Homeopathic Treatments for Prevention of Colds and Flu

Catching a cold? Homeopathic medicines can help prevent a cold as well as treat the symptoms. The remedies are available in most health food stores and online.

Homeopathy is a system of medicine pioneered by Samuel Hahnemann over a hundred years ago. The remedies work by treating along a specific Law of Cure, described as “like cures like.” Homeopathic pharmacies prepare the remedies according to a specific protocol that involve using the most minute doses needed for a cure.

Homeopathic Remedies to Prevent Colds and Flu

Both of these remedies are most effective when you are first coming down with a cold.

Oscillococcinum is made from the liver of a goose. Geese fly great distances each year. They are exposed to many viruses in their travels, and build up immunity in their livers to each. By taking this remedy, you gain that immunity. It is safe to combine with prescription medications, for children or the elderly, and causes no drowsiness or stimulant effect. There are numerous clinical trials showing good results using this product. It is useful for intestinal flu as well.

DIRECTIONS: Oscillococcinum can be taken every 12 hours to stave off a cold.

Influenzinum is made from the same flu vaccine substances that are prepared by the World Health Organization. It is updated each year and the substance is prepared in dilute quantities, and then homeopathically potentized. The remedy is used instead of a flu vaccine to stimulate the body’s defense system in order to resist the season’s flu strains. Its action boosts the immune system.

DIRECTIONS: Influenzinum is useful after first exposure, in the early stages of a cold, or as a preventative. 

Recommended dosage is once a day for a month.

Homeopathic Remedies for the Early Stages of a Cold.

Aconite is for that cold or fever that comes on within an hour of exposure to a cold wind. It works best in the early stages of an illness with a sudden onset of intense symptoms. The person needing Aconite feels thirst for cold water and restlessness and anxiety. The skin can be red and dry.

Ferrum Phosphoricum is a good remedy at the start of a cold when there are no clear symptoms or weakness with inflammation.

There can be a low-grade fever. The cough is short and tickling and the head is sore and worse movement or cold.

Gelsemium can treat early symptoms of a cold. Gelsemium symptoms include dry throat, dry cough, runny nose, and achiness. The patient may be irritable or have chills running up and down the back. Gelsemium is also a good remedy for bronchitis.

Vincetoxicum treats a rapid onset cold (within 1-6 hours). The symptoms include weakness, leaden tiredness, aching bones and shivering. Vincetoxicum is useful for viral infections as well. The cough is spasmodic and the sore throat feels worse when swallowing. The patient has a low-grade fever but feels very hot, or they can alternate with feeling hot then cold.

Note: If you have a cold for more than 5-7 days, seek medical attention. Or if you become extremely lethargic or weak, visit a doctor immediately or head to the emergency room.

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Pool chlorine tied to lung damage in elite swimmers

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Competitive swimmers who train at indoor chlorinated swimming pools may have lung changes similar to those seen in people with mild asthma, a new study has found.

Researchers from France and Canada compared lung tissue and breathing tests from twenty-three elite Canadian swimmers, whose average age was 21, to ten mild asthmatics and 10 healthy, non-allergic people of the same age. Tissue samples and tests were taken during the off-season when swimmers were not competing.

The team, led by Valérie Bougault at the Lille 2 University of Health and Law in France, found that tissue samples taken from swimmers' lungs had nearly six times as many immune cells associated with asthma and allergies as the lung tissue of healthy subjects -- a similar amount to what was found in the group with mild asthma.

Swimmers and asthmatics also showed evidence of scar tissue in the lungs, while healthy non-swimmers did not.

"This study is the first to show direct evidence of airway damage associated with swimming in chlorinated pools," Alfred Bernard, a toxicologist at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, Belgium, noted in an email to Reuters Health. Bernard was not involved in the study.

What these changes may mean remains unclear. "There's currently no evidence to suggest that these changes will lead to asthma down the line," Dr. Sally Wenzel, a pulmonologist at the University of Pittsburgh, told Reuters Health.

Lung tissue inflammation was not associated with actual asthma symptoms, such as coughing and wheezing, or with difficulty breathing during a medical test used to determine lung function.

