2 Points For Eliminating Lower Back and Hip Pain

Lower back and hip pain are common complaints among older adults with a wide range of underlying causes. Legs aside, the hips are the most important weight-bearing parts of the body that provide support and allow us to stand upright and move in all directions. However, lift something that is too heavy, twist the wrong way, strain your back muscles and you are in a world of pain. The pain can be simply a dull throbbing, a burning sensation or tingling that continues over a period of time. Or it could be sharp waves of pain pulsating upon movement. When looking for a way to treat the momentary pain on the spot, many people consider alternative medicine.

According to WebMD, acupressure is the ancient Chinese medical practice used “to promote relaxation and wellness and to treat disease.” It is often thought of as simply acupuncture without the needles. Acupressure is the application of pressure, or massage, of key pressure points on your body to help restore health and balance. Hundreds of acupressure points exist within the human body, and although some of the benefits of the points overlap, each point accomplishes something unique, too.

Acupuncture Points for Lower Back Pain Relief

There are 2 acupuncture points that can help you relieve your lower back pain. They are B48 and GB30, as presented on the image below.

Massaging the GB30 is supposed to lessen hip pain, pain in the buttocks, lower back pain, sciatica, muscle spasms and hip joint pain. It also helps in relieving leg pain, lumbar pain and hemiplegia.

Massaging B48 should lessen hip pain, sciatica and pain in the sacral area. Take note that often the B48 points can be very sensitive and inflamed if you are already experiencing back pain, and care should be used when massaging them. Massaging B48 is also helpful in treating diarrhea and diabetes.

Locating the GB30 and B48 points on the body

GB30 is also known as the Jumping Round point. This point can be located by moving three-quarters into gluteal muscles from the middle of the sacrum. It is located between the sacrum and greater trochanter.

B48 is a local acupressure point for hip pain. In some literature it is mentioned as B53. This point is also known as the Bladder Vitals and it is located 3.0 chon to the side of the sacrum, right in the middle of the gluteal muscles of the buttocks.

What Else to Do to Reduce Lower Back Pain?

When dealing with lower back pain it’s often useful to apply ice pack on the affected area to lessen the inflammation. Continuing to move around helps prevent tightening of the muscles and muscle spasms.

Stretching and exercising the muscles around the sore area, like we demonstrate in this article, is a great way to strengthen them and can help in reducing and preventing lower back pain. Avoid wearing high heels (above an inch) as this will improve your posture and your lower back condition. Tummy sleeping and lifting incorrectly may also contribute to your back pain.

Sometimes light stretching and a little massage may be all that’s necessary to alleviate the discomfort you experience.

This article originally appeared on www.thehealthsciencejournal.com

https://www.thehealthsciencejournal.com/press-2-points-near-hips-eliminate-lower-back-pain-hip-pain-sciatica/

Feeling Sleepy? Have a Nap. It's Good For you!

Here's a very valid case to have a power nap. Experts say an after-lunch snooze is good for you and your productivity.

If you’ve ever felt the need to rest your head on your work desk to secretly get a few minutes of post-lunch shut-eye while the boss wasn’t watching, it turns out you’re not lazy or disinterested. In fact, you are very normal.

According to Moira Junge, sleep psychologist and member of the Sleep Health Foundation, we were designed to require an afternoon kip to get through the day.

“We are all pre-programmed to need a little nap in the afternoon, explains Junge. “What happens with our body’s sleep mechanisms is that we have a post-lunch dip in our system and have a propensity to sleep.”

Junge explains the ‘post-lunch dip’ in our 24-hour circadian rhythm is like a sleepy switch that just flicks on in the afternoon. It’s independent of what we eat and of the amount we’ve slept the night before. This dip also gets repeated at night around 11pm and is the reason why some of us ‘crash out’ around that time.

“We are all pre-programmed to need a little nap in the afternoon. What happens with our body’s sleep mechanisms is that we have a post-lunch dip in our system and have a propensity to sleep.”

But, says Junge, what’s unique about this afternoon napping signal is that it’s temporary. It lasts 30 minutes to 1.5 hours before we go back to feeling alert again.

“If you don’t get an opportunity for sleep, say if you are at work, you can cycle through this dip quickly as your body’s systems will rise again, with or without a sleep if you can just manage to stay awake through it.”

