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Medical Information
The word "biofeedback" was coined in the late 1969 to describe laboratory procedures developed in the 1940's which trained research subjects to alter brain wave activity, blood pressure, muscle tension, heart rate and other "autonomic" bodily functions not normally voluntarily controlled. Biofeedback is a training technique in which people are taught to improve their health and performance by using signals from their own bodies.

One commonly used device, for example, picks up electrical signals from the muscles and translates those signals into a detectable form such as a flashing light or a beeping sound. each time muscles become more tense. If one wants to relax tense muscles, one can focus on altering the flashing and/or beeping and thus the client learns to associate sensations from the muscle with actual levels of tension and develops a new, healthy habit of keeping muscles only as tense as is necessary for as long as necessary. After treatment, individuals are then able to repeat this response at will without being attached to biofeedback equipment.

Medical Information

Bariatrics is the medical practice of weight reduction. Conditions in affluent western nations have led to an unprecedented number of overweight people. Depending on the criteria one accepts, one-third to one-half of American are obese. Most observers agree that this is due to the stress of modern life in combination with the eating patterns present in the culture. An over-dependence on the carbohydrate diet with its emphasis on breads, pastas, and other high glycemic index (i.e. changes to sugar quickly) foods such as potatoes and rice has led to new levels of fat storage.

Attempting to loose weight using the available information in the culture is a case of the blind leading the blind. Expert advice and support are usually necessary to help one break free from common cultural assumptions to adopt the life style changes necessary to achieve weight loss which endures. Bariatric medical weight loss programs are for those people with serious weight problems which do not respond to diet and exercise alone. Bariatric surgery also is performed for those unable to loose weight by more conventional means. This includes stomach resection, lipectomy (surgical removal of fat) and liposuction.

Medical Tips & Questions
Homeopathy is probably the most difficult of the mainstream alternative methods of healing for conventional doctors to understand. It was derived empirically by Samuel Hahnemann who discovered that a substance, which causes the symptoms of an illness, when given in a small dose acts as a trigger to intensify the healing processes that the body's immune system has already begun.

Doctors are not scientists. They like to imagine they are scientists, but really they are clinicians. The real mode of action of most medicines prescribed by conventional doctors are not fully understood by those doctors. Nevertheless, doctors have their explanations and they dream that this makes them scientists. The problem conventional medicine has with homeopathy (aside from the fact that it is competition) is that no explanation so far has been satisfying. Homeopaths themselves are less concerned with explanation and more concerned with results.

Homeopaths share with doctors who practice nutritional medicine the point of view that merely suppressing symptoms with drugs in no way goes to the heart of a health problem and that until one deals with the actual imbalance which produced the symptom in the first place, the disease process will continue to press for expression. Health problems may seem to disappear after drug administration, but the imbalance may appear in a new form.

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