I think they are probably exaggerating it to take our minds off the credit crunch and the dreaded global warming (another theory I don’t subscribe to).

Hi,

For your immune system, invest in Pycnogenol and Lacto Ferrin, they are both immune boosters.  A couple of weeks ago my family and I flew back to the UK from Miami.  Husband, son and daughter all caught a bad sniffly cold on the plane back (my husband thinks it came through the air nozzle above him because he had it at full blast). 

I take my Pycnogenol and Lacto Ferrin every day and had no cold whatsover, and I work in a reception area where germs walk through the door every day! I am hoping it will keep me safe if the swine flu comes through the door as well!

Hope this helps you.

Best wishes,

Katrina

Hi Rhonda, How could we possibly doubt the existence of evil when unfortunately it is all around us and man made. Why delegate the existence of good and evil to an unknown, unseen power? Why do winners of Oscars, Emmys and Grammys thank god so often? Is it not a reward for their own hard work and nothing to do with something floating around in ether supposedly controlling what happens down here? Is it just the done thing to keep in with their audience? We do not need the presence of faith or a god to be good or bad, we need to take responsibility for our own actions. Most religions are based on similar principles and the similarities between the Jewish religion and the Muslim one are remarkable, particularly when Israel and the occupants of Gaza are knocking seven bells out of each because of their imagined differences. I can unfortunately see right and wrong on both sides of that argument too, when it is more convenient to see just one. If we all behaved well in this world it could be the more perfect place that all right minded people wish it were, but unfortunately evil, selfish people are also born on this earth and basically screw it up for the rest of us. While not wishing to take the comfort of religion away from those who are not strong enough to make their way on this earth without it, it really is just an instrument of those who originally wanted to inflict their will on their fellow citizens. I have no wish to offend you and respect your right to believe in whatever works for you. Katrina

I like Flickr for storing mine and it is also very nice getting pleasant comments on my efforts. Unbelievable when you consider it is my first camera since I was about 14, which is too many years ago for me to want to do the maths! Schmap even asked to use a photo I took of Nexxt Restaurant in Miami Beach! It is easy to use and feels like a little community so it is worth trying. Good luck with it and thank you for the laughter you have brought to my life over the years since I first started watching you in Murphy Brown.

Tempur Pedic type pillows and mattress toppers are lovely. I use one pillow between my knees so I can lie on my side without rolling onto my front (I started this post surgery last year and can finally sleep on my side which means my neck doesn’t get so twisted). You may need a slim regular pillow underneath to bring it up to the right level. Take Joan’s advice and get the Tempur Pedic pillow and a mattress topper (Ebay are a more reasonably priced source of these things, I wasn’t looking in Century 21 for those in the linen department a couple of weeks ago, but they might have some too) and try some melatonin if you haven’t tried it before. Good luck.

I take melotonin for jet lag and when I can’t sleep. I don’t get nightmares but I only take 3mg unless I am having real trouble and then I take 6mg. You can safely take up to 10mg but as they come in 3mg, that is rather difficult to achieve! Normally I can get off to sleep ok, but a trip to the bathroom around 5.30am causes me more problems because it is too late to take a melatonin and I just lie there trying self-hypnosis and anything I can think of but once the brain starts up, I just can’t stop it. I was translating things into French (badly) this morning. I don’t know why, I didn’t need to but I just couldn’t get back to sleep because of it. Perhaps all that coffee to keep you awake during the day is having a lingering effect through the night. Maybe swapping to half caff or decaff in the afternoon might help a bit. I have a new patient who is suffering from extreme insomnia, if I make any breakthroughs with him, I will pass it on.

In spite of all of her money, Madonna always looks cheap, there is always something slightly ‘off’ about her. If you want good songs you don’t have to waste money on hers, there’s Nickelback, Matchbox 20 and My Chemical Romance for starters. I once remember a review of her back in the mid 80s when she was described as singing like Minnie Mouse on helium. I agreed then and have never changed my opinion and I am not some impressionable, young kid, I turned 50 this July about a month ahead of her. I also don’t deny having had ‘a little work done’ as she does. She is a classic example of fooling some of the people all of the time crossed with publicity and promotion. I also feel sorry for the children as they are doomed to spend their lives in the goldfish bowl of fame, because of who their mother is. That is truly a poisoned chalice and I hope they have happy lives in spite of it.

