Olwen Anderson's Blog

The Most Natural Remedy for Post Viral Fatigue

Saturday, November 04, 2017

It’s been a whopper of a flu season, don’t you think? So many struck down with one variety or another of the viral illness, and those of us who managed to dodge becoming infected had to reach frequently for our favourite cold and flu preventatives. If you were one of those badly hit, did you have to take time off work or study? More to the point, did you take time off? If you didn’t, and the flu is still hanging on, may I suggest a natural remedy.

Battling a viral infection uses up an immense amount of energy. So does the inflammation that creates the symptoms like the aching joints and oceans of mucus. That’s why you feel tired when you have the flu, and that’s why complete rest is a key strategy for recovery. By ‘complete rest’ I mean extra time in bed, more sleep, or at least spending time on the couch. That’s because when you rest your body gets a chance to gain the upper hand over the virus and prevent the inflammatory process becoming chronic. Your body can focus all its energies on getting well again.

Alas, some folk insist on soldiering on regardless of how their body is struggling. They push themselves out the door to work and generally behave as though nothing was happening. Problem is, this means the immune system never quite gets a chance to overcome the infection properly, and inflammatory processes causing fatigue, aches and pains can become chronic.

This doesn’t just happen with the influenza bug, but also with any of the mosquito borne viral infections we get around here, like Ross River Virus, Barmah Virus and the like. The key strategy to overcome them faster, and more completely, is through complete rest. Even though it’s frustrating to take time off work, say no to community commitments and decline party invitations, rest is your key tactic.

If you choose to just soldier on, you can expect you’ll be dragging yourself through many more weeks of feeling weary than if you had just come to a complete stop for a few days. Worse, some of those symptoms, like the aching joints and muscles, might not go.

So, if it seems the last time you felt really well was before you caught that flu, and if you just can’t seem to shake it off, perhaps you could engage the effective and very natural strategy of complete rest.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy 'chicken soup for colds & flu'

How to make it easier to exercise

Saturday, October 28, 2017

There are some that just do it, some that will only if a friend comes along, and some that put it off until tomorrow (although tomorrow never comes). Some don’t even think about doing it. I’m talking about exercise. Maybe you’d really like to get fit but it’s just not happening. What if you could leverage your natural personality traits to make fitness training easier?

Or, do you want to get fit and yet find it’s somehow impossible to actually strap on those training shoes and get out the door? A recently published book, ‘The Four Tendencies’, might help light up the way for you. It’s a very readable text about what motivates certain people to do particular things for certain reasons. The book divides people’s motivations into four types:

1. There’s the ‘upholder’ type who is self-motivated regardless of what others are doing. This is the kind of person who somehow manages to exercise regularly, regardless.

2. There’s also the ‘questioner’; this type who will only exercise when they devise their own fitness regime based on their own research and opinions.

3. Another type is the ‘obliger’ who is motivated through relationship; these are the people who can’t seem to exercise unless other people are relying on them to be there.

4. Finally, there’s the ‘rebel’ who won’t be told what to do – the kind of person who would deliberately refuse to exercise in response to recommendations that they do.

There’s a quiz associated with the book too, at www.gretchenrubin.com which might help you make discoveries that pave the way to actually make exercise happen. (Look for ‘The Four Tendencies Quiz’). For example, if you’re an ‘obliger’, then teaming up with others to exercise together will actually make it more likely you’ll exercise because others are relying on you to join in. Discover you’re a ‘questioner’? Well, you’ll probably get moving once you’ve done the research, identified what you consider to be the right exercise, and designed your own program. If you’re a ‘rebel’ type there’s no point at all in making suggestions about how to exercise, because you’ll only train if it’s something you want to do! And if you’re an ‘upholder’? Well, then, you’re probably already exercising daily and enjoying the benefits.

Curious? Why not try out the quiz; it just might help you understand why you’re having trouble exercising, and how to manage yourself more easily to make it happen.

If you enjoyed this article you might also enjoy "Exercise is Good For Everything"

Your cells love a good conversation

Saturday, October 14, 2017

Sometimes it’s nice to simply take some time alone with your thoughts, to enjoy some refreshing solitude. Then you’re ready to head back out into the world, to reconnect with people. As well as time alone, it seems like our cells get healthier with people contact, and decline when we become too isolated from our community.

One of the earlier studies about the impact of connection on health was an investigation of a particularly cohesive immigrant community in the USA. Now known as the Roseto study, it was triggered when a physician noticed the members of a nearby close-knit immigrant community, Roseto, were less susceptible to chronic disease than other local communities despite being smokers and indulging in unhealthy food. Researchers concluded their community connections boosted their health more than smoking and what they ate undermined it.

This was about 50 years ago; and although in some respects we’re more closely connected (through social media), it seems easier than ever to isolate yourself from the people you live amongst. Perhaps you live alone, have retired or don’t work, or you’ve moved to a new area where you don’t yet know anyone. Paradoxically, it can be easier to isolate yourself in the more densely populated areas, and much harder to live as a hermit further away from the towns. For example, if you live in a rural corner of the valley you’ll most likely know who your neighbours are; in a large block of apartments, though, it’s all too easy to remain a stranger to those living close by.

Without regular in-person people contact you can become vulnerable to mental health problems like depression; a mental health disorder which, cruelly, makes it even harder to re-connect and creates its own form of punishing solitary confinement. It turns out that our cells love a good conversation, with another person, face to face. Somehow, just having a ‘how’s the weather’ chat actually boosts your health.

There’s a limit to this, of course, and it’s true that contact with other people can bring tension. When that happens it’s time to take time out, enjoy some solitude and recharge your enthusiasm for people contact. Once you’ve had a little time alone the best thing you can do for your health is get back out there and talking with people, in person. “People who need people” (to cite a popular song) really do remain healthier, both mentally as well as physically.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy 'Being connected to your community', here

Image credit: Jessica Gale via MorgueFile

Loving the disease that's keeping you healthy

Saturday, October 07, 2017

Twenty years ago a certain book was first published with a title designed to get your attention – and maybe make you a little bit angry too: “Love Your Disease, It’s Keeping You Healthy”. I confess to feeling more than a little irritated myself: It smacked of an unhelpful “you brought this upon yourself” attitude. Did this title annoy you as well? Surely the author isn’t suggesting that being unwell is a good thing?

But I read it, and eventually the title made sense. Then over the last decade or so of clinical practice I began to see where he was coming from. Today I’d like to share with you why this medical doctor author might just be correct about the connection between disease and health.

Virtually all of us have at least one health challenge to manage. Perhaps there’s some part of you that’s never worked completely because you were born that way. Maybe something went awry with your mental health or hormones in adolescence. Possibly a series of health challenges have seemingly just descended on you out of nowhere. Maybe an accidental injury has changed your life. Maybe you’ve been able to avoid any health challenges. But sooner or later, most of us get at least one.

Having a health issue, injury or disability to manage, especially the chronic variety, often means you have to take extra actions as preventative maintenance. Like, for example, a daily stretching routine to help you minimise your pain and maximise mobility. Or maybe you have to include or avoid certain foods to keep your digestion content. Perhaps ensuring you get enough sleep and meditate daily so your brain supports your mood and mental health better. Funny thing is - stretching, eating well, meditating and sleeping enough are great health boosters on their own.

If you were one hundred per cent healthy and functional you might regard these activities as optional extras in life. But then you might not do them at all, feeling you could get away with those unhealthy practices. But because your particular health challenge forces you to eat well, manage your movement and coddle your brain, for you these health practices have become compulsory.

Was this what the author, Dr Harrison was trying to communicate? He’s recently re-released the book, plus two other books, one focussed on smoking. Maybe you’d enjoy reading them too – if you can get past the unfortunate titles.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy 'What's different about functional medicine'

Lessons from the plant hospital

Saturday, September 16, 2017

“I think we’d better keep these in for the week”. I admit to mixed feelings when the plant hospital wouldn’t let me take my office plants home. Well, they did look a little tired. Seems they needed re-potting and a nutritional boost of some microbes and fertiliser. Indeed there is such a thing as a plant hospital – at least in Murwillumbah - and they’d been running a plant clinic.

If you’re a gardener yourself, or have house plants, you know how much they can lift a room. Being in a much-cared for home garden feels so uplifting, and spending time in nature can really calm and soothe your soul. Being able to gather vegetables for your next meal from your own back yard is priceless.

Turns out that healthier plants produce more nutritious food too. I had the chance to talk with the plant experts and also do some research about soil health and the nutrient density of food. Plants rely on microbes to help them as much as we humans rely on microbes in our intestines to help us absorb food. Healthy soil leads to not just happier, but healthier plants too.

I wondered, too, is the health of the soil and its nutrient density reflected in the mineral concentration of the plants? Is this why, despite eating vegetables, we can still come up short on nutrients like zinc and magnesium? A brief exploration of the peer reviewed scientific literature revealed that yes, the mineral density of crops has diminished over the years; for instance, a crop of modern wheat harvested today doesn’t have the same concentration of magnesium as an old variety of wheat harvested several decades ago. (In case you didn’t already know, modern high intensity agriculture doesn’t use compost, just specific fertilisers to make the plants grow.)

This means that growing your own vegetables using nutrient-rich compost is now more important than ever, and could reduce your reliance on supplements to stay healthy. Maybe this is why our great-grandparents, fed by backyard vegie plots, stayed so healthy into old age.

Also, keep in mind that organic growers routinely use more nutrient-rich materials like compost , which makes their produce perhaps worth the little extra cost. It could be worth your while to deliberately seek out more nutrient-dense vegetables and perhaps grow a little of your own food. After all, healthy soil leads to healthy plants, producing healthier people.

If you enjoyed this article you might also enjoy 'More Minerals Please'

Birds, rainwater and your toothbrush

Saturday, September 09, 2017

If there is such a thing as rainwater tank envy, I bet many of us experienced it recently when our shire’s water supply became polluted with salt. Overnight, our tap water became a far less pleasant drinking experience and having your own water supply became priceless.

If you are blessed with your own rainwater tank, I bet you’ve got at least one filter and a first flush diverter between the tank and your home, because you know what happens on your roof: Incontinent birds and bats land there. Leaf litter and perhaps even the occasional nest can gather in the guttering. It’s surprising how much muck builds up, as any householder tasked with cleaning out the gutters finds out.

All this gunk washes off with the spring rains, and without a barrier, straight into your water supply, ready to brew into a less than healthy concoction as the temperature rises leading towards summer. You want to prevent all that bacteria-and-parasite laden water polluting your water supply.

If you’ve ever acquired a gastrointestinal parasite or small intestine bacterial overgrowth, you know just how challenging they are to evict and the intensity of symptoms they can produce. So most people have a filter between the tank and their kitchen tap to keep what’s lurking in their rainwater tank out of their drinking water. But there’s another source of infection many householders overlook.

If you develop some uncomfortable and inconvenient bowel symptoms your practitioner will ask: Do you filter your rainwater supply? The next question will be “and what about your bathroom tap?” After all, every time you pick up your toothbrush then rinse your mouth out after brushing you could be using straight tank water – with all the muck from the guttering included.

We all get more active in the warmer spring weather, and any parasites and bacteria already present in your tank get more energetic too. Healthy intestines are capable of brushing off the occasional invading bug or parasite, but vast quantities from a polluted tank can overwhelm your body’s defences. So perhaps, if you don’t already filter your bathroom tap water, it could be time to. Or consider a ‘whole of house’ filter where your water pipe enters the building.

You don’t need anything more sophisticated than a ceramic filter, and they’re remarkably cost effective, particularly when you consider how much it’s going to set you back if a parasite takes up residence in your intestines.

If you enjoyed this article you might also enjoy 'Nine Bowel Signs You Shouldn't Ignore'

Speaking your mind in a consultation

Saturday, August 26, 2017

It was probably confusing as a child, but now you’re an adult it makes sense. Maybe you got a swift kick under the table. Or a subtle arm-pinch, perhaps just a pointed glare. You were having dinner at someone else’s home and it seemed your parents didn’t appreciate you voicing your unique, indefensible opinions about politics, religion or immigration. You were taught that to keep social events congenial, it’s considered polite to refrain from controversial topics. Following this custom also meant is was more likely you would be invited back another time.

Avoiding uncomfortable topics works well in social situations; but it’s all too easy to carry this custom into a practitioner’s consultation room. When you do, it can result in you leaving with the frustrating sense that your real concerns haven’t been addressed. Feeling like you wanted to speak up but somehow couldn’t.

As practitioners we call this effect the ‘imbalance of power’. The client (or patient) visits us in our ‘home’, our office. As a result, the visitor can feel constrained from speaking frankly, from disagreeing. For you, that can mean that the ‘elephant in the room’, what you’re really worried about or don’t agree on, isn’t discussed. After a few of these kinds of consultation with different practitioners you can come to feel that no-one will help you.

I hope this hasn’t happened to you, but it seems that some folk (like women, those with disabilities, and members of minority groups) are more vulnerable to this imbalance of power, and are less likely to get the health services they need. So, if you sense you’re not getting what you came for, here are a couple of tips to help next time you sit down with a practitioner.

One technique is to write down before you go what you want from the consultation. Keep it with you. This is a fast way to communicate what you need when it can seem time to talk is too brief. It will help you stay on topic too.

Another technique is to take a wingman with you – an assertive person you trust who also knows what you want to achieve from the visit, and is happy to speak up for you if it seems you’re not being heard.

Whichever technique you use, just remember that when it comes to your health care, this is the time to forget the keep-everyone-comfortable custom and speak your mind instead.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy 'Nine clues you have found the right practitioner'

Is it worth reading?

Saturday, August 19, 2017

You’ve probably had this kind of lightbulb moment. The television presenter breathlessly reports research that seems just the answer to your health problem. Maybe it’s about the importance of a vitamin, a magic formula for weight loss, or reassuring news that red wine and chocolate really are good for you. But you know that some reported ‘research’ might not be genuine or credible when examined closely. How can you uncover what’s real and what’s not in science?

We used to have to physically thumb through card catalogues and roam through dusty library shelves to locate a single study. But since the internet was born, the computer does this work for us. There’s now an overwhelming amount of information available with just a few clicks: good, mediocre and useless varieties. And the speed of our 24/7 news cycle can mean that research might not be checked diligently before the broadcasting begins.

We now have this problem because the internet doesn’t differentiate between what’s real and what’s make-believe. To help out, there’s a process in academic publishing called ‘peer review’, where a study is subjected to the scrutiny of several experts before the journal will agree to publish it. Although the process isn’t perfect, it does winnow out a lot of the chaff of research. Good quality scientific information is peer-reviewed, and worth reading; the rest might not be. Here’s how you find out if what you’re hearing is worthwhile.

First, seek out the journal. If where it was published isn’t mentioned, do an ‘advanced’ search through Google Scholar using clues from the news report. Once you know the journal name, head to their web site. There, perhaps in ‘instructions for submitting articles’, or the ‘about’ section will be the term ‘peer reviewed’ or ‘refereed’ or similar. If their website doesn’t mention this vetting process, or if it charges writers to publish, then you can suspect nobody’s checked the article before printing.

Still not sure? You could look for studies on the academic databases. Most libraries (including ours here in the Tweed) have access to research & study databases whose octopus-like tentacles reach into vast collections of academic journal articles. You can just tick a box in your search requesting ‘peer reviewed articles only’ and voila, it will locate the kind of research worth reading.

Now, when you hear about some fabulous new research you know how to reach behind the veil of publicity and see if it’s real.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy 'How to become an informed health consumer'

What about in a few decades?

