Active and happy self management for chronic illness is becoming an increasingly viable option and the following article looks at what’s involved and what is available in the way of support

In The Meantime Here Is A Powerful Shortlist of Natural Pain Relief Solutions To Support Your Self Management

• Laugh Your Way Free of Pain It works! Try it and see.

• Natural ease with Eazol, made with natural ingredients

• Physiotherapy Exercise Guide pain management for chronic pain

• Meals That Heal Inflammation, a nutrition guide for inflammatory pain relief

• Relieve Chronic Back Pain through a gentle home managed program

• Pain Relief With EFT a simple and natural energy therapy technique you can easily learn and apply at home. It worked for me. I can highly recommend it!

• Meditation Guide and how to manage chronic illness by deeply relaxing

• Transform Pain to Joy. Taking Control of Chronic illness instead of it controlling you

Introduction to Chronic disease managament

Are You an “Expert Patient”? Can your Doctor(s) say the following about you?

“My Patient knows more about the disease than I do; as much about the disease as I do, and enough about his/her symptoms that it is easy to communicate with him/her.”

Why is becoming an Expert Patient so important?

There is plenty of emerging research about the needs of 21st century patients. Most of that research centers around the concept of “Illness Self-Management”, for what is called “chronic illness”.

What, you ask, is a “chronic illness”

Acute Illness

Health concerns are usually classified as either acute or chronic. Acute illnesses usually begin abruptly and last only a short time. Most people with an acute illness can expect to return to normal health. A strep throat is an example of an acute illness: it is easy to diagnose with a lab test and is cured with antibiotics.

Chronic Illness

Chronic diseases are different. They usually develop slowly, last long periods of time, and often are never cured. In most cases, there is no cure. The long-term effects may be difficult to predict. Some conditions cause few problems. Others cause only episodic problems or symptoms that can be controlled with medication.

However, in some cases, a chronic disease may severely limit a person’s ability to work, go to school or take care of routine needs. Examples of chronic diseases include, but are in no way limited to: diabetes, congestive heart failure, asthma, hypertension, chronic kidney disease, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, arthritis, emphysema, fibromyalgia, parkinsons symdrome, chronic fatigue and multiple sclerosis – just to mention a few.

Why is “Chronic Disease Self-Management” so important a concept for those with a chronic condition?

For the person with a chronic condition, there is no way not to self-manage the disease/illness. If one retires from life and stays at home as a depressed person this is a type of self-management. On the other hand, many people learn to deal with their conditions and remain active, happy participants in life.

Laugh Your Way Back to Health  Learn How

Chronic Disease Self-Management covers the following areas:

• knowing how to recognize and respond to changes in a chronic disease

• dealing with problems and emergencies

• using medicines and treatments effectively

• finding and using community resources

• getting enough exercise

• coping with fatigue, pain and sleep problems

• maintaining good nutrition

• making decisions about when to seek medical help

• working with your doctor(s) and other care providers

• talking about your illness with family and friends

• managing work, family and social activities

It is the learning of the skills necessary for this later type of proactive disease/illness self-management that is the subject of this document. The information about developing the skills is fascinating; and, they (the skills) really are the key to deciding and remaining active, happy participants with a quality of life as full as you can make it.

Research and practical experience in North America and Britain are showing that today’s patients with chronic diseases need not be mere recipients of care. They can become key decision-makers in the treatment process.

By ensuring that knowledge of their condition is developed to a point where they are empowered to take some responsibility for its management and work in partnership with their health and social care providers, patients can be given greater control over their lives.

(Note: Once again, this process of acquiring the knowledge of your condition so that you can reach the self-management level with your Doctor(s) is one of the primary purposes behind the www.disabilitykey.com website.)

Self management programs can be specifically designed (between you and your Doctor(s)) to reduce the severity of symptoms and improve confidence, resourcefulness and self-efficacy (a big word that basically means self reliance).

Chronic Pain Self Management with EFT Access Free Training Video Here

Why become a chronic disease self-manager?

