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This site is meant to reach out to all those suffering from common illnesses and help alleviate their pain. Published here for general information are excerpts from my research.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away…

Including apple and other fruits in our regular diet helps to make us healthy and resistant to diseases.

Management of Common Ailments

by Claire Buere

The Treatment of Urinary Tract Infections

Management of Acute Arthritis and Joint Diseases

Diabetes mellitus – the scientific name for diabetes – is a chronic (frequent recurrence) disorder in which your cells cannot properly use the sugar, or glucose, your body obtains from the food you eat. To help your cells use glucose, they need a hormone called insulin, which allows your cells to accept and take in glucose (a simple sugar in the bloodstream that comes from the carbohydrates you eat) to use as energy.

 To understand why insulin is important in diabetes, you need to understand how your metabolism works. Briefly, your body derives energy from three sources in the food you eat: glucose from carbohydrates, fatty acids from fats, and amino acids from protein. Glucose, a simple sugar used by the cells, is the body’s first choice for energy, protein is second, and fats are the least efficient and used as a last resort. Glucose is quickly absorbed into the bloodstream and goes to the cells with insulin so it can enter and supply the body with energy. Without insulin glucose has difficulty entering your body’s cells. Extra glucose is stored in the liver and muscles (called glycogen) until they are filled to capacity.

 When the body has little or no insulin available to help the cells get glucose for energy, it turns to another, though much less efficient, the energy source-fat cells. When the body burns fats for fuel, it creates byproducts called ketones, which raise the acid level in the blood. The result is a toxic condition called ketoacidosis, which, if left untreated, can cause death.

The following guidelines were compiled from various sources involved in the management of diabetes and represent the wisdom from several successful food plans for diabetes.

1. Eat five to six small meals a day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with a snack between each meal and then a night time snack if desired or needed. This helps maintain a steady blood sugar level.
2. Reduce salt intake: it reduces blood glucose levels. Avoid foods that have a high salt content, such as bagoong, salted dried fish, snacked foods and processed foods.
3. Consumption of meat can cause sugar cravings in your body’s attempt to establish a protein/carbohydrate balance.

Excessive meat consumption also produces prostaglandins that cause pain, inflammation, and depression. It is best to avoid meat and meat products.

4. Avoid foods containing sugar, honey, glucose syrup, candy, cakes, cookies, puddings, sweetened cereals like suman, and other sweet foods.
5. Foods high in fiber, especially soluble fiber, should be a central part of your diet. Soluble fiber, found in vegetables,oats, and fruit, increases the time it takes for the intestines to absorb glucose and help maintain optimalblood glucose levels.
6. Avoid refined and processed foods. Whole, natural foods are used by the body more slowly and evenly, which allows better maintenance of blood glucose levels.
7. High-protein diets are dangerous, especially for people with diabetes. Excessive protein, especially animal protein, causes the kidneys to work overtime and excrete large amounts of calcium from the body. The result can be kidney disease and osteoporosis.
8. Avoid alcohol, as it can impair how your body handles sugar.
9. Avoid soft water. Diabetes is higher in soft water areas. Drink natural, noncarbonated mineral or spring water that contains naturally occuring trace minerals. Clinical studies have shown that a good supply of trace minerals is important for effective glucose tolerance and utilization.
10. You deserve good, healthy food. Create time in your schedule to shop fresh fruits and vegetables. Take a diabetic cooking class or cook with a friend. Make it fun and hobby.

Part Used: Fruit

Uses: This tropical fruit has been used as a folk medicine for diabetes in many cultures. The fresh juice or extract of the ripe bitter melon lowers blood glucose levels. Better melon contains charantin, a hypoglycemic agent that is more potent than the oral hypoglycemic drug tolbuttaamide, as well as an insulinlike protein that reduces blood glucose levels when injected into people with Type I diabetes.

Dose: Two ounces of the juice per day.

Part Used: Cloves

Uses: Garlic and its relative, the onion (Allium cepa) help reduce blood glucose levels. These plants contain sulfur compounds that have chemical structures similar to those of insulin, and these compounds—allicin and allyl propyl disulphide—are believed to lower glucose levels.

Garlic also lowers cholesterol, triglyceride, and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels while increasing high-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels. Garlic is available in powder, tablet, capsules, and liquid. Fresh uncooked garlic is the best way to reap its benefits.

Dose: One clove per day; or one-half teaspoon of the juice three times daily. Take commercial products according to package directions.

Part Used: Leaves

Uses: In addition to its reported anticancer effects, green tea also helps keep serum cholesterol levels low. It is available as a tea and in capsules.

