What happens to your Brain when you have Trouble Sleeping

Have you ever noticed how when you've had trouble sleeping, that you just seem to forget the most obvious things sometimes? You forget to turn the stove off until you come back late in the evening and the house seems surprisingly warm, you walk into the men’s bathroom at the office and wonder why on earth there are urinals on the wall and you can't imagine why you would have so much trouble keying your credit card number into the Amazon website. How does all of this happen when you can swear that you're wide awake? Apparently, being awake isn't really a black or white thing. It isn't like a switch which is either on or off. The brain can schedule unscheduled rest time for different parts of the brain off and on.  Parts of your brain that really need rest can just go out from time to time, while the rest of the brain works reasonably well to all appearances.

That's what they found, testing the brains of sleep deprived rats. Scientists feel these results may well apply to humans as well. There isn't a great deal of difference between rats and humans when it comes to how the brain functions when it has trouble sleeping. So how exactly do they test when a rat has a rolling blackout of the brain? They plugged in electrodes into parts of the sleep deprived brains of rats to find out what parts shut down from time to time and came back on again. They couldn't possibly do this kind of thing with people.

How do you keep a rat from sleeping then? You do it is by really making life a lot of fun for them. You think hard for all kinds tempting toys and foods that the rats would wish to stay up past their bed times for. After the rats were sleep deprived for a while playing with their toys, something funny showed up on the machines that were monitoring their brains. To all appearances, the rats would be playing just fine. But then, the monitoring machines would suddenly fall silent, turn by turn - and in a very regular way, too. It looked like someone was in charge of the brains of these rats and they were switching off parts so that they could get some kind of rest.

The sleep deprived rats would appear to do fine when they just had to play with toys. When they had to do something somewhat skilled to get at a sweet or something, they would repeatedly make mistakes. And these were things they were used to doing when they were well-rested.

That's what happens when we have trouble sleeping. If we are called upon to do something like driving or remembering to get everything on our way to the office, sometimes, our brains just shut down. And we make mistakes. A good reason to get enough shuteye if ever there was one.

Disease Prevention

A common saying goes "an old saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." This is nowhere more true than with communicable diseases. Using effective disease prevention strategies not only helps you, but helps those around you. By reducing your risks of catching a disease, you also reduce your risk of spreading it to others, Keeping your community as a whole healthier and happier.

Effective strategies for preventing diseases very greatly depending on the disease. A lot of the most common illnesses, of course, are airborne viruses. The most effective disease prevention is to minimize your exposure. Wash your hands regularly, stay away from sick people and, if you notice yourself coughing or sneezing, stay home from work or school for a few days to minimize the chances of spreading the disease to other people. Boosting your immune system is also a useful form of disease prevention. During the winter, I make sure to take a multivitamin every day in addition to extra vitamin C to keep me healthy. When I think I might be coming down with something, I take echinacea and goldenseal root to help ward off the virus. Most importantly, I eat healthy foods, exercise and get enough sleep every night. This keeps my immune system in good shape to help me fight off any illnesses that I am exposed to.

More exotic diseases often require unusual disease prevention methods. For example, if you live in an area with lime disease, wearing long sleeves and long pants may be the best way for you to prevent infection. Blood disease, you see, is spread by tick bites. If the ticks can't get through your clothes, they can not bite you and therefore, can not spread the disease. Staying away from thick grass where ticks hide will also reduce the risk of lime disease. Similarly, for preventing food-borne illnesses, the best thing you can do is to use proper food preparation techniques. Refrigerate all your food, keep raw meats out of contact with vegetables and surfaces you will use to serve food, and be sure to cook everything thoroughly.

If you are very serious about disease prevention, you might find it prudent to stockpile supplies in case of  an outbreak. If a pandemic such as a super flu sweeps through the country, having enough supplies to ensure you and your family clean food and drinking water for a week or two could literally mean the difference between life and death. After all, super flus spread aggressively. If you can stay inside and cut off all contact with other people, you greatly increase your chance of survival

Pain Meds - Should it Matter that you don't know what's in Them?

