(HealthDay News) — There may be nothing wrong with stuffing your turkey full to bursting, but you might not want to do the same thing with your suitcase as you pack for holiday trips.

More than 53,000 people were treated in 2008 in U.S. hospital emergency rooms, doctors’ offices, clinics and other medical facilities for luggage-related injuries, such as muscle strains, pulls and tears, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

“Lifting and carrying luggage that is too big or heavy for a person’s size and frame can put serious strains on your body,” Dr. Jeffrey A. Fried, an orthopedic surgeon and spokesman for the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, said in a news release from the academy. “To minimize any damage to your neck, shoulders and back, it is important to bend at your knees, lift luggage with your leg muscles while tightening your abdominal muscles and avoid twisting and rotating your spine.” Read more…

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Increasingly, younger men are experiencing aches and pains which were primarily associated with old age. Physicians at the University of Connecticut (UCONN) Health Center say “young” arthritis is a mounting health concern.

Hip conditions are often attributed to anatomical abnormalities that begin early in life or result from overuse through repetitive motion, as seen in baseball. Femoro-acetabular impingement (FAI), also known as hip impingement, occurs when there is a change in the bony form of the hip joint, resulting in decreased range of motion and pain. Simply put, it is too much friction in the hip joint. It is not uncommon for doctors to misdiagnose hip impingements and dysplasias as growing pains.

But due to recent improved understanding of hip abnormalities, along with advances in diagnostic imaging techniques and minimally invasive surgery, many patients are given new hope for relieving chronic, misdiagnosed hip pain.

“This is a relatively new diagnosis or a new evolution of arthritis that we didn’t know occurred, “ said Dr. Michael Meneghini, an orthopedic surgeon at UCONN Health Center. “And we’re now recognizing arthritis years before it happens in a pre-arthritic state if you will.“

Dr. Meneghini said he’s seeing men in their early twenties come in with symptoms. “The patients will present with pain some times flexing their hip—sometimes going up and down stairs—sometimes squatting down playing with their kids. Those kinds of activities they’ll notice they’ll get pain in their groin or pain in the outside of their hip.“

Unfortunately, a young patient with persistent hip pain who is not properly diagnosed and treated may face early arthritis and eventually require a total hip replacement.

However, new options have been identified by hip specialists to slow or reverse the progression of degenerative hip disease. This results in their patients returning to their normal activities and, in some cases, reducing the need for more extensive surgeries.

“In the past few years, the understanding of hip structural abnormalities has increased, allowing specialists to better identify underlying hip conditions that previously went unrecognized and to more accurately diagnose hip problems,” said Douglas E. Padgett, M.D., chief of the Hip Service and co-director of the newly formed Center for Hip Pain and Preservation at Hospital for Special Surgery. “Health insurance companies also now readily recognize the value of hip preservation procedures and, depending on one’s coverage, reimburse their cost.

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My left calf stings a little with each step, and the muscles on the front of my shoulders refuse to let me reach behind my head.

But I love it.

I’m still sore from my workout from two days ago, a session with my personal trainer. The sessions have been a mix of weights and plyometrics training, designed to increase speed, power and agility (picture at left is a girl performing a box jump, one of the exercises I do).

He’s been careful never to push me so hard that I start to feel ill, which I respect. I’ve had trainers who operated with the philosophy that their job was to get me sick. That’s a good way to lose me as a client. I expect the workouts to make me sore, not make me pay.

I’ve been working with this new trainer once a week for about six weeks, and I’m just starting to see some results in my arms and shoulders.

Paying someone to make me sore? Absolutely. It’s worth every penny.

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Homeopathy is a form of holistic healing. It believes not in treating symptoms but in treating the individual as a whole.

Homeopathy aims to deal with the actual cause of a disease and not just the outward symptoms.

Homeopathy believes in the natural law of healing. This states that healing occurs from inside to outside, from the important organs to less important organs and from the top to the bottom. Simply put, it means that unless the person is treated from the inside a disease or an ailment cannot be cured.

Just because the outward symptoms of a disease have been cured it does not mean that the disease has been cured. It is like trying to remove a weed by stripping its leaves. The leaves will simply come back.

Only when the weed is pulled out from its roots, can it be eliminated permanently. Once the roots of a disease or ailment are healed or removed, one can expect to be permanently cured.

Homeopathy does not aim at treating the ailment or the disease. It believes in trying to bring about a balance in the forces inside the body. A balanced body will heal itself faster and better.

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But I didn’t realize there was an entire movement out there by researchers to dispel that widely-accepted belief.

