Hilary Beard's Blog http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/ Executive editor of Real Health and bestselling book author. Got comments or questions for Hilary? Email her at hilaryb@realhealthmag.com en Copyright 2008 Thu, 15 Nov 2007 21:07:06 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss How to Shop for a Doctor Chicago Tribune has run a great article on finding a new doctor. But you can't use the website they give you for checking your doctor's license unless you live in Illinois. I can't vouch for the reliability of HealthGuideUSA, but I was able to use it to find licensing information about several of my physicians.]]> http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/11/how_to_shop_for_a_doctor.html http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/11/how_to_shop_for_a_doctor.html Thu, 15 Nov 2007 21:07:06 -0500 Is Bed Rest During Pregnancy Beneficial? bed rest prescribed during pregnancy to prevent preterm labor.
"Each year in the United States, bed rest is prescribed for hundreds of thousands of pregnant women considered to be at increased risk for preterm delivery. The use of bed rest is based on two important assumptions: that it is effective in prolonging pregnancy and that it is harmless. Both assumptions are largely unsubstantiated."
Among the downsides? Bed rest may take a physical, mental and emotional toll on many women. Cons listed range from financial distress to the inability to take care of family responsibilties to atrophying muscle and bone. ]]> http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/11/is_bed_rest_during_pregnancy_b.html http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/11/is_bed_rest_during_pregnancy_b.html Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:51:14 -0500 New evidence of garlic's effectiveness Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. According to the Times's Well blog,
researchers show that eating garlic appears to boost our natural supply of hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide is actually poisonous at high concentrations — it’s the same noxious byproduct of oil refining that smells like rotten eggs. But the body makes its own supply of the stuff, which acts as an antioxidant and transmits cellular signals that relax blood vessels and increase blood flow.
Antioxidants help the body heal. The article explains how garlic can help fend off breast, prostate and colon cancers, protect the heart and may even lower cholesterol. Go here to read more. ]]> http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/10/fans_of_holistic_health_treatm.html http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/10/fans_of_holistic_health_treatm.html Sun, 21 Oct 2007 20:19:13 -0500 CNN story about alternative remedies Empowered Patient. ]]> http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/10/cnn_story_about_alternative_re.html http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/10/cnn_story_about_alternative_re.html Thu, 18 Oct 2007 20:51:38 -0500 Do Mammograms Have a Downside? here), there are downsides to getting the annual breast screening, from momentary discomfort during the boob-smooshing part to false-alarms leading to biopsies and other often-painful procedures to the risk that comes from radiation exposure. The American College of Physicians suggests that doctors review both the possible harms and benefits of getting a mammogram with female patients 40 to 49 years old. However, none of my doctors has ever suggested that there's a downside to having my breasts tested. Perhaps that's because my mother developed the disease and my doctors believe there's no downside of mammograms because I'm at higher risk. But I'm not certain that's the reason, since none of my doctors has ever mentioned that mammograms sometimes have undesirable consequences and until now I didn't know to ask. In the following article, published in the Journal of Family Practice, a physician provides fellow doctors with a simple sheet to help them discuss mammogram's potential pros and cons with their patients. Of note, the sheet differentiates between the risk incurred by black and white women, since black women are less likely to develop the disease than their white counterparts but are more likely to die of it -- and at a younger age. You may want to print this sheet out to help you have a more intelligent conversation the next time you visit your doctor. ]]> http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/10/do_mommograms_have_a_downside.html http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/10/do_mommograms_have_a_downside.html Wed, 17 Oct 2007 22:54:08 -0500 Steps I Take to Prevent Breast Cancer second-hand smoke can cause breast cancer. My father smoked. And while I know this is at odds with what some doctors might tell me, as far as I'm concerned, inhaling that same smoke--rather than the mere fact my mother died of the disease--is my primary risk factor for the disease of the known causes. Still, I've taken several steps to avoid her fate, by minimizing my exposure to the people, places and things that could make me sick. As we enter October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I'd like to share the preventive steps I've taken over the years. Some of the changes were easy to implement; I phased in others over years. Maybe you can implement these or other changes to reduce the likelihood you'll develop this devastating disease. • I don’t smoke; • I don’t take birth-control