Caring for Our Wisdom Keepers. Our Elder Citizens who have contributed to
building our respective society’s, giving birth to the next generation, and
have fought on our behalf in wars on foreign soils, deserve respect, dignity,
quality of life and quality of care as they continue life’s journey into their
advancing years, especially in the over 15,000 of our nationals nursing homes.
JOIN SARA AND PHYLLIS HERE FR A LOOK AT ELDERLY CARE
Phyllis Ayman, an author of the international best-selling book “OVERDUE Quality Care for Our Elder Citizens”, published February 8, 2019, has become known as “The Voice for Eldercare Advocacy”. Her first book “Nursing Homes to Rehabilitation Centers…What Every Person Needs to Know” was published in December 2017.
She
is an Eldercare Advisor/Coach, Advocate, Keynote and Breakout Speaker,
Speech & Language Pathologist and Certified Dementia Practitioner who
brings an insider’s view into the nursing home industry after working in 40+
skilled nursing/short-term rehabilitation facilities for over 25 years.
Phyllis provides the necessary information and valuable unique insight from an insight perspective for individuals and families so they can become more effective advocates when seeking care for themselves or their loved ones in a short-term rehabilitation, traditional long-term or memory care stay within a skilled nursing facility.
As a speech & language pathologist and Certified Dementia Practitioner, Phyllis has been known for her empathy and high standards of care while building and creating innovative programs in an effort to improve the quality of life and quality of care for all nursing home residents. Her specialties have included working with patients having all stages of respiratory disease, including those who are ventilator dependent or have tracheostomy tubes, Parkinson’s Disease, strokes, and other neurologic impairments, Alzheimer’s Disease and other dementias, and impairments in swallowing.
Phyllis has been a regular guest on WGCH AM Greenwich Business Talk Radio since November 2018 and now brings her own guests whom she interviews on the “Darby and Friends” show. She was also interviewed on the Sustainable Success Show and the Amplified Radio Show on the Voice America’s Influencer Channel. She joined the team at HPATV as the host and Associate Producer of “The Golden Years….Understanding Better Living” in April 2019. She has been interviewed on other podcasts and blogcast radio shows, independent TV stations, and has plans to launch her own radio show on the Voice America channel September 5th.
She conducts Webinars and Seminars on Caregiving and “The Sandwich Generation” for national insurance providers, small business and major corporations in the public and private sector, and is a keynote and breakout speaker on Aging and Eldercare in America, Caregiving, Communication, Empathy and Cultural diversity. She serves as a board member of the Massachusetts Advocates of Nursing Home Reform.
All of our shows/interviews are done by donation, if you enjoyed this show please support us here with either a one-time donation or subscribe and support, thank you. and please support Our Forgotten Children’s anthology and help to bring this book in to awareness.
Ever feel like this? You have achy pain all over your body, especially in your muscles. When you sleep — whether it’s five hours or 14 — you never feel refreshed and you’re always tired. Sometimes you forget where you just put your keys or your brain is in a fog. You might feel worse in the morning, when it’s cold or when the weather changes. If this sounds familiar, you may have fibromyalgia, a chronic illness with three main symptoms — widespread pain, chronic fatigue and cognitive trouble.
Fibromyalgia is a complicated illness that’s not well understood. In the past, it was mischaracterized as a mental health disorder. Even today, some doctors wave off fibro symptoms as being “all in your head.” This isn’t the case. Fibromyalgia involves alterations in the function of your nervous system and how your brain processes pain. It also causes a response in your hormone and immune systems that can lead to many different changes, including neuroinflammation or inflammation in the tissues in your nervous system.
Many doctors refer to fibromyalgia as a “hypervigilant” or “fight-or-flight” illness because your nervous system stays in alarm mode all the time. If someone in your family has fibromyalgia, you’re more likely to have it. If you’ve experienced trauma, such as sexual or physical abuse, a bad car accident or combat, you also have a higher chance of developing fibromyalgia.
It’s common to have fibromyalgia and other chronic conditions as well as mental illness, though fibromyalgia is not a mental health condition itself. These conditions could include:
Currently, there is no cure for fibromyalgia. Though fibromyalgia can be debilitating, there are many treatments to try. These might include:
Medications
Exercise programs
Pain management regiments
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT)
Natural and integrative medicine therapies
Lifestyle changes
It can take a while to find a combination of treatments that help. Researchers are working to find the cause of fibromyalgia, a potential cure and additional treatment options.
