Breeze Health

06/11/2024

Runners Update.
After running 26km this weekend, as you can imagine, sore legs. The answer stretch. Every day, do a 5 minute routine. What to do is the question. Phils 3 Tips,
1. Swing the arms round 10 times forward and ten times backwards
2. Breath in stretch up and breath out bend towards toes , 10 times and ten deep breaths.
3. Swing the legs, (support as needed) but swing back and forward 10 times. Like a pendulum on a grandfather clock.
Hope you feel as great as I do :)

04/11/2024

Osteopathy and IBS: Can Osteopathic Treatment Ease IBS Symptoms?
Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) affects up to 15% of the population (Canavan et al., 2014), with symptoms like abdominal pain, bloating, and disrupted bowel habits. As the link between the gut-brain axis, stress, and musculoskeletal imbalances becomes clearer, osteopathy has gained attention as a potential approach for managing IBS.

How Osteopathy Can Help IBS Patients
Osteopathy focuses on reducing physical restrictions, promoting blood flow, and balancing the nervous system to enhance the body’s natural healing. For IBS, osteopathic care may improve symptoms by easing muscle and joint tension around the abdomen and pelvis, promoting stress relief, and enhancing overall gut function.
Research on osteopathy for IBS is still emerging, but studies suggest benefits in alleviating IBS symptoms. For instance, a 2015 study found significant reductions in pain and bloating in IBS patients following osteopathic treatment. Techniques that stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system (the “rest and digest” response) may also help in relaxing the gut and easing symptoms.

Mechanisms of Action
1. Nervous System Balance:
2. Diaphragm and Abdominal Release: By releasing muscle tension around the diaphragm and abdomen, osteopathy may relieve abdominal pain and improve digestion.
3. Improved Circulation and Lymphatic Drainage: Osteopathy boosts blood flow and lymph drainage, reducing inflammation and aiding digestive comfort.
Key Osteopathic Techniques for IBS
Osteopaths use techniques like visceral manipulation (gentle organ adjustments), soft tissue release around the abdomen, diaphragmatic release, and sacral manipulation to relieve tension and support better nerve function in the gut.
Conclusion
While not a cure, osteopathy may complement traditional IBS treatments by addressing physical and stress-related aspects of IBS. With a holistic focus on relaxation and structural alignment, osteopathy offers IBS patients a gentle, natural approach to symptom management.

27/09/2024

23/07/2024

More Good news. Love Scientista nd a useful post about how to keep your back ache away for longer.

People who regularly have lower back pain go longer without the discomfort if they incorporate walks into their weekly routines

09/07/2024

Sad news today. Denis , one of the many brave Combat Medics we treated just 25 days ago, was killed yesterday by a Russian military offensive. He gave his life to save others. Love to him and his cause, his family, and those that he touched with his heart.

03/07/2024

As some of you know, Philip was part of the Hands with Heart Foundation (https://handswithheartfoundation.org/) treating front-line Ukraine Combat Medics. Three Osteopaths, Philip from the UK, Burt from Belgium and Jorge from Spain spent some time in Sweden working with these amazing men and women. (they were flown from Ukraine for ten days) More info to come. Sad to report that today a British charity founder who worked for other combat medics Peter Fouche was killed in the Ukraine. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp38xlkk5pzo.

04/05/2024

Our Last Tip from M Mosley.
We will talk about, sleep, olive oil, light and other factors another time, but for now. MYTH 10
Diet Myth 10. Doing exercise helps you lose weight
It seems incredibly obvious. Do some exercise, burn some calories, lose weight. But that isn’t what actually happens. Part of the problem is that fat is very energy dense. You would need to run for about 36 miles to burn off a single lb of fat. The other problem is that people often reward themselves for doing exercise by having a treat. If you run for a mile you will burn about 120 calories; but if you then decide to eat a small bar of chocolate, you will consume 240 calories. There are lots of benefits to be had from doing exercise, but losing weight is unlikely to be one of them. That said, exercise is a great way of stopping you putting weight back on once you’ve lost it.
Now the above myth needs to be looked into.

