So Many Allergy Medications, So Little Time

Any time you approach your doctor or your pharmacist for help with the symptoms of an allergy, they'll offer you your pick from among a bewildering range of possible treatments. They have several antihistamines, corticosteroids, decongestants, combination drugs, natural remedies and so on for you to try at home. And yet, none of these allergy medications is a cure. They are just a way to control the situation and make your life livable. You just have to keep trying something until it works, and then stick with it for aslong as your body decides to have the allergy.

Most people will only take their allergy medications only when they actually have a problem. Experts these days though, feel that pretreatment is a much better way to go about it. When you know that you have an allergy and that your body reacts in a certain way to certain kinds of environment, there's really no reason to wait for everything to swell up and become itchy. You can just take the medicines you need before the symptoms begin to bother you.

Let's quickly run through a couple of the most popular allergy medications there are.

Antihistamines are just about the oldest and best-known allergy medications on earth. You even get them over-the-counter sometimes. Antihistamines, nasal sprays and eyedrops, for instance, are available without prescription. Several kinds of popular names for over-the-counter antihistamines - names like Allegra, Benadryl and Claritin, are ones everyone knows about.

Antihistamines work by making it difficult for your body to let those bothersome histamines loose on you. If you're wondering what histamines are, they are substances that your immune cells produce for no reason, when there's an allergy. The funny thing is, that if you are bothered by how antihistamines make you sleepy, you have to go to a doctor for a prescription for antihistamines that don't make you sleepy. You would think that they would regulate the sleepy stuff and not the stuff that just does its job.

It's hard to make your mind up about what kind of allergic reaction is the most bothersome. When you're all itchy and your eyes and nose won't stop running, it often seems like nothing could be worse than those. But when you have trouble breathing because your airways are all congested and constricted, it feels like you're fighting just to stay alive. Decongestants are some of the most important allergy medications around.

Decongestants work by shrinking swollen tissues in your airways. They also help your body produce less mucus. They can be really useful when you're in the middle of a full-blown liturgy attack. Doctors sometimes recommend that you take combinations - decongestants together with antihistamines, for instance. You don't have to take two pills though. They sell combinations over the counter - with names like a Allegra-D or Claritin-D.

Does Fertility Acupuncture Help?

You mustn't think that acupuncture is just something that dodgy practitioners in back alleys in Chinatown offer you. In some cases, acupuncture is accepted by mainstream medicine, too. Fertility acupuncture is one of those rare cases.

Now this is not to make you think that the medical community has tossed all traditional medical knowledge out the window in favor of acupuncture. Fertility acupuncture to the medical establishment, is only something that works in an assistive role. No doctor at this point believes that you can just accept acupuncture and it will help you get pregnant even if you're not using traditional fertility methods.

If you want to go with a few obscure studies, they do say that acupuncture can help on its own. Mainstream medicine though, only accepts acupuncture in a supporting role.

The science of acupuncture obtains its results in a rather unconventional way. According to the belief system in acupuncture, the body is filled with a kind of vital energy that they call Qi. Many diseases, they believe, merely occur when the body loses the plot on how to balance its energy. To help the body do this, acupuncturists locate energy hubs on the patient's body and try to redirect energy flow with those little needles.

It was only in the year 2002 that researchers discovered that acupuncture could quickly help in cases where women suffered from infertility. The research was done in Germany. Scientists there took up a group of 160 women who were in the process of getting treated with IVF, and tested them with fertility acupuncture. The results of the test were unequivocal. The research concluded that the women did get more easily pregnant with IVF, when they received, fertility acupuncture.

Ever since then, there's been quite a lot of research done on fertility research. They believe that acupuncture might help you relax your muscles, and that it might help the body send more blood to the uterus. The stress-relief benefits of acupuncture might help too, they say. All of these can certainly help a woman's attempts to become pregnant.

Even more surprising, they've found that fertility acupuncture can actually help with male infertility too. Of course, men don't have IVF or anything. You can't help them as they try to get pregnant. You can only treat a man in a general way to perhaps help sperm production,or motility. And this, acupuncture is said to be able to do.

Researchers have found that with regular acupuncture, men with fertility problems are able to produce better quality sperm – sperm is less damaged and more alive.

Do Old Time Remedies Really Work?

As an educated man, I sometimes cringe when my grandmother trots out some of her old time remedies for ailments and sores, because I don't believe they really do anything. I could be wrong, and after all, there is a reason that people did some of the things that they did back in those days, but there is no scientific evidence to back up those remedies, and some of them actually seem quite dangerous. I guess it all depends on who you ask.

One of the old time remedies that actually works is gargling salt water for a sore throat, and I have used this on a number of occasions. My grandmother told me about this when my throat was sore, and I could not believe how much better it felt. There again, however, there is an actual explainable reason that this method works, which is that the salt dries out and eventually kills off the bacteria in your throat that cause the infection. There have been times where that was all I did, and did not take any medication at all, and it eventually got rid of the problem.

On the other hand, one of the old time remedies that my grandmother swears by that I am absolutely terrified to try and categorically refuse to do so is use bleach to whiten your teeth. I remember a few years ago, I told her that I wanted to go and get my teeth cleaned, but was concerned because it had been a while since I had it done and I was worried it would be painful. My grandmother informed me that I should just use bleach, as that will get them even whiter than if I went to the dentist. I informed her that bleach was toxic, but this did little to dissuade her from her position.

Another one of her favorite old time remedies was using baking soda to treat a rash. As a little boy, I had a very severe rash under my arm and she mixed baking soda with water into a paste, and then brushed it over the rash generously! I screamed out in pain, and then rushed into the bathroom and turned on the shower and ran it under the cold water for about 10 minutes before it finally stopped burning, and the rash was worse than before when I came out!