Who Gets Fibromyalgia?
An estimated 3 to 6 percent of the U.S. population lives with fibromyalgia, and it’s considered the most common chronic pain condition.9 Fibro is twice as common in those born female.10 Doctors believe women get fibromyalgia more often because of the construction of their nervous system. Male and female nervous systems operate differently because of the variations in male and female genes.2
People of all ages can get fibromyalgia. However, fibromyalgia is most common among young adults in their 20s and 30s. Today, doctors more frequently make the diagnosis in teenagers, but many still go undiagnosed until much later.7Fibromyalgia also occurs among all ethnic groups.
Where Does Fibromyalgia Come From?
We don’t know what exactly causes fibromyalgia. In the past, doctors found the symptoms of fibromyalgia mysterious — their patients didn’t look sick but they reported constant pain and fatigue. Doctors couldn’t find a source of the pain, so they dismissed their patients as having a mental health condition or said their symptoms were “all in their head.” Unfortunately, there are still doctors who may dismiss your symptoms because they don’t understand the latest research on the condition.
In their work to understand fibromyalgia, researchers first thought it was an autoimmune disorder. Autoimmune diseases occur when your body attacks healthy cells. However, that’s not what scientists observed in fibromyalgia. People with fibromyalgia had symptoms in their nervous system and their immune system that couldn’t be explained by any other chronic illness or mental illness. Fibromyalgia is best understood as a pain processing disorder in your nervous system caused by your fight-or-flight alarm system going off all the time. Fibromyalgia also impacts the immune system, and it is likely passed through families.
The Nervous System
Your nervous system, made up of several different systems, is a complex web that regulates the body’s functions. Fibromyalgia affects your autonomic nervous system. This controls the “automatic” functions in your body thanks to two separate branches — the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system.
Your parasympathetic system takes charge when you’re relaxed. Your muscles loosen up, the brain calms down and the digestive process begins. Your sympathetic nervous system revs up when it feels you are under attack. It activates your body’s fight-or-flight mode, tensing your muscles, pumping up your heart rate and increasing your attention and awareness.
When your hypothalamus, a part of the brain that coordinates your autonomic nervous system, senses danger, it sends a signal to the sympathetic nervous system to prepare the body to react: fight, flight or freeze. In a healthy nervous system, once the perceived threat ends, the hypothalamus signals the parasympathetic nervous system to take back over and calm the system back to a resting state. In fibromyalgia, however, your alarm system gets stuck in the “on” position.
Fibromyalgia causes you to stay in that hypervigilant state much longer than you’re supposed to. As a result, you experience chronic muscle tension (pain), trouble getting good sleep, issues with digestion and an overall sense of fatigue.7
In addition, fibromyalgia affects the complex systems in your brain that process pain. The systems in your spinal cord designed to reduce pain don’t work well if you have fibromyalgia and the ones that amplify pain work overtime. Pain that wouldn’t bother most people is amplified when you have fibromyalgia.6 Scientists can see from neuroimaging brain scans that people with fibro process sensory information, especially pain, differently than the average person.10
Trauma
When you hear “fight-or-flight response,” your mind might automatically think of trauma. Many fibro patients report the sexual or physical assault at some point in their life, often that happened during childhood. There’s also a strong overlap between fibromyalgia and the trauma-related mental illness post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Nearly half of men diagnosed with combat-induced PTSD also meet the criteria for a fibromyalgia diagnosis.8
The link between trauma and fibro, however, isn’t so straightforward. Fibromyalgia tends to develop when you experience high amounts of psychological stress during trauma or a physical illness — and this is common in any traumatic situation. Fibromyalgia also can run in families (more on this later), which means your parents pass the genes on to you. However, having a gene for fibromyalgia doesn’t necessarily mean you will get the condition. You may never get fibromyalgia and never know you carry the gene. But if you have a gene, you have a much higher risk of developing the condition.
Trauma like abuse, wartime combat, a bad car accident or violence, can be enough to trigger your fibromyalgia. It’s like a one-two punch. You have a genetic predisposition for fibromyalgia. Then a trauma triggers the gene to express itself and you develop the condition. The timing of when you experience a trauma also seems to factor into whether you will get fibromyalgia, though it’s unclear why. Women who experience trauma in their adolescence seem particularly prone to having fibromyalgia.