Well you are doing a damn fine job as I never realised that you were 85! I hope I look as good as you do and are as dynamic at the same age. I am only 50 (oh, it felt so good writing it that way) and don’t achieve as much as you do! I am an ongoing project myself though so I know what you mean. Long may you continue.

I wouldn’t be so easily impressed by him if I were you. With Gordon Brown the devil is in the detail. For so many years he has presented himself as the greatest Chancellor we have ever had (he was just very lucky to inherit a very healthy economy from the previous Tory Chancellor, Kenneth Clark) he claimed to have ended ‘Boom & Bust’ personally! Under his leadership (and he was in charge of our country’s finances for ten years) he created the environment whereby this crash was able to happen in the UK. The checks and balances he put in place, to replace what had worked very well for decades, were plainly inadequate. He has taxed us to the hilt and squandered it on increasing his own voter base by creating jobs in the public sector. If they vote against him, they will end up losing their jobs. He has caused my husband to work 5 years longer than he had planned because Gordon Brown has been taking billions (no exaggeration) annually out of the pension funds to pay for all of his daft schemes. We are as a country more in debt now as a result of his control of the UK finances than we were when he took over in 1997. He wasn’t mending the roof while the sun was shining. We had one of the best pension systems in the world until he got his hands on it. Thanks to him, we are paying more in tax for our gas than the cost of the gas itself. I don’t actually mind what we pay to the gas companies, they at least do something for their money, like find it, get it out of the ground, refine and distribute it. Our government just sits on its backside watching it roll in while we hurt far more than you Americans have, and the raise in cost really hurt you. At its worst, our gas was approximately $8 for one of your gallons, thankfully it is slowly going down. It always goes down slower than it goes up! Oh, how he is enjoying this crisis. It is the first time he has been seen smiling this much in years. Let us hope he has come up with the right solution in these drastic circumstances, but one of our political journalists thinks that the Labour Party will use public ownership of the banks to their own ends. Already they have stipulated that no jobs be lost in Scotland as a result of the HBOS (Halifax Bank of Scotland) merger with Lloyds. Who knows what more they will stick their oar into? With luck this shower will be voted out at our next General Election. Unfortunately, we can’t anticipate when this will be like you can in the US. It is on the whim of the incumbent government.

There is indeed, you can also buy it in drop form. I use it in my porridge but it doesn’t taste exactly the same as sugar. It has a licorice type flavour but if you like it, it is very useful. You can buy it easily in the US but I have to bring it back to the UK with me from vacations and because of that I don’t recommend it to my patients here as they can’t just go out and buy it. Sugar free jellies can be helpful as well. I have a sweet tooth so know only too well how hard it can be to go without sweet food for a couple of weeks or so. I usually lose about 5 pounds though!

Right, find a friendly doctor who will prescribe fluconazole for you (you can’t buy it over the counter in the US). I would recommend that you try for three or four capsules (they each work over a 72 hour period - I am also married to a pharmacist and he approves of what I do and recommend). Take one capsule and leave a 3 day gap, then take another until you have finished them in this manner. Get some milk thistle capsules and take them at the same time to support your liver and help you deal with the ‘die off’ effect of the fluconazole. This can make you feel temporarily worse (a bit fluey and headachey) but stick with it. The crucial thing to do while you are taking the fluconazole is to remove all sugary foods and yeasty foods from your diet (yes, that means bread and mushrooms and even fruit as that is a type of sugar too) as yeast/candida feed on sugar - so you don’t want to be feeding the little critters while you are trying to kill them off. It is self-defeating and wastes your money too. I don’t normally recommend either aspartame or Splenda, but during this period if you have to resort to them do, it will help keep you sugar free. The yeast is probably making you crave sugar and you possibly have a high-carb, high sugar diet as a result. If you can keep to a Dr Atkins type of diet with lots of vegetables, meat and fish, it is the best way to do it. In kinesiology, practitioners use muscle testing to help identify what is going on in the body. We aren’t allowed to diagnose as we aren’t medically trained, that notwithstanding, it is amazing how we do manage to identify candida, parasites, helicobacter pylori (a bacteria in the stomach) and bring patients back to health. It does take at least 2 years to become this kind of ‘quack’ though! Stay in touch, I have put an e-mail alert on this, so if you have any queries, just drop me a line.

