For the most part, we aren’t even conscious of our breath, and spend hour after hour breathing shallowly into the chest, depriving ourselves of the tremendous energy and revitalizing power that proper breathing can provide.

The primary purpose of breathing is to deliver oxygen to every cell in every tissue and organ in the body while removing carbon dioxide. Oxygen’s primary role in the body is to produce the energy required for every basic bodily function via its interaction with adenosine triphosphate (ATP).

Since the cellular content of ATP is responsible for the body’s total energy levels and its ability to perform all of its functions, adequate oxygen levels are essential for our overall health. When our oxygen intake is reduced, ATP is diminished as well.

A variety of environmental factors can also contribute to oxygen deficiency, including high carbon monoxide and smoke pollution, smog, and high altitude. (Oxygen content decreases by over 3 percent every thousand feet above sea level.) The primary cause of chronic reduced oxygen levels in the body, however, is due to shallow and inefficient breathing patterns.

Typically, most of us habitually breathe in through the chest, failing to breathe deeply and frilly. This unconscious and inefficient method of breathing significantly reduces our oxygen supply. By simply learning how to improve the way you breathe, you can considerably improve your health and ensure that your cells remain in an oxygen rich state.

Practice abdominal breathing. Breathing through the abdomen instead of through the chest is a simple yet powerful way to improve energy and flow of oxygen, enhance digestion, relieve stomach pain and flatulence, and diminish stress. Since most of us rarely breathe through our bellies, learning to do so at first may seem odd. Yet, abdominal breathing is easy to do.

Just direct your breath in and out through your belly. If you do so correctly, your chest will not move. You can easily check this by placing one hand on your belly and the other on your chest. As you breathe, the lower hand should move, while the hand on your chest should remain motionless..

Don’t get discouraged if you are unable to accomplish this on your first try. Make it a practice to spend a few minutes each day breathing abdominally (working up to twenty to thirty minutes a day is recommended), along with regular brief sessions whenever you notice yourself feeling tense or irritable.

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1. Breathing Meditation
2. Breathing Technique To Quit Smoking
3. The Power of Breath

There is therefore less room and a smaller margin of error for the dentist drilling in primary teeth. The other important consideration is that the primary teeth will all fall out by around twelve years of age.

It doesn’t make sense to construct a major restoration for a tooth that will come out naturally in a short time, nor is it cost effective to fill a primary tooth that will soon be lost. The rule of thumb is not to fill a cavity if the tooth will be lost before the cavity starts to hurt.

This saves time and money. The dentist is able to judge, from the X rays and the clinical appearance of the tooth, if the tooth should be treated or left alone until it falls out by itself. Aside from these considerations, the treatment of baby teeth and permanent teeth is about the same.

We believe that it is actually more difficult to fill a primary tooth than a similar cavity in a permanent tooth. A general dentist’s fees for children’s dentistry, therefore, should be comparable to the fees for adult dentistry.

Time, as we have stressed elsewhere in this book, is the indispensable key to success in all phases of dentistry, and children’s dentistry is no exception. In areas which do not have fluoride in the drinking water the use of fluoride supplements for very young children is essential .

If your child is prone to cavities, stricter attention to diet and home care (less sugar and more brushing) is in order, and the use of an over the counter fluoride rinse could be helpful. Parents often are concerned because of thumb sucking or the use of a pacifier.

Sucking is a normal instinct. Many infants start sucking their thumbs or using a pacifier within three months of birth. Thumb sucking and pacifiers can cause the permanent teeth to grow in out of position if the child continues these habits past the age of five or six.

Fortunately, most children discontinue these habits well before this age. If your child hasn’t stopped, we recommend a program of positive reinforcement, with gold stars being given for every day that the child doesn’t suck his thumb and a big prize being given if forty or fifty stars are earned.

Sometimes peer pressure can help. (Do you want to be the only kid in class with your thumb in your mouth?) Appliances that have sharp spokes that stick into the thumb and torture kids aren’t effective, nor is yelling at and punishing them. If worse comes to worst, the teeth are easier to fix than your child’s psyche.

It’s not surprising that in a country as affluent as the United States, the care and maintenance of children’s teeth have a high priority. In many families, parents neglect their own needs in order to ensure that their children have a healthy and pain free mouth. Even with all the widespread interest in children, we see a deplorable lack of knowledge and scandalous lack of quality care in the treatment of children’s oral problems.