Not everyone who has survived trauma will develop fibromyalgia, and you can still have fibromyalgia even if you can’t identify a traumatic experience in your life. Other incidents, like bad auto accidents where you experienced whiplash, have a strong connection to fibromyalgia. If you have another chronic illness, like Lyme disease or chronic fatigue syndrome, that can also trigger fibromyalgia.7
The Immune System
Fibromyalgia also affects your immune system. It’s not an autoimmune disorder — it doesn’t cause your body to attack healthy cells — but it does cause immune system dysregulation. When immune cells become inflamed, they send a signal that something is wrong in the body. With fibromyalgia, your inflammation signals aren’t firing right — they send the wrong signals at the wrong time to the wrong places. This is why sometimes, especially when your fibro flares, you feel achy like you have the flu. Researchers have confirmed that inflammation can occur in the brain and nervous system as well.1
Genetic Causes
There’s evidence that fibromyalgia runs in families. If your parents, siblings or children have the condition, you’re more likely to be at risk. Researchers haven’t identified all the genetic markers linked to fibromyalgia yet, however, they have identified differences in genes linked to the pain control systems.
They have found that fibromyalgia patients often have a gene related to a dysfunctional enzyme — a substance in the body that facilitates chemical reactions between cells. This enzyme should break down the chemicals involved in the fight-or-flight process, but something goes awry when you have fibromyalgia. You’re also more likely to have genes programmed for abnormal receptors in the fight-or-flight or pain nerves.
Other Research
Researchers continue to discover new information about fibromyalgia. For example, they’ve found that fibromyalgia could be related to an area of your brain called the default mode network (DMN). The DMN helps us reflect on our lives, and is typically most active when you’re at rest or daydreaming.
When you’re doing a goal-oriented cognitive task, the DMN is usually quieter. Using brain scans, researchers found that the DMN in patients with fibromyalgia seems to be online more than usual during cognitive tasks. It was caught communicating with the insula, another part of the brain that influences sensory processing like pain when it should be quiet.10
Long-Term Outlook
Fibromyalgia can be a serious illness. Many have such severe symptoms it impacts their ability to go to work or school or even complete basic tasks around the house. When you have fibromyalgia, you’re twice as likely to be hospitalized versus someone without the condition.3 Approximately 30 percent of those diagnosed with fibromyalgia qualify as disabled.4 Your experience may be different.
It can also be expensive and difficult to afford the care you need with fibromyalgia. Treating the disease often requires experimenting with different medications and doctors, which can be costly even if you have insurance. One 2007 study found that those with fibromyalgia typically spent between $100 to $1,000 a month out of pocket for medical costs related to the condition. Another study revealed that fibromyalgia patients paid nearly $1,500 for alternative treatments and spent a total of about $5,300 annually out of pocket for all medical expenses.4
Despite the lifelong challenges of living with fibromyalgia, it’s a misconception that nothing can be done to help. There are many treatment options for managing your symptoms even though it can be hard to find what will work for you. However, many people find they do better and experience some improvement or relief from their symptoms with the right combination of treatments.5Fibromyalgia is a painful and frustrating condition, but there is hope.
Related: Here are some ways people describe what it’s like living with fibromyalgia.
The Mighty’s Condition Guides combine the expertise of both the medical and patient community to help you and your loved ones on your health journeys. For the fibromyalgia guide, we interviewed five medical experts, read numerous studies and surveyed 13,997 people diagnosed with the condition. The guides are living documents and will be updated with new information as it becomes available.
The Mighty’s Condition Guides combine the expertise of both the medical and patient community to help you and your loved ones on your health journeys.
This week on The Wellness Journey with Lynnis Woods Mullins and her guest Dan Young, they discuss the 5 aspects of getting well. ON air from July 23rd
At mid-life many of us are looking for the panacea for wellness. We want to know how can we ward off those extra pounds? How can we get a good nights sleep without the sweats and tossing and turning? What can we do to increase our energy and lessen our fatigue? These are just a few of the questions that plaque mid-lifers. The good news is according to Dan Young, a Board Certified Naturopath, there are 5 things we can do that can increase our wellness and minimize and in most cases remove many of these symptoms. In this interview, Dan covers these five things and shares great information about living a well life in mid-life.
