Post about "Mind Body Spirit"

Mind-Body-Spirit Strength Training When Facing a Chronic Or Life-Threatening Illness

How strong are you? If you go to the gym you can measure your strength by using some of the apparatus in the gym. Aside from muscular strength in your arms and legs you hear trainers talk about core strength; the strength in the torso of the body, abdomen and back. It’s easy to measure your strength on the physical level but what about measuring your emotional or spiritual strength? Is it possible to develop a workout program for you mind and spirit? What would it look like? How would you know the workout is working?Developing emotional strength takes practice just as if you were working out your body’s muscles. You develop your emotional strength by experiencing your emotions and allowing them to unfold in their own time. When you give yourself the freedom to express yourself fully, you give your emotions room to expand and become stronger in how they manifest. Full emotional expression is freeing, stress reducing, and an authentic way to life your life. It comes down to willingness. If you didn’t grow up in an environment where emotions were expressed then this may be a challenge, but it can be learned. It requires that you place yourself in environments where emotional expression is not only modeled, but encouraged. This is why support groups are a great model for authentic emotional expression when facing a chronic or life-threatening illness. Being in an environment where emotions are present or right below the surface gives you a safe place to experiment. It’s like having your own emotional strength building gym.Have you ever tried to measure your spiritual stamina? It’s not like you can start running and see when you get tired, although the concept is similar. Spiritual stamina requires that you find inner guidance providing you with a sense of faith and hope. Developing your spiritual stamina is not about dogma; it’s about knowledge of your beliefs, values, and intuition. Having the capacity to find comfort and peace by going within is building spiritual stamina. Some may need a personal trainer just like when training the physical body and they turn to spiritual directors to help fortify their spiritual stamina in the face of a health challenge. Knowing that there are others willing to support you is empowering. It punctuates the knowledge that you have your own internal and external resources for health and healing.Remember that developing your emotional and spiritual strength is just as important as developing your physical health when facing a health challenge. Finding outlets that will support this development is the key. Learning to ask good questions of yourself and others serves as a catalyst for this type of development. It’s about coordinating your strength building efforts between the mind, body, and spirit. Don’t under develop one area and over develop others…you’ll live life lopsided and that doesn’t benefit your journey toward health and healing.

What is Charcot’s Foot that Occurs in Diabetes?

Charcot’s foot is one of the many problems which might occur in those with diabetes mellitus. The higher blood sugar levels that stem from all forms of diabetes have an affect on numerous body systems including the eyesight, renal system as well as nerves. In long standing cases, particularly if there has been an unsatisfactory control of the blood sugar levels, you can find problems with the nerves supplying the feet. This will make the feet in danger of issues as if something fails, you don’t know it has gone wrong as you can not really feel it due to the harm to the nerves. This might be something as simple as standing on a rusty nail and that getting contaminated and you are not aware that you’ve stood on the nail. Should it be a blister or ingrown toenail which gets infected and you do not know that it is present on the foot unless you have a look. This is why foot care can be so necessary for those with diabetes and why it will be provided a great deal of emphasis. A Charcot foot is the destruction occurring to the bones and joints if you have an injury and you do not know that the injury has happened.

A way of looking at it could be to consider this way: pretend that you sprain your ankle horribly and you also are not aware that you have simply because you do not experience the pain from it. You then carry on and walk around on it. Picture all of the additional harm which you do by walking about on it. The earliest you may possibly discover that there may be something wrong happens when you take a seat and look at the feet and you observe that one is a great deal more swollen compared to the other foot. This is exactly what occurs in individuals with diabetes who develop a Charcot’s foot. There may be some destruction, such as a sprained ankle or maybe a progressive failure of the arch of the foot and as no pain is sensed they carry on and walk around on it. It should be apparent simply how much more injury that gets done to the original injury prior to the problem is finally observed because of the swelling. At times there is not much swelling, but the Charcot’s foot is picked up from the difference in temperature between the two feet as a result of inflammation related process in the damaged foot that generates more warmth.

The development of a Charcot foot really needs to be dealt with as a bit of an urgent situation since the further it advances the much more serious it’s going to be and the more challenging it can be to handle. The individual definitely needs to quit all weightbearing without delay or at least obtain a walking support so that the damage is protected. For the not too major instances and those conditions which were serious and have improved a really supportive orthotic in the footwear is required to support the feet and the injuries. Sometimes surgical procedures are required to straighten the subluxed and dislocated bones. By far the most critical situations can end up with the foot and/or leg required to be amputated as the trauma has been doing an excessive amount of impairment.