For those of you who have had an opportunity to read about my professional career , you will see that I started out as a “Federal Auditor” of Human Resources practices, policies and procedures (which is why I was able to create the Disabilitykey Workbook in the first place). As an Auditor, I always wanted to know what is the “ROI” (Return on Investment) as they say in the business world, for anything I worked on, or for any initiative I tackled.

Why would people with chronic illnesses want to learn how to manage their disease symptoms? Why would their Doctors want them to learn and do these things? What is in it for both patients and Doctors?

Laugh Your Way Free of Pain It works! Try it and see.

First of all, it was a fascinating subject for me to research! And, imagine my surprise to learn that, even though the original Chronic Disease Self-Management study was conducted here in the United States at Stanford University, it appears that, at this point in time, (mid-2005), England, Scotland, and Australia appear to be further along in actually implementing programs than we are here in the US!

And, imagine my chagrin to find out that to be able to take the great online training program to become certified in chronic disease management, you have to live in England!

In the United Kingdom, their Department of Health came to the following conclusion:

• Little has been done to prepare patients for long-term management of their diseases

• They face many challenges in coping with discomfort and disability and carrying out treatment programs on a regular basis.

• They need to modify behavior to minimize undesirable outcomes, adjusting their social and work lives to accommodate their symptoms and functional limitations and deal with the emotional consequences.

• For their care to be effective, they must become adept at interpreting and reporting symptoms, judging the trends and tempo of their illness and participating with health professionals in management decisions.

(Note: language has been “Americanized” for greater ease of understanding here in America on, what they [the United Kingdom] call, “the other side of the Pond”.)

Expert patients

It was the chief medical officer for the United Kingdom, who first introduced the name ‘expert patient”. He said that expert patients are “people who have the confidence, skills, information and knowledge to play a central role in the management of life with chronic diseases.” Doesn’t this sound logical?

Here are some Chronic Illness statistics here in the US

In the US for example, less than One Percent of the people who stand to benefit from self managing their chronic arthritis – do so.

Chronic disease has become pandemic in the United States, and estimates are that it will affect 148 million people by the year 2030. Patients with chronic illnesses cost the health care system over three times more than individuals without chronic conditions.

The Population of U.S. adults over 65 is expected to double between 2000 and 2030. Over 80% of adults over 65 years of age have one or more chronic conditions — over 60% have two or more chronic conditions.

Deep Relaxation is known to be deeply healing and helps to boost the immune system and relieve pain

Find Deeply Relaxing Meditation CDs and Downloads here

Consumers with five or more chronic conditions account for two-thirds of all Medicare spending. People with chronic conditions are responsible for 78% of all health care spending, 95% of all Medicare spending, and 77% of all Medicaid spending for community-dwelling adults.

The U.S. has by far the most expensive health care system in the world — but lags most other developed countries in key quality and consumer outcomes.

However, it is the following statistic about how much actual time, on average, that a patient here in the United States spends with their Doctor(s) that really got my attention.

On average, we with a Chronic Disease spend around three hours per year with a health professional. This means that the patient is left to manage his/her own condition for the other 8757 hours of the year.

If you, or someone you know has a chronic illness, wouldn’t you be more comfortable knowing what to do during those “other” 8,757 hours that you are not in a health professional’s presence? I sure did, and I didn’t even know that such a thing as chronic disease management as a concept existed when I did the work depicted in the Disabilitykey Workbook.

I only knew that I needed a way to live the best possible life in spite of my chronic disease; I wanted to control it; I did not want it controlling me! OK, chronic disease management just seems to make sense. But, the Auditor in me asks, are there measurable, objective results that this concept is worthwhile? And, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), there are.

Chronic Disease Symptom Management Program

AHRQ-funded research at the Stanford University Patient Education Research Center led to development of the “Chronic Disease Symptom Management Program” (CDSMP). Standford’s CDSMP is a 17-hour course taught by trained lay people that teaches patients with chronic disease how to:

1) better manage their symptoms

2) adhere to medication regimens

3) maintain functional ability.