JOIN LYNNIS AND DAN HERE FOR THESE 5 ASPECTS AND MORE
For the past 20 years, Dan Young who is a Board Certified Naturopath, family business, Original Remedies, Health and Wellness S[ace centers around 3 key components: First – The Clinical Component, Country Doctor Nutritional Center in Cheyenne, WY. was established in 1998 in Torrington, WY. later moving to Cheyenne. Our office is working on its third generation of practitioners bringing Original Remedies to people. These Original Remedies are actual solutions not bandaids for people’s health. To date, Dan has accumulated over 25 thousand clinical hours of hands-on experience with helping people with all types of chronic illness regain and experience superior health. The outreach of these Original Remedies, Natures Response to Chronic Illness, is needed in every community in America. Second – The Manufacturing Component, Country Doctor Herbals, INC. Our facility adheres to GMP as laid out by the FDA. Our Herbal Based Dietary Supplements have stood the test of time by consumers all over the world for Purity, Potency and Performance. These Original Remedies can be traced back as far as mans earliest recorded history, hence the name, Original Remedies. Third – The Mentorship Component – Because of the overwhelming success our clinic continues to enjoy, we want to give back by making it possible for ALL Nutrition minded Practitioners to experience the business of their dreams. Many come out of school enhanced healers and have ZERO clues how to Create, Market, Manage, Grow or Sustain an actual Wellness Practice. Practice BluePrint is making this possible with our 6 Day Intensive Hands-On Mentorship Program.
For details and a syllabus overview, contact danyoungbcn@gmail.com Our motto: “We walk students into professional mastery so the may run at any pace they choose.” Hands-on clinical experience combined with our proven education platform for achieving maximum results has no equal in the Nutritional Therapy industry.
“Your Health is your choice” with Sara Troy and her guest Suzanne Gundersen, on-air from July 23rd
Get Empowered with Energy Tapping Managing stress with more ease & flow personal transformation, the time is now, for now, is where the answers are.
Her Transformation Mentoring and “30 Days to Relieve Anxiety & Quit Overthinking” programs have helped hundreds of women #getshifting to more calm, clarity, and choice. Suzanne takes online private clients from around the world, she speaks nationally “Get Empowered with Energy Tapping”, teaches workshops and hosts monthly women’s transformation retreats.
JOIN SARA AND SUZANNE HERE FOR MORE ON TAPPING TO HEALTH
In the Healing Arts, Suzanne is a Holistic Stress Relief Mentor who helps women relieve anxiety on demand and resolve chronic stress & trauma. Using her own proven 3 step ACE Method she helps you unlock and resolve patterns and limiting beliefs that have you stressed and struggling. ACE (uses her own style of Energy Tapping), reprograms stress and realize beliefs to help you respond to life with choice, confidence, and curiosity. Imagine having tools to manage stress for the rest of your life. Suzanne’s unique ACE Method (uses her own style of Energy Tapping) reprograms your stress, revitalizes your energy and reclaims your power; through awareness and clearing of limiting beliefs and programs, building authentic inner connections and boundaries, expansion into living with aliveness is possible. Suzanne’s early developmental trauma led her to seek holistic approaches that helped her shed the layers of dysfunction, uncover her value and live with self-honor, compassion, and grace. She dropped hundreds of pounds and the anxiety meds and has kept it off for over 10 years. You’ve got to go in, to get out and you too can transform!
Women are invited to join her free private Facebook group “Empowered Tapping revolution”, to build inner wisdom and resiliency for life’s stresses.
Recovering the Whole of you, with Kiti Adderley and her guest Paulette Lewis, ON AIR JULY 23rd
Dr. Lewis is a Georgia licensed Physical Therapist, and owner of NeuroMotion Physical Therapy in the same state. At her clinic in Georgia, she practices Neurological Physical Therapy daily, helping patients who are often overlooked by other outpatient clinics because therapists simply don’t like Neuro.
JOIN KITI AND PAULETTE HERE AS THEY ADDRESS PARKINSONS
Dr. Lewis has a Master of Physical
Therapy Degree that she obtained in 1999 from NovaSoutheastern University. It
was here that her love for neurological physical therapy began as she completed
her thesis research in the area of stroke rehab. In 2017 she obtained a
specialized Doctoral Degree in Neurological Physical Therapy from the Neuro
Recovery Training Institute of Evidence in Motion.
Clinically, Dr. Lewis has been a certified LSVT Big PT since 2013 and is now a PWR Moves and Parkinson Boxing certified PT. All certifications equip her with a level of expertise in Parkinson’s Disease therapy that significantly benefits her patients and their caregivers, far beyond what other clinicians in the area and state can provide. Her patients come from significant distances at times to partake in her knowledge as it affords them a level of function and quality of life that they cherish. Neurological PT is her love and is her area of expertise.
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