I do not trust old time remedies for the most part, because as I said, there is not scientific proof in most cases that these things work. I have learned the hard way on a couple of them, and I think from now on, I will just avoid them entirely!

The Best Music For Sleep

I sometimes like to listen to music to help me get to sleep, and I have a whole collection of songs and genres I like to play. What is funny is that I have a couple of friends who do the exact same thing, but their selections are much different from my own, and it got me to thinking about the best music for sleep and what it would actually be. As the old saying goes, different strokes for different folks, and I guess the best music for sleep just depends upon who you ask.

One of my favorite songs that I like to listen to when I am trying to go to sleep is ironically entitled Sleepers Awake, by Johann Sebastian Bach. It is such a mellow piece of classical music and so beautifully composed, that even when I am awake and it comes on I immediately start to become drowsy and have to get up and stretch a bit. This is probably the best music for sleep for me, because I can always fall asleep whenever I hear it and I never grow tired of playing it before I go to bed, but I do like some variety.

I am not sure if this works for everyone, and it could just be the Texas in me, but some of the older country and western ballads that do not really have a lot of louder dynamics can usually put me to sleep. I am not sure if it is their voices or the music itself, but I have always found this type of music to be very relaxing and soothing. Even more modern songs, like "Chiseled in Stone" by Vern Gosdin, for me, is some of the best music for sleep, and I will often play a compilation of country songs that I created just for that purpose.

On the other hand, a good friend of mine swears that the best music for sleep for him is classic rock. He said that he can put on a local oldies station and be asleep in no time. He attributes that to the fact that he grew up with a lot of the songs that he listens to before he is going to bed and said he thinks it just takes him back to his childhood where he always felt safe and comfortable. Another friend of mine swears by light jazz when he is trying to get to sleep.

I guess the best music for sleep just depends on what types of music a person likes for each different occasion. I know that soft classical and country can usually do it for me, but for other people, it may be something else.

How To Increase Intelligence

You've heard the "Use it or lose it" exhortation often enough, applied in relation to your brain. You also hear it applied to your body and your muscles. You have seen it applied to your skills. It's actually true, and you can practically apply it to everything - even riding a bicycle. If you come back to a bicycle for the first time in 10 years, you won't have lost all of it; but you will have lost most of it. You'll be quite unsteady. Well, the opposite is true too. If you use it, you boost it. The best way to increase intelligence is to use your nut in all kinds of productive ways. But quite apart from this, let's look at a few ways you can help yourself be smarter.

Know how they say that children these days have all their time scheduled for them and they just don't have the time to just sit and dream like children used to at one time? Well, it's not just children who are like that.

You're like that yourself. If you schedule the heck out of your life, if you're working all the time, it costs you your intelligence.  know where the most creative ideas come from? They come when you have the time to stand and stare, to reflect. We're not talking meditation here either.

You just want to go back to a simpler time. When there was just unscheduled time and you didn't have anything planned. Just take a lazy walk, roll in the grass or something. And do this sometimes, not all the time. You'll give your mind time to rebuild itself.

Reading will help you increase intelligence. Just because you can get lots of new ideas (even if that is something to consider). It's just that when you read good, challenging books, or even high-quality novels, you develop your ability to use words better.

Know how you think better? You think better when you have the words to put things together with. When you read good books, you come by all kinds of new words and sentence bits by which to put new thoughts together. Try it. New words and new sentence constructions are the building blocks of new ideas. Compliments on how your intelligence seems to rise by the day are guaranteed.

The opposite of reading good books is - don't expose yourself to bad ones. Don't read comic books, and you don't do anything that's equivalent to that - don't watch TV. Comic books, TV, suspense thrillers - all of these are mental chewing gum. It looks like your mind is doing something, but it isn't. That's why when you've finished doing any one of these things, you don't feel energized. You feel drained. Don't do anything like that.

And finally - the key to help you increase intelligence - exercise. Yes, it's rather counterintuitive. Why use your muscles when you know, you're all brain? You should do this because your body is designed for it. Treat your body in an unnatural way and no good can come of it.

Some Good Tips For Falling Asleep

From time to time, I will get insomnia, and it seems that no matter how late I go to bed, I just can't get to sleep. I decided to tackle this problem head-on and discovered some viable options. I have a number of good tips for falling asleep now that have worked for me, and while I am not sure that they will work for everyone, they might be worth trying. The worst that could happen is that they don't work and some alternative option will have to be sought out.

One of my first tips for falling asleep is making sure that you get enough exercise in the day. I have a job where I work primarily from behind a desk and sometimes neglect to do the exercise that I should do. The good and bad thing about it is that I can almost always tell when this happens because I have insomnia that will only go away once I start working out regularly again. Most of the time, this is the issue, and after a few workouts, it goes away. This is not always the case, however, and sometimes I have to resort to other means.

I have also had problems with leaving work at work, or fretting about all that I have to do the next day at work and having insomnia then. One of the tips for falling asleep when I can tell that this is the case is making sure that I leave work at work. There is nothing that can be done about work until you are actually at work, and all of the worrying and lack of sleep in the world is not going to make anything better. As a matter of fact, it will likely make things worse, because you will probably not have the energy to meet your problems at work effectively.

One of my other good tips for falling asleep that I often recommend is reading. This is kind of a tough one, because if you start to read a really good book, it might be hard to put down. If you read a boring book, however, you might lose interest quickly and find your mind starting to wonder again. The key is to find a book that will hold your interest, but at the same time allow you to become tired and be ready to fall asleep. That is a way that has always helped me, and I would recommend it to anyone.

These are some tips for falling asleep that I have found useful and try to relate to others who are having the same problem. I am not saying they will work for everyone, but they sure have worked for me!