Professor Leon Lack from the School of Psychology at Flinders University is pro-power napping and says if we can, we should. He reminds me that our need to nap in the afternoon is the reason why siestas are an accepted practice in many countries and explains that napping is a natural human habit dating back hundreds of years.

“We’ve become so fixed in our cultural habits of having a single nighttime sleep,” Prof Lack tells SBS. “This idea is a reasonably recent cultural adaptation from the industrial revolution and because of the advent of electric lights.

“Over 300 years ago, when most people were rural farmers, you probably had naps in the middle of the day and stayed up a little later at night but only so long as the fires burned in your house.”

So let’s say one day, our workplaces radically changed to become pro-napping zones. How long a kip should we have on our desk before the alarm rings? Junge says the trick is for the nap to be very short: 20 minutes is ideal, with time dedicated for you to fall asleep.

“If you sleep more than 20 minutes, you get into that deep slow wave of sleep where you can’t hear anything or wake up and don’t know where you are,” says Junge.

“That’s because the first 20 minutes of sleep are very light, stage one and two of sleep, and if you sleep for longer, you are more likely to have sleep inertia, where you wake up and feel worse or take a long time to ‘wake up’ and get going. Longer naps might also affect your sleepiness and ability to sleep at night. So short, sharp naps are recommended.”

Prof Lack goes even further to suggest that the average adult should be having 10 minute power naps in the afternoon, as needed, with a few minutes added to fall asleep.

He co-conducted research in 2006 comparing no naps with naps of five, 10, 20 and 30 minute durations. The 10-minute adult nap gave participants the biggest rise in alertness with the minimal amount of post-nap grogginess.

“With the 20 and 30 minutes sleeps, performance was impaired a little bit immediately after waking up for the first half hour or so,” says Prof Lack. “But the 10 minute naps produced significant benefits in cognitive performance.”

"Stop the struggle and have a quick kip so you can be more productive at work for the rest of the day.”

The moral of this dreamy story, Prof Lack suggests, is that if someone is really struggling with sleepiness in the afternoon, it’s likely they will continue on struggling for up to 90 minutes until they come out of ‘that dip’.

“So managers should find out what’s better for the worker. Is it better for them to be below par at work for 1.5 hours [during their afternoon dip] and potentially make mistakes? Or allow them 15 minutes – five minutes to relax and fall asleep and 10 minutes of napping – to increase the productivity for the remainder of that 1.5 hours?

“Napping could be considered beneficial if you are struggling with sleepiness in the day, commonly in afternoon and have a decline in alertness. Stop the struggle and have a quick kip so you can be more productive at work for the rest of the day.”

Both experts stress that this advice is general and that sleep needs vary according to individual needs and circumstances. They recommend that people with sleep disorders consult a GP and, if needed, see a sleep specialist.

This article originally appeared on sbs.com.au and was written by Yasmin Noone

A Probiotic That Lasts?

The bacteria in yogurts have largely failed to live up to their hyped health benefits, but there are other microbes that might.

Imagine that you take some North American mice, breed them in captivity for many generations, and then release them in small numbers into a South American jungle. Smart money says that these house-trained creatures wouldn’t last very long. And yet, this is effectively what we’re doing whenever we buy and consume probiotics.

These products — yogurts, drinks, capsules, and more — contain bacteria that supposedly confer all kinds of health benefits. But most of the bacterial strains in probiotics were chosen for historical reasons, because they were easy to grow and manufacture. They aren’t A-listers of the human gut, and they aren’t well-adapted to life inside us.

To make things worse, they’ve been effectively domesticated, having been reared in industrial cultures for countless generations. And they’re delivered at very low concentrations, outnumbered by the bacteria that already live inside us by hundreds or thousands of time.

A sound concept that doesn’t stick

That’s why studies have repeatedly shown that the bacteria in probiotics are more like tourists than tenants — they pass through without settling down. “You’re trying to establish organisms in an ecosystem to which they haven’t evolved,” says Jens Walter, from the University of Alberta. “They don’t possess the adaptations to be successful.”

That’s why probiotics don’t seem to have any effect on the make-up of the microbiome — the community of microbes that lives within us. It’s also why these products have been so medically underwhelming. The most discerning reviews suggest that they are useful for treating some kinds of infectious diarrhea, but little else.

And over the last decade, European Union regulators have been so unimpressed by the evidence behind probiotics that they banned every single health claim that appeared on these products’ packaging — including the word “probiotic” itself.

