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Aspirin Is Very Useful

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Take two and call it a day -:- aspirin makes car, home, beauty, and clothing care a cinch!

Revive dead car batteries:-
If you get behind the wheel only to discover that your car’s battery has given up the ghost — and there’s no one around to give you a jump — you may be able to get your vehicle started by dropping two aspirin tablets into the battery itself. The aspirin’s acetylsalicylic acid will combine with the battery’s sulfuric acid to produce one last charge. Just be sure to drive to your nearest service station.

Remove perspiration stains:-
Before you give up all hope of ever getting that perspiration stain out of your good white dress shirt, try this: Crush two aspirins and mix the powder in 1/2 cup warm water. Soak the stained part of the garment in the solution for two to three hours.

Restore hair color:-
Swimming in a chlorinated pool can have a noticeable, and often unpleasing, effect on your hair coloring if you have light-colored hair. But you can usually return your hair to its former shade by dissolving six to eight aspirins in a glass of warm water. Rub the solution thoroughly into your hair, and let it set for 10-15 minutes.

Dry up pimples:-
Even those of us who are well past adolescence can get the occasional pimple. Put the kibosh on those annoying blemishes by crushing one aspirin and moistening it with a bit of water. Apply the paste to the pimple, and let it sit for a couple of minutes before washing off with soap and water. It will reduce the redness and soothe the sting. If the pimple persists, repeat the procedure as needed until it’s gone.

Treat hard calluses:-
Soften hard calluses on your feet by grinding five or six aspirins into a powder. Make a paste by adding 1/2 teaspoon each of lemon juice and water. Apply the mixture to the affected areas, then wrap your foot in a warm towel and cover it with a plastic bag. After staying off your feet for at least ten minutes, remove the bag and towel, and file down the softened callus with a pumice stone.

Control dandruff:-
Is your dandruff problem getting you down? Keep it in check by crushing two aspirins to a fine powder and adding it to the normal amount of shampoo you use each time you wash your hair. Leave the mixture on your hair for 1-2 minutes, then rinse well and wash again with plain shampoo.

Apply to insect bites and stings:-
Control the inflammation caused by mosquito bites or bee stings by wetting your skin and rubbing an aspirin over the spot. Of course, if you are allergic to bee stings — and have difficulty breathing, develop abdominal pains, or feel nauseated following a bee sting — get medical attention at once.

Help cut flowers last longer:-
It’s a tried-and-true way to keep roses and other cut flowers fresh longer: Put a crushed aspirin in the water before adding your flowers. Other household items that you can put in the water to extend the life of your flower arrangements include: a multivitamin, a teaspoon of sugar, a pinch of salt and baking soda, and even a copper penny. Also, don’t forget to change the vase water every few days.

Use as garden aid:-
Aspirin is not only a first-aid essential for you, but for your garden as well. Some gardeners grind it up for use as a rooting agent, or mix it with water to treat fungus conditions in the soil. But be careful when using aspirin around plants; too much of it can cause burns or other damage to your greenery. When treating soil, the typical dosage should be a half or a full aspirin tablet in 1 quart (1 liter) water.

Remove egg stains from clothes:-
Did you drop some raw egg on your clothing while cooking or eating? First, scrape off as much of the egg as you can, and then try to sponge out the rest with lukewarm water. Don’t use hot water — it will set the egg. If that doesn’t completely remove the stain, mix water and cream of tartar into a paste and add a crushed aspirin. Spread the paste on the stain and leave it for 30 minutes. Rinse well in warm water and the egg will be gone.