As an example, every year or so we hear the news that a child died in a dentist’s office while undergoing routine dentistry such as a few fillings, under general anesthesia. Children have this kind of dangerous anesthesia due to the parents’ fears of dental pain and the dentist’s assurances of safety. Often the child had been un-cooperative in another dentist’s chair, and the parents, being embarrassed, found a dentist, usually through an ad that says the dentist “caters to cowards,” who will put their child “to sleep.”

They do this rather than finding a dentist who would take the time to relax the child’s fears and convert the child to a cooperative patient We believe that general anesthesia for filling teeth is absolutely unnecessary and should not be done, except in the case of a child with a medical problem that makes it impossible to do dentistry any other way, such as a child with seizures.

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A lot of “research” has attempted to back up some of these claims. The results of such research, it may not be surprising to learn, have been much more favorable to the product when the research was paid for by the manufacturer than when it was done independently.

Recently an FDA advisory panel found no convincing evidence that baking soda or sanguinaria is effective against plaque accumulation or gum disease. Some toothpaste manufacturers make the popular claim that their product has an “anti tartar” formula, implying that it can remove calculus or slow the growth of new calculus.

Any toothpaste, used in conjunction with a toothbrush, accomplishes this. While some studies show that certain chemical toothpaste additives do indeed help in removing tartar that is above the gum line, they don’t help with disease-causing under the gum tartar.

Gum inflammation, a major sign of periodontal disease, is not reduced by the use of these “anti tartar” toothpastes. Furthermore, some of these chemical additives interfere with enzymatic activity of the saliva, and questions have been raised about the long-term safety of using these formulations. Since their contribution to oral health is trivial at best, and since there are doubts about their safety, we do not recommend their use.

Of course fluoride, usually the only active ingredient listed on the toothpaste container  does help reduce decay, but it is much more effective when taken internally, from a fluoridated water supply, than when applied topically. We recommend you always use a fluoridated toothpaste; like chicken soup, it cannot do any harm and may do some good.

The other ingredients in a toothpaste are, commonly: an abrasive, binding agents to hold the paste together, sudsing agents, moisturizers, flavoring agents, coloring, and water. Some toothpastes claim that they’re “natural.” This implies that they are safer than other toothpastes, but this is nonsense, pandering to those poorly informed people who think something must be good if it is “natural.” Of course, whether or not it is natural is not the point:

What is important is whether or not it is safe and effective. All toothpastes that have been accepted by the American Dental Association are safe, in the sense that they are not too abrasive. Extra money spent on a “natural” dentifrice is thrown away. Some toothpastes are specifically targeted for people with sensitive teeth, but we have found their results to be inconsistent.

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Snoring is one of the most common sleep related problems, causing discomfort and disturbances not only for the snorers themselves but for their partners too who can say how many relationships have been put to the test by this irritating and sometimes ear splitting phenomenon ?

Snoring is a typical manifestation of hyperventilation , but its cause is still unknown. It is often explained as a sound caused by vibrations of the soft parts of the mouth and throat area, but this is really a
description and not an explanation.

It has been suggested that in the distant past our ancestors were most vulnerable to enemies when they were asleep, and that snoring may have served a useful purpose in keeping them at bay. In the 1980s a four year study on chronic snorers was conducted by Finnish scientists.

Among their findings was the fact that more snorers than non snorers suffered from high blood pressure. A Japanese study carried out in 1996 found that a rise in blood pressure seemed to follow a poor night’s sleep.

Snoring can be exacerbated by sleeping on the back, excessive body weight, cold, flu, a blocked nose, polyps, adenoids, or a heavy meal or too much alcohol before bed. While you may address these contributory factors, you must also treat hyperventilation as a cause, rather than snoring as a noise.

That’s why ‘breathe easy’ patches, and operations on polyps, the soft palate and so on are not the answer. They may be successful in the short term, but cause more health problems in the long run. By using these methods you simply ‘shoot the messenger’  snoring  without even bothering to read the actual message.

Who Snores?

