Alternative Acne Treatments

Posted on January 23, 2009
Category: health | 1 Comment

Following the last post Acne Treatments, where I looked briefly at the mainstream approach to treating acne, here I want to look at the alternative to using medical preparations, creams and potions. Alternative acne treatments are those types of treatments that take a holistic approach to treating and curing acne. When we talk about alternative acne treatments, we are talking about a whole body approach to not just treating the outward symptoms, but by working with the body to find the cause, remove it and thus remove the necessity for the outward bodily symptoms that appear as nasty red spots filled with even yuckier yellow pus that we all know and love to hate as acne!

Where in the post about gout treatments A Natural Cure for Gout?, I looked at how the body reacts to certain stimuli, the same strategy can be used for almost any ailment and certainly for acne.

So what do we need to look at first?

Well, to begin with, it helps to know your age group. The obvious age group for the majority of acne is that of the teenager. In this age group, acne is chiefly caused by a huge imbalance in the body’s hormone production which is unfortunately to be expected at this age as the body is making its transition from that of a child to that of an adult. In this area, the effects of acne can still be reduced considerable by adhering to some simple precepts. This also goes for any age group, but is specifically aimed at teenagers.

First and foremost, look very closely at your diet. This is something you probably don’t want to hear, but what you put into your body is a direct correlation to what you get out of it. So if you are eating fatty foods, such as fried stuff, crisps or potato chips etc, sweet, sugary foods such as chocolate, candies, cakes, biscuits etc, or too much dairy produce such as cheese, butter etc then you are going to have to cut right back on all of them.

Why?

Dairy products are laden with saturated fats, as are fried foods. They are also packed full of the residue of growth hormones, antibiotics, and a cocktail of bovine medication that farmers pump into their animals and that get into to milk which you consume. This helps to further exacerbate your hormonal imbalance leading directly to more spots, I’m afraid to say.

Eating sugary foods, especially chocolate and chocolate coated candy bars is simply asking for a serious break out – I don’t even need to tell you this as its something every teenager knows only too well!

That’s just the start. Teenagers like to drink gallons of fizzy canned drinks like cola etc and think they’re doing themselves a big favour by choosing low calorie or diet drinks. Wrong! The artificial sweeteners used in low calorie drinks, such as aspartame, saccharine and sorbitol are known to interfere with cell DNA and can potentially not only lead to cancers, but also mess with your hormones – yep the imbalance thing again! The sugary ones lead to weight gain, mess up your blood sugar levels and can trigger a break out of spots. Not only that, but in some canned or bottled fizzy drinks, the artificial colours and flavours used have also been shown to affect mood by sending levels of seritonin and cortisol haywire. Read hyperactivity in children…

Added to all this, you allow your bodies to become dehydrated far too often without even realising it. To counter this is the easiest thing in the world, but for some strange reason teenagers shun this like its some kind of poison… water! yes, you must drink at least 2-3 pints of water every day. If the stuff that comes out of your tap is pure, drink that. If you’re unsure of it, drink bottled water or use a filter jug, but drink plenty of plain water every day.

That last tip is probably one of the most important things you will ever do to not just reduce your tendency to get spots, but will improve your overall health by quite an appreciable factor if you are not already doing it. After just a couple of days of drinking the right amount of water throughout the day, you’ll notice a difference in many aspects of your health and body appearance. You skin will start to clear, the feelings of tiredness will be reduced, you will feel more alert and better in yourself all round.

If that was primarily aimed at teenagers, then guess what? It works even better for all other age groups who don’t have the growing up syndrome to have to deal with. Is any of that stuff difficult to understand?

I didn’t think so.

Acne No More

alternative acne curesWhile the above is a good start to working on your individual problem, it is not the only thing you can do, of course. If you need more to go on and there is plenty more to know about the problems and the many alternative cures and remedies that exist to combat acne, then you will be interested in reading this ebook: Acne No More. You can click on that link or on the image of the book itself to find out more and to buy this highly useful digital book that you can easily download.

While acne is a problem for many people, it needn’t be when you know how to do the right things that will minimize and even prevent it from happening. Knowledge is power and the power in this instance is the difference between a predominantly clear skin and a not so clear one!

Terry Didcott
Alternative Cures

Acne Treatments

Posted on January 23, 2009
Category: Info | 4 Comments

In this post, I’m going to mention in passing some things about acne treatments that may be useful to you if you are afflicted with this condition. Ok, there are plenty of brand name treatments out there that are all fairly good at what they do, which is to clean the skin up and remove the dirt and grease that builds up in the pores that can lead to infection setting in and acne forming.

There are also treatments for acne that you can get your hands on by searching the Internet. I’ll save you some of that bother by mentioning one treatment for murad acne that can be sourced online by following that link to a web site run by a company called murad acne complex. They have products that seem fairly priced that are probably every bit as good as other types of acne treatments so may be worth your looking into.

Ok, this is not one of my epic posts, just one to bring to your attention that there is another side to alternative treatments for acne in the mainstream medical sense, so if you do suffer from acne complex, then this is one method that might appeal to you.