pills, which some, though not all, studies suggest might increase breast cancer risk; • I eliminated most high-fat foods, including red meat, from my diet, eating more poultry and fish instead; • I cut back on the two Margueritas I was known to down at Friday happy hours; today now I drink alcoholic beverages sparingly; • I exercise almost every day, typically walking; • The above activities help keep me at a healthy weight, since gaining 20-30 or more pounds after high school increases your risk • I increased my consumption of Vitamin D, whose deficiency, experienced by many Americans of African descent, may be linked to breast cancer; • I get my annual mammogram. • Just to play it safe, I swapped out my high-pressure “grind” in favor of less stressful work that I love. I pray, meditate and seek counseling as needed to minimize and effectively cope with stress. For more cancer-prevention tips, check out the American Cancer Society's risk factor fact sheet. ]]> http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/10/breast_cancer_prevention_steps_1.html http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/10/breast_cancer_prevention_steps_1.html Tue, 02 Oct 2007 22:57:20 -0500 Low-Cost Health Insurance Resource for New York State Residents Ithaca Health Alliance, based in Ithaca, New York, allows any citizen of New York State to purchase a minor-medical plan for a reasonable cost: $100 annually for adults and $50 for children. The benefit is designed to cover "everyday emergencies," he says, including such expenses as stitches, burns, broken bones, ambulance rides and some dental work. "Members are covered for those categories of medical emergencies anywhere in the world from any health provider," says Glover. "We usually pay bills overnight to the maximum specified." Members who are also Ithaca residents can obtain discounts from area health practitioners. What's more, they can seek care at their own free clinic, where services are actually free, and members can receive traditional medical as well as complementary and alternative procedures. To learn more about the Ithaca Health Alliance, go here. To support Philadelphia's fledgling co-op or to learn how to start a one in your community, visit HealthDemocracy.org. ]]> http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/05/lowcost_health_insurance_resou.html http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/05/lowcost_health_insurance_resou.html Wed, 09 May 2007 07:15:52 -0500 Resources if You're Un- or Underinsured HealthCareCoach.com. Advice on everything from finding affordable insurance to your rights under COBRA to getting your contraception covered by your group health plan. • InsureKidsNow.gov. Some 9 million children lack insurance; 16% of them are black. Unfortunately, while low- or no-cost children’s health insurance programs are available in every state, they can be difficult to identify because they go by different names. This website describes your rights and helps you identify resources in your area: You can also call 1-877-KIDS-NOW. • Medicaid. Children and young adults under age 21 who are on Medicaid automatically qualify for the Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnosis and Treatment program, a comprehensive plan designed to diagnose and treat health problems at an early age. To learn more about these benefits, click here. • Young adults. Most health-insurance plans will cover students until age 20-24 (in some states until 30)—but only if you alert your plan’s administrator. Before your child turns 18, inform your insurer if your child is still in high school or entering college. Some colleges offer their own plans, and some young adults qualify for COBRA. For more information, go here. • Reproductive health. Planned Parenthood offers contraception, STD screenings, sexual health counseling, breast and gyn exams to women and men at prices scaled to your income. For more information, go here http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/05/resources_if_youre_un_or_under.html http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/05/resources_if_youre_un_or_under.html Mon, 07 May 2007 07:04:18 -0500 Oprah Reviews Rolfing alternative treatments. First up, rolfing, one of my favorite complementary health modalities. I like to describe rolfing as the soft-tissue equivalent of chiropractic work. Just as a chiropractor realigns your bones, a rolfer realigns and reorganizes your muscles and the other soft tissues in your body. Now, I’ll be honest: rolfing is an investment. It often costs $150/per 60- to 75-minute session. Ideally, you’ll get 10 sessions, during which your entire body is realigned. Ka-ching! But it’s worth it. I’m convinced that it’s changed my life and that I am aging differently because of it. I first got rolfed in 1996, when I awakened one morning to discover that my right heel felt to painful to step on. I limped around on it for a couple of days, thinking I had injured it while playing beach volleyball the night before. But it didn’t go away. So I made an appointment with a podiatrist—a foot doctor—who told me that I had bad bunions, and that the bunions were causing problems in my heel. (I'd upload a picture of my feet so you can see them, but I fear that they'll end up on some foot-fetish website!) His prescription: a cortisone steroid shot to ease the inflammation, a $500 orthotic device to improve my foot function, and surgery to correct my bunions. Hmm… Well, I do have bunions—but not bad ones; black people know bunions! And while the cortisone shot eliminated the pain—at least temporarily—his explanation of bunions as the root cause of my discomfort didn’t make sense to me. If bunions were the cause, I reasoned, I would have experienced discomfort that had gradually worsened over time. Instead, the pain had developed overnight. I knew that doctors make recommendations based on what they know about. Podiatrists’ training includes prescribing orthotics and doing foot surgery. But they aren’t necessarily knowledgeable about other approaches. I got the orthotic device—ka-ching!