BLOOD GLUCOSE TESTING

I have trouble obtaining enough blood to perform a blood sugar test. Is there anything that I can do to make this easier?

The good news is that many of the new meters need only tiny amounts of blood in order to perform a test. However, if you are having trouble obtaining enough blood then try warming your hands by washing them in warm water before you start, and drying them thoroughly before pricking your finger. When squeezing the blood out of your finger, try ‘milking’ the blood out gently, allowing the finger to recover between each squeeze. Do not squeeze so hard that you blanch the finger white.

I am about to buy a meter that allows blood to be taken from the arm. Are there any problems with arm testing?

At the time of writing there are three meters that allow blood for testing to be taken from the arm. They are the OneTouch Ultra from LifeScan and the FreeStyle Freedom and Freestyle Mini from Abbott. The OneTouch Ultra and FreeStyle use strips that allow a tiny blood sample to be taken, which makes arm testing feasible. Under certain conditions, samples taken from the arm may differ significantly from fingertip samples, such as when blood glucose is changing rapidly:

• following a meal;
• after an insulin dose;
• when taking physical exercise.

Arm samples should only be used for testing prior to, or more than two hours after meals, an insulin dose or physical exercise. Fingertip testing should be used whenever there is a concern about hypoglycaemia (such as before you drive a car), as arm testing may not detect hypoglycaemia. Obtaining sufficient blood from the arm is not always easy but for some it is a welcome alternative to fingertip pricking. Your health professional should be consulted before you begin arm testing.

facebook Canadian Health and Care Mall – new article and news. Subscribe.

I have heard that there is a way of obtaining blood from a finger using a laser. Is this true?

The Lasette is a single shot laser that makes a small hole in the finger to obtain a drop of blood, but it is not a blood glucose monitoring device. The use of laser light, as opposed to a steel lancet, reduces tissue damage, and many users of the device report feeling less pain than when using a traditional lancet. It weighs just less than 260 g (9 02). However, it is very expensive. It is slightly smaller than a videocassette.

I would like to measure my own blood glucose levels, but as I am now blind I do not know if this is possible. Can it be done?

After a long spell when no speaking meters were available there is now the new SensoCard Plus Meter which will speak instructions and also speak the result. The meter has recently come down in price. Strips are available on prescription and your pharmacist would need to contact the company, Cobolt Systems Ltd, directly. It also supplies control solution to check that the meter is working properly, and software to download results from a computer.

Source: Canadian Health and Care Mall at acanadianhealthcaremall.com

LIVING IN TUNE: UNDOING THROUGH THE POWER OF MUSIC

Just as dreams are legendary in their power to heal, so is music, which is the next and final part of the Undoing process. In the Old Testament and the I Ching, music was considered inspirational, sacred, and healing. The Greek philosopher Democritus wrote about the curative powers that emanate from the music of a simple flute. Indigenous cultures throughout the world have always used music to express the range of human emotion as well as mark rites and passages in a person’s life. Today, music still flourishes. The forms are endless: jazz, rock, rap, rhythm and blues, show tunes, folk, classical, liturgical, orchestral, operatic, and so on.

In The Mozart Effect, Don Campbell calls music the “common tongue’’ of the modern world and tells us it can replace costly medical treatments. This is not as far-fetched as it seems. Campbell’s own experience with healing a blood clot in his brain is part of some convincing proof he brings to bear. It’s nothing new to hear that “music hath charms that soothe….” It can also energize, excite, inflame, rejuvenate, and cleanse us; it inspires love, compassion, and faith. From Brahms’s “Lullaby’’ to the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” music moves us in ways that words can never express. Talking about our disappointment, loneliness, or grief helps us vent, but it rarely gets us beyond our trouble, while the experience of listening to, playing, or creating music is genuinely therapeutic.

MUSIC TO BREATHE BY

Long before music was used as entertainment, it was used as a source of healing. Like your dreams and imagery, music embodies feelings and beliefs; moods, hopes, fears, and possibilities. When music speaks to you through a specific lyric or sound, it becomes part of you and infuses you with its power to illuminate and heal.

Create Your Own Top Twenty

Using music as a healing technique goes beyond just turning on the radio or slipping in your favorite CD and getting lost inside the sound pouring out of the speakers. When you listen to music as a reflection of where you are and what you are feeling in your life, it becomes an active, creative process. When you resonate with a particular piece, the next possibility is to tape it and to make it a part of your healing practice. To create your own top twenty, you may:

• Use pieces that you already know and love, that may already be a part of your music collection.
• Use music you find by listening to the radio or any other available source.
• Compose your own music and/or lyrics (or you may also compose lyrics for existing music).
• Listen to the tape you have made and make it a part of your life. Sing, dance, walk, run, cry, and laugh with it. Let it draw out your current feelings and open you up to new ones.