TAKE CARE:-
About 10 percent of people with severe asthma are also allergic to aspirin — and, in fact, to all products containing salicylic acid, aspirin’s key ingredient, including some cold medications, fruits, and food seasonings and additives. That percentage skyrockets to 30 to 40 percent for older asthmatics who also suffer from sinusitis or nasal polyps. Acute sensitivity to aspirin is also seen in a small percentage of the general population without asthma — particularly people with ulcers and other bleeding conditions. Always consult your doctor before using any medication, and do not apply aspirin externally if you are allergic to taking it internally.
From The Book : Extraordinary Uses For Ordinary Things

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Ayurvedic Healthy Tips

Herbal Tea As Stomach Soothers

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A user-friendly guide to herbs that can help settle your tummy.
If you’re the type of person who keeps Rolaids in her pocket and Pepto-Bismol in her desk drawer, consider adding herbal teas to your stash. Since what we eat and drink (especially dairy products, sugar, alcohol, and coffee) often triggers gas, bloating, indigestion, heartburn, constipation, and diarrhea, how better to treat these common gastrointestinal problems, herbalists say, than by ingesting herbs that naturally offset the culprits?

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But with the ever growing variety of herbal teas and home remedies clogging the shelves of health food stores, it’s hard to know which ones will really help. There are numerous herbs that can affect the gastrointestinal system, according to Walter Kacera, Ph.D., an herbalist at the Apothecary Clinic in the Garden in London, Ontario. Luckily, you don’t need to buy out the entire store to get relief. Peppermint, chamomile, and ginger are the three herbs most commonly used to soothe abdominal symptoms. “They’re versatile and a good place to start,” says Jill Stansbury, N.D. (doctor of naturopathy), chair of the botanical medicine department at the National College of Naturopathic Medicine in Portland, Ore.

Peppermint
Chamomile
Ginger
Teas to Ease an Aching Stomach

Peppermint (Mentha piperita) can do a lot more after dinner than just freshen your breath. The herb’s essential oil contains menthol, a volatile substance that has a direct antispasmodic effect on the smooth muscle of the digestive tract. In addition, the pleasing smell of peppermint tea may help soothe nerves (and thus a nervous stomach). The ability to calm cramping stomach and intestinal muscles makes it a superb treatment, herbalists say, for symptoms of indigestion including heartburn, gas, stomachache, and the “I ate too much” feeling. It also makes peppermint a popular alternative treatment for irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), an intestinal disorder that causes abdominal pain, bloating, and irregular bowel movements in about 5 million Americans, most of them women.

Science is starting to back up some of mint’s claims. A study published in the Journal of Gastroenterology in 1997 found that IBS patients taking peppermint-oil capsules for symptom relief experienced an approximately 40% greater reduction in abdominal pain and a 50% greater reduction in bloating and flatulence than those patients receiving a placebo.

A carminative (gas-relieving) herb, peppermint in the form of tea has long been used as a home remedy for flatulence. A 1996 German study validates this usage, finding that patients with chronic indigestion not caused by an ulcer who were treated with an herbal preparation of peppermint oil combined with caraway oil (a bitter herb also believed to relieve gastrointestinal ailments) experienced about half as much abdominal pain due to gas as did people who received a placebo.

Even in the absence of abdominal symptoms, some herbalists recommend regular consumption of peppermint tea, saying it allows the entire gastrointestinal system to function more fluidly. But, despite the enthusiastic reports, many doctors say that peppermint can lower the sphincter pressure of the esophagus, actually causing some people to have more heartburn. Even Dr. Stansbury avoids treating heartburn with peppermint. If, however, people do experience relief from indigestion with peppermint or any other herbal therapy, Col. Peter McNally, D.O. (doctor of osteopathy), a gastroenterologist at the Evans Army Hospital in Colorado Springs, Colo., sees no harm in continuing to use the herb. “At the very least, the extra consumption of water (through the teas) can be quite helpful in aiding digestion,” he says.

Chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla), considered to be one of the safest medicinal herbs, is frequently recommended as a gentle treatment for common gastrointestinal problems. In Germany, where herbalism has long been considered conventional, tradition holds chamomile to be so useful that it has been dubbed alles zutraut, or “capable of anything.” Indeed, for gastrointestinal ailments, it’s somewhat of a superherb. Antispasmodic, anti-inflammatory, and carminative, chamomile can act upon the digestive system in a number of healing ways. It relieves flatulence and heartburn by mildly sedating and soothing the mucous membrane of the digestive tract. Its natural sedative properties can also relax the entire body, which may help if your digestive discomfort is caused by stress or worry.