Dose: For an infusion, add one pint of boiling water to 1 ounce of leaves. Steep for five to twenty minutes and drink hot or warm, one to two cups per day, upon wakening and at bedtime.

Note: Because green tea contains caffeine, you may want to steep the leaves for only two to three minutes to keep the caffeine levels low—it has twenty to thirty milligrams of caffeine per cup.

Kidney stones may be caused by kidney infection or urinary tract infection; or may result from stagnation of the urine in the kidney because of obstruction in passage of urine to the bladder. This obstruction may be caused by back pressure from an obstruction at the bladder outlet rather than by anything wrong in the bladder or the ureter. In people with gout there is a tendency to the formation of kidney stones.

It is also thought that improper balanced diets or deficiencies of certain vitamins favor the formation of kidney stones. The chemical salts in the urine, especially phosphates and urates, may be precipitated and form the beginning of stones. The chemical salts in the urine, especially phosphates and urates, may be precipatated and form the beginning of stones. Such precipitation would be promoted by concentration of the urine, resulting from drinking too little water.

If the stones are small, they may pass down the ureters and be voided from the bladder without the person’s knowledge. If a stone remains in the pelvis of a kidney, it will steadily increase in size. A large stone may lie unsuspected in a kidney for years. The symptoms of a kidney stone may be trifling. In fact, a kidney may be destroyed before the victim has enough pain to consult a physician. Usually, however, there is increased frequency of urination, especially with exertion or riding over rough roads. There may be vague pains and soreness through the upper back and side. If a ureter becomes blocked, there may be pain, chills, and fever. If a stone starts to pass down through a ureter, it can cause sudden and excruciating pain, which is often called renal colic. The urine in such cases will contain blood and possibly pus. The pain may be in the back, but more often originates in the abdomen and radiates downward to the bladder, groin, inner thigh, and urethra. The pain may last from minutes to several hours or days, and it is one of the worst pains humans ever have to bear. It may stop as suddenly as it began.

There is a frequent desire to void urine during attacks of renal colic. The distress may be so closely confined to the bladder and its functions that the victim thinks the bladder is primarily at fault.

The urinary tract can be infected from above (by bacteria entering the kidneys from the bloodstream and travelling downward, for unborn babies or infections within) or from below (by bacteria entering the urethra and travelling upward).

In older children and adults infection most often starts from below. In small children still using diapers, stool (which is largely bacteria) can sit for some time right at the meatus; the longer it sits there, the more likely it is that bacteria may enter the urethra. Baby boys are less likely to have this happens than baby girls, since girls’ urethrae are so much shorter and the head of the penis isn’t as likely to sit in stool. Though, bacteria can hang out in any moist, warm area, and that UTI’s seem to happen more often in uncircumcised boys than in circumcised boys since bacteria can accumulate beneath the foreskin. Older girls may become prone to UTI’s through wiping back-to-front when they are first toilet-trained, which pulls stool into the vaginal/meatal area. Sexually active teenage and adult women are more prone to UTI’s because of friction at the meatus, which tends to push bacteria into the urethra (urinating after intercourse helps avoid UTI’s); the same mechanism may cause UTI’s in teenage boys and adult men, although they are again less prone to UTI’s than women of the same age.

The first step in treating a UTI is to make sure there really is one. The only certain way to know if there is a UTI is to take a sample of urine and "culture" it: try to grow bacteria from the sample. If there are bacteria, we can then test several antibiotics to see which ones kill the bacteria most efficiently.

The problem here is in getting a good sample of urine for culture. Simply urinating into a sterile cup may not stop contamination by bacteria on the skin, especially with girls. If you can control your urine, it is possible to use a "clean-catch" sample. You get this by cleaning the meatus and the surrounding area thoroughly with antiseptics (such as iodine solution), then urinating a little into the toilet before filling the sample cup, and finishing your urination in the toilet. This flushes out bacteria that may be in the urethra or meatus.

Unfortunately, small children can’t cooperate well enough to do this sort of collection, even if they are toilet-trained. It is possible to collect urine with a bag that is taped over the meatus and genitals. However this almost guarantees contamination by skin bacteria. Once UTI is diagnosed, antibiotics is given. Typical antibiotics used for UTI include trimethoprim-sulfamethoxamole, nitrofurantoin, cipro, doxycycline and certain penicillins such as amoxicillin, cephalexin.

Kidney stones are most often caused by high levels of ionized calcium (as in calcium salts) in the urine. Cranberries can help prevent this condition because they are rich in quinic acid. The acid increases the acidity of the urine. As a result, the levels of ionized calcium in the urine are lowered.

