Heartburn or GERD can Kill

Heartburn is a common annoyance. The busy lifestyle, quick meals, fatty or spicy foods all contribute to the occasional need of a chewable pain reliever. The acceptance of heartburn as an inconvenient, but natural, part of the daily grind can blind you to the warning that a severe heartburn symptom can bring.

Heartburn as a Disorder

Heartburn can be a symptom as well as a disorder. Simple heartburn or GERD can be controlled and dealt with. However, heartburn can signal the presence of a much more serious problem. If it’s heartburn, you will have a burning sensation in the chest usually after eating. There may be a spread of the burning to the throat, sometimes accompanied by a bad taste, difficulty in swallowing, belching, coughing, hoarseness and/or wheezing.

It can become worse by lying down or bending over or by eating. Relief can come from an antacid. While the more severe heartburn symptoms may be mistaken for a heart attack, simple heartburn is usually not made worse by exercise. If there is any concern that the pain may signal a heart attack, get help quickly.

Friday, July 24, 2009

The Keys To Stress Reduction

By Kimberlee Cusumano

Easy ways to find inner peace.One of man's current troubles is to come up of ways on how to lessen the stress in their lives without having to spend too much money or too much time in the process. In our busy lives, we often encounter a lot bumps that create greater tension and hinder us from doing our best. A way of finding the secrets to relaxation is trying the reiki technique.

What is Reiki? It is a way of explaining how the proper flow of an individual's energy levels affects one's body. Reiki is basically from Japanese origin as a technique for stress reduction and relaxation that can also promote healing. It treats the whole person including body, emotions, mind and spirit creating many beneficial effects that include relaxation and feelings of peace, security and wellbeing. The reiki technique is to bring wholeness in you and get rid of all stress whether they may be on the outside or in. The Reiki technique believes that if one's "life force energy" is low, then we are more likely to get sick or feel the stress and if it is high, we are more capable of being happy and healthy.

The purpose of this technique is to let your body unwind and release all tension. Let the aches and stress find release, it can be as simple as the practice of meditation where basic and proper breathing keeps the mind and body relaxed. There are various types of meditation, the most common being formal sitting is concentrated in keeping the body immobile and the attention controlled. Examples of these would be Zazen and Vipassana meditation; these elaborate on how a posture can affect our breathing and how our breathing can affect our body's way to relieve stress. Other meditation techniques involves how a person treats the situations that happens to him/her, there are expressive practices where we are let to have anything happen and be happy with it.

A popular form of getting rid of stress is also through massage. This can be expanded with healing starting from the physical state of a person and getting through all the way to the mind and the soul. The goal of a massage is to slowly eliminate tension in muscles after the body has felt better; the mind will also start feeling better. It has been said that pain is only in the mind and if ache is taken off from the body then the mind would also stop thinking of pain.

As said earlier, massage is about making the body loose and less tense by applying pressure. The hands, feet, fingers, forearms and elbows of the person can be used to apply pressure, but the person should preferably be a massage therapist. Since a massage therapist is already well oriented on what areas of the body need pressure, it will have a better effect and prevent the individual from feeling more tension caused by wrong methods of massage.

There are simple and easy ways to feel better. Whether we choose to start from our physical pain moving inward or create an inner balance in ourselves and move outward. Various methods will help us get through every back-breaking day with ease and comfort.

About the Author:

No comments: