Tag Archives: sickness

Going Healthy, Health, Life, Parenting

Keeping Your Family Healthy and Well

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2020 hasn’t been the best year for many of us. The coronavirus and Covid-19 pandemic has caused stress and wrought chaos throughout the past months and many of us are pretty concerned when it comes to maintaining our families’ health and wellbeing. Not only are we concerned on a physical level – as nobody wants to contract the virus – but we are also concerned on a level associated with mental health and wellbeing. Isolation is proving pretty difficult for many of us. But what can you do to maximise your family’s overall wellbeing during these times? Here are some suggestions to help guide you along the way!

Follow Covid Guidelines

Perhaps one of the most important things you should be doing right now is following the coronavirus and Covid-19 restrictions being laid out by your government. Why? Well, these measures are being specifically put in place to slow the spread of the virus and to keep you and your family – included in the general world population – as safe as possible. Sure, it may feel difficult playing by the rules all the time. Staying home isn’t the most fun and after months of this situation, many of us are craving seeing people who are not inside our bubble. But at the end of the day, the sooner we all comply with these restrictions, the sooner this will all resolve and pass. Some general advice includes:

  • Avoid spending time in public as much as possible
  • Wear masks when in public
  • Make sure everyone washes their hands regularly
  • Avoid touching things in public spaces
  • Stay two metres away from others who don’t live with you
  • Carry hand sanitiser for use outside of the home

Keep Up With Routine Health Appointments

If your family is asked to attend routine health appointments, it’s still important to attend them. They’re designed to check in on your health so that medical intervention can take place if necessary. Some routine checks could include a visit to the optometrist, a dental checkup, a smear test, a prostate check, routine vaccinations or other health appointments that will vary depending on you and your family members’ sex, age and other factors.

As mentioned earlier, going for a routine medical examination can also include regular visits to dentists and other healthcare professionals, even when you feel there’s no reason to do so. Such regular examinations can help identify potential health issues before they become problematic. This way, your healthcare expert will be in a better position to offer immediate treatment or prevent the condition from occurring. How often you visit your healthcare provider will depend on which area of your health. That said, going for medical examinations at least once a year should be more than enough in most cases.

Routine health appointments cannot only keep you physically healthy, but they can also promote your mental health. Once you attend a specific appointment, you may have to worry less, leading to a stress-free life. And if the health of your family members is in check, as a parent, this can significantly impact your mental state. 

Health appointments will go a long way in promoting a healthy lifestyle. For instance, a dental check-up with Zuroff Orthodontic Care will not only promote your teeth’ health, but it can boost your confidence. Going for a scan can help detect the presence of cancerous cells. This can enable you to get the proper treatment and ultimately put you in a better mental state. It can also allow you to prepare yourself financially and also have every family member on board.

There is no limit to how you can benefit from regular health checks. Therefore, ensure you make it a habit never to skip them.

Keep Spirits Up

It can be easy to begin to feel down or struggle during these times. But where possible, do what you can to keep spirits up. Think about it. You and your family at least get to be together during these times. Some people are living completely alone. You can keep spirits up in a number of ways. Cook great meals. Bake together. Watch films. Decorate the house. Pick up hobbies. Exercise together indoors. Use video chat to keep in touch with others. While we may be leading more limited lives than before, there are a number of things you can do to keep yourselves entertained.

Sure, times are difficult. But hopefully, you and your family will pull through okay. The above advice could help to make the upcoming months a little easier, so why not try them out?

Going Healthy, Health, Life

How Do You Know If You Have The Flu?

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In recent weeks and months, the knowledge of knowing the symptoms of flu have become a top priority. Since the pandemic occurred, we have come to know why this is so important. The novel Coronavirus is part of the flu virus family and the symptoms can sometimes seem like they are the same. So you can see the danger in not knowing what the real flu is like and what a cold might be, or allergies or heaven forbid, the virus itself. There can be a number of confusions occurring because you can feel fine for 14 days and then suddenly, your ‘flu’ symptoms get worse when they should be getting better. So let’s look at the clear and distinct signs of flu.

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Where does the flu start?

The flu is primarily a respiratory virus, so you’re breathing should immediately be affected right? Well, not all the time. The flu virus can affect other parts of your body first, such as aching muscles. Your body can feel hot and fatigued, yet you might not be sneezing yet, not have a running nose or watery eyes. The reason for this is, your extremities might be kept warm. So if you’re wearing layers such as gloves, a hat or a scarf, it can feel like you just have a fever. However, give it time and you will begin to breathe slower and shallower, as the virus begins to attack your lungs.