Over a period of 2 years, AHRQ-funded investigators compared health behaviors, health status, and health services use in patients age 40 to 90 years (average age, 65) who had completed the CDSMP. When compared to baseline measures taken for the 6 months prior to the CDSMP, researchers found the following:

• After 6 months, CDSMP participants had: Increased exercise. Better coping strategies and symptom management. Better communication with their physicians. Improvement in their self-rated health, disability, social and role activities, and health distress. More energy and less fatigue. Decreased disability. Fewer physician visits and hospitalizations.

• After 1 year, CDSMP participants had: Significant improvements in energy, health status, social and role activities, and self-efficacy. Less fatigue or health distress. Fewer visits to the emergency room. No decline in activity or role functions, even though there was a slight increase in disability after 1 year.

• After 2 years, CDSMP participants had: No further increase in disability. Reduced health distress. Fewer visits to physicians and emergency rooms. Increased self-efficacy. Another source of actual results from people who have made the decision to become Chronic Disease Self-Managers comes from The United Kingdom. The United Kingdom has a website describing the recent results of their Expert Patient “Programme” (EPP). The website provides periodic ‘eUpdates’ to inform people about new developments within the Expert Patients Programme such as new publications, forthcoming events and news from the national team.

The EPP is a National Health Service (NHS) lay led self-management programme for people living with any long-term health condition(s).

Groups of 8-16 participants, with a mix of different conditions, meet over six weekly sessions and are led through a structured course by trained tutors who are also living with a long-term condition.

Each session (lasting two and a half hours) looks at ways to better manage the effects of their long-term condition. For more information about the EPP please visit the EPP website at www.expertpatients.nhs.uk

EPP Pilot Internal Evaluation

Internal evaluation data from approximately 1000 EPP participants who completed the course between Jan 2003 and Jan 2005 indicates that the programme is achieving its aims in:

1) Providing significant numbers of people with long term conditions with the confidence and skills to better manage their condition on a daily basis. – 45% said they felt more confident that they would not let common symptoms (pain, tiredness, depression and breathlessness) interfere with their lives. – 38% felt that such symptoms were less severe 4 – 6 months after completing the course. – 33% felt better prepared for consultations with health professionals.

2) Providing significant reductions in service usage by people with long term conditions completing the EPP course. – 7% reductions in GP consultations – 10% reductions in Outpatient visits – 16% reductions in A&E attendances (US note: note sure what this is.) – 9% reductions in Physiotherapy use

Over 94% of those who took part felt supported and satisfied with the course.

If you want to sign up to receive periodic updated information about what the Brits are doing, you too can sign up to receive an “eUpdate” as they call them. It is FREE, and you can sign up by going to: www.expertpatients.nhs.uk.

What is Chronic disease self-management?

Chronic Disease Self-Management; Self-Efficacy; great terms, but what do they really mean, and how does one start to become a Chronic Disease Self-Manager?

Consider the following quotations associated with these concepts.

“Row Your Own Boat” – Chronic Disease Self-Management.

”Every bird flies with its own wings.” Swahili proverb

What do the two quotations have in common? First of all, the desire, then the knowledge, then the action to take back control over your health, and your life.

Here are questions – a ‘mini quizz’ that you can use to ask yourself about your “readiness” to adopt the concept of Chronic Disease Self-Management (or, to assist someone else in their journey toward this objective).

Chronic Disease Self-Management Readiness Test

Created By Stanford University’s Patient Education Research Center, this test is called: Self-Efficacy for Managing Chonic Diseases 6-Item Scale. The test measures how confident you are that you can keep ‘your situation’ (i.e., the situation addressed in each of the following 6 questions) caused by your disease from interfering with the things you want to do?

For each of the following questions, please choose the number (between 1 and 10) that corresponds to how confident you are that you can keep the symptoms caused by your disease from interfering with the things you want to do? #1 represents “Not at all confident”; #10 represents “Totally confident”.

1) How confident are you that you can keep the fatigue caused by your disease from interfering with the things you want to do?

2) How confident are you that you can keep the physical discomfort or pain of your disease from interfering with the things you want to do?