—but felt that bunion surgery would have left me worse off. Being an informed consumer of medical services, I didn’t do everything the doctor ordered; I sought out alternative solutions. Enter rolfing, which I had first learned of in 1990 and had avoided, since I was told that it’s painful. Well, not exactly. Rolfing is only uncomfortable to the extent that you are holding stress in your body. But I get ahead of myself; I’ll explain more later. So I made an appointment with a rolfer. He asked me to strip down to my underwear (you don’t have to) and walk around the room. As I walked, he observed that there was something unnatural about my gait and that it was originating in my left ankle. “You’re limping,” he told me. He was right. I had broken my left ankle 20 years earlier and, in spite of a lot of physical therapy and strengthening exercises, it hadn’t felt right since. I had even asked people if they thought I was limping and they would tell me no. But I had known better, and now the rolfer was confirming my suspicions. “You’re not extending properly when you push off of your left foot,” he told me. “That’s setting off a chain reaction in your legs and hips. One of your hips is higher than the other. I suspect that the answer to the pain in your right heel begins in your left foot. If you don’t mind, I’d like to begin there.” That immediately made sense. While rolfing is bodywork, it isn’t anything like massage. A masseuse rubs and kneads your muscles; a rolfer works surgically using an individual finger, a fist, a forearm and occasionally an elbow, focusing on one muscle at a time. My rolfer began in my left ankle, where, I realized for the first time muscles deep inside my feet and ankle were very tender and sore. Then he worked up my calf, where with one finger he pushed along one muscle that ran from my ankle to my knee. I was surprised to discover that it, too, was sore. He manipulated something in my knee, then moved to my thigh, which was tender, then to my hip and buttock, which also had soreness deep down. At that point he moved across to my right side, where he worked first on my right hip and buttock, then down my thigh and into my calf. Then he was done. “Aren’t you going work on my heel?” I asked. “I don’t think I need to,” he replied. “Why don’t you walk around?” When I got up, the pain was gone and I haven’t experienced it since. At the end of the session, when I went to put on my shoes, he told me I’d need to throw out my orthotics. “But I paid $500 for them!” “They will lock your feet into the painful position,” he said. “I just freed you of the pain. Why would you put yourself back in it?” His explanation kind of made sense, but I wasn't convinced. My motherwit told me not to throw out something I paid $500 for. So I held onto them for years. But I never needed them—I never experienced any pain again! My second experience with rolfing occurred after my mother died. When she became seriously ill, I would find myself clenching my body, often my buttocks. Eventually, I developed a soreness in my right quadriceps (the back of the thigh), from clutching my muscles as I drove to the hospital. By now, I knew that stress can kill you. So while my mother was dying (I would never have said that out loud at the time, but I suspected that that was what was happening), I invested in a weekly massage to get the tension out of my body. But while the massage helped, the tightness returned within a day or so, and massage never removed the cramp in the back of my leg. After mommy died, I decided to invest in the entire 10-session series as a gift to myself. Each rolfing session focuses on a different part of your body. Session 2, I believe, focused on my spine. All I know is that when I came out of the appointment, I was a full inch taller than I was when I went in. The treatment had removed compression in my spine that had developed during my long commutes to work and from sitting so much. It realigned the muscles so that they pulled my spine straight. Only one session was uncomfortable—the session where he worked on my chest. And, I must admit, that session was extremely painful. But it wasn’t because my rolfer was hurting me; it was because I was hurting within myself. When my rolfer tapped lightly on my sternum, the bone that runs down the center of your chest, I cried out in pain. He was barely touching me but it hurt like heck! “You’re holding a lot of tension in your chest,” he told me. “Do you smoke?” “No, but I’ve been having trouble breathing at night,” I told him. “Ever since my mother died, if I sleep on my back, I wake up choking in the middle of the night. I feel like I’m choking—it’s almost like I’ve stopped breathing (Note: I now know that this is a classic sign of sleep apnea).” “You can’t breathe,” he told me. “Your ribs are compressed very tightly--like a smoker’s. There’s not enough room for your lungs to expand. You’re not getting enough