Pain meds - the kind you get over-the-counter - are popular purchases with every person on earth, to be sure. But no one really knows what is in them or what makes them tick, a new study finds. Now does one need to know what is in the drugs one takes? Can't one just pop something appropriate and go about one's own business? Not really; over-the-counter drugs, even if they don't need any professional prescribing, are still chemicals. They still do need a certain amount of caution and expertise for safe use. When people don't understand how exactly these things work or what is in them, the potential for overuse or misuse is dangerously high.

The study finds that only one out of three people know that Tylenol is acetaminophen, for instance. And only one out of two people know that Motrin and Advil are ibuprofen. So what happens when people use Tylenol incorrectly? Is it capable of doing anything to the body? It certainly is - reckless use of acetaminophen is actually an important cause of liver failure in young, healthy people. One of the biggest causes of acetaminophen poisoning in young people is that they take some Tylenol and then some other drug, one after the other, not realizing that they all contain acetaminophen. It can add up and it can destroy the liver. This was a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The study shows that a problem like this involving ill-advised use of pain meds exists mainly in people who are poorly educated - at a level below the sixth grade. These are the people who will easily resort to pain meds without properly understanding what they do and how they work. Adding to all the confusion, many of these drugs have confusing labeling. Even when people with education issues do what they can to read the label, these chemicals are often named using alternative names and terminology. Acetaminophen is sometimes termed APAP on drug packaging, for instance.

There's been other research done that's found that parents of young children often have a lot of trouble understanding how much of a liquid medication they need to give their children. Package labeling is confusing to most people - even when they happen to be well-educated. A lot of the problem comes from how manufacturers label their products carelessly and in a very confusing way. They hardly seem to try to label their products in a way that people might understand them.

Medical Advice you Never Knew you Couldn’t Trust

For most of us, the bulk of the health knowledge that we carry around in our heads comes from medical advice that we’ve received from the unstudied, unscientific, hit and miss information that people love to share among themselves. Of course, a little knowledge can be dangerous thing. It can help us sometimes and it can harm us at others. Here are a few of the most enduring myths of our medical world and why you should guard against believing in them.

Let's start with a piece of mythical medical advice that seems to be particularly popular these days - it's the one that warns parents against getting their children vaccinated because vaccines are supposed to cause the flu (and autism as well for good measure). Here is what makes the typical caution you hear against vaccinating quite untrue. All the viruses in a flu vaccine are dead viruses. There is no way anyone's ever discovered to bring anything back to life from the dead - even viruses. And so, a vaccine cannot cause the flu. So where did the myths about vaccines causing autism come from? Most people trace its path to an article in the medical journal The Lancet. The 1998 article, carelessly made a passing mention of how a half-dozen parents wondered at how their children had received their autism diagnoses right after they had received their shots for mumps, measles and other childhood diseases. They were just a handful of parents and they weren't even suggesting that the vaccines could actually be the cause. Some parents who read this, who were somehow naturally suspicious of modern medicine, seized on the testimonies of these parents and accepted them as real proof. And now, they won't be swayed even when there are research articles published in other respected medical journals on tests done with hundreds of thousands of children that have not found that vaccines and autism are at all connected. But the damage is done. It appears to be difficult to convince people of anything when they like to believe in sketchy hypothetical stuff more than they do real scientific findings.

Another diehard piece of mythical medical advice that lots of people just believe in without adequate proof is the one that says that you can fall ill if you are cold. The fact that a cold is called a cold does do something to help the myth stay around too. The thing is, our bodies don't automatically become more susceptible to diseases when we are chilly. Temperature has nothing to do with it, and doctors have known about this for at least 50 years now. Even if you are drenched in icy cold water and you don't towel off and fill yourself with hot soup for a couple of hours, your body is no more likely to catch a cold than at any other time. And if you do already have a cold, exposing yourself to the cold doesn't make you any sicker. The only reason you get sick in the winter is because you tend to stay indoors where the air can be far more germ-polluted that outside.