Canadian Health and Care Mall News Medicine official blog: http://canadianhealthcaremallnews.blogspot.com

THE ESSENTIALS OF UNDOING

It’s difficult enough to change your backhand in tennis, to start a new job, or just to negotiate a parallel parking space. Here you are being asked to Undo the way you think. Such a turn of mind is not for the faint of heart. When Marilyn, a thirty-three-year-old mother of twin girls, reached this point in the program, she likened it to giving birth — specifically to that moment during labor when she decided it was time to go home. “This was more than I had bargained for,” she said. “It was too much pain, too scary. I wanted to stop. Then maybe I would come back and try again when I felt rested and more in the mood. Getting to this place in the work felt the same,” she said. “It was like giving birth all over again — not to a baby, but to a new way of living life. And I had no idea of how it would turn out or if I could really do it.”

The stress Marilyn felt and that you may be feeling now is not the stress that we associate with exhaustion, helplessness, hopelessness, depressed immunity, and disease. It is, in fact, something known as “eustress” or good stress — stress that’s beneficial, that strengthens your immune system and physiology. By choosing not to retreat and to go on to Now Act, you get the chance to put into action much of what you have already learned. We shape and heal ourselves — our minds, our souls, our spirit — by taking action in the everyday world. Mere contemplation won’t do it for us. Through suggestions, exercises, and examples, chapter 8 provides the tools and opportunity to make that leap and to create a transformation in your health and in all areas of your life.

The Essentials of Undoing

1. Play with opposites. Reverse what you ordinarily think and do. Even if it feels uncomfortable, think, say, and do the opposite. If you habitually defer, take over; if you usually fault yourself, give yourself credit; if you are quiet as a mouse, roar like a lion.
2. Turn toward your difficulty. Undo your impulse to label events, feelings, symptoms, and so forth as “bad.” See what comes up for you as a challenge or opportunity instead of as a problem, and embrace it.
3. Value the shocks. Stop complaining about them. They can actually make you stronger and help you to grow.
4. Heal the past through the processes of imagery, writing, and dream work. Releasing grief, sadness, resentment, and anger makes room for joy. It’s good mind medicine for the lungs.
5. Live in tune. Use the power of music to attune yourself to life, to generate joy, and to support your body’s natural healing power.

Facebook and Twitter Canadian Health and Care Mall.

The results from this study indicate that only about one in three people with asthma are receiving influenza vaccinations. This vaccination rate has changed little from 1999 through 2001. These results suggest that recommendations to vaccinate adults with asthma are not being met. In particular, younger people with asthma are not being vaccinated against influenza. Only approximately one in five people with asthma aged 18 to 49 years reported having received such a vaccination.

Respiratory infections, including influenza, can cause serious morbidity in people with asthma. Some evidence suggests that people with asthma may be more likely to experience influenza-associated morbidity than people who do not have asthma. For example, during periods when influenza virus was the predominant circulating upper respiratory virus, hospitalization rates for acute respiratory infections among children with asthma were much higher than those among children without a high-risk condition.

These considerations taken together with the fact that inactivated influenza vaccine has been shown to be both clinically effective and cost-effective—albeit not necessarily based on studies of participants with asthma—suggest that people with asthma could benefit considerably from receiving an influenza vaccine. Yet, a review of nine randomized trials noted that the benefits and risks of vaccination for patients with asthma were inconclu-sive.

All but three trials had sample sizes < 100 participants. In these trials, both early and late outcomes (mortality, hospital admission, pneumonia, asthma symptom scores, lung function measurements, medical visits, number of rescue courses of corticosteroids) were examined. The authors called for additional trials of sufficient size to study the question of the benefits and adverse effects of influenza vaccination in people with asthma. Questions about the short-term safety of the vaccine among people with asthma may have been answered by a large, randomized trial of children and adults with asthma that was published after the review.

In this trial, the administration of inactivated influenza vaccine did not affect the frequency of exacerbations of asthma during the 2 weeks following the vaccination. The cost-effectiveness of annually vaccinating all eligible people with asthma is unknown. The Healthy People 2010 objectives call for 90% of noninstitutionalized adults aged > 65 years and 60% of noninstitutionalized high-risk adults aged 18 to 64 years to receive an annual influenza vaccina-tion. People with asthma are included in the high-risk designation. The NHIS data show that 20.9 to 22.7% of asthmatic participants aged 18 to 49 years, 42.3 to 47.8% of asthmatic participants aged 50 to 64 years, and 64.8 to 72.8% of asthmatic participants aged > 65 years received a vaccination from 1999 to 2001.