“[Juice] is pretty much the same as sugar water. … There’s no need for any juice at all,” a researcher says in this story. Read on:

By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times

To many people, it’s a health food. To others, it’s simply soda in disguise.

That virtuous glass of juice is feeling the squeeze as doctors, scientists and public health authorities step up their efforts to reduce the nation’s girth.

It’s an awkward issue for the schools that peddle juice in their cafeterias and vending machines. It’s uncomfortable for advocates of a junk food tax, who say they can’t afford to target juice and alienate its legions of fans. It’s confusing for consumers who think they’re doing something good when they chug their morning OJ, sip a 22-ounce smoothie or pack a box of apple juice in their child’s lunch.

The inconvenient truth is that 100 percent fruit juice poses the same obesity-related health risks as Coke, Pepsi and other widely vilified beverages.

With so much focus on the outsized role that sugary drinks play in the country’s collective weight gain — and the accompanying rise in conditions including diabetes, heart disease and cancer — it’s time juice lost its wholesome image, some experts say.

“It’s pretty much the same as sugar water,” said Dr. Charles Billington, an appetite researcher at the University of Minnesota. In the modern diet, he said, “There’s no need for any juice at all.”

A glass of juice concentrates all the sugar from multiple pieces of fruit. Ounce per ounce, it contains more calories than soda, although it tends to be consumed in smaller servings. A cup of orange juice has 112 calories, apple juice has 114 and grape juice packs 152, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The same amount of Coke has 97 calories, and Pepsi has 100.

And just like soft drinks, juice is rich in fructose — the simple sugar that does the most to make food sweet.

University of California, Davis scientist Kimber Stanhope has found that consuming high levels of fructose increases risk factors for heart disease and Type 2 diabetes because it is converted into fat by the liver more readily than glucose. Her studies suggest that it doesn’t matter whether the fructose comes from soda or juice.

“Both are going to promote equal weight gain,” she said, adding that she’s perplexed by the fixation on the evils of sugar-sweetened beverages: “Why are they the only culprit?”

Juice is a relatively recent addition to the human diet. For thousands of years, people ate fruit and drank mostly water.

But in the early 1900s, citrus growers in Florida were harvesting more oranges than they could sell. Then they had an epiphany: Promote juice.

“You consume more oranges if you drink them than if you eat them whole,” said Alissa Hamilton, author of the book “Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice.”

The U.S. Army was instrumental in turning orange juice into a commercial product.

It originally served a powdered lemonade to ensure soldiers got enough vitamin C, but it tasted “like battery acid,” Hamilton said. So, during World War II, the Army commissioned scientists to invent a system for freezing OJ in a concentrated form. The patent wound up with Minute Maid, which sold cans of frozen juice concentrate in grocery stores.

Body builder Jack LaLanne and other health gurus touted juice as a natural medicine, and decades of advertising helped secure its place at the breakfast table. Today, about half of all Americans consume juice regularly, according to NPD Group, a market research outfit.

The Juice Products Association emphasizes the value of the vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients in juice — especially when so many American eat so little fresh produce.

“If someone can add a glass of fruit juice at breakfast, that’s an important addition to the diet,” said Sarah Wally, a dietitian for the trade group.

But scientists increasingly are questioning whether the benefits outweigh the sugar and calories that come with them. “The upside of juice consumption is so infinitesimal compared to the downside that we shouldn’t even be having this discussion,” said Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco.

Several researchers have linked juice to more healthful diets and lower weights. But many experts say the data simply reflect a correlation between juice and healthful diets.

“Kids who drink more juice are more likely to be eating breakfast, and kids who eat breakfast tend to weigh less than kids who don’t,” said Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University.

“Having apple juice and eating an apple are not the same,” said Billington, the University of Minnesota appetite researcher.

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By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) – Overuse of antibiotics in Europe is building widespread resistance and threatening to halt vital medical treatments such as hip replacements, intensive care for premature babies and cancer therapies, health experts say.

Dominique Monnet of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control's (ECDC) scientific advice unit said the "whole span of modern medicine" is under threat because bugs are become resistant to antibiotics, rendering the drugs useless.

"If this wave of antibiotic resistance gets over us, we will not be able to do organ transplants, hip replacements, cancer chemotherapy, intensive care and neonatal care for premature babies," he told reporters at a briefing.

Antibiotics are needed in all these treatments to prevent bacterial infection. But drug-resistant bacteria are a growing problem in hospitals worldwide, marked by the rise of superbugs such as methicillin-resistant Staphyloccus aureus (MRSA).