A caveat: While some research has found chamomile to be effective in relieving diarrhea in young children, Dr. Stansbury strongly cautions against self-treating diarrhea with herbal remedies (for children or adults) until you have consulted with a medical professional. “The body may be trying to rid itself of a toxin or harmful substance, and you don’t want to interrupt that process,” she advises.

Though widely used and highly praised as a safe natural remedy, chamomile may cause allergic reactions in individuals with sensitivities to ragweed, asters, and chrysanthemums.

Ginger (Zingiber officinale), like peppermint and chamomile, is a carminative and can be used to treat gas, along with its associated bloating and pain. In botanical medicine it’s considered a warming herb, one that causes the inside of the body to generate more heat. Herbalists say this can help regulate sluggish digestion, though Dr. Stansbury points out that some find this extra warmth uncomfortable and may instead prefer peppermint or chamomile teas.

But what makes ginger a standout among herbs is its effectiveness in treating nausea and vomiting. (Remember Mom giving you ginger ale when you had a stomachache?) Herbalists now know that ginger works against both nausea and vomiting, making it an excellent preventive against motion and morning sickness. And unlike its drug counterparts, ginger doesn’t cause drowsiness. Perhaps that’s why it’s a favorite in many a sailor’s first-aid kit.

Teas to Ease an Aching Stomach
“Teas are the best way to take herbal gastrointestinal remedies,” says Jill Stansbury, N.D. (doctor of naturopathy), chair of the botanical medicine department at the National College of Naturopathic Medicine in Portland, Ore. The warm liquid is easy to digest and allow the remedy direct contact with the stomach and intestinal walls. Herbs in pill form can be hard to digest, and most tinctures contain alcohol, causing them to be absorbed largely in the mouth. The one exception: Irritable bowel syndrome sufferers may use peppermint or chamomile tea and may also take peppermint in capsule form. The capsule allows the mint to maintain its potency until it reaches the intestines, where it calms the spasms characteristic of IBS. Look for enteric-coated capsules containing .2 milliliter of oil; take one or two, up to three times a day between meals.

How to Choose Tea
When selecting a tea, Walter Kacera, Ph.D., an herbalist at the Apothecary Clinic in the Garden, recommends looking for aromatic herbs: Can you smell the peppermint or ginger through the teabag? If not, the herb is probably past its prime. Look for a tea that has the date the herbs were harvested on the box; aromatic herbs should be less than a year old.

Next time your digestive system flares up, try one of these teas:

Peppermint        pepperment tea

For a minty fresh herbal aid, the Herb Research Foundation in Boulder, Colo., recommends the following ratio of peppermint to water: Steep one to two teaspoons of dried peppermint leaves, or one tablespoon of fresh leaves, in one cup of hot water for five to 10 minutes; sweeten as needed with honey; and drink in the morning and after dinner.

Chamomile
Substitute dried or fresh chamomile flowers for the peppermint leaves in the above tea preparation.

Ginger
Steep ¼ to ½ teaspoon of dried gingerroot powder in one cup of hot water. Sweeten with honey and drink at night as a digestive aid, or prepare as needed to prevent motion sickness.

Fresh ginger is delicious and just as effective as the dried kind. Dr. Stansbury suggests simmering three ¼-in. peeled slices of the root in one cup of water for 10 minutes, or to desired strength. Flavor with lemon and honey.

If you need immediate help on hand for your next trip to the amusement park, dried or candied ginger will also do the trick.
Source:Reader’s Digest

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Positive thinking

Gentleness

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If you want to get love and respect from anything or anybody ,you must apply Gentleness to Everything.Throughout life we must cope with blockages that impede our forward momentum. Whether these obstacles are of a personal, professional, or societal nature, our first instinct may be to push against the obstruction. But the simplest way to alleviate resistance is to approach it gently, with a soft manner and kind intentions. Struggle and strife can find no foothold when confronted with mildness because conflict can only exist when fed by two opposing forces. So many areas of our lives can benefit from the application of gentleness. The beauty of gentleness lies in its multifaceted nature. It is part love, part compassion, part patience, part understanding, and part respect for others. When we move through life gently as a matter of course, we naturally attract these wonderful elements into our lives.

