Home Cures and Treatmentsfor common ailments

As a whole, the modern people would not want to go back to those times, but people were healthier and more focused on what it took to take care of their families.

The majority of people live on their own farms and raise their own food without pesticides, fungicides or growth stimulating hormones for their livestock.

They eat lots of fruits and vegetable and work from sunup to sundown. They are exercising their bodies all day and they have a purpose and meaning in their lives. They live in the midst of an extended family and do things in balance and without extremes. They are patient, they live for peace, harmony and character development. This is not to say that ALL people lived that way, but the majority did.

By the time the children were 6th graders they were the equivalent to today’s eleventh graders. By necessity, people were more self-sufficient and interdependent. They share tasks. One person mends and quilts. Another makes the candles. They preserve perishable in honey because, while they don’t know just why, they do know that honey doesn’t go bad. Fruit is dried. Apples are strung on fishing line to dry in the attic and there will be apples to last all year. Grains, seeds and nuts are easily stored in giant barrels in storage areas together with dried fruit. The Barns Looked Like Health Food Stores. A root cellar five feet underground help squash, potatoes, yams, rutabaga, kohlrabi, parsnips, carrots and other vegetables. A cheese house holds many different cheeses, each aged in a wax casing and preserved on the outside by honey. Generally they do not kill their cows because they need them for plowing. Horses are used for hauling. They eat fish when they can be found, and if they’re not eaten immediately, the entrails are removed, and they are salted and dried. Many vegetables are dried. They had to have everything they needed for each winter ahead.

There was little obesity. They used home remedies and as long as they had good well water, they had the potential to live long and healthy lives.

TODAY’S LIFE IS NOT SO SIMPLE. The stress of taking care of a family, completing an education, living in an environment with dirty air and eating foods that only have a minimal amount of nutrients, has taken a toll on everyone’s health. The problem is growing by leaps and bounds.

Here are some tips if you are really interested in regaining good health so you can live to a ripe old age. Detox your body, find a product, get a plan and DO IT.

Contact your Naturopathic Physician and determine what supplements you need to assist in rebuilding your immune system and stamina and then add the supplements into your daily routine.

Adopt a reasonable diet, moderation being the key, eliminate fast food and stick to it.
(DO NOT switch back and forth between diets…it won’t work)
Exercise DAILY Even if it is only a walk, exercise and get your blood flowing.
Find a way to eliminate stress in your life..THIS IS MOST IMPORTANT.
Find an outlet for the stress. RELAX…RELAX….RELAX and choose to be HAPPY.

Whether you are walking, standing or lying in bed at night, your muscles are constantly contracting and relaxing. As a result, they need a lot of nourishment.

While you can’t entirely prevent muscle cramps entirely, choosing the right foods will make them less likely to return.

There are certain minerals, that help the message get from the brain to the muscle and tell it to contract and how much and then to relax. The minerals are calcium, potassium, sodium and magnesium and they are known as electrolytes. These minerals play a role in helping the message get through. If you don’t get enough of these minerals, or have sweated them out, a muscle may not get the signal to relax and this can cause a painful cramp. Here are links to some supplements, but listed below are the foods that contain these supplements. If you are on the go….supplements work.

Magnesium is one of the most important because it helps the other electrolytes do their jobs.

1. You can get magnesium from tofu, spinach and Spanish mackerel.
2. Include dairy in your diet for calcium, a cup of fat-free milk for example has 300 mg of
calcium.
3. Bananas and potatoes have potassium.
4. Say no to sodium because there is enough of that is the other food you eat.
5. Drink at least 16 oz of water or juice each time you work out to get the necessary minerals.
6. Dodge cramps with carbs. Muscles need more than electrolytes and water to function well. They also need glycogen, a sugar that comes from carbohydrates.

The Greek word anemia means “no blood.” But that is an exaggeration. The person has plenty of blood, there is just not the usual number of red blood cells or these cells are NOT carrying their usual payload of energy-giving oxygen.

The most common form of anemia is iron-deficiency anemia unless the person is losing blood - as a result of menstruation or perforated ulcers for example. The symptoms are that your brain feels fuzzy or you are always cold.

Luckily, it’s generally an easy condition to correct, and the cure is our favorite thing–food.

The Daily Value (DV) for iron is 18 milligrams. Pregnant women need a much higher amount - 30 milligrams a day.

It’s not too hard to get enough iron if you eat meat, fish, and poultry. 3 ounces of steamed blue mussels have 6 mg. of iron. A 3 oz. serving of lean, broiled top round steak has 3 mg, and the same amount of roasted turkey has 1 mg.

If you eat little or no meat you have to pay more attention to your diet. A cup of canned pumpkin has 3.4 mg. of iron. Kidney beans and lentils have about 3 mg in a half cup serving. As you can see, the total amount of iron isn’t the problem with these foods.

It has everything to do with how well our bodies absorb the nutrients we eat. The iron found in meat is readily absorbed. The iron found in plant foods is less so.

Combining certain foods can increase the absorption rate. For example, pairing a food that contains vitamin C with a food that contains iron guarantees that you will get substantially more of iron into your bloodstream. Iron is best absorbed in an acidic environment. There are many ways to include vitamin C with your meals to increase your absorption of iron. For instance, a large tomato has 23 milligrams of vitamin C or 38 percent of the DV or drink citrus drinks.

One nutrient you don’t want to combine with iron is calcium. Especially when you are taking iron supplements. They compete for the same receptor sites in the cells. For example, put milk on our cereal in the morning, but wait until later to take your iron supplement.