3) How confident are you that you can keep the emotional distress caused by your disease from interfering with the things you want to do?

4) How confident are you that you can keep any other symptoms or

health problems you have from interfering with the things you want to do?

5) How confident are you that you can do the different tasks and activities needed to manage your health condition so as to reduce your need to see a doctor?

6) How confident are you that you can do things other than just taking medication to reduce how much you illness affects your everyday life?

The higher you score toward “10″ on each question, the more “self-efficacy” you have.

(Reminder: self-efficacy is the belief in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the sources of action required to manage situations.)

As you can probably figure out, I score either 9 or 10 on each question. My Disabilitykey Workbook (see www.disabilitykey.com) and the confidence that I received by first, executing the processes contined therein for myself, and then in developing the Workbook to assist others, has allowed my self-efficacy to be high.

OK, you have rated yourself, and you want to know more about the ‘what’ of this topic. First, we will discuss the definition of Chronic Disease Self-Management; next, the stages of a “chronic disease self-help behavioral change”; and, finally, something called “social learning theory”.

Definition of Chronic Disease Self-Management

Based on a comprehensive literature review of over 400 articles, Researchers have proposed the following definition.

“Chronic disease self-management involves [the person with the chronic disease] engaging in activities that protect and promote health, monitoring and managing of symptoms and signs of illness, managing the impacts of illness on functioning, emotions and interpersonal relationships and adhering to treatment regimes.”

There are a number of key elements to this definition that will enable us to develop a practical concept of self-management. It is important to note that these elements are about the behaviors of the patient, rather than models of self-management for health care systems, service providers or health professionals.

These elements suggest that self-management:

• Entails engaging in activities that promote health
• Involves managing a chronic condition by monitoring signs and symptoms
• Entails dealing with the effect of a chronic condition on personal well being and interpersonal relationships and
• Involves following a treatment plan prescribed to you by your Doctor(s).

The definition of self-management encompasses a range of behaviors, as well as knowledge and attitudes and is an important starting point towards the development of a concept of chronic disease self-management.

Help getting from where you are to becoming a Chronic Disease Self-Manager

Stages of Behavioral Change

A model of behavior change that has been applied to chronic disease self-management is based on research on how people change behavior, either on their own or within an intervention program (i.e. some sort of action to assist in the change). The theory is that the ceasing of risk behaviors (eg. smoking) and acquisition of health promoting behaviors (eg. physical activity, relaxation) involves the progression through the stages of change.

Health Promoting Behaviours

Pre-contemplation [not thinking of change] Contemplation [thinking of change] Determination [ taking preliminary steps to change] Action [ actively engaging behavior change] Maintenance [ sustained behavioral change] Relapse [ can occur at any point.]

‘Can do’ Attitude

Behavioral change is facilitated by a personal sense of control.

If people believe that they can take action to solve a problem, they become more inclined to do so and feel more committed to this decision. This “can do” attitude mirrors a sense of control over one’s environment. It reflects the belief of being able to master challenging demands by means of adaptive action. It can also be regarded as an optimistic view of one’s capacity to deal with stress. (Not to sound redundant, but this really is about the glass being “half-full” and not “half-empty”.)

Social Learning

OK, now we understand the behavioral change steps, now on to the social learning stage. The theoretical underpinning of effective chronic disease self-management programs should be based on social learning and behavioral theories.

The key principles of these theories as applied to chronic disease self-management are:

• Disease management skills are learned and behavior is self-directed
• Motivation and confidence (including self-efficacy) in managing one’s condition dictate an individual’s success
• The social environment (ie. family, workplace & health care system) support or impede self-management and
• Monitoring and responding to changes in disease state, symptoms, emotions and functioning improve adaptation to the chronic condition.

Becoming Trained In Chronic Disease Management

How do you become trained in Chronic Disease Self-Management?

Here are the primary resources available

1) Start with your own health insurance company. Call up the Customer Service folks in Plan, and ask if they offer “Chronic Disease Self Management Program” classes. My Internet searches indicate that many of the larger companies are offering such classes for their enrolees. And, in some cases, self-management is becoming a requirement of retaining insurance coverage!