We disagree here, see Tim Ferris work and a host of others, on metabolic involvement of exercise on sugars and subsequently weight.

03/05/2024

The Fast 800 diet myths from M Mosley,
Diet Myth 9. Following a low fat diet is a good way to shed pounds
‘Go on a low-fat diet’ has been the advice of dieticians and doctors for the last half century, despite remarkably little evidence that such regimes are effective. The Women’s Health Initiative, for example, was a massive study that began back in 1991. Approximately 48,800 women were randomly allocated to either a low-fat diet or to a control group (‘stick to what you are doing’). At the end of eight years those on a low-fat diet were just .88 of a pound lighter than the control group and there was no difference in rates of heart disease or cancer. So what should you eat? Choose a Mediterranean diet, rich in fruit and vegetables, but also olive oil, nuts and the occasional glass of red wine. It’s a far better way to lose weight and reduce your risk of heart disease than a low-fat diet.

02/05/2024

Diet Myth 8. Don’t weigh yourself more than once a week
Only 2 more myths to go from M Mosley but enjoying them so far.
There is a widely held belief that you shouldn’t weigh yourself more than once a week because then you will become overly obsessed with your weight. Well, I weigh myself several times a week, sometimes more and I have science on my side In a recent study they followed 40 people attending a weight loss programme. Some weighed themselves daily, others weekly, monthly or hardly at all. What they found was that the more often people weighed themselves the more weight they lost.

01/05/2024

Diet Myth 7. Juicing is a good way to lose weight.
There are juice diets out there promising that you can lose “7lbs in 7 Days” and on a pure juicing diet that can certainly happen. But most of that weight loss is going to be water. The reason is that your body keeps a special store of emergency fuel locked up in your muscles and liver in a form called glycogen. This also binds water. When you stop eating your body burns through the glycogen stores, releasing the water. Not surprisingly, once you start eating normally, your body will replenish its water and glycogen stories and much of the weight will come back on.
Let me talk about Juicing another time as well, as for some conditions juicing is brilliant.

30/04/2024

Diet Myth 6
Eat or dont eat, that is teh question......Eating breakfast is important if you want to avoid putting on weight.
We are often told that eating a good breakfast is a simple way to control your weight. If you skip breakfast, then you will get hungry later in the day and snack on high calorie junk food. Eating breakfast revs up your metabolism, preparing you for the day. It seems a plausible suggestion but is it true? To test this idea researchers got 300 overweight volunteers and asked those who normally skip breakfast to eat breakfast, while those who routinely ate breakfast were asked to skip it. They weighed the volunteers beforehand and 16 weeks later. So what actually happened? Well, the breakfast skippers who had made themselves eat breakfast lost an average of 0.76kgs. While the breakfast eaters, who had spent 16 weeks skipping breakfast, lost an almost identical amount, an average of 0.71kgs. The researchers concluded that, contrary to what is widely believed, a recommendation to eat breakfast “had no discernible effect on weight loss in free-living adults who were attempting to lose weight”.

29/04/2024

Diet Myth 5. It is better to eat several small meals a day rather than a couple of large ones. (thanks Micheal Moseley)
A common belief is that if you spread out your food into lots of small meals this will increase your metabolic rate, keep you less hungry and help you lose weight. Well, in a recent study, researchers at the Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine in Prague decided to test this idea by feeding two groups meals with the same number of calories but taken as either two or six meals a day. Each group ate around 1,700 calories a day. Despite eating the same number of calories the “two meal a day” group lost, on average, 1.4kg more than the snackers and about 1.5inches more from around their waists. They also felt more satisfied and less hungry than those eating little and often.