Recent research has confirmed the effectiveness of cranberries in preventing UTIs and kidney infection. Two studies in the mid-1990s, one involving women of 65 years or older and the other involving younger women between the ages of 18-45, showed that cranberries are effective in preventing bladder infections. The researchers found that the antibacterial properties of cranberries are derived from their proanthocyanidins (or condensed tannins). Proanthocyanidins inhibit Escherichia coli bacteria from attaching to the inside walls of the bladder. These bacteria can then be easily flushed out with the urine before they can multiply inside the bladder and cause infections.

A person needs to drink 2 glasses daily to effectively prevent UTI or kidney infections. Cranberry capsules or powder concentrates are also available for people who prefer them to juice. It is important not to consume too much cranberry, however, as very high acidity in the urine actually increases the risk of getting kidney stones.

Drink herbal teas (marshmallow tea, taheebo tea, guava tea, green tea, Jason Winter’s tea, stevia tea, ginseng, coconut water, 3x a day and drink plenty of sterilized or distilled water). It will help cleanse the bladder and expel kidney stones.

Diet should be low in protein, obtaining protein from vegetables sources such as peas, beans, lentils, mushrooms and asparagus. High protein diets (meat) cause the body to loose calcium and when this is excreted, it passes through the kidneys and can cause painful kidney stones. Accumulation of protein in the bloodstream which is toxic results in uremia (toxic build-up of protein waste in the blood).

Drink 3 glasses of unsweetened cranberry juice daily. It inhibits growth of bacteria by acidyfying the urine. Diet should consist of 75% raw foods (fruits, fruit salad and vegetables, vegetable salad). Reduce intake of potassium and phosphates. Do not use any salt or potassium chloride (salt substitute). Avoid fish, meat, eggs, spinach, rhubarb, Swiss chard, beet tops, chocolate and cocoa because of their high oxalic acid content. Excess oxalic acid may lead to kidney stones.

Eat garlic, potatoes, asparagus, parsley, radish, unions, tomatoes, mango, grapes, turnips, watercress, celery, cucumbers, watermelon, cantaloupe, apple, papaya, pineapple, bananas, kiwi, lentils, oranges, citrus fruits, strawberries, all fresh fruits and vegetables. Clean properly and eat well balanced food and nutrition. Live a clean life… Pray, Praise and thank God always.

 Acute or septic arthritis may attack people who have tonsillitis, decayed teeth, pus pockets around tooth roots, infections in the body, infection in nasal sinuses or mastoid cells, or infection in the intestinal tract, kidney; but it is still not certain if these focuses of infection are actually the source of the germs present in the arthritic joints. Arthritis may be a complication of such acute infectious diseases as septicemia, rheumatic fever, erysipelas, scarlet fever, typhoid fever, gonorrhea, bacillary dysentery, undulant fever and several others. The disease is most common among young adults. Males are more often affected than females.

 Acute arthritis usually begins abruptly. The fever rises quickly, and at the same time, one or more joints become swollen and very painful, especially when moved. It is characterized by inflammation and pain in joints. But as a rule the infection finally localizes in one joint. There is loss of appetite, thirst, perspiration of peculiar sour odor, and constipation. The urine is strongly acidic and scanty. The swollen joint is tender and hot to the touch and may have a reddish appearance. If not promptly and properly treated, permanent stiffness and deformity may result.

1. During the first day at most, ice compresses or ice bags may be used thirty to forty-five minutes out of every hour.
2. Long continued applications of heat are helpful, whether in the form of fomentations, hot-water bottles or any other convenient method. A heating compress, one with very little water, worn every night, may give some relief.
3. Protect the body against chilling.
4. The services of a physician are essential in the treatment of acute arthritis, and they should be sought as early as possible. Antibiotics are likely to be needed. The joint may need to be splinted, put in traction or a cast, aspirated, or opened to drain the fluid possibly present.
5. Surgical or other treatments or prescribed exercises may be needed to restore the usefulness of the joint. Complete rest is needed.
6. Take plenty of herbal medicine teas as liquid diet as long as fever persists. Eat little or no meat, but plenty of fresh fruits, vegetables and vitamins, especially papaya, garlic, unions, and herbal tea like ginger tea, green tea, taheebo tea, guava tea, Jason Winter tea, santan flowers tea and others for body cleansing and healing. Pray always. Live a clean life…

 Other Related Disease

Rheumatism.

A general term for acute and chronic conditions characterized by inflammation, soreness and stiffness of muscles, pain in joints and associated structures. It includes arthritis (acute, infectious, rheumatoid, gouty), arthritis due to rheumatic fever or trauma, degenerative joint disease: neurogenic arthropathy; hydroarthrosis, myositis, bursitis, fibromyositis, and many other conditions.