•    While 20 per cent of men under 30 snore, only 5 per cent of women do.
•    40 per cent of women and 60 per cent of men aged 50and over snore.
•    S per cent of people who snore go on to develop sleep apnoea , but 95 per cent of cases are undiagnosed.
•    In 1993 a Swede, K. Valkert, became the proud holder of the Loudest Snorer record when he hit a deafening and quite astonishing 93 decibels  about the noise level of a kalashnikov!

What to Do

In 1915 a Mr George Little of Pennsylvania wrote to House wife Magazine, desperately seeking advice on how to stop snoring in order to save his marriage. The printed reply was from a Mrs D. P., who wrote: ‘Did you know that Indians never snore? . . The secret is that Indians teach their children to sleep with a closed mouth from a young age.’

Indeed George Catlin, author of Notes and Travels Amongst the North-American Indians (1870), made the same observation. He visited 150 tribes (‘more than two million souls’) and noted a striking difference between the health of these people and that of ‘civilised’ society: no stillbirths, hardly any lung or bronchial problems, and strong and beautiful teeth.

To stop snoring you must deal with hyperventilation. The first three of the steps given below should be enough to help 75 per cent of snorers; the remaining 25 per cent will probably need step 4 as well:

•    Go to bed only when you are sleepy.
•    Tape your mouth with surgical tape .
•    Sleep on your left side  if not on your front.
•    Practise Gentle Breathing and Shallow Breathing for 10 minutes each before you go to bed.

Old Wives’ Snoring Remedies

•    Place salt in the mouth and keep it there until it has
•    high pile of pillows.
•    Bite your pillow for as long as you can.
•    Prince Charles has been said to advocate putting toothpaste  in the nostrils before going to bed.

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1. What Is You Snore Level

1.  Diseases of the central nervous system in which the parts of the brain that participate in the regulation of sleep and awakening are damaged. This causes real insomnia but accounts for only a small percentage of ah people suffering from sleeping problems .

2.  Diseases of internal organs or peripheric nerves where pain or other unpleasant feelings disturb normal sleep. This can be anything from asthma symptoms (or anticipation of them) to muscle cramps, and can deprive you of sleep for a long time.

3. Neurotic disorders and functional disorders affecting the nervous system. Sufferers from emotional problem(including mood swings), people who are obsessed with  disease or those who have a tendency to worry unduly make up this group.

4.  Psychiatric diseases can affect sleep centres in the core of the brain, causing very unusual sleep patterns. Schizophrenics may be asleep or awake regardless of day or night, experiencing a sort of sleeping fit. Those who suffer from depression also need less sleep than others, despite the fact that they long for sleep as a means of forgetting their worries, at least for a while.

5.  Changes of environment such as changes in the weather, sleeping in a different place, entering a different time zone and new working shifts can cause temporary sleep problems.

6.  Drug abuse, whether medical or illegal.

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1. Sleeping Problems
2. Insomnia

Doctors seldom actually see the problem  the patient just tells the doctor that he has trouble sleeping and medication is prescribed on that basis. However, a patient’s word can be very misleading, as was seen when some Russian doctors researched a group of patients who claimed that they did not sleep at all during the night.

Using a polysomnograph a special piece of equipment designed to give an objective picture of the brain’s activity by registering a whole range of physiological parameters during sleep  they found that
patients actually slept for 4-5 hours. Their sleeping pattern was different from the sleep of ‘good’ sleepers, but they slept none the less.

In other words, many people who wake up 2-3 times during the night are inclined to believe that they are insomniacs, and rather than ask their doctor if this is the case, they just ask for sleeping pills. And some doctors (not all), in turn, prescribe medication without asking any questions at all.

Some researchers are unhappy with the term ‘insomnia’, believing that the word itself adds psychologically to the burden of being unable to sleep. However, none of the alternative terms used to describe sleeping problems is precise, and none really gives a full picture of what is involved.

Three Sleep Scenarios

-  You sleep short hours but feel fully alert and rested all day. If you fit into this category you are not an insomniac no matter how little you sleep. You are simply able to function well on less sleep than most people, which gives you more hours in which to get things done (even if they may not be the most socially acceptable hours)!

-  You sleep short hours and feel fine for most of the day, but a little bit drowsy for part of it; your performance, however, is not compromised and while you may want to nod off at some point, you can just as easily keep going. Provided that getting less sleep at night is not affecting your physical or mental output, it is quite acceptable from a physiological point of view and, if daytime sleepiness does become difficult to resist.