This does not mean that gentle people are by nature passive or meek. Rather, their copious inner power is manifested in their gentleness and their choice to move with the flow of the universe instead of against it. You can make use of gentleness in your own life by applying it in situations where you feel challenged by your circumstances or by people in your environment. As you move forward gently, the energy pervading your life will likely shift and, consequently, the blockages before you will vanish. Cooperation progresses smoothly when approached gently because all parties involved feel confident that their needs will be met. And quarrels are easily quelled with gentleness because the dualistic concepts of losing and winning are made moot by our willingness to exercise infinite patience with those whose values differ from our own.

Gentleness must be practiced, as we are inadvertently encouraged to act competitive in certain phases of our lives. At first, your established habits may make being truly gentle challenging. Yet after a time, if you commit to consciously applying gentleness to all areas of your life, whether by collaborating rather than competing or yielding graciously to the impassable roadblocks in your path in order to seek a new road, you will find that you begin to act gently habitually. Your patterns of thought and behavior become ever more peaceful, and you will discover that you encounter far less impassable resistance on your individual journey.

Source:Daily Om

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News on Health & Science

Unraveling The SIDS Mistery

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A new study finds evidence of brainstem abnormalities among babies who succumb.

Susan Gertler of Olympia Fields, Ill., was delighted. Her 15-week-old son, Joey, had slept through the night for the third time. “I can’t believe he slept through the night again,” she said to her husband, Jeff, when she woke that morning—Jan. 19, 1996. But Joey hadn’t slept through the night. He’d stopped breathing around midnight and never started again, a victim of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Gertler administered CPR, while her husband called 911 and summoned a doctor friend down the street, but all their efforts proved fruitless. Joey had been dead too long. “My memories of that morning are all grey, as if someone had turned out the lights,” says Gertler, now 46. “You’re responsible for your baby’s life. You were the one who put them to sleep. It’s nobody’s fault but your own.”

Painful as it sounds, that’s what many people used to think. But according to a study appearing Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, it now seems that there is a biological basis for SIDS, which kills more than 2,100 infants a year in this country. SIDS was long regarded as a mystery disease. But the study by Dr. Hannah Kinney and David Paterson at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School provides the strongest evidence to date that babies who succumb to SIDS have specific problems in a part of the brainstem, known as the medulla, that helps regulate automatic functions like heart rate, breathing and body temperature. Kinney says babies with these abnormalities don’t react like other babies when carbon dioxide levels in the blood rise too high or oxygen levels fall too low during sleep. “Normally a reflex action would cause them to wake or breathe faster or shift positions to get better air,” she says. That apparently doesn’t happen in babies with SIDS—particularly when they’re sleeping on their stomachs or have their faces covered by bedding, causing them to rebreathe exhaled carbon dioxide. The combination of biological abnormalities and external factors can prove deadly.

The precise chain of neural events leading to SIDS isn’t fully understood. But Kinney says the problem relates to abnormalities in the regulation of serotonin, a brain chemical that helps relay messages from one brain cell to the next. Kinney and her colleagues have implicated the brain’s serotonin system in SIDS before, finding defects in the way serotonin binds to receptors on brain cell surfaces in SIDS babies. But the new study shows that the problems are more extensive than previously thought. By examining autopsy tissue from the brains of 31 babies in San Diego who died of SIDS and comparing them to brains of 10 infants who died from accidents or known diseases, Paterson and Kinney found that the SIDS babies have fewer serotonin receptors on brain cells in the medulla than normal babies. Curiously, they also have far more neurons devoted to serotonin processing—perhaps the body’s attempt to compensate for poor receptor function. They also appear to have insufficient amounts of the so-called serotonin transporter protein, which helps brain cells recycle serotonin for further use.

The findings help explain why certain groups are at greater risk than others. Male SIDS babies outnumber female victims two-to-one. In the new study, the male babies who died of SIDS had lower serotonin-receptor levels than female SIDS infants. Premature babies are also more frequent victims—perhaps because the serotonin system is less developed at birth. And infants of mothers who smoke during pregnancy are also at increased risk. “We know that nicotine and cigarette smoke affect the levels of serotonin, receptors and even numbers of cells devoted to serotonin in the developing fetus,” says Kinney.