Such infections kill about 25,000 people a year in Europe and around 19,000 in the United States. On top of the risks to future treatments, Monnet said the costs of antibiotic resistance were already hurting — and may hit healthcare budgets across the European Union yet harder if the problem is not addressed.

The six most common multi-drug-resistant bacteria — often referred to as superbugs — cause around 400,000 infections a year in Europe, killing around 25,000 people and using 2.5 million hospital days a year.

The ECDC, which monitors and advises on disease in EU, calculates that with a hospital day costing an average of 366 euros ($548), superbug infections are already sucking up 900 million euros a year in extra hospital costs, and a further 600 million euros a year in lost productivity.

"Across the European Union the number of patients infected by resistant bacteria is increasing and that antibiotic resistance is a major threat to public health," the ECDC said.

Britain's government was criticized by a parliamentary committee on Tuesday for failing to tackle the majority of hospital-acquired infections by narrowing its focus to two high profile ones — MRSA and Clostridium difficult.

The ECDC is planning an "antibiotic awareness" campaign on November 18 to urge doctors to stop overprescribing antibiotics.

Patients demanding antibiotics for viral infections often are not aware that they will not work, it said, but doctors are and should stop giving in to pressure.

Sarah Earnshaw of the ECDC's communications unit, pointed to a 2002 survey that showed 60 percent of patients do not know that antibiotics do not work against viruses like flu and colds.

"Patients often demand antibiotics," she said. And doctors often think, she said, that giving in is a quicker way to deal with demanding patients than persuading them otherwise.

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The "Randomized Controlled Trial of Stress Reduction in the Secondary Prevention of Coronary Heart Disease in African Americans," will be a 12-week study conducted at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. The trial will examine 56 patients who have had a heart attack or bypass surgery, angioplasty, or chronic angina.

"For decades, stress has been implicated in the cause and progression of heart disease," said Robert Schneider, M.D., F.A.C.C., lead author and director of the NIH-funded Center for Natural Medicine and Prevention. "And while standard cardiac rehabilitation usually includes supervised exercise and lifestyle education, it does not usually include a formal stress reduction program. Now, for the first time, this study will evaluate whether adding stress reduction through the Transcendental Meditation technique to conventional cardiac rehabilitation will aid in the treatment of serious CHD compared to conventional cardiac rehabilitation alone."

Patients will be carefully evaluated, using PET scans, before and after the study for changes in their coronary artery disease. "PET is an innovative imaging technology that allows us to visually and non-invasively study blood flow to the heart. With this state-of-the-art technology, doctors can now measure the blood flow to the heart and thus quantify the full impact of stress reduction on CHD," said Sabahat Bokhari, MD, Director of Nuclear Cardiology at Columbia University Medical Center and study co-director,

The NIH funding allocation is part of the Obama Administration's economic stimulus bill. Competition for the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act funds was intense with over 20,000 applications for the Challenge Grants category and only 840 awarded. "This is worthwhile research since we know that strong emotional stress can lead to conditions such asarrhythmia and hypertension," said NHLBI Director Elizabeth Nabel, M.D.

Results from several earlier trials on the Transcendental Meditation program found reductions in risk factors for heart disease, such as hypertension, psychological stress, insulin resistance, and build-up of atherosclerosis in the arteries, with indications of reduced mortality from heart disease. This newly funded study will directly evaluate coronary artery disease and continue to examine the potential of meditation for improvements in cardiovascular health.

Source: Ken Chawkin
Maharishi University of Management

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The study included 69 pro football players and 155 pro baseball players, all currently playing. They were tested for fasting glucose levels, blood pressure, body mass index (BMI), triglycerides, cholesterol, waist circumference, insulin resistance and waist-to-height ratio (an assessment often given to athletes who typically have more muscle and less body fat).

Overall, the football players had higher fasting glucose levels, waist circumference, waist-to-height ratios and BMI compared with baseball players, although blood-pressure numbers were lower among football players. Among the 19 linemen in the study, the numbers were even higher for fasting glucose levels, BMI, waist circumference and waist-to-height ratio.

"We expect professional athletes to be in peak physical condition given the demands of their jobs and the amount of time they spend exercising heavily," study co-author Dr. Michael Selden said. "However, there does not seem to be a complete protective effect of exercise, particularly among the larger athletes, like football linemen. Instead, the impact of their sheer size may outweigh the positive benefits of exercise to mitigate their risk for cardiometabolic syndrome, fatty liver disease and insulin resistance."

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