Shopping for an Affordable Health Insurance Plan

Admittedly, shopping for an affordable health insurance plan depends on how much an individual or a corporate entity is willing to spend. While some people prefer purchasing comprehensive plans that requires hundreds of dollars in monthly premiums, others find such a cost too high thus preferring plans that will cost them lower premiums. Usually, the cost of health insurance differs according to the degree of cover offered. As such, a person willing to insure him or herself extensively would have to purchase a comprehensive and costlier plan, than a person willing to purchase an outpatient insurance cover.  Luckily, the insurance industry is today awash with providers catering for the different income groups. This therefore means that all people, regardless of their earnings, can find affordable insurance plans that can adequately cater for their healthcare needs.

Shopping for an affordable health insurance plan requires the interested partner to research on the different health insurance plans offered first. Based on the research, one is then able to choose the most appropriate plan. Even as one does this, he or she should realize that the probability of being duped by marketers exists. Normally, health insurance marketers do not tell outright lies. However, they leave out vital details when informing potential clients about the insurance plans. It is therefore advisable that consumers request for information regarding the policy plan before purchasing the same. As lawyers would readily tell, ‘reading between the lines in the policy statement’ is always a prudent thing to do. Aptly put, consumers should look out for any hidden meaning that may be contained in the insurance policy text.

Does affordable health insurance plan have to be cheap? Well, not necessarily. In the free market economy that America is, the term ‘affordable’ has different meanings to different people. Often, the affordability of the insurance plan is determined by the amount of disposable income that consumers are willing to spend on insurance cover. In addition to the health insurance being affordable, the contemporary consumer is conscious of the need to purchase a plan that offers good value for money. Luckily, the competition among health insurance providers has granted the consumer market a wide array of services from where they can make a selection. The high competition also enhances the possibility of giving quality services to consumers as providers try to outdo each other.

For consumers shopping for affordable health insurance plan, the swarmed insurance industry poses several challenges to them. One such challenge is the fact that choosing the ideal provider can be confusing. Luckily, consumers can rely on insurance agents or brokers to provide them with the relevant information needed to make a choice. Based on that information, the consumer can then narrow down his or her choices, usually by zeroing in on the insurance providers that offer services that cater for the consumer’s significant health insurance needs.

Dental Health Insurance For Your Children

There are some adults that go for years without seeing a dentist because they do not have dental health insurance and because they can not afford the visits otherwise. They only show up when they have an emergency. This is not the best way to go about dental care, but for many, this is the only way they can go about things when money is tight. Adults are old enough to make these choices on their own, but children are not. Your children benefit from regular dental visits, so make sure you find a way to get them there as recommended.

If you have insurance through your work, your children should automatically be included on your dental health insurance plan. Don't just assume that this is true. Most children have to be added to both health and dental insurance after they are born. They are not added unless you do it. Make sure you contact the proper people in your company to get that taken care of within weeks of the birth of your baby. They will not use dental insurance right away, but you need to have them signed up. It may cost you more out of your paycheck, but it is well worth it.

Children need to start using your dental health insurance as soon as they start to get teeth. It is a good idea to get them in to have an early checkup. The dentist won't do more than try to get a look at their teeth, and then they will give you instructions for proper care of those teeth. If they go in for checkups as recommended by your dentist, it is not a totally new experience when they have to go for a problem or for a cleaning. They may not like it, but they will think of it as going to the doctor. It is just somewhere they have to go once in a while.

Some children don't do well with the dentist, so see if you can find a pediatric dentist in your area that takes your dental health insurance. These people can not always make a dental experience better for a frightened child, but they do have ways to help some children relax and do as they need to do for an exam or cleaning. If they need filings or other work done, these pediatric dentists can be your only hope when your child is screaming and struggling all the way down the steps and out the door to go to the dentist.

There are some programs out there if you do not have dental health insurance for your child or children. You can purchase a policy on your own if you can afford to pay for it, or you can see if there are any sponsored programs that will help you with some or even all of your dental expenses for your children. Life is hard on some families, but that does not mean that those children should have bad teeth. Dental problems can lead to other health problems, as well as severe self esteem problems, so look around to find the help you need for a better life and a better smile for all your kids.