Causes: It is associated with a number of conditions: infections such as gonococcal, tuberculous, pneumonococcal, rheumatic fever, ulcerative colitis, trauma, neurogenic disturbances, degenerative joint disease such as osteoarthritis, metabolic disturbances such as gout, neoplasms such as synovioma, hydrarthosis; para-or periarticular conditions such as fibromyositis, myositis or acromegaly, psoriasis, etc.

1. Attention should be given to the patient’s mental attitudes. Though still young, he may fear he has passed the prime of life. He thinks his symptoms mean he is approaching old age. He resents this and disregards the symptoms as much as he can, trying to keep up his usual pace of activities. He needs help in becoming willing to establish a new pattern of life consistent with his reduced capacities or activities. Following such pattern will enable him to prolong his period of productive usefulness, even to the normal life-span.

2. If the joints are painful, apply dry heat in any form for half an hour or more at least three times a day.

3. Avoid injury to the involved joints, and avoid bending them far enough to cause pain; but correct faulty posture as far as possible. Give massage and passive exercise with caution, taking care not to cause pain. In some cases splints or casts may be needed to prevent pain-producing motion.

4. Avoid fatigue and overexertion, especially in activities that involve the affected joints. If overweight, reduce the weight to normal.

5. If the joints of the lower spine and hips are involved, lying down for more hours of the day than usual may help bring relief by taking pressure off the affected joint surfaces.

6. Pay attention to all habits that influence the general health, including such correction of posture as will improve body mechanics, also such exercise as will increase muscle power.

7. Eat plenty of fresh fruits, vegetables especially garlic, onions, green leaves, seafoods, vitamins especially calcium, Vit. A,B,C,D,E and herbal teas especially ginger tea, taheebo tea, glucosamine formula and others for body cleansing and healing.

Ginger is mostly known to us in the West as a spice and a flavor. In China, however, it has been used for thousands of years for medicinal purposes, stomachache, rheumatism, and toothache. Modern research has found ginger to be a powerful anti-oxidant and to have strong anti-inflammatory effects. The pharmacologically active components of the ginger root are thought to be aromatic ketones known as gingerols. These have been shown in experimental studies to inhibit both the cyclooxygenase and lipoxygenase pathways and the production of prostanglandins, thromboxane, and leukotrienes.

It is established that dietary fatty acids determine the composition of lipids in the cell membranes, which influences the production of prostaglandins and leukotrienes that regulate inflammation, a fact that has given rise to interest in the potential of these dietary substances. Omega-3 oils, such as fish oil and flaxseed oil, have the ability to suppress the production of inflammatory mediators and thereby influence the course of chronic inflammatory diseases. When fish oil supplementation was given to rheumatoid arthritis patients, arachidonic acid levels were reduced by 33% , suggesting that increase of dietary omega-3 oils can be complementary in treating rheumatoid arthritis.

Vitamin C & E supplements have been studied and found to be important in the treatment of osteoarthritis and counteract free radical damage. Deficient vitamin C intake, which is common with elderly people, impairs the synthesis of collagen, the main protein of cartilage (Bates, C. J.). Studies on vitamin E have shown its ability to stimulate the production of cartilage components, such as glycosaminoglycans, as well as to inhibit the breakdown of cartilage. Healthy foods and a minimum of toxins is more important for our health than we want to believe. The body strives to heal itself, whether it is cut finger, a cold, or a damaged or inflamed joint.

Calcium is necessary in the maintenance of adult bone strength and in preventing osteoporosis. The bones of the human skeleton contain 99.5% of the total calcium in the body. The calcium within bones is available to the body should the body need it for other purposes. It is the activity of bone osteoclasts which absorb the calcium in the bone and release it into the blood stream. Many men and women do not get enough calcium. Much of this is blamed upon substitution of soft drinks or sodas. One of the easiest and most effective methods of increasing your calcium intake is to take an oral calcium supplement daily like GNC calcium natural, citracal, calcium milk and others. It is better to consult your doctor or nutritionist.

 Vitamin D

Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin which is essential for the absorption and utilization of calcium and phosphorous. It has a variety of functions, mainly, it is essential for growth and the promotion of strong bones and teeth. It also helps in regulating the heartbeat, preventing muscle weakness and the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis and hypocalcemia, enhancing immunity, thyroid function, normal blood clotting and protect against some types of cancer. Vitamin D can also be obtained from the sun's ultraviolet rays. Sun exposure for fifteen minutes three times a week is an effective way to ensure adequate amounts of vitamin D in the body.

Disclaimer:

When symptoms of your ailment persist despite self medication or alternative treatment, it is always best to consult your trusted family doctor. This site is not responsible for any damage that may result from misuse of any information provided herein.

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