2) Go to your State’s Home Website, and look up the Department of Health, and of Aging. In some cases they might be the same, in others, different. Call each and see if and when they will be offering classes in your city or county for a Chronic Disease Self Management Program.

3) Use one of the many Internet search engines to locate this statement: “(your state) Chronic Disease Self-Management Program (CDSMP)”. This should help you locate classes in your state. In my state, they located classes by county and city. Some of the “bigger” states even offer classes derived from the original Stanford research program.

4) Use one of the many Internet search engines to ask locate this statement: “Chronic Disease Self-Management Program (CDSMP)”. This should provide you with additional options.

5) Finally, and probably the best source, from the original Stanford site where the concept was created, there is a link to each state’s CDSMP sites: http://patienteducation.stanford.edu/programs/cdsites.html If you go to this site, you can click onto your state and see which organizations in your state are licensed to offer the Chronic Disease Self-Management program.

Conclusion

The National Center for Quality Assurance (NCQA) in their 2004 Health Care Quality Report comments that “the U.S. healthcare system as a whole remains plagued by deadly quality gaps that contribute to 42,000 to 79,000 avoidable deaths every year and $1.8 Billion in excess medical costs due to the system’s routine failure to provide needed care.”

According to Catherine Hoffman of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly half the people in the U.S. are living with chronic conditions, at a cost of $234 billion in lost productivity and $425 billion in medical spending per year. These figures are rising.

Moreover, they do not include billions of dollars in lost productivity of employees who miss work to care for family members who have chronic conditions. Many people with chronic conditions, as well as family members who care for them, also suffer needlessly from the physical and emotional effects of their illness. By helping people change their behaviors and adapt to their conditions, self-management programs often increase people’s adherence to medical treatments, strengthen their control of pain and symptoms, and improve their overall emotional well-being.

About The Author

Carolyn Magura, noted disability / ADA expert, has written an e-Book documenting the process that allowed her to:

a) continue to work and receive her ‘full salary’ while on Long Term Disability; and

b) become the first person in her State to qualify for Social Security Disability the first time, in under 30 days.

Click here (http://www.disabilitykey.com/products.htm) to receive Carolyn ‘s easy-to-read, easy-to-follow direct guide through this difficult, trying process. If you are disabled, don’t let this disabiling process disable you. Read Carolyns Disability Key Blog http://www.disabilitykey.com/disabilitykeyblog.shtml.

Disabilitykey.com is a website designed to assist each person in his/her own unique quest to navigate through the difficult and often conflicting and misleading information about coping with disabilities.

Here are some more posts related to the topic of coping with a chronic illness…

Coping with Chronic Illness in Your Marriage

How can you improve your marriage when you live with chronic illness Bill and Pam Farrel are relationship specialists international speakers and authors of 30 books including best-selling Men are like Waffles Women are like Spaghetti.  

Living with the downs of chronic illness

I recently googled coping with chronic illness and found an interesting article where she says that a Ployanna like existance is not real and that intermittent depression is normal and to be expected. Living in the acceptance stage 

Coping with Chronic Illness in Marriage

It’s easy to become a little self-absorbed when living with chronic illness and, for the spouse, it’s normal to resent MS and the impositions it imposes. The trick is not to resent each other. 

Coping with chronic illness

My Mom has been coping with a crush of medical problems that resulted in an emergency room visit a month ago and surgery one day last week. My mother’s problems aren’t life threatening, thankfully, but they are chronic illnesses 

In Sickness and in Play Children Coping with Chronic Illness

For children who live with a chronic illness, each day is filled with endless treatments, painful symptoms, confusion, and embarrassment. How can an eight-year-old girl understand diabetes, let alone explain to her schoolmates

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If you’re a computer user, or your work involves constant repetitive movements with your hands and arms, you may develop tendinitis.

Tendinitis is the inflammation of a tendon – the tough elastic fibers that connect muscles to bones. You can get tendinitis in any tendon, but it’s very common in the hands and arms.