27/04/2024

Day 4, Diet Myth 4. (Thanks to Moseley once more)
You need to eat regularly to keep your blood sugars up
In the study I mentioned above they also measured the volunteers’ blood sugar levels. Although these levels did fall after three days without any food, they still remained well within the normal range. At the same time the levels of fat in their blood shot up, showing that their bodies had switched into major fat burning mode. Eating lots of small meals simply feeds your hunger. See next myth.

26/04/2024

Day 3,
Diet Myth 3. Starvation Mode
One of the most popular dieting myths is ‘starvation mode’, the claim that if you stop eating your metabolic rate immediately slows down as your body tries to conserve your fat stores. In a recent experiment researchers took 11, healthy volunteers and asked them to stay in a metabolic chamber (a room where they precisely measure your metabolic rate) living on nothing but water. By day 3 their metabolic rates had risen by 14%. This was probably due to a rise in a hormone called noradrenaline, which is known to burn fat. If they had continued then, I’m sure, the volunteers’ metabolic rates would eventually have fallen, not least because they would have begun to lose significant amounts of weight. But, in the short term, there is no evidence that starvation mode is anything other than a myth.

24/04/2024

Agin taken from M Mosley...Day 2, Myth 2.
Diet Myth 2. It is important, before you start dieting, to set realistic weight goals.
This is another of those very popular beliefs which simply isn’t supported by any science. In a study, “Weight loss goals and treatment outcomes among overweight men and women” they asked nearly two thousand overweight men and women about their goals before they started on a weight loss programme. They followed these people for two years and found the that women who had ‘less realistic goals’ were the ones who lost the most weight. In other words, it was better to set a big goal rather than say, “I’ll try to lose a few pounds”. For men there was no link, one way or the other, between how realistic their goals were and how much weight they lost.

23/04/2024

For the next few days I am going to borrow from Micheal Moseley Myths of diet. So lets start today.
Diet Myth 1. It is better to lose weight slowly and steadily, rather than rapidly
There is a widespread belief that if you lose weight fast then you will put it on even faster. But is it true? In a recent review article titled “Myths, Presumptions and Facts about Obesity” in the prestigious medical journal, The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers put this claim firmly into the “myths” category. After looking at numerous studies which have compared rapid with slow and steady weight loss, they concluded that you would do better to lose it quickly rather than slowly. A recent Australian study backs up these claims. Researchers took 200 obese volunteers and put half of them on a low calorie diet (less than 800 calories a day) for 12 weeks. The other half were asked to cut their calories by 500 a day (enough to lose around a pound a week). They were asked to do this for 36 weeks. There was a very high drop-out rate among the steady dieters: less than half made it to the end of the 36 weeks. Most said they gave up because they were frustrated by the slow rate of progress. By comparison, more than 80% of those in the rapid weight loss programme stuck to it. They were then followed for three years. Although both groups put some weight back on, the amounts were similar. Katrina Purcell, a dietician who led the study, said, “our results show that achieving a weight loss target is more likely, and drop-out is lower, if losing weight is done quickly.” Rapid weight loss isn’t suitable for everyone and if you do decide to lose weight fast you have to make sure you have the right balance of nutrients in your diet.

16/04/2024

Prostate Check up
Great article this week (April 2024, new scientist) on the old prostate. Well worth a read. In short randomised trials show for every 1000 men taking regular PSA tests, there is one fewer death from prostate cancer over ten years. BUT.. 3 men are left incontinent and 25 impotent. These are uncomfortable figures indeed. The solution, MRI tests , more expensive, but if you would like one let me know and we can arrange it. Remember PSA levels can be high after exercise, s*x or just naturally. The Lancet Commission on Prostate Cancer, recommends PSA and MRI. The three high risk groups are Black men, those with a history of disease and those with BRCA genes. Speak to one of us if you are worried or unsure what to do.

10/04/2024

Watch this link. It is about processed foods and something we should all be aware of.
https://fb.watch/rl4WL5X5kq/