The concept is sound, though. We know that the bacteria in our microbiome are important for our health, and that changes in the microbiome have been linked to many conditions including inflammatory bowel disease, colorectal cancer, diabetes, and more. So it should be possible to improve our health by taking the right microbes. The problem is that we do so in a crude and naïve way. These are living things and we are ecosystems. You can’t just introduce the former into the latter and assume they’ll take hold. You need to know why they might succeed or fail. 

Unexpected results

That’s what Walter and his team have started to do. They focused on a specific strain of Bifidobacterium longum, which is a common, stable, and dominant part of the human gut. María Maldonado-Gómez, from the University of Nebraska, asked 23 volunteers to take daily doses of either B. longum or a placebo pill, and checked their stool for signs of the strain’s DNA.

In most of the volunteers, the bacterium disappeared within the first month or even the first week.  But in a third of them, it persisted, and for more than half a year in some cases. Unlike normal probiotics, this strain seemed to establish a permanent foothold.

“I never expected that,” says Walter. “Even with part of our core microbiome, I thought that our resident strains would outcompete the new one.”

In a way, they did. By comparing the volunteers’ microbiomes, Maldonado- Gómez showed that his B. longum strain was less likely to settle down if its new hosts already had B. longum strains of their own. That makes sense: Closely related microbes should be more similar, and thus more likely to compete for the same nutrients, resources, or living spaces. If many kinds of B. longum are already present, there are few niches for an incoming strain to fill.

Maldonado-Gomez also found that the ingested strain was more likely to wash out if a volunteers’ microbiome carried a few dozen particular bacterial genes, the vast majority of which are involved in breaking down carbohydrates and other nutrients. Again, this makes sense: If the native microbes are using these genes to digest whatever food is available, there’s nothing for an immigrant strain to eat.

These results show that it is possible to turn a swallowed microbe into a permanent part of the gut, and they hint at the type of factors that make for successful colonisation.

“I’m excited,” says Walter. “I think it really does show that we might be able to modulate gut ecosystems, by going in and establishing certain microbes. We didn’t look at health, and we’re still trying to identify what microbiome configurations are associated with disease. But if an individual misses or loses strains that are important for their health, it could be possible to redress that.” 

Ecosystem first

“The smart way to administer probiotics is to look at a person’s existing microbial ecosystem first,” says Emma Allen-Vercoe, from the University of Guelph. “Are all the engine parts present and running as they should?  If not, can we provide a missing part by giving a probiotic that possesses it? Can we predict how this newly introduced part will integrate into the engine?”

That’s a savvy and personalised approach to probiotics, with ecology at its heart — very different to the blundering, one-size-fits-all approach that companies currently take.

The success of this personalised approach depends on working out, on an individual basis, what niches in the gut are vacant and which strains are best at filling them. “But what if you could create a niche that only your strain could access?” asks Sean Gibbons, from MIT. Several scientists, he notes, are creating cocktails that contain both a probiotic microbe and a food source that only that microbe can eat — a so-called prebiotic.

“As long as the prebiotic was consumed in the diet, the probiotic would stick around,” says Gibbons. “If the prebiotic were removed, the probiotic would be washed out of the gut.”

Such a strategy might help to address concerns about giving people microbes that are specifically meant to persist in the body. Current probiotics have a fantastic safety record, but perhaps that’s because of their transience. If we switch to strains that are better colonisers, it might lead to unintended consequences.

Then again, there was no evidence of that in Walter’s study. The newcomer strain didn’t displace any of the volunteers’ native microbes, in the way that invasive species like fire ants or cane toads do. It didn’t affect the volunteers’ health, either.

Still, Walter worries that the use of better-colonising strains would lead to inappropriately harsh regulatory hurdles. He feels that the risks of ingesting core members of the microbiome are very small. “We’re already doing that with fecal transplants, and we introduced bacteria into our bodies all the time from our surroundings,” he says.

For now, such talk is moot, because the era of precision microbiome medicine still seems a long way off. “The findings need to be replicated in larger studies,” says Nadja Kristensen, from the University of Copenhagen. And while the study reveals why bacteria might colonise healthy humans, it’s unclear if the same principles would apply to sick people with disturbed microbiomes.

Walter’s study also looked at just one strain of B. longum, which is being developed by the Irish company Alimentary Health as a probiotic. Many other strains exist and they behave very differently.