However, previous research has linked exposure to swimming pool chemicals through water and air to respiratory allergies and asthma.

While acting as a disinfectant, chlorine reacts with a wide range of chemicals from human sweat, urine and hair, for example, to form chlorine byproducts -- some of which are hazardous to human health.

These byproducts are very volatile and can escape into the air above the water, according to Ernest Blatchley, an environmental engineer from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana who specializes in water chemistry.

Competitive swimmers are known to inhale large amounts of these chlorine byproducts while doing strenuous exercise in the pool. Exposure to the chlorine compounds in indoor pools may make swimmers more sensitive to allergens such as pet dander, pollen and dust, wrote Bernard.

Indeed, roughly 50 to 65 percent of competitive swimmers are sensitized to common allergens, compared to 29 to 36 percent of people in the general population, wrote Bougault in an email to Reuters Health.

In the current study, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 18 of the 23 swimmers had at least one allergy. While exposure to allergens can cause changes to the lung tissue, "we found changes in the lung tissue of non-allergic swimmers as well," wrote Bougault.

This suggests that exposure to the chlorine byproducts themselves may be causing tissue damage, according to Bougault, who serves on the advisory boards for several major pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline and MerckFrosst, makers of the asthma medications Advair and Singulair.

The researchers cannot say for sure whether repeated exposure to swimming pool chemicals caused damage to the lung tissue. A previous study in elite cross-country skiers showed that the stress placed on lungs during high-level endurance sport training itself might be enough to induce airway changes.

While the effects of exposure to chlorine byproducts on the lungs remains unclear, it's likely the benefits of exercise outweigh potential risks posed by swimming in chlorinated pools, in those with or without asthma, according to Wenzel.

However, there are certain precautions that all swimmers can take at the pool to limit exposure to harmful chemicals, according to Bernard.

He suggested avoiding pools with a strong chlorine smell in the air -- a sign the chemicals in the pool are poorly managed.

One of the best things people can do to reduce exposure to harmful chlorine byproducts is to practice better hygiene, said Blatchley, even in so-called saltwater pools (which are not actually chlorine-free).

"Always taking a shower before entering a pool and not using it as a urinal can cut down on toxic byproducts," he said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/zqlLDT Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, online.

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Stroke patients maintain benefits of robot therapy

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Stroke patients who have the most trouble walking may see lasting benefits from using machines that move their legs to simulate walking, say Italian researchers.

Their study, although small, is one of the first to observe a benefit lasting at least two years in a group of stroke patients who used the machines, which are sometimes employed in conjunction with traditional physical therapy.

The new findings should help doctors target which stroke patients will benefit the most from the machines according to lead author Dr. Giovanni Morone, of the Santa Lucia Foundation in Rome.

"Robotic and electromechanical devices might play an important role, not for all patients, but for a selected kind of patients," said Morone in an email.

The new findings, published in the journal Stroke, are based on the same group of 48 patients the researchers reported on in September, in the journal Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair, where they suggested stroke patients who were most severely affected by a stroke also gained the most from the machines after three months of therapy.

At the beginning of the study, each patient whose mobility was seriously compromised by a stroke started in the zero functional ambulation category (FAC). The FAC is a zero-to-five scale that ranks how much help a patient needs to walk. Patients with a zero score need the most help.

After the three months of therapy the patients who used the machine significantly improved and moved up the scale to four, which meant they were able to walk with some assistance.

Those who did not use the machine moved up the scale to two, which meant they still needed help with balance and coordination.

Two years later, the patients who used the machine continued to improve to a near perfect score. The patients who did not use the machine also improved, but only to a level that still needed supervision.

As for the group least affected by the stroke, they improved at about the same pace whether they used the machine or not.

Therapeutic walking machines, like the one used in the study, have been around for a few decades and were originally developed for patients with spinal cord injuries, according to Dr. Bruce Dobkin, director of the Neurologic Rehabilitation and Research Program at UCLA in California.

Typically, the machines support a patient's weight by placing them in a harness and a device similar to an elliptical trainer moves their legs.

