health

Front View of Heart and Lungs Q: Got a friend (a smoker) who ended a camping trip in the mountains (probably around 6K feet) by getting a collapsed lung. His wife got him to the hospital and all is well--he is even back to enjoying his electronic cigarettes (says it is not really smoking!) Anyway, I was thinking of using this as an opportunity to (finally) get him to try breathing meditation, Yoga/Tai Chi�but the lung thing has me worried. This was spontaneous with no obvious indications of why it happened or if it will happen again. He does nothing half-way, this guy, so if I get him doing deep-breathing exercises he will be going for the max. Is there a danger of the collapse happening again or can we use deep breathing to strengthen his lungs? A: Thanks for writing to us about your friend�s condition. As always, the information I will share is of a general nature and in no way a prescription for how you will want to work with your friend. But I hope the following discussion will giv...

by Nina Just a brief announcement today that one of our guest bloggers, Carol Krucoff (see Yoga May Be the Best Activity for the Elderly ), has released a new book! It is called Yoga Sparks: 108 Easy Practices for Stress Relief in a Minute or Less . Baxter reviews the book in the September 2103 of Yoga Journal Magazine, which is currently available. Subscribe to Yoga for Healthy Aging by  Email  � Follow  Yoga for Healthy Aging  on Facebook � Join this site with  Google Friend Connect

by Nina Horses Grazing by Brad Gibson It's a running joke in our family that when Brad gets impatient with me�because I often do various household tasks a bit slower than he does�he says to me, "Take your time!" He swears that Bill Murray said this repeatedly in the movie Caddy Shack, but when we watched it again recently, no one actually ever uttered that line. Regardless, I always reply, "You take your time." But many worthwhile things really do take time. For example, if you want to cook a really good meal instead of eating fast food, you need to shop for fresh ingredients and prepare everything from scratch. And if you want to turn a new acquaintance into a close friend, you need to spend a lot of time together, getting to know and trust each other. The same is true for seeing results from yoga practice. Obviously, one Downward-Facing Dog pose doesn't instantly make your arms stronger, though with regular practice, it definitely will increase your str...

by Baxter A Woman's Legs by Vincent van Gogh Recently while reading through one of my Family Medicine journals, I came across an article that caught my interest due to the frequent complaints of some of my students.  It was on nocturnal leg cramps.  Yes, quite often my students will ask me what they can do to address these ill-timed leg cramps (as if there is any good time for a leg cramp!).  I�ll get into what we know about the nocturnal leg cramps (NLCs) in a minute, but what caught my eye in reading was the recommendation for treatment: �Limited evidence supports treating NLCs with exercise and stretching�� Now, they don�t specify yoga, but as we all know by now, modern yoga would fit the bill. This treatment was recommended before any mention of medications, which is quite unusual for these journal articles.  It is usually the other way around�meds first, non-drug options mentioned last. This gave me a great sense of hope that modern medicine is beginni...

I will keep this article short and informative! First, let me thank you for your visit here, I will try to tell you some words that could help you lose weight fast . To begin with, I would like to tell you that to lose weight safely, you should not expect to lose more than 3 pounds per week. You can do this from home by following a diet and by exercises. Once again, I am talking about losing weight SAFELY! Let me give you an example. If you burn 500 calories per day for a week, then after this week, you would burn 1-2 pounds. If you want a quicker fat loss, then you should eat less and exercise more. But more than 4-5 pounds per week could be dangerous! Now let me give you some examples of what you should focus: * Drink plenty of water. * Eat more times per day, but less! * Eat more vegetables when you feel hungry. * Try NOT to eat when you feel bored or in front of the TV. * Also try to eat more fruits, egg whites, fish, dairy foods, soy products, etc. I can tell you more weight ...

Take Back Your Life by Melina Meza Yoga for Healthy Aging will be on vacation for the next week. We'll return to our usual five posts per week starting on Monday, August 26. Have a good week off, everyone!

Take Back Your Life by Melina Meza Q: I am curious about how yoga might be used to benefit someone with a diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis (MS).   I have heard about it, but am not sure how to proceed. A: Thanks for checking in about this. I am surprised we have not addressed this to date, so I am happy we will go over it today! After I did my teacher training in 2001, one of the first workshops I ever attended was down in the South Bay, where a well known teacher from Catalina Island, CA named Eric Small was teaching a weekend workshop for the National MS Society on �Yoga for People with Multiple Sclerosis.� In my previous incarnation as a full-time family MD, I had cared for a few patients who had the diagnosis of MS. But honestly, it was their neurologist that really addressed their MS and its symptoms more than I did. If only I had known then what I learned from Eric back in 2001, I would have had some very powerful tools to address this serious condition. And, boy, was I...