“The company has another B. longum on the market, and they know for a fact that it doesn’t persist,” he says. “I would hope and anticipate that we’d see more studies that are similar to ours, using core members of the microbiome. We’re really just at the beginning.” 

By Ed Yong

Source: The Atlantic

How Your Social Life Changes Your Microbiome

Every hug, handshake, and hip-check sends the tiny communities that live inside us back and forth.

Social contact can clearly spread disease: That’s why we lean away from snotty hugs, tell sick colleagues to go home, and quarantine people during epidemics. But the germs behind infectious illnesses are but a tiny fraction of our full microbiome—the microbes that share our bodies. Most of these are harmless, perhaps even helpful. And they can hop between individuals, too.

A growing number of studies, including two recent ones with chimps and baboons, have shown that social interactions affect the composition of the microbiome. Through hugs, handshakes, and even hip-checks, we translate our social networks into microbial ones, transferring benign or beneficial microbes to our neighbors, and acquiring theirs in return.

This means that there’s a “pan-microbiome”—a meta-community of microbe species that spans a group of hosts. If you compare your microbiome to your private music collection, the pan-microbiome is like the full iTunes store, and every handshake is an act of file-sharing.

To study how social ties affect the microbiome, you’d ideally want to track people over long periods

There’s some evidence that humans share microbes through physical contact. In one study, people who share living quarters end up with similar microbes. In another, the skin microbes of opposing roller-derby teams converge during a game. But these were snapshots. To study how social ties affect the microbiome, you’d ideally want to track people over long periods—everything from the friends they hung out with to the bacteria in their poop. “You’d have to invade their privacy to an extent that most people probably wouldn’t put up with,” says Andrew Moeller from the University of California, Berkeley.

So instead, he turned to chimps.

Since Jane Goodall’s pioneering work in the 1960s, scientists have constantly observed the Kasakela chimpanzee community in Tanzania's Gombe National Park. They’ve recorded their interactions, and collected stool samples. Using some of this data, Moeller showed that the chimps’ gut microbes are mainly passed horizontally from peer to peer, rather than vertically from parent to child. Although they get their first microbes from their moms, these are eventually overwhelmed by those they pick up from friends.

During seasons when the chimps were more sociable, their microbiomes started to converge. And the most sociable individuals, those who spent most time grooming, touching, or otherwise hanging out with their peers, had the richest diversity of species in their guts.

"Our major exposures are probably each other"

Jenny Tung and Elizabeth Archie found similar trends among two groups of wild baboons in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park. Those that groomed each other more frequently ended up with more similar microbiomes. As a result, the two groups ended up with their own distinctive communities, even though they lived in overlapping areas and ate the same food. Their separate social networks carved a gulf between their microbial communities.

“These animals are eating food covered in dirt and drinking from muddy waterholes, but despite that, we saw signatures of contact with other animals,” says Archie. “You could argue that the effect would be even stronger in humans because we live in such sterile environments. Our major exposures are probably each other.”

These results have important implications. If chimps and baboons (and possibly humans) just inherited microbiomes vertically, they would naturally lose some members because of random events, like dietary upheavals. But if they pass microbes through contact, they ensure that species which disappear from an individual still exist within the wider pool—the pan-microbiome. (And with chimps, it's more like the pan-Pan­-microbiome.) “The propagation of microbes through social interaction may be one of the ways in which diversity is maintained in the microbiome over very long evolutionary timescales,” says Moeller.

The benefits of picking up helpful microbes might even have helped to drive the evolution of social living in the first place. This idea was proposed by Michael Lombardo in 2008; he predicted that if animals get microbes from their peers, they’re more likely to have a more complex social system that regularly brings them into close contact with their contemporaries.

The hypothesis makes intuitive sense and some creatures seem to fit the pattern well. By eating each others’ poop, bumblebees pick up microbes that protect them from parasites; termites do the same through anal licking, and both insects live in cooperative colonies. “Bees have distinct microbiomes, but asocial wasps don’t as much,” adds Moeller. “Primates are some of the most social mammals and have these very consistent microbiomes that track host lineages.”

Still, Lombardo’s hypothesis “is pretty much speculation at this point,” says Moeller. “We’d need to map degree of sociality to some measure of microbial diversity across the tree of life.”

By Ed Yong

 Source: The Atlantic