oxygen.” He asked me to breathe deeply while he literally pulled apart my breastplate and made more space in my chest cavity. This hurt. A lot. But it wasn’t because what he was doing was so awful; it was because my muscles were all in spasm. I had to deep-breathe for a minute or two while he worked with the area. When he was done, I felt my lungs expand and oxygen rush into my body. Then I burst into tears. I cried and cried and cried. All the tears that I had suppressed because I hadn’t wanted to fall out at my mother’s funeral because it had been important to me to speak. Tears I hadn’t cried because there had been family business to tend to. Tears I hadn’t cried because I was tired of crying—my father had died just 5 years earlier and I had grieved so much then. Tears, I now learned, that were literally choking me. That night, I got a good night’s sleep for the first time in a long time. Not only did I rest through the night, I didn’t wake up feeling like I had stopped breathing. In a later session, he removed the spasm from my thigh. I had my body back—free from the stress of the trauma I had experienced and was holding in my body. Stress I now know can poison you. This is why I tell people that rolfing has literally saved my life. To find a rolfer, go here. Please be patient if the rolfer doesn't immediately return your call. They're probably swamped with the crush of Oprah viewers. ]]> http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/04/oprah_reviews_about_rolfing.html http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/04/oprah_reviews_about_rolfing.html Sun, 29 Apr 2007 07:49:55 -0500 Moving in the Right Direction rolfing appointments to help my broken arm heal (see previous posting). Comparing my pre- and post-rolfing PT experiences is like contrasting night to day. Prior to being rolfed, my physical therapy sessions caused me to feel as though some of my muscles were out of alignment and that several stretches I was being led through were hurting rather than helping me. Now that my rolfer has realigned my muscles and reestablished their right relationships, I can tell the PT is helping me. There is no more unnatural crunching and scraping as my arm moves through normal motions. A stretch feels like, well…a stretch—it isn’t necessarily easy, but it isn’t painful, it isn’t uncomfortable, and I don’t feel like I’m injuring myself. Although it wasn’t covered by my insurance and I had to pay for the pricey treatments out of my own pocket, investing in an alternative treatment in addition to physical therapy was clearly the perfect choice for me. Wishing you good health, Hilary ]]> http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/03/alls_well_that_ends_well.html http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/03/alls_well_that_ends_well.html Thu, 29 Mar 2007 22:18:45 -0500 Honoring My Inner Wisdom rolfing sessions—about 6 so far though we’re not done yet. Rolfing is a form of bodywork that I can best describe as the soft-tissue equivalent of chiropractic care. Just as a chiropractor realigns your spine, a rolfer realigns your muscles. My rolfer told me that because my arm had been held captive in an unnatural position while I was in the splint, my upper back, arm and shoulder muscles had been pulled way out of alignment. Not only that, because some of the muscles had atrophied, now the relationships between them were incorrect. The weak muscles were no longer working in balance with the strong muscles. Consequently, my muscles were no longer coordinated with each other. This muscular disorganization even caused my sacroiliac joint to be pulled out of alignment, making it painful to walk. As my rolfer moves my muscles into alignment and right relationship with each other, motion I have been unable to achieve during my PT sessions immediately returns. It isn’t forced; it isn’t painful; it’s natural. This experience has taught me several important lessons: 1) I should always honor my inner wisdom even when I’m scared and an “authority figure” is pressing me. 2) Traditional medicine has many strengths -- in this case the X-rays that helped doctors diagnose and evaluate the break, my orthopedist’s opinion that I did not need surgery, and some of my PT, which has proven useful. But it also has limitations. 3) When conventional medical approaches don’t work for me, there will be times when I will need to fend for myself to find alternatives that work. 4) Just because a healing treatment isn’t covered by my insurance doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work or that it can’t help me. But to benefit from it, I may need to dig into my own pocket. 5) I joyfully invest in my wardrobe or my home décor or vacations, so I will gladly invest in my health and wellbeing. Finally, I must acknowledge that though for years I did not have health insurance, I do have it now and a savings account to boot. As a result, doctor’s appointments, physical therapy and nontraditional approaches like rolfing are options for me. They are not options for everyone. All human beings deserve high quality healthcare that is both affordable and accessible. Of course, this is not the case. I support political candidates who believe in universal healthcare and encourage you to, as well. In good health, Hilary ]]> http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/03/this_past_thanksgiving_weekend.html http://blogs.realhealthmag.com/HilaryBeard/2007/03/this_past_thanksgiving_weekend.html Thu, 29 Mar 2007 13:50:12 -0500