Your first symptom may be pain, but it’s more likely to be swelling initially, and a sensation of numbness or pins and needles. Then your hands and arms become sore and painful, and you may be woken by pain at night.

Rest Is The First Solution To Hand And Arm Tendinitis

Since most hand and arm tendinitis develops from over-use, your first solution is to rest from the activities which are causing the tendinitis. Of course since we use our hands and arms constantly, this is not completely possible. But try to rest as much as possible. If you suspect that computer-use is the culprit, cut down on keyboarding as much as you can.

Whatever the case is, do not leave a neck pain to continue without treatment or it will become more complicated with the passage of time. The most important thing is to find a way to relieve the pain so as to go on with work as usual, even if the pain is not completely eradicated.

Techniques for alleviating it

For patients who have chronic pain, getting addicted to narcotic painkillers is the last resort. Natural remedies to help alleviate it are preferred. One of the best ways is to learn how to relax.

While this may sound easy, it can take a lot of practice to consciously relax. One way to go about this is with meditation and breathing exercises. The idea is to focus on the breathing or an object and chant a word such as "Om" until one gets into a trance.

Another meditative approach is called osteomyelitis. The goal is to focus all the attention on the pain in a relaxed way as possible. Don’t think about negative thoughts about the pain (such as cursing to yourself or pitying yourself or getting angry). Make the pain a focus of your meditation, observed dispassionately for what it is.

You could also try  EFT to dissolve pain within minutes 

One of the best and most fun ways is to relax through laughter 

Author Francisco Rodriguez H.Trabajar desde casa es f cil si sabes como
Todo sobre Juegos para gente que le gusta jugar Encontrar un Trabajo Empleo es f cil si sabe d nde buscar

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Building a positive focus in your life which includes a regular dose of laughter can play a key role in supporting the body’s ability to cure illnesses through its own healing system.

Learn how to have a regular dose of laughter medicine daily for your pain

A man rushed into a veterinarian’s office carrying his limp, lifeless dog. The vet examined the animal and told the man the dog was dead. The man asked if there was any way the doctor could revive the dog. The doctor left the room and returned with a cat, who sniffed the dog from head to tail then looked up at the vet and meowed.

“Sorry,” said the doctor. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“Thanks for trying,” said the man with a sigh. “How much do I owe you?”
“Three hundred and fifty dollars,” replied the doctor.
“Three hundred and fifty dollars! Just to tell me my dog is dead?”
“Well,” said the doctor, “it was $50 for the office visit. The other $300 is for the CAT scan.”

Whether the above joke made you laugh or groan, it lightened your mood. And if you had been in pain, many scientists agree, it would have eased the hurt at least temporarily.

A fresh take on an old idea

The notion that  laughter is good for the body has been around for thousands of years, certainly as far back as the Old Testament. Proverbs 17:22 says, “A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” Seventeenth century English physician Dr. Thomas Sydenham remarked, “The arrival of a good clown exercises more beneficial influence upon the health of a town than of twenty asses laden with drugs.” Or as Groucho Marx put it, “A clown is like aspirin, only he works twice as fast.”

How do you get a sweet 80-year-old lady to say the F word? Get another sweet little 80-year-old lady to yell *BINGO*!

The value of laughter in helping to relieve pain began to attract significant attention in the 1980s when Dr. Norman Cousins in his book Anatomy of an Illness described how watching Marx Brother movies and reading humorous books and articles helped him recover from a life-threatening tissue disease. Cousins made it a point to enjoy a hearty belly laugh several times a day. He claimed that a few minutes of laughter gave him an hour or more of pain-free sleep. As a result, many pain centers around the country began to use humor therapy to reduce the level of pain medication needed by patients. There was even a movie made about real-life doctor Patch Adams, a physician who was totally committed to making his patients laugh as an essential part of his treatment.

How does laughter reduce pain?