Why can’t Suzy Menkes see what we see when she looks in the mirror? She certainly is brave walking about with that lump of hair on the top of her head for all these years. Doesn’t she have a sense of the ridiculous? Or is this irony? That is the usual excuse these days. And why does Miuccia Prada always look like an Italian hausfrau? (I am not clever enough to know what that is in Italian!) If she was on ‘What Not To Wear’ she would have been divested of that baggy jumper years ago. Why is that those who purport to advise us on style don’t look as though they would recognise it if it slapped them in the face? Anna Wintour is a bit of an exception I must admit and Jacqueline de Ribes looks pretty impressive for 77. Oh well, I will limp along on my own, raiding TK Maxx (in the UK), Century 21 and Loehman’s (when in NY, as I was last week) and doing the best I can. I wonder how much worse they would look on restricted budgets.

I don’t know about coffee killing off good bacteria but any antibiotics, the Pill, HRT, steroids or just too much sugar in your diet can kill off good bacteria. When this good bacteria, which acts like the police in your gut, is killed off it gives the naturally occurring yeast candida albicans the chance to mutate into the mycelial fungal form. Doesn’t sound like much of a problem, does it? The trouble is it burrows through the walls of your small intestine which is meant to be porous like blotting paper, but isn’t meant to be like a sieve. This sieve-like state is known as ‘leaky gut’ (found commonly in the digestive tracts of children with autism) and this causes problems because most of us don’t chew our food properly, expecting our stomachs to ‘just sort it out’ for us. When undigested food particles (which the stomach can’t always sort out for us) get into the leaky walled small intestine, they can then get out of the leaky walled small intestine and into our blood streams. Then the immune system is triggered because it senses an invader, straps on its red cape like Superman and flies off around our blood stream to kill off the invader with histamines and white blood cells, treating it like a bacteria, virus or fungus. This leads to food intolerances, because the immune system has a memory and every time you eat the offending food again, the immune system will react. So food intolerances are not all in the mind and Eliza Dodd is on the right track with the probiotics because they are good bacteria and boost the ‘policemen’ in your gut to prevent all of this. If all of this has taken place, then a good anti fungal is what you need as well as the probiotics, they can’t do all the work on their own. And how do you feel if all of this has taken place? Like crap, tired, bloated, headachey, foggy headed, poor concentration and memory. Any of this sound familiar? It was because of this that I first went to a kinesiologist in the UK and thanks to her getting me better, like that guy in the Remington ad, I trained to become a kinesiologist myself to identify when someone is suffering from this and get them better. I may not be a doctor but I have a very good track record of curing people of this draining condition. Eliza, I bet you wished you had never mentioned probiotics now! I really don’t think you need to beat yourself up about the coffee though, some well-meaning doctor probably gave you antibiotics when you were five (although I have been drinking coffee myself since about then!). Best wishes to you.

It always amazes me how seriously religion is taken when there is no proof that there is a god. I sincerely believe that clever rulers in the past in all races and parts of the world used religion to literally ‘put the fear of God’ in people to make them behave in a way that they wanted them to. I believe that the Ten Commandments are a good framework by which to run your life but I try to be a good kind person and have no reference to any god. I was half-heartedly brought up as a Methodist in the UK but really saw Sunday School as somewhere to go and wear my best clothes. From the age of three I have been a girl in search of a good social life! I am sorry if this seems disrespectful to your views and beliefs but without religion there wouldn’t be so many wars being fought in the world at the moment. What about Margaret Thatcher, Marie Curie and Mother Theresa as suggestions?