But why does SIDS affect only babies—mainly infants aged 0 to 6 months? “We think that the control systems for these vital functions reach full maturity only towards the end of the first year of life,” she says. In the womb, vital gases are supplied by the mother. At birth, the baby suddenly has to coordinate breathing on its own. “The synchronization of heart rate, breathing, arousal and sleep are functions that coalesce in the first year of life,” says Kinney. But since the underlying abnormalities continue, that raises the question of whether these differences may later play into other problems like sleep apnea. Only further research will tell.

The study will not lead to a susceptibility test for SIDS anytime soon. Eventually, Kinney hopes to develop a blood test that would detect some marker for abnormalities in serotonin processing. But for the moment, Kinney says, there is still too much to learn. “I don’t think the answer to this will be as simplistic as the serotonin system alone,” she says. “[Our study] is an important step, but it’s not the final step.”

The main effect of the study in the near term is simply to underscore the importance of the Back to Sleep campaign, which was launched in the early 1990s by the National Institutes of Health and the American Academy of Pediatrics. The fundamental message of the campaign is to put babies to sleep on their backs—not their stomachs or even their sides. Tummy time should be reserved for play, when the baby is awake and a parent is there to watch. The rate of SIDS has fallen by 50 percent since the Back to Sleep campaign was launched. Even so, 65 percent of SIDS babies in Kinney’s study were sleeping on their stomachs or sides at the time of death.

Source:Published in the Newsweek

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Healthy Tips

10 Ways to Manage Stress

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Stress is a normal part of life and usually comes from everyday occurrences. Here are some ways you can deal with everyday sources of stress.

1.Eliminate as many sources of stress as you can. For example, if crowds bother you, go to the supermarket when you know the lines won’t be too long. Try renting videotapes rather than going to crowded movie theaters. Clear up the clutter in your life by giving away or throwing away the things that get in your way. A garage sale is one effective way to do this.

2. If you are always running late, sit down with a pencil and paper and see how you are actually allotting your time. Say it takes you 40 minutes to get to work. Are you leaving your house on time? You may be able to solve your problem (and de-stress your life a bit) just by being realistic. If you can’t find the time for all the activities that are important to you, maybe you are trying to do too much. Again, make a list of what you do during the day and how much each activity takes. Then cut back.

3. Avoid predictably stressful situations. If a certain sport or game makes you tense (whether it’s tennis or bridge), decline the invitation to play. After all, the point of these activities is to have a good time. If you know you won’t, there’s no reason to play.

4. If you can’t remove the stress, remove yourself. Slip away once in a while for some private time. These quiet moments may give you a fresh perspective on your problems. Avoid stressful people. For example, if you don’t get along with your father-in-law but you don’t want to make an issue of it, invite other in-laws at the same time you invite him. Having other people around will absorb some of the pressure you would normally feel.

5.Competing with others, whether in accomplishments, appearance, or possessions, is an avoidable source of stress. You might know people who do all they can to provoke envy in others. While it may seem easy to say you should be satisfied with what you have, it’s the truth. Stress from this kind of jealousy is self-inflicted.
6. Laborsaving devices, such as cellular phones or computer hookups, often encourage us to cram too many activities into each day. Before you buy new equipment, be sure that it will really improve your life. Be aware that taking care of equipment and getting it repaired can be stressful.

7. Try doing only one thing at a time. For example, when you’re riding your exercise bike, you don’t have to listen to the radio or watch television.

8.Remember, sometimes it’s okay to do nothing.

9. If you suffer from insomnia, headaches, recurring colds, or stomach upsets, consider whether stress is part of the problem. Being chronically angry, frustrated, or apprehensive can deplete your physical resources.

10. If you feel stress (or anything else) is getting the better of you, seek professional help — a doctor or therapist. Early signs of excess stress are loss of a sense of well-being and reluctance to get up in the morning to face another day.

Source:Reader’s Digest

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