Clinical staff consistently note that the primary benefit of humor therapy is that it serves as a diversionary tactic, that is, it takes a patient’s mind off the pain. A study published in the Journal of Holistic Nursing reported that patients who were told one-liners after surgery and before painful medication was administered perceived less pain when compared to patients who didn’t get a dose of humor as part of their therapy.

Why don’t bunnies make noise when they have sex? Because they have cotton balls.

Another study, this one published in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis, found that young girls with burns who were shown cartoons during very painful hydrotherapy said they felt less pain than similar patients who were not exposed to cartoons during the same procedure. A second theory of how laughter helps relieve pain is that it triggers the release of endorphins, the chemicals in the brain that can make us feel good.

Natural healing

Around the same time that the Cousins book appeared, the departing editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Franz Ingelfinger, noted that 85 percent of all human illnesses are curable by the body’s own healing system. Building a positive focus in your lifewhich includes a regular dose of laughter can play a key role in supporting the body’s ability to do just that. Laughing, in fact, has been shown to increase the body’s natural killer cells and T-cells, which are types of cells that attack foreign material in our bodies.

Laughter also keeps away negative emotions such as anxiety and depression, which tend to weaken the immune system.

Why are they called “hemorrhoids”. They should be called “asteroids”?

Research on stress-related hormones and humor has shown that laughter reduces at least four of the hormones associated with the stress response, including epinephrine, cortisol, dopac, and growth hormone. Some studies have indicated that laughter improves lung capacity and with improved lung capacity come improved oxygen levels in the blood, thereby alleviating ischemic pain or pain do to lack of oxygen-rich blood.

Internal jogging

According to Dr. William Fry from Stanford University, one minute of laughter is equal to 10 minutes on the rowing machine.  Laughter is a kind of “internal jogging” that exercises our heart and reduces blood pressure in the same way as does standard aerobic exercise. This kind of laughter exercise is well suited to sedentary people and those who are confined to a bed or wheelchair.

What did One saggy boob say to the other saggy boob? If we drop any lower people are gonna think we are nuts!

If you keep the Huh Huh Huh – going for long periods of time and increase the number of times you do it while at the same time shrugging your upper body you will keep the oxygen flowing to the cells that need it and you will be giving what you body need to begin to reduce your pain and speed healing.

And here’s a final fascinating fact: Researchers at St. Paul Ramsey Medical Center in Minnesota say that tears of laughter remove toxic substances that normally build up during periods of emotional stress…

So, whether you prefer Dirty jokes, Redneck jokes or Funny Photos the Internet has provide us with an unlimited number of resources not to mention the ton of emails that you get from your friends that they think are funny and they just have to send to you for some reason thinking that you have the time to read it and that you have nothing else to do. Maybe just read one a week and see how you feel.

If you do read a joke or see a funny photo and it does put a smile on your face learn to keep that smile going longer and feel how good you feel when you keep your head up and a smile on your face. Life will always be full of challenges but we should always be driven to seek those thing that give us Joy and Peace, so if a joke can give you 30 seconds of joy, read a joke and keep smiling.

If you enjoyed this article, and would like more information in alternative back pain treatments sign up for our Back Pain Advisory and you will join the nearly 1 million people that have received this life changing information. Please visit our new web site at http://www.losethebackpain.com/ for more free informative articles, videos and open forums.

By Steve Hefferon

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When someone with a chronic illness like fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome catastrophizes, they’re essentially giving up all attempts at trying to manage their illness. It’s no surprise that catastrophizers don’t do as well 

If I Live to Be 100 or Coping with Chronic Illness

New to this edition are chapters on stress and coping, chronic sorrow, courage in chronic illness, and empowering people with AIDS. 

Coping With Chronic Illness

Coping with chronic illness life can seem difficult and frustrating. Not only are you dealing with your ailments, but often you are dealing with doubt from your loved ones.  

Jeanne’s Endo Blog

As I have blogged about extensively, music is a huge tool for me in coping with chronic illness and pain. So your blogging about relaxation music was interesting to me. 

Ill In A Day’s Work

Women are especially susceptible to certain kinds of chronic illness. For instance, they are four times more likely than men to be diagnosed with an autoimmune disease

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