I’ll be posting again shortly with more information on more natural acne cures and treatments that don’t make use of creams or potions, so watch out for that one. I’ll be seeing you again shortly.

Terry Didcott

A Natural Cure for Gout?

Posted on December 16, 2008
Category: healing | 6 Comments

A natural cure for gout, if it could be proved to work consistently, would be a great breakthrough for sufferers, but so far, nothing seems to really work on a sustainable and consistent basis. My last post Natural Remedies, went back to grass roots for this blog and dealt with some of the issues surrounding their use and some of the potential consequences to watch out for. I’ve also been asked what is the difference between arthritis and gout?

Here in this post, I want to revisit where I left off in my last post about curing gout, What Is Gout, by talking about a personal discovery that might be useful in examining the length of gout attacks and gout lasting months in stead of just a few days.

After many years (15 to be exact) of suffering attacks of gout at irregular intervals I’ve read up on and educated myself about just about every aspect of this painful, frustrating and infuriating disease. I started, like most people on my then doctor’s recommendation of allopurinol tablets which I would have to have taken for the rest of my life. That didn’t go down well with me, a person who views the drugs industry with a very suspicious eye.

Down the toilet they went and I started looking for alternatives!

I found many that had some affect, such as a drastic change in my diet and lifestyle, losing weight and taking a daily dose of cider vinegar and molasses (gleaned from a book written by Margaret Hills called “Curing Arthritis the Drug Free Way”). This was truly effective at clearing out the arthritis I was suffering from in the early days, but it did not prevent further sporadic attacks of gout.

When I moved from the UK to Spain several years ago, my first two years here were completely gout free, which I put down to a better diet, slower pace of life, less stress etc. But it came back and recently the attacks had started getting worse and lasting much longer – the last bad one lasted nearly 3 months.

Yes, three bloody months!

It was in both feet – toes and ankles making walking almost impossible on many days. Nothing I had or could do seemed to get rid of it. I tried most every natural gout treatment I knew to bring it down. Ice packs to take down the swelling. Increasing my water intake (which is already quite high at 2 litres plus a day). Not daring to touch alcohol. Cutting my diet down to almost nothing with any food remotely high in purines off the menu. Eating cherries, cranberries, pineapple, bananas and everything else I could think of that might help.

Then I had no option than to resort to anti-inflammatory pills. You can get some damn strong ones here in Spain over the counter so Voltaren and Indonillo got taken. Forget ibuprofen – it doesn’t touch gout! In the early days, I consumed a whole packet of the damn things one day with absolutely no affect! Well, these strong pills helped, but of course they only treat the symptom and not the cause, so it was only delaying and not curing the problem.

I have a very good Spanish doctor here, who is dead against prescribing any drugs unless there really are no other options. He recommended I try what he called soda water to help reduce the body’s over-acidity.

At first I didn’t understand what he meant by this, but soon realised that he meant water with some bicarbonate of soda dissolved into it. Now this is an old fix for heartburn that I used to get many years ago when my lifestyle was, shall we say, more in keeping with the affluent City of London commercial culture, which is where I worked and enjoyed far too many “liquid lunches” with my colleagues.

Well, with nothing to lose, I tried this mixture that I admit I hadn’t thought of as it was only good for countering excess stomach acid, right? Well, only partially right, it seems. I took it and saw the rapid appearance of the end of that gout attack. I was not immediately convinced, as so much time had elapsed and its end could simply have been a coincidence. But my curiosity was sufficiently aroused to keep a tub of bicarb handy, just in case.

Well, only a couple of months later, gout returned. I immediately started taking bicarbonate of soda three times a day and it seemed to prevent the obtuse swelling that I normally suffer with and only got a mild swelling instead. A marked improvement straight away. I kept taking it and I’m convinced it has cut down the length of time I get the swelling typical of a gout attack. In fact, it cut down the overall length of the attack from what could potentially have been weeks to just a few days.

So what happened?

I think it must have something to do with lowering the body’s overall acidity.

We know that when uric acid levels in the blood go over 7 ppm, that’s when crystallization occurs in the joints and BAM! Gout attack. Get that level back below 7 ppm and the uric acid in the blood starts to clean out the crystals from the joints. Kind of role reversal!

So I guess that getting that level down as fast as possible is the main aim and taking sodium bicarbonate 3 times a day seems to be working for me. That doesn’t mean it will work for someone else, though. I know people who swear by cherries to take the swelling down, but they don’t work for me. As the saying goes: “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”

What was the next step?

I tested this on myself 2 weeks ago while gout free. I did this by deliberately eating some known bad stuff for me – prawns, salmon and mushrooms with asparagus! Man, that together is a guaranteed gout attack in the making! That night I took a glass of bicarb before going to bed and again in the morning – no attack!

Ok, its not a very scientific test, but 2 weeks later still not sign of gout. I’ll still shy away from all the bad foods, as I don’t like to tempt fate. It’s also important to stick with known prevention methods by keeping up the good, vegetarian Mediterranean diet and laying off alcohol. But maybe, just maybe I now have a weapon in my arsenal that might just work in those times when everything I do to prevent gout is still not enough.

Only time will tell.

Terry Didcott
Alternative Cures

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