You Have to Take Care of Yourself with Proper Exercise, Excellent Nutrition, and Good Medical Care
Welcome to The Health Promotion Pages!
Essentials to Know. First off, although I am still a physician who is constantly learning and developing, I do have a good degree of knowledge, especially in the areas of preventive medicine, nutrition, and longevity, having researched these issues for decades, and chronic pain management for over a decade. Within my subspecialty training, I've also had expert training in Traumatic and Hypoxic Brain Injury and Spinal Cord Injury, with publications in both these areas. These topics are not the focus of this website however. I'd like to also point out that many of my ideas about health care are nothing new, just not things that are usually or routinely practiced in modern society. Exercise can be fun, dieting can be delicious, quitting smoking can be very rewarding, and cutting back or avoiding alcohol can be eased by proper health care and good healthy daily routines. Very Importantly, for tens of millions of Americans, if you have chronic pain, even if you've seen a Pain Management specialist and he has told you you'll spend the rest of your life in pain, or on narcotics or multiple medications to control your pain, don't give up hope! Speaking from personal experience with a past history of chronic severe daily neck pain and multiple severe daily headaches (following a car accident which caused severe whiplash injuries with excruciating pain that persisted for years), you with the help of multiple changes in your life style, and habits, along with several types of Professional and other support, can get back to where you actually get up in the morning pain free, and go for many days at a time without having to resort to pain killing medications!
About one hundred and thirty years ago, an MD named Dr Andrew Taylor Still became very disgruntled with the then current practices of medicine, which mostly consisted of giving potent poisons to patients and hoping the disease causing germs would die before the patient did! He (re)discovered that most of our illnesses are self inflicted by four major bad habits, viz. smoking, drinking alcohol, not exercising, and eating too much. Now 130 years later we know how accurate his observations were, but we still persist in the same bad habits anyway, hoping that in our individual cases we will be spared the inevitable results of our own misconduct. Although we still need to reduce our violations of reasonable health habits, modern medicine has also found that there are some amazing things we can do to decrease our susceptibility to both normal and self-inflicted degradation of our bodies. Number one among these would be the use of anti-oxidants such as Vitamin E, Vitamin C, N-Acetyl Cysteine, Grape Seed Extract, etc. (but all things in moderation, unless mixed in the same proportions as found in nature.)These all appear to slow molecular destruction of our cells in various ways, as a first example it is known that antioxidants keep free radicals (activated by oxygen) from oxidizing the "bad" cholesterol (LDL) which makes it "sticky" and more harmful, (allowing it to stick to the walls of your arteries). Thus the antioxidants make LDL less likely to stick to the sides of your arteries and eventually cause heart attacks, strokes, or high blood pressure. However, recent evidence shows that people who take 400 IU's or more of Vitamin E are MORE likely to die of heart attacks. This cautionary tale means 2 things: a) Don't take more than 200 IU's of Vitamin E per day, and b) Try to get all your antioxidants and phytonutrients from your food! This site will have further development and give more info (including references to demonstrate the science behind my statements). Thanks for visiting.