The same goes for coffee and tea. Both beverages contain tannins, chemicals that have a blocking effect on iron supplements, so don’t take you iron supplements with coffee in the morning.

One way to get more iron in your diet is to simply cook your meals in cast iron pots. As a rule, this increases iron by 2 to 5 percent.

The stress of modern life has given rise to worldwide epidemic of depression.  Mood disorders are more prevalent now than ever before, and they are occurring at younger ages.  Much of the blame for this may well rest with technology and the sweeping lifestyle changes it has encouraged. Today people seem to live at a breakneck pace, 24 hours a day, all year long. Fast paced living reduces the levels of serotonin which is a key buffer against depression.

Exposure to light raises serotonin levels, so get outside.  If you live in “gray” climate, consider buying a light box (10,000 lux)  It can be used while reading or watching TV.  Caution: Light boxes should not be used by people with retinal disease.

Get more sleep. Sleep deprivation is strongly linked to depression.  Keep your bedroom cool and dark…avoid stimulating TV or work for about an hour before bedtime.  Cut down on caffeine and alcohol. Exercise late in the day, but at least 5 hours before bedtime and rise at the same time each day.  If you can’t get the rest you need, nap.

Exercise is an excellent serotonin booster–it is linked to better moods and also better overall health.  In spite of all the reports, Americans get less exercise today than even 10 years ago.  Find an exercise you enjoy and do it regularly. Aerobic exercise several times a week is ideal, but any kind of exercise is better than none.

Rethink your diet.  Emphasize fruits and vegetables while limiting your consumption of grains and sweets.  When you do eat grain, eat whole grains. They have less effect on blood sugar than white breads or processed cereals.  Keep meals under 500 calories and don’t let more than five hours pass between meals (except when you are asleep)  Frequent small meals keep insulin levels lower than a few large meals. Do not eat red meat or egg yolks more than once a week.

What about antidepressants? Anyone who is so depressed that he/she has trouble functioning at work or at home should seek a medical diagnosis.  The tips listed above are a good start to managing depression a natural way, although prescription drugs might help a severe case until you can control it naturally.

Oxygen therapy is quickly becoming one of the most controversial, yet effective forms of alternative medicine to enter the medical spotlight. It has many potential uses, ranging from a means of headache relief to a possible cure for AIDS and cancer, and the treatments seem simple and inexpensive. Oxygen therapy, however, remains a sketchy area in the medical community. Despite all the claims that have been made, little evidence has been brought into the public’s eye to confirm or deny the validity of these reports. It will be shown, however, that like many other scientific claims, it is easy to separate the facts of oxygen therapy from the fiction.

Many of the advocates of oxygen therapy feel that its potential uses are limitless. This is due to the fact that: For many years the health sciences have been seeking to identify the primary physical cause of all diseases, and the cure-all that this basic principal would yield. Now both have been found, but their utter simplicity makes them difficult to accept at first since it seems like if it’s that easy, we should have been using them all along.

This fundamental cause of all disease, according to some specialists, is a lack of oxygen. This is made evident by the fact that the body is “composed mostly of water, which is eight-ninths oxygen,” and “only oxygen is in such a constant demand that it’s absence brings death in minutes”.

This topic is covered in a publication called “The One Minute Cure” so you can decided for yourself  if this is an alternative healing treatment you may want to try.

Elizabeth Scott wrote:  Research has shown health benefits of laughter ranging from strengthening the immune system to reducing food cravings to increasing one’s threshold for pain. There’s even an emerging therapeutic field known as humor therapy to help people heal more quickly, among other things. Humor also has several important stress relieving benefits.

Stress Management Benefits of Laughter:

• Hormones: Laughter reduces the level of stress hormones like cortisol, epinephrine, (adrenalin), dopamine and growth hormone. It also increases the level of health-enhancing hormones like endorphins, and neurotransmitters. Laughter increases the number of antibody-producing cells and enhances the effectiveness of T cells. All this means a stronger immune system, as well as fewer physical effects of stress.
• Physical Release: Have you ever felt like you “have to laugh or I’ll cry”? Have you experienced the cleansed feeling after a good laugh? Laughter provides a physical and emotional release.
• Internal Workout: A good belly laugh exercises the diaphragm, contracts the abs and even works out the shoulders, leaving muscles more relaxed afterward. It even provides a good workout for the heart.
• Distraction: Laughter brings the focus away from anger, guilt, stress and negative emotions in a more beneficial way than other mere distractions.

• Find Humor In Your Life: Instead of complaining about life’s frustrations, try to laugh about them. If something is so frustrating or depressing it’s ridiculous, realize that you could ‘look back on it and laugh.’ Think of how it will sound as a story you could tell to your friends, and then see if you can laugh about it now. With this attitude, you may also find yourself being more lighthearted and silly, giving yourself and those around you more to laugh about. Approach life in a more mirthful way and you’ll find you’re less stressed about negative events, and you’ll achieve the health benefits of laughter. (See this article on maintaining a sense of humor.
• ‘Fake It Until You Make It’: Just as studies show the positive effects of smiling occur whether the smile is fake or real, faked laughter also provides the benefits mentioned above. So smile more, and fake laughter; you’ll still achieve positive effects, and the fake merriment may lead to real smiles and laughter.

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There are migraines which almost cripple some people and regular tension headaches, eye strain and many more kinds of headaches from which we all suffer upon occasion.  Migraines can be caused from food allergies to such things as sugar and caffeine or processed foods that contain artificial dyes and preservatives–nitrites and sulfates.   All these can cause a migraine attack, but the key to finding those triggers is sometimes very difficult and take a very long time.

The Migraine Headache Program is an E-book with solutions to gaining relief.