-  You sleep short hours and find it difficult to get out of bed in the morning; you may have a headache, you feel sleepy and weak throughout the day, and are moody and irritable too.

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1. Insomnia
2. Treatment of Sleep Disorder

Still estrogen may play a role in the prevention of bone loss in men. Of all risk factors, the postmenopausal avalanche of bone loss experienced by almost all women is the most dramatic. It outweighs most other risk factors except for severe illness like poliomyletis or perhaps the accumulated effects of long term corticosteroid therapy.

Addressing other factors such as lifestyle and exercise may help to slow bone loss, but the effectiveness of this approach varies from one individual to another. Lifestyle changes made in youth or early adulthood may help you reach peak bone mass at a later age, giving you more bone to lose before complications set in, but menopause will still make significant inroads into your skeletal stores of calcium.

Under no circumstances should any woman ignore the importance of preventive measures before, during, and after menopause. Still, even those who do not begin ERT promptly as long as they begin within a few years of menopause can still benefit.

Estrogen production virtually stops with natural menopause, at which point the rate of bone turnover speeds up significantly. Osteoblasts begin to create new bone at an unprecedented rate, but the osteoclasts are even more aggressive and the overall result is a continuous net drain of calcium from bone.

For estrogen replacenTlent therapy to prevent or slow this metabolic change, it must be maintained throughout the normal period of menopause. When therapy is discontinued and bone loss picks up again, it is not at the accelerated postmenopausal pace. It is generally closer to the more moderate rate of loss taking place when therapy began.

There are, therefore, two advantages to hormone replacement therapy: First, it diminishes bone loss and maintains a stronger skeleton. Second, it alleviates many other common, unpleasant effects of menopause. Therapy is usually begun at menopause and maintained for seven to ten years. Studies have shown that hormone replacement reduces the risk of osteoporotic fractures of the hip and forearm by about one third, and fractures of the spine by more than a half.

Hormone replacement therapy is not a cure for osteoporosis, nor will it completely arrest bone loss. But if it is taken for this period, it removes a potent risk factor that otherwise leads most women down a dangerous path of bone loss and a toward a prognosis of early osteoporosis.

The ideal time to begin hormone replacement is when the ovaries stop working and your natural supplies of estrogen begin to dwindle. Overall bone loss begins at menopause but is slowed dramatically by the use of estrogen drugs. The sooner you take it, the less bone you’ll lose. It can even be taken up a year or two after the onset of menopause, although some bone loss has already taken place and a late start is not recommended.

Remember, estrogen therapy prevents or slows bone loss but does not rebuild bone already lost. In earlier times, osteoporosis was but one of many signs of age related degeneration. However, global life expectancy has risen dramatically since 1950 to its present sixty six years, so most women worldwide live long beyond menopause.

In highly industrialized countries many women reach menopause with more than one third of their lives yet to be lived. Consider also that 55 percent of people over sixty and 65 percent of eighty year old are women, and that by 2050 one fifth of the world’s population will be over sixty. Osteoporosis often makes those years difficult and painful, and the cost to society  is increasing dramatically as people live longer. However, it can be easily prevented in most cases.

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1. Osteoporosis Natural Hormone Therapy

From a lifestyle point of view, alcoholics tend to eat poorly, which certainly contributes to poor bone condition. The negative effect of heavy alcohol use on the liver is well known. Poor liver function in turn affects the body’s ability to metabolize vitamin D and leads to impaired calcium absorption.

Also, chronic alcohol use affects the nervous system and makes long term drinkers more susceptible to falls. Heavy drinking affects the bone-renewal cycle by impairing the function of osteoblasts, responsible for bone growth. The bone depleting action of osteoclasts does not seem to be affected. Heavy drinkers who quit using alcohol generally regain their osteoblast function, all other conditions being equal.

A study conducted in Barcelona, Spain, focused on a group of heavy drinkers with no significant liver disease. The lack of liver problems minimized the possibility that metabolic bone disorders were
caused by poor vitamin D absorption. Researchers noted increased blood calcium levels and reduced levels of parathyroid hormone, suggesting that alcohol has the primary effect of removing calcium
from bone and releasing it in the blood. However, they concluded that moderate use of alcohol does not seem to cause significant damage.

