Most therapists in conventional medicine make the assumption that we can.

However, if back pain is not due to a specific medical condition is it usually a muscular problem. The human body is perfectly capable of supporting itself with minimal muscular effort. Postural muscles are ‘designed’ to provide long periods of sustained activity to keep us upright and balanced. The phasic muscles (or movement muscles) are for short bursts of activity such as lifting your arm or turning your head. This is a bit of a simplification because all muscles provide a mixture of both functions but it will do for this example.

In my opinion, back pain and other muscular-skeletal problems can occur when we ‘misuse’ our body, or in other words use the wrong muscles to sit, stand and move. If we’re not moving correctly I our daily activities we’re going to do the same when trying to perform corrective exercises.

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If you are new father or new mother or soon become father or mother, you need to know more about your baby sleep patterns. Sleep pattrens play important part in our baby health care. An average newborn sleeps much of the day and night, waking only for feeds. A newborn baby cannot distinguish night and day and may sleep as long as 16 hours a day, in 2-4 hour stretches, between meals.

Baby Sleep patterns

Each baby is a unique individual with his own distinct sleep requirements.

*Newborns generally sleep for 16 -20 hours a day with breaks for meals.

*Their longest sleep period is usually 4-5 hours because this is how long their stomachs can go between meals.

*There is no fixed schedule for newborns because their internal clocks are not well developed yet. This usually lasts till about three months when the baby sleep pattern begins to shift towards the night. About 90% of babies this age sleep through the night, meaning 6-8 hours at a stretch.

*Sometimes babies may cry or make soft noises when they are in light sleep. They may also wake up momentarily in the night but go back to sleep again on their own. You need not attend to these minor interruptions; let your baby learn to get himself to sleep.

*If your baby continues to cry for several minutes then it’s time to respond to his cries. He may be hungry, wet, cold, in pain or he may be sick. Attend to his needs as quickly and as quietly as possible without overstimulating him and put him back to sleep

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Ask any nutritionist on what you need to do in order to ensure that you eat healthy for your personal health care, and you will probably get the same answer; eat a balanced diet made of a variety of foods and in moderation. Does that sound familiar? Well, that is just a general summation of the healthy eating tips that you need to observe.

The human body needs at least 40 different nutrients for maximum health. The sad news is that no single food item has them all. The good news on the other hand lies in the fact that the nutrients can be obtained from different foods. As such, healthy eating tips will often advise people to eat foods from all food groups. This includes proteins, carbohydrates and vitamins.

Among the healthy eating tips recommended by nutritionists include eating fruits, vegetables and whole grains. A healthy adult should eat an average of three fruit servings and four vegetable servings a day. Whole grains are recommended due to their roughage content and their reliability in providing the body with nutrients contained in the husks.
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