THE LEG I DIDN’T HAVE JUST KEPT ON HURTING

“I don’t know how this works, but it does.” Those were the words of Bill twelve weeks after his first visit to Healthy Visions Wellness Center where hypnosis was used to teach Bill how to control his Phantom Limb Pain. Prior to this, Bill was taking pain medicine two to three times a week. Sometimes the pain was so unbearable that he went to the emergency room for intravenous pain medication.

On a beautiful fall day fifteen years ago Bill went deer hunting at a favorite spot in the mountains near Huntsville, Tennessee. As he reached the area where he would set up his deer stand he was taken down

by a severe deep cramping and burning pain in his right leg. A pain so severe that it brought tears to his eyes and a scream of agony from deep inside. A pain so intense that he was unable to walk or even stand. He was down and lying on his back with the only way down the mountain was to use his rifle and good left leg to push himself inch by inch. Moving only a few inches with each desperately painful push for what seemed an eternity. “I pushed with my rifle just like I learned to do in the army when crawling
under machine gun fire,” Bill said. “Of course crawling under that machine gun fire and concertina wire wasn t nothing compared coming down that mountain thinking I was dying of pain.” The pain was unrelenting and after what seemed to be a life time he finally reached where he had parked his truck. Once there, he could neither stand nor pull himself up into the truck. “With nothing else left to do in agony I spread my orange hunting jacket out were it could be seen from the sky and crawled under my truck to….

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A migraine, despite popular belief, isn’t simply a type of headache. Instead, migraines are a disease, with headaches being one of the main symptoms. During a migraine episode, cranial blood vessels both expand and narrow, causing a great deal of pain. The tissue surrounding the brain also becomes inflamed, compounding the pain into something even more severe. While a headache is usually the most noticeable and common indication of a migraine, other symptoms such as nausea, blurred vision, loss of appetite, and fatigue do occur. This plethora of symptoms often sets headaches caused by a migraine apart from headaches caused by something else.

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New discoveries are made every day. The field of heart research is no different. It can be difficult to follow what scientists discovered recently. Here we summarized the latest news on heart health.

1. People who survived heart attack are at risk for diabetes or prediabetes, according to Harvard researchers. A study of 8,300 Italians who had survived a heart attack revealed that after 3.5 years, almost two-thirds of them or 62% developed diabetes or prediabetes.

2. HDL, also called the “good” cholesterol, might have a bad side, according to researcher from the University of Washington in Seattle. They found that defective forms of HDL can increase the risk of a heart attack. However, overall the substance is beneficial.

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Isn t Yoga just for young hard bodies, like you would see on the cover of a magazine? Don t you have to turn your body into a pretzel, to practice Yoga? These are, a few of the many, questions I am asked about Yoga and Chair Yoga. Any idea that Yoga is only for the fit, and young, is a complete myth. Anyone can practice Yoga, at any age, but not all Yoga styles are the same.

Many of us struggle, most of our lives, to find the optimum exercise routine, in order to stay in shape. As time goes by, we look for low-impact fitness solutions, due to excessive wear

in our joints. It can t be helped that, joints will wear, as our bodies take a lifetime of stress, tumbles, and injuries.

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August 2007 saw several elite athletes lose their lives to heart attack is this a trend or coincidence?

First in this string of incidents was 22 year old Spanish soccer player, Antonio Puerta, who collapsed in the first half of a game. Although he was able to walk from the field, he collapsed again in the change rooms and was rushed to hospital. His organs shut down, and he died 3 days later. The hospital said the attack was caused by a weakness in the right ventricle of the heart, either because of a congenital problem or because cells had been replaced by fat or scar tissue.

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