On the other hand, research by D. T. Felson and others in a Framingham, Massachusetts, study revealed that postmenopausal women drinking at least seven ounces per week (one drink per day) of alcohol had higher bone density at most sites than women drinking less than one ounce. They concluded that the alcohol increased their estrogen levels and this in turn reduced net bone loss. A slight but less significant advantage was also seen for male drinkers.

Another study by D. Hemenway and others showed that women over fifty who were both very thin and who consumed at least fifteen grams of alcohol per day were particularly susceptible to fractures. Thinness is already known to be a serious risk factor for osteoporosis, especially in women.

In spite of studies implying the apparent advantages of moderate alcohol consumption, the overall statistical picture shows that habitual alcohol intake is associated with decreased bone mass. Considering its general negative effect on metabolism, alcohol abuse (but not necessarily alcohol use) may combine with other risk factors to worsen imbalances in the bone renewal cycle.

Nevertheless, research results on this subject remain widely divergent and quite contradictory, some researchers reporting the positive effects of drinking on bone, others asserting the negative effects. It is important to clearly distinguish between alcohol use and abuse and to moderate its use. Although American cultural sensibilities often equate alcohol use with abuse, moderate drinking does not seem to be a significant risk factor for bone loss and osteoporosis.

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1. Osteoporosis And Menopause
2. Treatment For Osteoporosis

Even if people know what caused the fear, it doesn’t change the treatment. It’s what they do about it is that’s important. I’ve worked with more than 500 fearful fliers, and they basically fall into three categories.

The first includes people who have associated phobias. Claustrophobic individuals have a fear of confined spaces, so they can’s handle lifts or tunnels or that sort of thing. Others have a fear of heights or an obsessive fear of dying.

A second group of fearful fliers are people whose life situation has precipitated the phobia they were okay but suddenly things combined to overwhelm them. People in this group often develop their fear of
flying after a divorce or the death of a parent.

Women often experience it after they’ve had children: They feel all of the responsibility at once and develop a fear of dying and therefore leaving the children as orphans. For people in this group, there’s some sort of a buildup of environmental stress or a combination of events divorce, losing a job, whatever any one of which they could cope with on its own.

Yet, in combination, these events are the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The person goes into stress overload. And it just happens that they have to take a flight at that inopportune time. The third group of fearful fliers is made up of those who have had some sort of frightening or disturbing incident involving flying.

They’ve been in an emergency landing, have experienced severe turbulence, or have had a relative die in a plane crash. They feel the fear as a result of a real life incident involving a degree of real threat, and they need help to overcome that fear.

In spite of the differences between these groups, I honestly don’t believe it makes any difference where the fear comes from, because ultimately everybody has to learn to think and behave differently. Obviously, what they’ve been doing in relation to flying hasn’t been working.

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Pressure in certain directions, applied through the teeth to the alveolar bone, results in resorption of the bone, which is an actual dissolution; the bone elements are decalcified and carried off by the bloodstream.

Yet force applied to alveolar bone in other directions can serve to strengthen it. These same properties of alveolar bone can cause problems in adult life; resorption of the bone in response to certain pressures, chemical as well as mechanical, leads to periodontal disease, the most common cause of tooth loss.

In fact, a common feature of periodontal treatment is the reshaping of dentition to relieve destructive pressures on the bone while chewing. But the orthodontist is able to relocate teeth by exploiting these properties of alveolar bone.

By the use of orthodontic appliances, usually braces, the doctor creates a controlled pressure that causes a controlled resorption of the alveolar bone. As the bone is resorbed in response to the pressures generated by the braces, the tooth, guided by the appliance, moves into the space created by the resorption.

New bone then forms behind the tooth to fill in the space that has been vacated. This explains how the orthodontist can seem to move a tooth bodily through a block of solid bone. These procedures are not without risk, and care must be taken by the doctor.

In a young child, healing is quick and efficient, and new bone is rapidly formed to replace the resorbed bone. But as the individual gets older this process becomes less efficient, and the teeth must be moved more slowly, lest the new bone not form and the bony defect become permanent, seriously weakening the tooth.

In adults particularly, tooth movement should be done slowly and deliberately. Another risk associated with rapid tooth movement is resorption of the root of the tooth, leaving less root to hold the tooth in place. A competent orthodontist takes great care not to use excessive force or obtain too rapid tooth movement.

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