Saturday, August 12, 2017

Swiping through Facebook the other day, I enjoyed the video clip about a nun regularly competing in triathlons. That’s a little outside what we would expect our religious to be doing, but that wasn’t the most unusual aspect: she was 86, and had taken up running in her early 50s as a spiritual exercise. It stuck. Sister Madonna Buder did miss competing in one triathlon in 2014 due to a broken hip, but according to the internet, is back on the track.

Then I came across another video clip, this time of a grandfather, Jean Titus, who had decided in his mid-40s that, really, he probably wasn’t even half way through his life, so it was time to get the mindset that would help him stay fit – and healthy – so much so that age would become just a number. He didn’t want to die at 25 to be buried at 70, realising that health & wellness were something money couldn’t buy. Judging by the film footage, he’s doing OK.
Now perhaps I was spending too much time on the internet. But these kinds of video clips and social media shares serve a purpose: they can shake us out of our habitual belief that our health and fitness will only be as good as the people around us. Which, if you’re living amongst people who have given up, might not be so good.

Maintaining your health certainly does become more challenging as the decades pass, partly thanks to the decline in reproductive hormone production from the middle years onwards. But I suspect that another powerful de-motivator is when you see the people around you getting tubbier, purchasing mobility aids, and forgetting where they were headed to after they’ve walked out the front door.

As social beings, we’re hard-wired to perceive the way most of the people around us look as being normal. For example, it might seem normal now to be overweight since more than half of our population now wear plus-sized clothes. But if you were regularly mixing with people like Sister Buder and Mr Titus, your outlook on your own health and vitality might be a little different, perhaps?

So, if a little voice in your head is whispering that you might enjoy life more and feel better if you were healthier, maybe watching some of the inspiring folk on the internet, and getting amongst people intent on staying fit and healthy could help you shift aspirations into actions.

If you enjoyed this article you might also enjoy 'The Controversies of Health'

Is your morning routine boosting or undermining your health?

Saturday, August 05, 2017

The alarm rings, signalling it’s time to catapult yourself into a new day. Most people have really strong habitual routines; around what they eat, their fitness, and their mood. I’d like to invite you to consider whether your own morning routine is boosting or undermining your health.

Sound impossible? In reality, how you approach your morning routine, and what it includes can have a powerful effect on how you feel by the time the sun goes down, and on your long term health too. If you’re feeling frazzled, rushed and propelled only by nervous energy, supported through your day with caffeine and sugar, this idea might seem impossible: but there are only three key ingredients.

Actually, it starts the night before, where you may have to peel yourself away from the television to enable a solid eight hours rest.

In the morning, allow enough time for your health-anchoring routines. This takes practice and adjustments. There are three elements you want to include: a breakfast to fuel your body, some exercise, and attention to your soul as well. It’s not so much the amount of time you have available for each as that you’ve attended to them.
Your breakfast, if it’s going to save you from irresistible cravings for sweet stuff, should include some high quality protein, some good fats, slow release carbohydrates and fibre. This could be as simple as a hard-boiled egg and avocado on toast.

When it comes to exercise, it’s easy to let it slip by, assuming it will take too long. But in reality every little bit makes a difference. There are apps easily available now that guide you through five minutes of yoga, or strength training. Or you could investigate the possibilities of high intensity cardiovascular exercise promoted by a medical practitioner, Dr Moseley. Exercise helps because it burns off stress but, curiously, generates more energy than it uses.

The third item, for a truly holistic approach, is attending to emotional wellbeing. This is different for everyone: Some people have a religious affiliation inviting them to morning prayer. Others like to meditate, and for some folks it’s reviewing their goals, adjusting their internal compass for the day.

With a morning routine like this you’ll head out the door feeling refreshed, sustained, and well supported. In the long term, these habitual practices of a good breakfast, exercise, and attending to your soul will pay big benefits in better health for you.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy 'Breakfast of Champions'

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