by Bridget Wet Handlebars by Melina Meza While not yet a senior myself, I do teach seniors at the North Berkeley Senior Center. I came to yoga with serious, debilitating back pain�caused by high-speed, over-the-handlebars bike accidents in my teens, and untreated whiplash from several car accidents later on. The gentle Iyengar-style yoga taught at The Yoga Room in Berkeley set me on a path of healing. So, to me, yoga has been a therapeutic, kind and compassionate endeavor�one that has strengthened my back and quieted my mind to an extraordinary degree. Because of this, teaching seniors and working with any physical limitations they may have has been a pretty natural process. My students at the senior center range in age from late-50s to late-80s. Within the group there's also quite a range of abilities, but there is such a sweet cohesiveness, and a sense of community and support for each other. I try to keep class moving along for the more active students, but everyone is pa...

by Ram Succulent Plant with Blossom by Melina Meza Both the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali provide several references to how a sound mental health helps to achieve a stable physical body. According to these texts, the goal of any human activity is to achieve a state of perfect understanding, clarity, and renewed strength that can be achieved only from a strong mind-body connection.The mind-body connection uses our thought process to minimize the negative effects and positively influence our body�s physical responses. Thus, positive qualities (including happiness, appreciation, selfless service, and so on...) help to relax the mind, which in turn strengthens the physical body. The mind-body connection is described as follows in both the above mentioned texts: �vita raga vishayam va chittam � Verse 1.37 Yoga Sutras (see here ) indriyanam hi caratam, yan mano 'nuvidhiyate tad asya harati prajnam, vayur navam ivambhasi Chapter-2 Verse 67, Bhagavad Gita  (see here ) Con...

by Baxter Fallen Tree by Brad Gibson We have mentioned  cortisol,  one of the body�s important hormones, a few times in the recent past, but always with the slant of it somehow being a problem child, a bad actor, a rotten apple, as it were. But cortisol, when it is working in harmony with a well-balanced body and mind, is part of a elegant system that tries to help us respond in the best way possible to short term stressful situations that are bound to arise in our daily lives. So on a daily basis, during the early morning hours - around 4-5 am, the body releases a bit of cortisol to get your inner furnace ready for the first foot hitting the floor in the morning. It releases a bit of sugar into the blood stream, sends a bit more blood to the brain and heart, and really gets us ready for action, however mellow or intense our morning will be. Then, if the day is relatively uneventful, the level of cortisol gradually diminishes to its lowest levels around 10pm. When released i...

by Nina Ice Floes on Siene by Claude Monet When I was doing research for my post on menopause and headaches (see Yoga for Menopause: Headaches ), I was very surprised to learn that the most common complaint that Japanese women have during menopause is not headaches (which is what I previously thought) or hot flashes (the most common complaint in the US) but frozen shoulder. As many of you probably know by now, I experienced two bouts of frozen shoulder during perimenopause/menopause. Although I knew this co ndition was common among women my age, no one I consulted about the condition really tied it directly to menopause, although there was some speculation that it might be related to hormonal changes. That's because they all said  no one really understands what causes this temporary (though very painful) problem. So it was very interesting for me to learn that in Japan it is considered a problem related to menopause. And because we've been focusing recently on menopause and I...

This week, we have a follow-up question to our Friday Q&A on chair yoga (see Friday Q&A: Chair Yoga ) from one of our readers who actually teaches a chair yoga class Q: I teach a chair yoga class which cannot go to the floor for healthy aging. How can I do a safe inversion or back stretch that does not stress the osteopenic back? A: If you teach chair yoga, many students are older or infirm and not able to transfer from standing or sitting in a chair to the floor, where you might have them do any number of reclining poses that could stretch the back or approach an inversion, like Legs Up the Wall pose (Viparita Karani).  If by �back stretch� you mean a forward bending action of the spine, like in Standing Forward Bend (Uttanasana), in light of possible osteopenic or osteoporotic spine, you need to be careful with most forward folding positions (see What is Ostepenia and How Can Yoga Help? ).  It is not hard to do a seated version, however, if that is what you are looki...

by Nina Needle and Ice by Melina Meza When a man has mastered himself, he is perfectly at ease in cold, in heat, in pleasure or pain, in honor or disgrace � Bhagavad Gita , trans. by Stephen Mitchell We get many comments on our blog, but every once in a while there is one that makes me feel sad, like this one, which one of our readers left on a post about menopause: This will certainly be relevant for me (65). Besides ongoing extreme irritability, yoga is not the joy it has always been for me because of joint stiffness and pain. What little stability I felt in life came from yoga, and feel that slipping away when I need it most. My first reaction to this was to write to Shari and suggest that she write about menopause and joint pain because I knew that she, too, was currently suffering from joint problems (see Yoga for Menopause: Joint Problems ). But even after ensuring that this topic was going to be addressed, I was concerned about the underlying issue: yoga is not the joy it has al...