According to Dobkin, who was not involved in the new study, the goal was to "instill the movement in the nerve," but after years of studies the patients using the machines did just as well as those who went through traditional physical therapy.

"It turned out they were equivalent and the strategy to ingrain more activity just wasn't working," said Dobkin.

Dobkin said there are only a few hundred of these machines in use around the world and that they're still seen as inefficient. These results are likely not going to change that.

The new findings are from a small group, Dobkin added, and it would be hard to apply the results to a larger population.

However, he said the machines may be more useful someday if other medical advances that stimulate nerves are developed.

"They may be part of a future solution," said Dobkin. "But they are only part of it."

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/xHuI7K Stroke, online.

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Frequent red meat eaters at higher risk of stroke

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A high-protein diet might benefit health in some ways, but depending on what kind of protein a person consumes, it could raise their stroke risk too, suggests a large new study that finds eating lots of red meat ups the likelihood of having a stroke while poultry lowers it.

"The main message from this paper is that the type of protein or the protein package is really important for the risk of stroke. We have to consider protein in the context of the foods," said Dr. Frank Hu, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the authors of the study.

He and his colleagues collected data from two massive health surveys that tracked tens of thousands of men and women from roughly middle age to their senior and elderly years.

Over 20-some years of the study, nearly 1,400 men and more than 2,600 women had a stroke.

Caused by a blood clot or a burst blood vessel that stops blood flow to the brain, stroke is the third most common cause of death in the United States. Twenty-six out of every 1,000 people in the U.S. have experienced a stroke, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and about 800,000 die of stroke each year.

To see what influence different types of dietary protein have on stroke risk, the researchers divided up the people in the study based on how much red meat, poultry, fish, dairy and other sources of protein they typically ate each day.

Men who ate more than two servings of red meat each day -- which was at the high end of the meat eaters -- had a 28 percent increased risk of stroke compared to men who averaged about a third of a serving of red meat each day, the low end of the red meat eaters.

The researchers considered a serving of red meat as four to six ounces of beef or a hamburger patty.

Women who ate nearly two servings of red meat a day had a 19 percent higher risk of stroke than women who ate less than half a serving each day.

A 19 percent increase in stroke risk means that instead of 26 out of every 1,000 people having a stroke, 31 out of every 1,000 people would have one.

The researchers also looked at the change in stroke risk that would come with substituting different forms of protein for one daily serving of red meat: swapping in one serving a day of poultry lowered stroke risk by 27 percent, a serving of nuts or fish was linked to a 17 percent drop in risk and a serving of dairy dropped the risk by 10 to 11 percent.

Dr. Adam Bernstein, the lead author of the study and a researcher at the Cleveland Clinic, said he was not surprised to see that red meat eaters suffer more strokes.

"We've also done work on red meat and diabetes and red meat and coronary heart disease. So it makes sense that these cardio-metabolic diseases are grouped together," Bernstein told Reuters Health.

An earlier study, led by Susanna Larsson at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, also found that eating red meat had a link to stroke risk (see Reuters Health story of December 31, 2010).

What was new in the current study, Larsson said, was that frequent poultry eaters showed a lowered risk of stroke.

People who ate the most chicken or turkey each day -- about a half serving for women and three-quarters of a serving for men -- had a 13 percent reduced risk of stroke compared to those who ate barely more than a serving a day.

One serving was considered four ounces.

"I do not think that poultry has been considered as a protein source that might lower the risk of stroke. This is new," Larsson told Reuters Health in an email.

Also surprising in the study was that fish seemed to offer no protection against stroke.

Larsson pointed out that earlier work has found fewer strokes among groups who eat fish often.

It's possible that the benefits of fish depend on how it's served, Bernstein said.

"There's a lot of variation in how people cook and prepare fish, and we couldn't get down to that level," he said.

The researchers didn't prove that beef is to blame for the increased number of strokes, but Bernstein said it could be that the fat and iron in red meat play a role.

Larsson said the findings support current recommendations to limit how much red meat people eat, and to opt for chicken and fish instead.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/w2FeDQ Stroke, online.

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