The external signs

The clear and present signs of flu are as follows.

  • Running nose, which develops into very thick yet still watery mucus that drips from your nose.
  • Watering eyes, it can feel like your eyes are sore, sensitive and cannot stop blurring your vision.
  • You might also start to cough up throat mucus. If you have the flu, it will be green, while normally, it is beige.

A runny nose is not the same as a dripping nose. A running nose is purely a liquid that runs down your nose, onto your top lip. A dripping nose is, so full of mucus and the virus, that it uncontrollably drops from your nose onto your clothes or the floor.

Allergies can confuse

Another thing that confuses people, is colds vs allergies. As we have talked about, the cold is not as severe as the flu but it can seem like allergies. However, the key difference is a change in body temperature when you have a cold as opposed to allergies. If you have a runny nose, watery nose and a cough, this could be allergies. If you have all of these and a fever, then it’s the cold, which is the onset of the flu.

Still unsure?

If you’re still unsure, do a little more research. Go online and read more on the subject, but one easy way to know is, when you next go to a pharmacy or supermarket, pick up a flu medicine and it will have all the symptoms on the box along with the chemicals used to fight the virus. 

The flu is a horrible virus and not as light as a cold. You should be able to tell when you have it now, the symptoms will be more severe, you will have less control over your fluids and it will take about 4-5 days to get over it.

Going Healthy, Health, Lifestyle

Coronavirus Myths Busted_ What You Should Know

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There is no doubt that people’s views are divided on the crisis facing the world right now. Some of that division – though not all – is along political lines, while some is based on little more than hope or instinct. One thing that is, however, definitively true is that if anyone tells you they know how things are going to go from this point, they are misinforming you. At this stage, the smartest epidemiologists have a range of confident predictions, but they don’t know how things will end up – so neither do any of us.

One thing that we can say, though, is that there is a propagation of myths that is far from helpful when it comes to staying healthy during this time. These myths are not a matter of opinion; they aren’t about trusting your instincts. They’re simply things that have somehow become understood as true by some individuals. If you see them shared on Facebook, and you feel up to correcting them, go ahead – but most importantly, just know that they’re completely and dangerously untrue.

We just need to wait it out into the summer – the virus will die in the heat

This is a myth based on a certain amount of knowledge, but not enough to really understand epidemiology. Yes, viruses classically like cooler weather; this is why you don’t get as many colds in summer. However, this detail is not uniformly true. Ebola, one of the most aggressive viruses known to man, lives and thrives mostly in Africa in temperatures well above what Americans will live with this spring and summer. The MERS coronavirus spread in Saudi Arabia in August – when the average high is 108 degrees.

The truth is, we don’t know how Covid-19 will behave in the summer, because it was only identified in December 2019. We haven’t lived through a summer with it. And even if it does die down, that doesn’t rule out a nastier second wave in autumn, and self-isolation over the holiday season.

Don’t buy anything from China – the packages will be contaminated

Leaving aside, for one moment, the fact that China has more successfully “flattened the curve” than most countries, this myth ignores that the survivability of a virus is limited outside the body of a host. While it is true that inspection of plastic surfaces has detected the virus up to 72 hours after the item was last touched by an infected person, any delivery you receive from that part of the world will take a lot longer than three days to reach you. You’re genuinely at greater threat if you shake hands with an old friend you haven’t seen in a while.

Bleach will destroy the virus inside the body

Let’s just deal with this one swiftly. If you drink bleach, coronavirus will very rapidly become the least of your worries. This is also true if you inject it. Bleach has no place inside the human body, and it’s not even necessary should you wish to kill the virus on the outside of the body – washing your hands or any contaminated area with soap and water will destroy the virus’ structure perfectly well. At the moment, the truth is that there isn’t a cure for Covid-19; it simply needs to be treated per doctors’ advice.

It’s easy to get carried away with a condition that has spread so fast and affected so many – Covid-19 has had an impact we could never have imagined back in January – but it’s vitally important to stick to the facts. Myths catch the attention in a way that mere facts can’t possibly hope to match – and that’s why, like the virus itself, you need to be vigilant in spotting and flattening them.